A lot of useless fluff

If she gives the listener permission one more time to stop and take notes, I’m gonna throw my phone out the window.

Here’s the WHOLE book: making a good decision is about odds, not outcome. Just like in poker.

Add hours and hours of blabbing on and on to the above and you have this book.

12 people found this helpful

An amazing book for making better decisions

On my Twitter account, I asked how many people have trouble making decisions, and over 50% of people said yes. 

I fell in love with Annie Duke's work after I read her last book Thinking in Bets, and I've been eagerly waiting for this book to come out for months. Annie is a former professional poker player who also studies psychology, so her perspective is extremely unique. At first, when I started reading this book, it felt like a lot of repeat information from her previous book, but I was extremely wrong. Annie not only presents a lot of new information, but she provides practical examples of when and how we make decisions, and the physical copy of the book comes with a lot of different exercises to try out. 

Recently, I became interested in risk assessment, and it blends perfectly with learning about how to make better decisions. We make hundreds of small decisions a day, and there are opportunity costs to most of them. Then, we have to make bigger decisions about job changes and relationships, which can be extremely stressful. Annie sets the foundation by explaining how we don't have control over the results, but we have a lot of strategies we can use to make the best decisions possible.

5 people found this helpful

Decide to Decide on this book. Great.

Wonderfully spoken by the author herself. A wonderful tour of decisions from a learned cognitive scientist, world class poker player, mother and wife. This book is for busy overwhelmed people who need help making decisions on what matters to them.
It is published as a written WORK book (pen not included) which is great for the plane, train or just a rainy weekend. As an audio book reviewing the included PDF is required to get the full impact of the concepts. After my second listen the clear simple and elegant techniques had me chuckling watching others stress with seemingly simple decisions. This book is a stress reliever and gives solid ground to make a quality decision with confidence. Her other book "Thinking in bets" is great too. Thank you Anne. Great!

3 people found this helpful

Good content but hard to listen to

content is good but author's voice and lisp made it almost unlistenable for me. I realize this sounds petty and heartless but when paying for an audio book I expect a professional sounding narration.

2 people found this helpful

Learned a lot

What I liked:
1. You get a lot of tools that help you make better decisions and remove your biases.
2. Some of the moments where she asks you to write stuff down really helps get your thoughts in order.
3. My favorite chapter is the one on removing analysis paralysis. It will definitely speed up your decision making.

What I didn’t like:
1. Sometimes, she asks you to write stuff down when just thinking of your answer is more than enough.
2. Some chapters are extremely redundant. I get that it can help you remember things better, but I feel like some of these 1 hour chapters could be summarized in a few sentences.

All in all, I do recommend the book, you just need to be patient. I listened to the whole book, but if you want to learn fast, listen to the last few minutes of each chapter.

2 people found this helpful

A great overview of eliminating confirmation bias in decision making

Annie does a great job giving practical tools for improving decision making. I already was using several of them (such as doing quick dirty anonymous polling in meetings) but others like creating decision trees and projecting the likelihood of success or failure for each decision have been really helpful. For example, our daughter is a senior and trying to decide on which college to attend. She’s been super stressed about it. Having her create a decision tree and project likely outcomes helped her narrow her decision down to three schools and gave her clear next steps on how to get better information on each school in making her final decision later this spring.

2 people found this helpful

Excellent book! Fascinating content.

I easily finish the book. The performance by the author as a narrator is excellent. Very thought-provoking.

2 people found this helpful

Go Slow to Go Fast

I'll start by saying I'm a fan of Annie Duke. Listened to Thinking In Bets and currently have her poker book in my library although it's taking me some time to get through it (and actually start playing poker). That said, this book is a great thinking methods book.

For someone looking for a quick process, the book may disappointment, but I think over time, one internalizes the steps and intuitively becomes a better deciderer...lol

I'm a fan of poker books, especially the memoire style ones that translates poker lessons into real life. I know it's become a little cliche, but I tend to pay attention to the cliff notes because good poker players are generally good thinkers, and we all need to be better thinkers in all parts of our lives. This book is in that genre without overtly being it. Annie only mentions one or two poker terms like tilt. Which is cool because knowing nothing of poker or that she is a poker star doesn't get in the way of these great skills she gives in the book.

Annie's voice is sometimes an acquired taste, but as I led with, I'm a fan!

1 person found this helpful

Required Reading

A must read. If you read only the first 2 chapters of this book, you will walk away a wiser person. The author does a fine job reading. (I am biased toward the original authors reading their work where possible. It makes the listening experience more intimate.)

I award highest recommendations for this work.

Looking a method to better decide ?

This is an excellent book to analyze how you take decision and improve your process.
Many time we take decision without process and it can impact the outcome.
The author is giving us a tactical approach and a PDF to help us.
@Vincethereader