89: Annie Duke | World Series of Poker Champion | ”Quitting isn’t a bad thing!”

Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker champion, having won more than $4 million in tournament poker. In 2004, she won the World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. 

In 2009, Annie was a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice, where she took 2^nd and raised more than $700,000 for her chosen charity.

She is the author of Thinking in Bets, a national bestseller, and Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.

Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and she recently completed her PhD.

She is also the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. 

In this episode, we discuss the following:

• Quitting isn’t a bad thing. With whatever we’re doing, don’t be afraid to say, “I don't love it” or “I loved it, but I no longer do” or “I still love it, but I think there might be this other thing that I love more.”
• All decisions are probabilistic, so it’s important to continually sample.Try a bunch of stuff, figure out what you like, and then keep trying a bunch of stuff.
• It’s hard for us to leave paths without feeling like we’ve failed. Luckily for Annie, she was forced to try other things when she got sick during her PhD program. And then sampling poker led her to becoming a world champion. Then she realized she liked writing books, giving talks, and running a foundation.
• Just because something survives a fact check doesn’t mean it’s true…true in the sense that it’s the right model of the facts. If the stock market drops 3,000 points in one day, people might say it’s the largest drop in history. But that would only be true in terms of total points, not true in terms of percentage.
• Given that every decision we make is a forecast, the quality of our decisions are only as good as the way that we’ve modeled the information that is inputted into the forecast.
• Annie has developed two questions that are fantastic for modeling facts:  “Out of how many?” and “In comparison to what?” By asking ourselves these two questions we will improve our models and make Annie happy.

Follow Annie:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnnieDuke

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/annie-duke-professional-speaker-&-decision-strategist/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_annieduke/

Annie's Books:

Thinking in Bets: https://amzn.to/3PjJ33s

How to Decide: https://amzn.to/3OW0UMv

Quit: https://amzn.to/3qM9aqu

Follow Me:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/