6 Insights For Gambling Your Way To A Better Life

This piece is made possible by the brilliant work of Annie Duke. She’s a Professional poker player with a Masters in Cognitive Psychology. Her specialty is “decision strategy.” Her book, Thinking in Bets, is all about using bets to make decisions with partial information. As we have to make 99% of our decisions this way, Annie’s book is incredibly useful and life-changing. Below are my top 6 takeaways from her work.

1. “All decisions are bets on the future.”

If we knew the future with certainty, we’d all be crypto billionaires. But we’d also be miserable because an entirely predictable future is already the past.

Because the future is mostly unknown, we must make decisions before we have perfect information. This is where bets come in!

Thinking in bets makes you exponentially more rational because you have real skin in the game, even if you’re not actually betting. You wouldn’t decide using wishful thinking if you risked losing $20,000. You’d prefer to guess accurately.