I recently read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. The book is about making better decisions when you don’t have all the facts.

Often times we confuse the quality of our decisions with the quality of the outcomes. Annie advocates that it is not the right approach. To make better decisions, it’s important to decouple the quality of decisions from the quality of outcomes. She talks about the hazards of resulting - the term poker players use to describe our tendancy of using outcomes to determine the quality of the decisions. The book highlights the irrational nature of our brain. From a survival perspective, our brains aren’t built for rationality. It has to make fast decisions, which can blindside us. For me, the most important takeaway was about redefining wrong - and using uncertainty as an advantage. Instead of thinking in a binary mode of right vs wrong, I liked the approach probabilistic percentages for better decision-making and self-compassion.

While I loved the book and got some good nuggets from it. The content was way too repetitive for my taste. After I completed half of the book, I felt like I am reading the same chapter over and over. There is a lot of filler content, the anecdotes weren’t resonating with me. I overlooked two chapters that talked about the buddy system and future planning.

Overall its a good book with the ideas applicable in professional and personal life.