Annie Duke was a quite accomplished professional poker player who understood well that poker is primarily about making the right decisions. But what are these "right decisions"? She wrote a very good book about it."Thinking in Bets"(auf Deutsch: "Entscheiden wie ein Pokerspielen") We highly recommend it because she dispels misconceptions about "right decisions" and has developed strategies that help not only successful poker players but also successful businesspeople make decisions.

Here are a few key insights:

Human thoughts tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, making it difficult to clearly recognize errors.

After all, a poor decision can lead to a favorable outcome, and good decisions can result in unfavorable outcomes.

We rely on future outcomes based on what we consider most likely.

If we want to seek the truth, we must overcome our innate tendency to believe what we hear.

[…] we must strive for truth and objectivity, even when something doesn't align with our beliefs.

But, for example, if you hear the rustling of a lion in the grass, you're less likely to stop and objectively analyze the situation; instead, you're more likely to run away!

[…] Just as easily as beliefs are formed, they are also difficult to change.

[…] We can bypass our biases with a simple phrase: "Want to bet?"

We can learn a lot from outcomes, but it's difficult to know which ones are meant to teach us something.

It's the outcomes that seem to primarily result from our decisions from which we should learn.

Most outcomes arise from a combination of skill, luck, and unknown information.

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

Once the stakes are raised, we begin to examine the causes more seriously, moving beyond self-interest and becoming more objective.

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

Intellectual and ideological diversity in a group naturally fosters high-quality thinking.

For productive collaboration, a group needs CUDOS.

The "C" in CUDOS stands for Communism, "U" stands for Universalism (using the same standards to evaluate all information, regardless of its source), "D" stands for Disinterestedness, referring to avoiding bias, and "OS" stands for Organized Skepticism (a trait that illustrates thinking in bets).

To make better decisions, we must invest some time into the future.

[...] Temporal discounting – making decisions that favor our immediate desires at the expense of our future selves – is something we all do.

[...] When our brains imagine what the future will look like if we stay up too late, they also draw on memories of staying up late and being tired all day, which might prompt us to go to bed.

A 10-10-10 decision brings the future into the present by asking ourselves, at the moment of decision, how we will feel in ten minutes, in ten months, and in ten years.

[...] we start with the future we want and work backward from there.

[..] we conduct premortems for our decisions. Premortems involve imagining that we have failed and asking, "What went wrong?"