From Annie Duke's "How to Decide" The power of negative thinking. "Negative thinking helps you identify things that might get in your way so you can identify ways to reach your destination more efficiently." (p. 212) "Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at...

From Annie Duke's book "Thinking in Bets" To make better decisions, make a bet or pretend you are making a bet. "“Wanna bet?” triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to. Being asked if we are willing to bet money on it makes it much more...

From Annie Duke's "Quit" Create a "Kill" Criteria with a date before you start a project. "We already know that we’re not particularly good at responding rationally in the moment to signals that tell us that we ought to quit. In fact, we tend to react to bad news by...

From Annie's Duke's "Quit" My Favorite Quotes from Quit "The second is that making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is...

From Chip Heath's book "Decisive" Enshrine your core priorities. "By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas." Examples: "Ramirez continued to agonize about the decision until, eventually, she realized...

From Annie Duke's book "How to Decide" Create a precommitment contract. Precommitment Contract (also known as Ulysses contract)- “An agreement that commits you in advance to take or refrain from certain actions, or raising or lowering barriers to those actions.Such...

From Gabriel Weinberg's book "Superthinking" Flex Your Market Power Arbitrage- "When you take advantage of price differences for the same product in two different settings." Sustainable competitive advantage- "describes a set of factors that give you an advantage over...

From Gabriel Weinberg's book "Superthinking" Unlocking People's Potential "Both Joy and Rumsfeld acknowledge that organizations hardly ever have perfect resources, nor can they always afford to wait until they have better ones before moving forward. Joy’s law further...

From Gabriel Weinberg's book "Superthinking" Dealing with Conflict "arms race. The term was originally used to describe a race between two or more countries to accumulate weapons for a potential armed conflict. It can also be used more broadly to describe any type of...

From Gabriel Weinberg's book "Superthinking" Decisions, Decision "grass-is-greener mentality, causing you mentally to accentuate the positives (e.g., greener grass) and overlook the negatives." "One simple approach to improving the pro-con list is to add some numbers...

"Superthinking," by Gabriel Weinberg Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics "It is human nature to use past experience and observation to guide decision making, and evolutionarily this makes sense. If you watched someone get sick after they ate a certain food or get hurt...

"Superthinking," by Gabriel Weinberg Become One with Nature “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment...

"Superthinking," by Gabriel Weinberg Spend Your Time Wisely "In the business world, there is a mental model that draws on Polaris for inspiration, called north star, which refers to the guiding vision of a company. For example, DuckDuckGo’s north star is “to raise the...

"Superthinking" by Gabriel Weinberg "tragedy of the commons. However, unbeknownst to him, his hypothetical situation had really occurred in Boston Common two hundred years earlier (and many other times before and since). More affluent families did in fact keep buying...

"Superthinking," by Gabriel Weinberg Being Wrong Less "The concept of inverse thinking can help you with the challenge of making good decisions. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less." "Or consider healthy eating. A direct approach would be to try to...

From Julia Galef's "The Scout Mindset" "So I’ve given it one. I call it scout mindset: the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement In Managerial Decision Making" STRATEGY 6: UNDERSTAND BIASES IN OTHERS "The nature of managerial life requires you to work closely with the decisions of others, reviewing recommendations, transforming recommendations into decisions, and...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement In Managerial Decision Making" Take an Outsider's View (from page 232) Kahneman and Lovallo (1993) explain this apparent contradiction by theorizing that we all have two perspectives on decision making: an insider view and an outsider...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement In Managerial Decision Making" Reason Analogically (from p. 232) Analogical reasoning, or the process of abstracting common lessons from two or more situations, turns out to be a remarkably simple debiasing approach (D. Gentner, G....

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement in Managerial Decision Making" Beware of Overconfidence, the Mother of All Biases! "Overconfidence. We lead with an exploration of this bias for two reasons. First, it is one of the most potent and pervasive biases to which human...

From Kahneman's "Noise" How to Lessen "Noise" Select better judges. Click here to see how."A radical application of this principle is the replacement of judgment with rules or algorithms. Algorithmic evaluation is guaranteed to eliminate noise—indeed, it is the only...

From Kahneman's "Noise" What Kind of People Make Better Judgements? "Judgments are both less noisy and less biased when those who make them are well trained, are more intelligent, and have the right cognitive style. In other words: good judgments depend on what you...

From Daniel Kahneman's "Noise" My Favorite Quotes From "Noise" "wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think." (p. 16) “Experiments show large disparities among judges in the sentences they recommend for identical cases. This variability...

From Kahneman's "Noise" How to "Debias" Bias Apply a percentage to adjust predictions.The Green Book- "The book urges planners to address optimistic biases by applying percentage adjustments to estimates of the cost and duration of a project. These adjustments should...

From Kahneman's "Noise" Why are Traditional Interviews Bad? "if your goal is to determine which candidates will succeed in a job and which will fail, standard interviews (also called unstructured interviews to distinguish them from structured interviews, to which we...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement in Managerial Decision Making" Improving Hiring Decisions (From P. 222) "Hiring decisions are among the most important decisions an organization can make. Virtually every corporation in the world relies on unstructured, face-to-face...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement In Managerial Decision Making" By contrast, it would be easy to set up a linear program to avoid this error. Indeed, Dawes (1971) did just that in his work on graduate-school admissions decisions. Dawes used a common method for...

From Max Bazerman's "Judgement In Managerial Decision Making" Lewis (2003) argues that baseball executives were consistently guilty of three mistakes. First, they overgeneralized from their personal experiences. Second, they were overly influenced by players’ recent...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" Motivational Interviewing "Instead of attacking or demeaning his clients, Miller started asking them questions and listening to their answers." (p. 146) "Together, they developed the core principles of a practice called motivational...

From Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" Beware of These 18 Biases and Illusions Before You Make a Decision! Availability Heuristic- If you can easily recall an event, you will think it happens more frequently than reality. "The process of judging frequency by...

From Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Beware of the Narrative Fallacy! "Taleb introduced the notion of a narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future." (p. 199)"Narrative...

From Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Beware of the illusion of Skill and Validity! "We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each of our specific predictions was valid. I...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" When your Beliefs are Challenged, You Will Want to Fight or Flight. "Neuroscientists find that when our core beliefs are challenged, it can trigger the amygdala, the primitive “lizard brain” that breezes right past cool rationality and...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" Why You Need a Challenge Network. "My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased” bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are,...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" What is Psychological Safety? It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture." (p. 209)"When I was involved...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" My Favorite Quotes From "Think Again." "As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" Most People Think and Talk Like a Preacher, Prosecutor, or Politician. This is not Good! "As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians." (p. 18)"The risk...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" How to Rethink in Organizations. (p. 255) Have More Nuanced Conversations: "Complexify contentious topics. There are more than two sides to every story. Instead of treating polarizing issues like two sides of a coin, look at them...

From Adam Grant's "Think Again" Motivational Interviewing is Useful for People who have a Hard Time Changing. "the core principles of a practice called motivational interviewing. The central premise is that we can rarely motivate someone else to change. We’re better...

9 Traps in Decision Making The Storytelling Trap"Storytelling makes us construct a coherent story from a selection of facts. But this is never the only possible story, and it can lead us into error." (p. 35) The Imitation Trap"Attribution error leads us to attribute...

Oliver Sibony's "You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake!" Favorite Quotes From "You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake" "Even if you are a competent, careful, and hardworking executive, you might end up making avoidable, predictable mistakes. This is precisely the...

From Robert Cialdini's "Influence" The Reciprocity Principle. "The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.""If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should...

From Annie Duke's "How to Decide" Why Do I Need This 6 Step Process? "For new decisions, you’re looking into the future, which is inherently uncertain. This six-step process will help you improve the quality of both new decisions on your horizon and your assessment of...

From Annie Duke's book "How to Decide" Why pros and cons lists are dangerous. "When we approach a decision, we have already started to form an opinion about what the right option is. Usually we don’t even know we have already formed an opinion, but that opinion can,...

By Chip Heath's "Decisive" To overcome short term emotions, we need to attain some distance. "When people share the worst decisions they’ve made in life, they are often recalling choices made in the grip of visceral emotion: anger, lust, anxiety, greed. Our lives...

From Chip Heath's, "Decisive" Set up a Tripwire to prevent yourself from going on Autopilot. "Chances are you know someone who has been stuck on autopilot too long. Sometimes autopilot causes people to neglect opportunities; maybe you have a friend who has talked...

From Chip Heath's "Decisive" What is Narrow Framing, and Why is is Bad? "narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms." People think, "should I do this? or not?" "Nutt found that “whether or not” decisions...

From Chip Heath's Decisive How to ask questions to get trustworthy information. "This practice of asking probing questions is useful when you are trying to pry information from people who have an incentive to spin you: salesmen, recruiters, employees with agendas, and...

From Philip Tetlock's "Superforcasting" What is the Fermi Method? Enrico Fermi was a physicist who helped invent the Atomic Bomb. He was also famous for answering seemingly impossible questions with little data. (During a time before the internet was invented.) "Fermi...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Biases are the enemy of good decision making. Is it Possible to Avoid Biases? Kahneman is not optimistic that you can prevent Biases easily. A big problem is you will be blind to notice your own Biases. "The message of...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" "Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in this book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which...

My favorite Ray Dalio quotes from his book "Principles." "Instead of saying “I know I’m right, one should ask, “How do I know I’m right?“ “None of us is born knowing what is true; we either have to discover what’s true for ourselves, or believe and follow others. The...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Beware of the Anchoring effect! Whenever you see a number before making a decision, this number will influence your decision unconsciously!"you should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Beware of the Availability Heuristic! When you are trying to estimate the frequency of something, you will make an estimate based on how easily you can recall it in your mind. This is called the Availability Heuristic....

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Don't Let Stories Distort Your View of Reality! Let's say you are trying to predict something. If you read a story or description of something, you will overweight this description as evidence and underweight the Base...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Beware of the Optimism Bias! "In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" How Much of Success is Due to Luck? "A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Even Statisticians Get Fooled by the Small Numbers Bias. The law of small numbers state:"Large samples are more precise than small samples.""Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do." (p....

From Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, fast and slow" What is Hindsight Bias? "The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion." (p. 203)"A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect...

From Peter Bevelin's "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." Investing tips from Buffet, Munger, and Bevelin: "I pay no attention to economic forecasting. I worry about being in good business with good people. That's all I focus...

From Peter Bevelin's "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." My Favorite Quotes from Bevelin's Book: "This modern generation, which has gotten so good at doing two or three things at once- multi-tasking, aided by electronic devices- I'll...

From Ray Dalio "Principles" 1, Instead of saying “I know I’m right, one should ask, “How do I know I’m right?" "None of us is born knowing what is true; we either have to discover what’s true for ourselves, or believe and follow others. The key is to know which path...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Is Overconfidence Good or Bad? "Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe that they are superior to most others on most desirable traits—they are willing to bet small amounts of money on these...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" People forecast and predict all kind of things. Financial analysts forecast earnings, Economists forecast inflation, contractors predict the time it will take to finish their project, people forecast how much growth of...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Be careful not to over appraise or under appraise someone due to the Halo Effect. If you like someone, you will probably over appraise them. If you hate someone, you probably dislike them more than they deserve. This is...

From Daniel Kahnehman "Thinking, fast and slow" If you are interviewing someone for a job, you probably will over weigh your personal impressions from the interview and under weigh the facts about the candidate. This is bad because the Halo Effect affects your...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" What is Regression to the Mean? Outcomes are a combination of skill and luck. If someone performs unusually well, it was due to luck. So next time they perform, they will do a lot worse. If someone performs unusually bad,...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Beware of of Base Rate Neglect! When people make a prediction of something, they underweight Base Rates or even neglect them. This is an illusion called Base Rate Neglect. "There are two ideas to keep in mind about...

From Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, fast and slow" Some people claim to have great intuition. Should you trust their intuition? What is Intuition and When Can You Trust it? First of all, what is intuition? Is it mysterious? Is it magic? No. Intuition is simply information...

From Charlie Munger "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "What a man wishes, that also will he believe." "The Greek orator as clearly right about an excess of optimism being the normal human condition, even when pain or the threat of pain is absent." "One standard antidote to...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "We all commonly observe the excessive self-regard of man. He mostly misappraises himself on the high side, like the ninety percent of Swedish drivers that judge themselves to be above average." (p.473) One spouse...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "The otherwise complex behavior of man is much simplified when he automatically thinks and does what he observes to be thought and done around him." (p. 480) "This make it wise for parents to rely more on manipulating...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Living in dominance hierarchies as he does, like all his ancestors before him, man was born mostly to follow leaders, with only a few people doing the leading. And so, human society is formally organized into dominance...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Man's imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what's easily available to it." (p. 486) "The main antidote to miscues from Availablity-Misweighing Tendency often involves procedures, including...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Man, as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted. Some people produce copious amounts of twaddle and others very...

By Charlie Munger's Almanack "Some seller of an ordinary industrial product will often change his product's trade dress and raise its price significantly hoping that quality-seeking buyers will be tricked into becoming purchasers by mere association of his product and...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Sibling jealousy is clearly very strong and usually greater in children than adults. It is often stronger than jealousy directed at strangers." (p. 465) "Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion, and literature...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "The automatic tendency of humans to reciprocate both favors and disfavors has long been noticed as extreme, as it is in apes, monkeys, dogs, and many less cognitively gifted animals." "The standard antidote one's...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "When one sperm gets into a human egg, there's an automatic shut off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result." (p. 461) "People tend to accumulate...

From Charlie Munger "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "I think I've been in the top 5 percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've alway underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that...

From Charlie Munger "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision." (p. 459) To help prevent Doubt- Avoidance Tendency, judges and jurors are forced to delay their decisions to try to...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" "Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object...

From Charlie Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack" A newly hatched baby goose is programmed to love the first creature that is nice to it, which usually is his mother. If the first thing a baby goose see is a nice human, the baby goose will "love" the human. "Each child,...

1 min. 10 sec. read Whenever we make a decision we use two modes of thinking, System 1 and System 2. You can think of System 1 and System 2 as two agents, each with their own character, abilities, limitations, and functions. "System 1 operates automatically and...