EP. 43: MAKING BETTER DECISIONS: ANNIE DUKE ON CREATING YOUR OWN CRYSTAL BALL.

Bounce! Conversations with Larry Weeks

What do you do when you're faced with a big decision?

If you're like most people, you might make a pro and con list, although many don't even do that - if you're like me, you might over-analyze and spend too much time searching for that extra data point that might make you sure.

There is a better way to make quality decisions and minimize second-guessing.

My guest is Annie Duke.

Annie is an expert on decision fitness and is the author of two books on decision making, the bestseller Thinking In Bets, and her latest How To Decide, Simple Tools For Making Better Choices, is the topic of the show.

Prior to the books, Annie used high stakes poker as her decision lab and became one of the world's top poker players, winning her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet in 2004. That same year, she won the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship.

Before professional poker, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

This is the second time I've had Annie as a guest (See Ep. 22) and the topic of this episode follows from the first except here we shift from highlighting causes of bad decisions to discussing in more detail the process for making better ones. We move to the more practical as she outlines the tools and heuristics we can use to make quality decisions and second-guess yourself less.

Here are just some of our talking points.

• A review of "resulting" and why it's a problem
• What's wrong with pro-con lists - and what's better
• Assigning probability and forecasting
• The tree of possibility
• The decision multiverse
• The three-column decision map
• Why we should embrace educated guesses
• Factors leading up to election cycles and how predictions might be wrong yet correctly made before
• and much more

Note Annie's audio is less than optimal but listen closely, it's a gold mine of decision-making wisdom you can use right away.

Enjoy!