Better's Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Learn how to work around your neurological wiring.

Like poker, life-changing decisions are largely based on luck. But calling it all "luck" is a bit disingenuous – it’s more like a game of probabilities. What’s more, the decisions we make are linked to the ways our brains are neurologically wired. So what can you control? Well, probably more than you think.

9 September, 2019 07:25 Share

Human minds tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, which makes it hard to see mistakes clearly.

decisions are rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Life isn’t like that. Life is like poker, a game of incomplete information – since you never know what cards the other players are holding – and luck. Our decision-making is like poker players’ bets. We bet on future outcomes based on what we believe is most likely to occur. So why not look at it this way? If our decisions are bets, we can start to let go of the idea that we’re 100 percent "right" or "wrong," and start to say, "I’m not sure." This opens us up to thinking in terms of probability, which is far more useful.

9 September, 2019 07:26 Share

If we want to seek out truth, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear.

The good news is, we can work around our tendencies with a simple phrase: "Wanna bet?"If we were betting on our beliefs, we’d work a lot harder to confirm their validity. If someone bets you $100 that a statement you made was false, it changes your thinking about the statement right away. It triggers you to look more closely at the belief in question, and motivates you to be objectively accurate. This isn’t just about money. Whenever there’s something riding on the accuracy of our beliefs, we’re less likely to make absolute statements and more likely to validate those beliefs

9 August, 2019 08:09 Share

And as easily as beliefs are formed, they’re equally hard to change. When we believe something, we try to reinforce it with motivated reasoning. That is, we seek out evidence that confirms our belief, and ignore or work against anything contradictory. After all, everyone wants to think well of themselves, and being wrong feels bad. So information that contradicts our beliefs can feel like a threat.

9 September, 2019 07:30 Share

We can learn a lot from outcomes, but it’s difficult to know which have something to teach us.

The best way to learn is often by reviewing our mistakes. Likewise, if we want to improve our future outcomes, we’ll have to do some outcome fielding. Outcome fielding is looking at outcomes to see what we can learn from them.

9 August, 2019 08:10 Share

We can try to circumvent self-serving bias by looking at other people’s outcomes. But in that case, it just operates in reverse: we blame their successes on luck and their failures on bad decisions.

9 August, 2019 08:10 Share

Some outcomes we can attribute to luck and forget about – they were out of our control anyway. It’s the outcomes that seem to have resulted primarily from our decisions that we should learn from. After analyzing those decisions, we can refine and update any beliefs that led to our initial bet.

9 August, 2019 08:12 Share

Most outcomes result from a mix of skill, luck, and unknown information. That’s why we often make errors in our fielding. Knowing how much of each is involved is tricky. Plus we’re all subject to self-serving bias. We like to take credit for good outcomes and blame bad outcomes on something or someone else.

9 September, 2019 07:32 Share

To become more objective about outcomes, we need to change our habits.

That’s where Phil Ivey excels. His poker habits are built around truth-seeking and accurate outcome fielding rather than self-serving bias. The author mentions a 2004 poker tournament in which Ivey mopped the floor with his competitors, then spent a celebratory dinner afterward picking apart his play and seeking opinions about what he might have done better.

9 August, 2019 08:12 Share

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have habits as good as Phil Ivey’s, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work with what we’ve got. One way we can improve the way we field outcomes is to think about them in terms of – you guessed it – bets.

9 September, 2019 07:33 Share

Let’s say we got into a car accident on an icy stretch of road. It might be that we were unlucky, that’s all. But would that explanation satisfy you if you had to bet on it? Chances are, you’d start to consider other explanations, just to be sure. Maybe you were driving too fast, or maybe you should have pumped your brakes differently. Once the stakes are raised, we start to look into the causes a little more seriously, to help us move beyond self-serving bias and become more objective.

9 September, 2019 07:34 Share

We can improve our decision-making by being part of a group, but it needs to be the right kind of group.

We’ve all got blind spots, which makes truth-seeking hard. But it’s a little easier when we enlist the help of a group. After all, others can often pick out our errors more easily than we can. But to be effective, a group dedicated to examining decisions isn’t like any other. It has to have a clear focus, a commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, and a clear charter that all members understand.

13 October, 2019 05:45 Share

To work together productively, a group needs CUDOS.

Centuries ago, the Catholic church put this into practice by hiring individuals to argue against sainthood during the canonization process – that’s where we get the phrase "devil’s advocate."

13 October, 2019 05:47 Share

To make better decisions, we need to spend some time in the future.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld describes himself as a "Night Guy." He likes to stay up late at night and doesn’t worry about getting by on too little sleep. That’s Morning Jerry’s problem, not Night Jerry. No wonder Morning Jerry hates Night Jerry so much – Night Jerry always screws him over. It’s a funny description, but temporal discounting – making decisions that favor our immediate desires at the expense of our future self – is something we all do.

13 October, 2019 05:47 Share

We can get around this with backcasting, imagining a future in which everything has worked out, and our goals have been achieved, and then asking, "How did we get there?" This leads to imagining the decisions that have led us to success and also recognizing when our desired outcome requires some unlikely things to happen. If that’s the case, we can either adjust our goals or figure out how to make those things more likely. Conversely, we can perform premortems on our decisions. Premortems are when we imagine that we’ve failed and ask, "What went wrong?" This helps us identify the possibilities that backcasting might have missed. Over more than 20 years of research, NYU psychology professor Gabrielle Oettingen has consistently found that people who imagine the obstacles to their goals, rather than achieving those goals, are more likely to succeed.

13 October, 2019 05:48 Share

Final summary

You might not be a gambler, but that’s no reason not to think in bets. Whether or not there’s money involved, bets make us take a harder look at how much certainty there is in the things we believe, consider alternatives and stay open to changing our minds for the sake of accuracy. So let go of "right" and "wrong" when it’s decision time, accept that things are always somewhat uncertain and make the best bet you can.

13 October, 2019 05:48 Share