Decisions and Luck

From the introduction of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets (2018). Before writing it, Duke spent two decades as a professional poker player, a job that is decision-making under uncertainty for a living.

Two forces set how things turn out, and you control exactly one of them. Luck does what it does; no amount of practice moves it. That leaves decision quality as the only thing effort can improve, which is why a book that opens by splitting the world into decisions and luck spends the rest of its pages on just the first half.

What stops people from working on that half is what Duke calls resulting: judging a decision by how it happened to turn out. Her opening example is Pete Carroll, the Seahawks coach who called a pass play on the goal line in the final seconds of the 2015 Super Bowl. It was intercepted, Seattle lost, and the call was branded the worst in Super Bowl history. The play was defensible; it only looked stupid because it failed. Score a decision by its result and you let luck grade your thinking, so you keep second-guessing good decisions that happened to lose and repeating bad ones that happened to win. Honing the one lever you actually control starts with refusing to let the scoreboard tell you whether you decided well.