Book Review – “Thinking in Bets – making smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts” by Annie Duke

Have you ever found yourself in a situation when you couldn’t leave your work at work? It follows you around, you lose your zest for life. Everything moves to the background – family responsibilities, friends, your hobbies. Everything, except work.

Lara: In the last few years of my corporate career I started having problems with my sleep. I would lay in bed for hours thinking through plans and actions to make sure nothing is missed. Or, I would beat myself up for ‘a mistake’ that caused a problem or a failure. I would never show my stress at work, because in the office you need to project full control of yourself and the situation. And this is what everybody does. But sometimes during a Friday drink, people would drop their guard and say: “This project stresses the hell out of me – I haven’t been sleeping for weeks now”. And then you know – you are not alone.

Is this an unavoidable cost for taking too much responsibility? Biting off more than you can chew? Or can we do something to avoid this suffering?

We recently came across a book “Thinking in Bets – Making Smarter Decisions when you don’t have all the facts” by Annie Duke. Annie was a very successful professional poker player for almost 20 years and her book talks about common problems in the process of decision making when the stakes are high (or we see them as such).

And the first point explored in her book is our inability to separate an area within our control from a Chance.

We cannot always get the desired outcome regardless of our best efforts.

The beautifully sad story comes to mind – ‘The gift of the Magi’ by O.Henry. Young and poor couple Jim and Della are buying presents for each other to celebrate their first family Xmas. They want to make it a special surprise, but they have no money. They have two treasures. Jim has a gold watch that belonged to his grandfather and Della has beautiful hair she is very proud of.
She decides to buy him a gold watch chain. And he decides to give her a set of tortoise-shell combs. Can you imagine their shock when they come home on Xmas eve and realise that Jim sold his watch and Della sold her hair to give each other the perfect present?
The chance was so negligible that they didn’t even consider it.

Back to “Thinking in Bets”. There are two dimensions in every strategy we develop to achieve something – the decisions we make to move towards our goal and the variables we can’t control.

The fact that we cannot control everything is common knowledge. There is a well- known saying “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”. Unfortunately, this wisdom is not easy to remember when we are in a middle of a mess.
There are two types of reaction that people experience based on their wiring:

1. “I am responsible for everything”. We ignore the probability of things going wrong regardless of our best efforts and correct steps. We judge our performance only by result and if the goal is not achieved, we devalue all the right decisions we made, feeling like a loser. And then it triggers guilt, shame, over-analysis, sleepless nights with spinning the same scenario over and over again in search of a mistake or better approach.
2. “Nothing is in my control”. This is not always about a victim mentality. For over-responsible people this is a real danger zone – this situation causes paralysis. Especially in the cases of high stakes (impact on your job, family or whole life). The more effort we put into an attempt to control ‘the uncontrollable’, the less ‘in control’ we feel. And this is when we fall into major stress.

Alina: Being a business coach I often work with top managers who have experiences similar to Lara’s. I find it most effective to start with separating and ungluing these two dimensions. That gives the client an opportunity to clarify and extend the zone under their control and come up with new ideas. And redirecting their attention to find new creative solutions reduces the level of stress.

About the author:  Annie Duke holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history. She has a unique combination of practical experience of a professional poker player and PhD in psychology and in her book you can find tools and strategies to establish and maintain a healthy habit of separating an area of control from a Chance.

Thinking In Bets