How to Know (Without a Doubt) If It’s Time to Quit | with Annie Duke

About Episode

“Expected value is not just about money. It can be measured in health, well being, happiness, time, self-fulfillment, satisfaction in relationships or anything else that affects you.”
– Annie Duke

Annie Duke is an author, speaker and a consultant in the decision-making space. And as a former professional poker player who has won $4 million in tournament poker, I’d say she has figured out a thing or two in regard to making decisions (especially under pressure). Her book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller and today, we’re going to talk about her latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.

In our conversation, Annie and I talk about her unique approach to the concept of quitting, drawing from her study of cognitive psychology and experience in playing tournament poker. We talk about why people tend to default in making bad decisions, and how learning to quit can actually be one of the best avenues you can take on the road to success. Annie walks us through the specific techniques she teaches for the art of decision making, and how you can apply these to your life (and choices) moving forward.

If you feel uncertain on whether or not you should quit (whether that be a job, a relationship, a goal, or even a system of habits) Annie’s simple and direct techniques will no doubt have you on the path towards making a clear decision. Her unique take on decision making backed by her study of cognitive psychology are the perfect combination for an eye opening conversation that I can’t wait for you to hear.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Annie Duke who is an author, a speaker and a consultant in the decision making space as a former professional poker player, you've won more than $4 million in tournament poker. No, that is not a typo. $4 million in tournament poker. In a previous lifetime, you were awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Your previous book, Thinking in Bets is a national bestseller. And today, we're largely going to be discussing the work that you've done in your latest book, which, by the way, shameless plug at the very top, buy this book, read it, absolutely internalize it for anybody that wants to design a more fulfilling career, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away any I know you and I just met, you have no idea how long you have been in my mind and how much and how long. I've wanted you on this podcast today. So I'm very, very excited that you're here.

Annie Duke: Well, it sounds like the good version of stalking.

Zack Arnold: I would say so yes. It's there's a delicate line between networking and outreach and finding people that you want to put into your network versus outright stalking. I've learned how to delicately balanced that line.

Annie Duke: So it's well done. It was well done.

Zack Arnold: Great. Well I appreciate that. So here's the ironic thing about today's call. This podcast is very much talking about how we can optimize human potential. And I've talked to plenty of bestselling authors and experts and athletes at a very high level and everyday people that achieve extraordinary things. And a common theme is always grit, and perseverance, and you power through and you work through the struggles, and you are probably the biggest quitter I have ever had on my show. So I'd love to learn a little bit more before we get into the science in the book and the research and everything else. Why you identify as a quitter. And I'd like to learn a little bit more about your origin story in your previous life and how you ended up playing poker and now ended up here today talking about this book.

Annie Duke: So I mean, here's the thing is that I think that we make two biggest distinction between grit and quit, we think of them as like opposing forces. But they're actually the same thing. You can be a quitter and a grater at the exact same time. And that's actually more how I describe myself. The reason why I talk a lot about the quitting that I've done is because I think that for adults, particularly high achievers, we lean so heavily into grit, like, you know, we like to talk about sticking to it. And I've never quit anything in my life and really like the trials and travails of sticking to hard things. And I think we think about it as such a sign of good character, you know, and lack of character is quitting. So So I like to actually talk much more about the quitting that I've done that. That being said, I've done well at many things, which means that I also by definition, must be pretty busy. In order to do well at something you have to stick to it. So it kind of all started back in graduate school, I did five years worth of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. And right at the end, I had all of my doctoral work done, I was going out for my job talks. I got really sick with a stomach illness and ended up in that hospital for two weeks, and found myself in a situation where I needed to take a leave of absence. And so I did that I was going to go back out on the job market the next year, this happened in the spring. And so I was going to go back out the next winter. But it was during that time that I was like, Oh no, I don't have a fellowship anymore. I need money. And I started playing poker in this little smoky basement bars in Montana, which is where I was sort of recuperating at the time. And I had a knack for it. So I quit graduate school. And I started playing poker. And you know, I look I stuck with graduate school for five years. I don't think that it was a bad quit once I sort of discovered poker and my love for poker. I sort of decided I wasn't going to go become a professor. So I'm going to stick to this for a while. And I did I stuck to it for 18 years, won some World Championships, did pretty well. But in 2002 ces about eight years into my poker career, I was asked to give a talk on the way that like the way that what we understand about poker might inform how somebody in the financial services business or an options trading might think about risk. And I actually started thinking about my work in cognitive science and the way that we think about cognitive bias and risk aversion and risk attitudes, how they converge with what you can learn about those from poker and I sort of realized it was kind of an interesting conversation to have between the two. So I ended up cutting back on how much poker I was playing and started giving these talks to different groups in business. Thinking about the the convergence or the intersection between poker and cognitive science. And then in 2012, I quit poker completely. started a nonprofit and moved back to the east coast. So I guess say quit LA, you could say,

Zack Arnold: I don't blame you side note.

Annie Duke: And then, you know, I really I had written some books about about poker specifically about poker strategy, but really wanted to write this book, which ended up being Thinking in Bets, which was sort of putting down what I've been talking about for 10 years to these really good, you know, groups of really smart people at the intersection of cognitive science and poker, put that down on paper, and that became thinking in bets. And I really loved it. And I loved the writing process, I, you know, did a lot of writing in graduate school, I was actually, in one of my majors in college was an English major. And I just really enjoyed the writing process and want to do more of it. So since then, I've written two other books Quit is the most recent one. And now I consult in that space. I'm actually back at the University of Pennsylvania, I teach executive at Wharton. And here's the funny thing, and this is, the important thing about quitting is that you have to realize sometimes you can go back, I'm just about to finish my PhD.

Zack Arnold: So you're not a quitter, you're a pauser.

Annie Duke: Um, well, all quitting is sort of pausing. And you don't really know until you're dead. If you are pausing, you're quitting, there's actually very few things that you quit, where you can never ever, ever go back. Even you know, people get divorced, they get remarried to the same person, that the few things were, you know, there are some things where it's really hard to go back, interestingly enough, not the academic world that I was in. But if you are an academic in the humanities, actually kind of interesting, and you exit that it's actually hard to go back. So that would be an example of something that we're you're pretty much closing the door. But you're really currently there, you're mostly leaving at a jar. And I think that's something that we should remember about quitting is that sometimes it is pausing. I haven't paused my thing for like, 30 years. But you know, not everybody pauses for 30 years and goes back.

Zack Arnold: Yeah and this is something that you've talked about before. That's called the two way door problem. Correct. From what Jeff Bezos popularized.

Annie Duke: Yeah, exactly. So here's, here's the main problem. And I think this is what Jeff Bezos is thinking about, is so when we choose to start things, when we make a decision to start something, whether it's like a career in writing, or we're going to move to LA to become an actor, or I'm going to start a job as an engineer at a tech startup, or I'm going to start dating somebody, or I'm going to marry somebody, I'm going to start running a marathon, whatever it is that you're starting, you're starting under conditions of uncertainty. And all that means is that you don't know everything like you were making decisions when we just don't have all the facts. And I think we've all had that feeling of discovering something after the fact, after we've started it, and kind of wishing we had known that at the time that we made the decision. And that's just that feeling. I mean, think about it, like when you take a job, how do you know about the job, you've never done it, right, I don't really know about the company, or the people I'm going to work with or whether it's going to be fulfilling, or I'm going to like it, or they're going to like me, we just don't know very much about that stuff when we choose to start, but we have to choose to start under those conditions, because we don't have ammunition. So that's one form of uncertainty that really kind of bogs us down. But then the other form of uncertainty is just pure luck. So even if I had perfect information, right, even if I knew for sure what the chances of different possible worlds are, that might occur, if I do something, it's still the case that I don't have control over what world I see. And you can kind of think about that in the sense of, you know, I can know all the traffic laws, right, so there's no information that's hidden from me there, I can know that the light is green. And I can go through, I can still get an accident just because I get unlucky. These is just in the possible set of set of things that could happen. So it's kind of like in poker, right? It's like, we can both put all of our chips into the pot. And we can turn our hands over and you could have a seven and a two and I could have aces. And then the cards go and I don't have any control over that. So that really makes these decisions to like, what am I going to start what am I going to decide to do? What am I going to decide to commit to actually quite difficult. But what Jeff Bezos points out with the idea of a two way door decision is that the option to be able to quit makes that decision to start things much easier. Because what that means is that when you do have that feeling of I wish I'd known then what I know now, the option to quit lets you do something about it. So if I find out that I hate my job, right, and it's just not for me, I can quit. So when I started there was just a bunch of stuff. I didn't know I started doing it but didn't like it. I can walk away. That's what it means about a two way door decision. Because the door doesn't just sat behind you, right? Like you can walk back through it, and go, maybe pick options that you rejected in the past. Or you could go find new options that you could choose fresh. And that takes a lot of the pressure off of, you know, how do you actually decide to start something? I mean, when you think about it, you really don't know anything, right. So that helps it. The problem, though, is that we don't open those doors back up very well. So it just turns out that we're really, really crappy at quitting. So in theory, it should help us that we have this option to quit. But in practice, we just don't do it very much.

Zack Arnold: Well, the first problem that you've created for me is in that one little blurb, I have about three and a half hours worth of questions and dissecting that I've already completed, I'm already completely engrossed and obsessed with this conversation. And there's a bunch of things that I want to pick out. The first one that I actually want to pick out, is that I'm sure that alarm bells are already ringing for my audience, because I talk incessantly about the concept of luck. And I have called in many contexts lucky four letter word, and my audience interprets that as well. Zach says that luck doesn't exist. Not even remotely true. However, I think so many people ascribe so much of their life's direction on luck, as opposed to let's focus on all that which we can control. If I know the traffic laws, and I see the light is green. And I get hit by a car, why couldn't have control that if i However, decided, I don't need to know the rules and add looking at the lights for suckers. Well, that's not luck, you put yourself in a situation where that likelihood was higher. But yes, luck does exist. So I just I want to talk a little bit more about how Yes, Lucky exists, but you can reduce the amount of luck in your life by being very strategic about your decisions. And the context that I want to frame this in is the difference between an amateur poker player and a professional poker player and how that factors into quitting?

Annie Duke: Yeah, so there's a couple of things that that I just want to pick up on. So the first thing is, it's interesting that so there's, there's a bias, I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's called self serving bias. And what it is, is that when we get outcomes, either good or bad, we actually apply luck asymmetrically. So when we have bad things happen to us, then we say I got unlucky. So it's like, oh, the world happened to me. And when we have good things happen to us, we say I'm so great. And you can see this poker all the time, right? So I'm going a slightly different direction. But so when players win a hand, they say, I played so great, I played my opponent. And when they lose a hand, they say, I got so unlucky. That was so unfair.

Zack Arnold: It was all in the cards, right? It was just the cards, I was dealt all the cards.

Annie Duke: And that's a really bad way to think about the world. Your point is exactly right, that what our job is decision makers is is to see see the luck clearly. In other words, really try to see clearly what was the influence of luck on my decision? Or if we're looking forward, if I make this decision? What are the different outcomes that could occur? And what's the probability of those in the same sense that it's good for me to know if you're flipping a coin, that will be heads 50% of the time and Tails 50% of the time, that allows me to make good decisions about like, would I be willing to bet you, if I had to give you $2, for every $1 that I won, that would be a bad bet. But that's because I can see the luck clearly. Because I can see that the coin is 5050. Right? So that's kind of that and then what I want to understand is, what was the influence of luck on my outcome? So if I do say, Sure, I'll give you $2 When you win, and one dollars at $1, if I lose, while there's luck in the equation, because of the flip of the coin, if I lose, that's my fault, because I actually did not make a skillful bet. So that's what we're always trying to do is, and it's very hard to untangle, particularly in the short run, when you get a particular outcome. Was it because I got unlucky? Or was it because I made bad decisions? And likewise, and I think this is really hard for people who are successful to say, what was the contribution of my own skill? But also, what was the contribution of luck? So we have to look at those two things symmetrically, right. So we could think about it this way. Like, look, I've obviously had a pretty good trajectory in my life. But there's luck at the base of my life, which is I was born at a certain time when women were allowed to do things that prior to my lifetime, they weren't allowed to do. I was born to educated parents, who really valued me getting educated, right, and things like that, that I absolutely had no control over. And that's not to discount the fact that I worked quite hard. But there's an intersection both on the good side and the bad side. And we need to see that pretty clearly. Otherwise, we're not going to get particularly good at decision making. So so that I was just thinking about that in turn So in terms of the luck element before we get to the good and bad poker player, you know,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, well, we're definitely going to get there. And as far as the way that you frame luck, you and I have a lot in common because what I always tell people when I explained the difference between what I see is luckier isn't my first example is I'm very that I was born white, male middle class in America in the late 20th century, hey, shit that I when the human lottery, right, right? That was amazing. And it doesn't, it doesn't discount the hard work that I've done. But I always ascribed everything about who I was, and my identity and what I've achieved the hard work. And the more that I grew up and learn more about the world, I'm like, There's a fair amount of not a large amount of luck that factors in, but I'm not going to focus on that, because that's not a good use of my energy, what is a good use of my energy is still focusing on what I can control. And when it comes to this, the self serving bias, when I learned about this, it was framed slightly differently. And it just completely clicked with me immediately, which is they had to learn more about this specifically in the context of sports teams. And people say we won versus they lost, right that we lost. And, exactly. And where this really clicked in is with somebody else's work, which is saying the same thing in slightly different terms, which is Carol Dweck and mindset, fixed mindset versus growth mindset. The fixed mindset is the world is happening to me, I can't do anything about it. It's all bad luck, versus some of that's existing. But how much of this can I control knowing that I'm changeable? I'm malleable, neuroplasticity has proven I can learn things, I can develop new skills. To me, we're all that we're having the same conversation with different words from different perspectives. But I want to frame this conversation around focusing on that which we can control. Because we can quit whether or not we choose to stick with something or we choose to quit.

Annie Duke: Yeah, and I think like the best poker players in the world become very sanguine about luck. Right? It's sort of like it exists, but I embrace it. Right, I mean, I can't really do anything about it, my job is to know the odds. And then to make the best decision to reduce the probability that I have a bad outcome. So I don't really like the phrase, you make your own luck, because that that implies you have some control over luck. What I like to say is you make your own decisions, that can change the distribution of possible outcomes in your favor.

Zack Arnold: So it's not nearly as good for an Instagram quote card.

Annie Duke: It isn't. But the problem is, I really do have people think that they have some sort of control over luck, which is not true. So that's what poker players are really trying to do, right? I don't control the deal of the cards. But I control which cards I play, I control how I play them. And what I can do is work to increase my win probability. And that's the thing that I should be laser laser focused on. And what's interesting is that what you hear from poker players who are talking about, you know, sessions that they've just had, is that they're mostly talking about bad beats. And the definition of a bad beat is I had the best hand, something bad happened to me that I didn't have any control over. What's the point that there's literally nothing to be learned from that, oh, the dealer turned a bad card. Okay. So is that going to make you play a hand differently next time. Because if it's not, there's really not a lot of use and talking about it. So you know, what you try to do is just say, Look, I'm just going to embrace the uncertainty. Because that's a world in which I live, it's a highly uncertain environment. And I'm going to try to make sure that I'm making decisions that are turning those the spread of possible outcomes in my favor. And interestingly enough, like some of that was really part of the thing that got me really interested in quitting. Because one of the best things you can do in poker to make the odds turn in your favor is to fold. And folding is just quitting. And when you look at amateur poker players, they're playing over 50% of the two cards, starting combinations in Texas Hold'em that they get dealt with professional players are playing generally about 15 to 25% of those. So you know, the amateur players are entering those pots twice as often. And that doesn't even count. Like once you've gotten involved in a hand like how willing are you to fold? Once you actually started playing in a game? How willing are you to quit and walk away when things aren't going well. And if you're going to turn your the odds in your favor, knowing that having the skill to be able to say you know what, return on investment is not here for me on this hand, I'm just going to let it go is one of the biggest things that you can do to make the essentially to make it go your way right to increase your win probability to make it so you're gonna earn more money, and it happens to be something that most people are terrible at. And really great poker players are really good at that.

Zack Arnold: And the reason that I'm so excited about the fact you brought this up just now it's the perfect segue to where I wanted to go And next, which is one additional thing you can very much control to change the proportion of luck in the equation is how long you play. And I know that one of the things you write about is that in poker you talk about, you know, playing a hand, not just a hand, or even a game or a day like it's over the course of a long period of time, which is similar to what I talked about with my students is that when you're designing your career, everybody's playing a game of checkers start playing a game of chess, don't worry about this one individual move, or I said no to this job, or I'm quitting this project, you've got to look at it as a much longer game. And as soon as I read this idea of the idea of playing a large amount of hands to reduce your luck, and like, you and I are totally on the same page.

Annie Duke: Yeah, so I mean, there's a saying in poker, which is poker is one long game. And what you're trying to do is keep your eye on what you're trying to accomplish in the long term, which is I'd like to win money in poker. In other things that might be I'd like to be the healthiest I can be, or I'd like to generate the most happiness for myself or the most fulfillment. But those are long games. The issue that we have as decision makers is that we're real short termers. So we can think about something like self serving bias, right? So it's a good, it's a good way to think about the short term problem, we can put self serving bias, kind of under this rubric of I'm good. I'm a good decision maker, right? Like this is the way we want to think about ourselves, I want to have a positive narrative of my life story. I don't want to feel like I made mistakes, I want to feel like I am a valid human. So what happens is that because we have this desire for what we could call internal and external validity, right, like, I want to view myself, well, I want other people to view me well, we get caught up in the short term, when we have something bad happen to us, right, we get fired from a job, or we get in a car accident, or have a bad day at work, or our sports team loses whatever it might be, we get caught up in the short term. And now we have a conflict. Because in the short term, we want to feel good about ourselves, right. And the easiest path to feel good about myself in the short run is to say it was my fault. So that's a short, that's a short run way to sort of get out of the problem, right. But it's clearly in our long term best interest. If we did have some part in what happened to take responsibility for that, and then change our behavior going forward. That's going to get us to where we want to go in the long run. But it doesn't matter because we're all what we would call temporal discounters. And temporal discounters, the way that you can think about it is, you know how people will win the lottery. And they'll take the money now. But they're getting like half as much money as they would if they just allowed it to pay out over the lifetime. So what that means is that in order to get the benefit today, they're taking a huge discount, right? I think it's 50%, it's might be 60%. It's a big discount. So they're discounting, you can take Think about it this way. They're their discount, they're taking a discount in the present, so that they don't have to wait and get the reward in the future. So that's kind of how we can think about temporal discounting, right is we're discounting, we're taking a discount in the present. And that's what's happening when we say it's not our fault, as like a knee jerk reaction is we're thinking in the short term. So in poker, this can happen as well, we can think about this in terms of quitting, which is that once you're involved in a hand, I've now invested money into the hand. Okay, so every chip I put into the pot, right, this is all money that's come out of my stack, and gotten into the pot. Now, if I keep playing the hand, there's a chance I could get that money back. Because I can get lucky, right? Like, even if the odds are against me, as long as I'm in the hand, something could happen. Maybe I went, it's only when I fold that I'm sure that I'm not going to get those chips back. Okay. Now, if it's the case that the hand isn't worth playing, it's best long run for me to fold. Because then I'm not putting more chips in investing more chips in a hand, that's no good. I can take those chips that I'm saving, and invest them in a hand in the future, that's going to be much better return on investment, that's all going to be good for me in the long run. But in order to do that, I have to feel like I'm a bad player. Like I'm taking the loss in the moment and people don't want to do that. And it's not just poker where people don't want to do that. People say all the time, like if I quit my job now I've wasted everything I put into it. That feeling of like I've wasted it. But if it's a crappy job that you hate, and you stay in it, the only waste that's happening is going forward, because I hate to tell you, but the time and money and effort and attention that you put into it already, that's already gone, you already spent it. What matters is are you going to continue and spend more at a waste which is a long run bad decision. That might give you some satisfaction in the short run. where you don't feel like I made a mistake to make the take the job or I've wasted all of my time? Or what's wrong with me that I couldn't make it work? Whatever those things are that that that self talk that we have that prevents us from actually walking away causes this horrible long run problem, because we're all temporal discounters.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is something I talk about with my students all the time. That's called the sunk cost fallacy. Well, I've already put all this time into this career path. And I've learned all these skills. And I hear this all the time. If I decide to quit and go a different direction, I have to start over. And what I want to bring that back to is actually the very beginning of your story where you have five years and master's program, you're from what I understand you were ready to defend your dissertation. It wasn't I took a few classes. You're like, I can literally reach out and I can touch the finish line. It was right there. I was dying and right. And so many people will think that you're so close, why would you want to, quote unquote, start over? And what I want to talk more about, and I think that you have the same obsession with this book that I do, you haven't named by name, but you've talked about the concepts. And that's arranged by David Epstein.

Annie Duke: I love David Epstein. By the way, he has a wonderful substack that everybody should

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I read it, I love it

Annie Duke: Widely. He's one of my favorites, was very helpful with Quit. Love him.

Zack Arnold: The reason I bring it up is if we go back to that situation where you go from, I'm ready to defend my to defend my dissertation to now I'm going to be a poker player. Most if not everybody, maybe with the exception of your family, because you come from a long history of people that have played poker. But outside of that people will say, well, that's dumb, you're starting over. But when you understand how do I take so many transferable skills and past experience, where it can not only be valuable in a new context, but my unique intersection of being somebody that knows poker, and the knows human psychology, I don't think it's an accident, or you got lucky that you got really good at the psychology of poker, right? So none of that was wasted. But why would people think you're starting over and you're a quitter. But that's the problem that so many of my students fall into is I have to start over.

Annie Duke: Yeah. So I mean, I, you know, I hadn't really thought about it in that frame. So I love that frame of starting over the way that I thought about, it was actually kind of the mirror image of that, which is people think that quitting stops your progress. And it's not true. So we can think about it this way. Look, if I can give you an analogy. So let's say that you're going somewhere, say on the 405,

Zack Arnold: We're not going somewhere, if we're talking about the 405 but go on.

Annie Duke: So you're heading in ways tells you that, you know, the traffic's pretty clear on the 405. And you get onto the 405. And it's a parking lot. All right. So the question is, should you exit the road. Now, you could think about this as your life's choices, right? Like, if you're in something that's basically dead ended, that isn't worth it to stick with, it's obviously going to get you to where you want to go faster if you exit the road. Right, so the first time the first exit that comes up on the 405, you should take it, because this is not happening. There's a semi that's turned over in front of you, and it's gonna take hours to clear, right. So in this case, we can see like when I talk about the traffic example, people can see pretty clearly that in this particular case, quitting, which is getting off the road is going to get you to where you want to go faster. So we can take that. And think about that for life's decisions. If I'm going to a job that is not going anywhere, that is not making me happy. That is not making me feel fulfilled. Where it doesn't have any opportunity for advancement or whatever it is that's going to make you happy in your work. Staying in it is what's stopping your progress. Because if you've aren't you figure it out, you're not going to get to where you want to go staying in this position. So you want to exit the road, because you want to get to so on onto something that has a higher what we call expected value or a higher chance of helping you to achieve your goal. So we can think about expected value in a simple way of we have goals. If you have a positive expected value, what you're doing is advancing you towards your goals. A negative expected value is advancing you away from your goals. And then sometimes you can think about like you're doing something that's pretty good. But there's other things that could be better. So that's sort of a nuance to that, but let's take it simple is is it positive expected value or negative expected value? Obviously, if you're stuck on the 405, and you can exit to a road, that's clear. The road that's clear has the higher expected value wanting to do that. And it's also true and career choices too. If I'm in a career that isn't doing it for me, where I've like toxic co workers or I just don't like the job, it's not great. I I'm then I ought to exit and go switch to something that is actually going to cause me to have a higher chance of achieving fulfillment. Now, how you decide when you exit? That's a different story because that has to do with like, how long can I afford to be without a job? But once you sort of figure that out, like how long can I afford to be without a job that sort of tells you how much do you have to overlap and maybe start doing some exploration while you're still in your current position, so that you don't get yourself in trouble on the switch. But that's what we would call like transaction costs, in the same sense that if I own a stock, and I want to sell it to buy another stock, there's there's some transaction costs. So we'll take that into account a little bit. But what we really care about is I want to sell this stock because it's a loser. So I can go buy this stock, that's a winner, I want to quit this job because it's a loser for me, it doesn't matter what I've already spent, that's irrelevant. Doesn't matter the training, it doesn't matter, all that stuff. It's not starting over its speed, it's I want to I want to get to where I want to go faster. So I need to stop this thing, because I am in traffic on the 405.

Zack Arnold: So I'm glad you brought this idea of expected value. This is exactly the whole reason that we are here. But I want to go back to this 405 analogy, and I want to throw one wrench in the works. That changes the whole circumstance, the assumption that we're making in your version is I have ways I know there's a semi backed up, and it's going to take hours. Now it's the same scenario I'm on the 405 traffic is stopped, I see it exit half a mile ahead. But I have no internet service. And the thought in my mind is I could get off at the exit. But what if traffic clears up in three minutes, I'm still gonna get ahead way faster if I just stick it out. And I know that more often than not, what I've learned about myself, when I get stuck in traffic, is the old version of me is like, Oh, I gotta get off, I gotta get around this. And then all of a sudden, I realize, if I just waited like five minutes, I would have gotten to my destination number one faster. And number two was way less stress. So if I had no internet connection, no ways and no certainty that there's a semi stopping my progress. Does that change your scenario?

Annie Duke: So yes, no, it doesn't. So let me explain why. So you're describing exactly the problem that I said about starting things. So when you choose to get on the 405, you're making that decision under conditions of uncertainty, given what I know now, it seems like this is the best route for me to go to get from, you know, the valley to Santa Monica. Okay, so. So that's kind of where you are, right? But there's all sorts of things that could throw a wrench in it, right? And you're trying to guess by like, time of day, is this a time when there's a lot of traffic, you don't have any internet. So that's sort of what you're going on. And then you get on the road and you learn new things. And whatever you're learning those new things, they're signals that things are going well, or things might be going poorly. And what it's doing is it's changing your estimate of expected value, which is just do I think this is likely to advance me toward my goals? Or do I think this is going to slow me down in comparison to other choices that I might make? And what's interesting is that we'll make that initial decision to start under those conditions of uncertainty, because that's exactly what you're talking about. You know, under management, you don't really know whether there's traffic on the four or five, you don't know if it's gonna be going faster, going slow, you're making your best guess at it. We're okay with that once we start, but what happens is once we started once we've gotten on the road, but I've already been on this road for so long, I've put so much time into it. If I exit, then I'll have wasted all of this time. What if? What if it ends up being okay? What if the traffic clears up in a second? Those types of counterfactuals are really, really hard for us. And they get us to keep to that our default is to keep going so that we keep going too long. So let's think about these two problems separately. One is how do you deal with this expected value problem? But how do we know that people tend to stick too long. So that is work that comes from separate and apart from? We know that things like sunk cost fallacy, the endowment effect status quo bias, like which we can talk about we've talked about some costs, gets us to stick to things longer than we ought to already. But Steven Levitt, who wrote Freakonomics and you know, has the podcast with Stephen Dubner actually did a really fun thing, which is he put up a website where people could put in like big life decisions where they were thinking about sticking or quitting. So let's say that you have a job and you're like, I don't know what to do, Zack, maybe I should stay in it. Or maybe I should quit. This seems like a really close call. And they could go to this website, and it could say I'm trying to decide whether to stay at my job or quit. And then they would ask for your time for you to rate your happiness on a scale of like zero to 100. And then they would flip a virtual coin. And if you know landed heads, you would stay in your job if Atlanta tails you would quit your job. So let me just sort of like get this sort of stipulations in here. So if someone is willing to flip a coin Trying to decide whether to stick with their job or not. Can we agree that they think it's a really close call,

Zack Arnold: Obviously. And we can also talk about how by the time you're asking that question, it's probably too late. But I'll get to that in a little bit.

Annie Duke: Yeah, exactly. So the reason why we know it has to be a close call is because it coin by definition is 5050. So if you're willing to flip a coin, to make the choice, you must think it's 5050. So now, let's translate that into saying that, what that means is that you think it's equally likely that you'll be happier staying in your position, as you will be quitting your position. That's sort of what the definition here of a close call would be. So remember, he measures their happiness on a scale of zero to 100. And then he calls them back in two to six months. So two months, six months, says, Tell me your happiness, on a scale of zero to 100. Now, if it's really a close call, what you should find out is that the stickers are as happy as the quitters to in six months later. But that's not what he finds, he finds that the quitters are happier. Okay, so what is going on there? Right? Well, what it means is that when we experience is a close call, it's not. Because the amount of evidence that you need to get on the 405 is much less than the amount of evidence that you need to exit the 405. That is, what we find out, right, is that you're willing to just get on the 405, you're willing to just take the job, you're willing to just go go on the date, or like start getting into a relationship or start up a mountain. But what happens is that once you're in it, once you're already halfway up the mountain, once you're already in the job, once you're already on the road, it's very hard to get us to quit. And we need a lot of evidence to make us do it, in fact, so much evidence that by the time most of us get to quitting, it's actually not really a choice anymore. And I think this is the insight that love it shows us. And I'm sure that you see this with the people that you coach, that by the time they're actually willing to walk away from a job, they are miserable, it is going nowhere, it is so incredibly clear that they don't really have a choice that their very happiness is at stake. Right? That's when we're willing to quit. But the fact is that you ought to be doing that much sooner. You can think about it. Like if I'm going up Mount Everest, I would like to turn around before I've already fallen in the to the crevasse. Because when I fallen into your boss, like obviously, I have to turn around a choice like, right, but we want to do it before the Blizzard is upon us. So we've already fallen and we'd like to do it, we just see the signs that that's going to happen. But we don't that's why there's so many people who are laying frozen on the top of Mount Everest, right? And this is what happens to us in our jobs. And the reason is that we're really bad at expected value, that once we get in something, we're so unwilling to walk away until we can say this sentence. Well, what could I do? I didn't have any other choice. Well, look, if you don't have any other choice, then it's just too late. You should have done it a long time ago.

Zack Arnold: One of the reasons that we are so bad at assessing expected value, and I want to workshop this even further. But one of the biases that I want people to better understand if they're not aware of it already, is the concept of loss aversion. So talk to me about how loss aversion is so dramatically in subjectively skewing our perception of whether we should choose Option A or Option B, what is loss aversion.

Annie Duke: So we have a pair of biases that go together. One is called loss aversion. That's an error and the other shore loss aversion. So we have to think about them both in parallel to understand why people don't want to make these switches. Okay. So loss aversion is the much more well known of the two. It's part of Prospect theory developed by Daniel Kahneman was a Nobel Laureate in economics, and Amos Tversky. Basically, what it says is that we experienced the downside, much more intensely, than we experienced the equivalent upside. So we ended up back in two ways. One is retrospectively if I would play blackjack, and I lost $50, it would feel about as bad to me as winning $100 would feel good to me. So that's sort of retrospectively, but also prospectively, what happens is that when we're considering starting something, buying a stock, starting a job, whatever, we focus on the possible downside, and we tend to neglect or not focus as much on the possible upside of the decision. So what that does is it causes us to become risk averse. We don't like to choose things that have some sort of loss associated with them, because we're afraid that we might actually experience those losses, even if the upside is really great. Okay, so that's loss aversion. You can think about it like people would rather buy a stock that doesn't have a lot of gains associated with it, but doesn't really have losses associated with it over one that might be a little bit more volatile. So that's loss aversion. Sure, loss aversion is a companion to it. Which is that once we have incurred losses, we do not like to quit, because that is the moment that those losses on paper, turn into realize losses. Right. So, you can think about that, as I'm trying to decide whether to buy a stock loss aversion is going to make it hard for me to start, right. So loss aversion is a problem with starting things. But now I've bought the stock, I bought it at 50. It's now trading at 40. Sure, loss aversion will make me not want to sell it, because if I sell it, I can't get my $10 back. Now, that goes back to what you said about it's all one long game, right? Like we're trying to make money across all the stocks that we own. But we don't want to sell that one stock because we don't want to take the shore loss. Right. So now let's think about your problem, right? Which is, why does this all stop us from starting things? Alright, it turns out that loss aversion is asymmetrically applied to the status quo versus a new option. So let's say we're on the 405. Okay, I will be much more tolerant of the losses that I might incur from staying on the road, that I will from exiting the road and finding out there's traffic there, too. So what happens then, is that we get focused on the losses that we might incur from the New option. But we don't really take into account the losses that were already occurring, that might be losses that will accrue from the option that we're already in. And then shore loss aversion makes it so we don't want to quit anyway, because we'll feel like we wasted everything that we put into it. So I think one of the most illuminating conversations that shows this kind of companion problem was a conversation I had with this woman who she was a doctor, Dr. Sarah Alston Martinez, who was an ER doc, but also a hospital administrator. And she had been doing that for 15 years, and over the last three years or so, had become pretty miserable in her work. She had, you know, at some point during her career, she had had young kids. And because she had become a hospital administrator, it turned out to be kind of a 24/7 job. And she felt like it was really interfering with her work life balance in a way that was making her incredibly unhappy. And she'd been a bit unhappy for years, as I said, so she got offered a new position as a claims evaluator, or a case evaluator for an insurance company. And she came to me and she said, I don't know what to do, I don't know whether I should quit or not. And so you know, I asked her about her current position. And you can imagine if she was telling me how horrible it was, and how miserable she was, I was getting quite confused. I was like, Well, why are we having this conversation? She's clearly really upset. Like, she hates her job. And I asked her, Well, why aren't you quitting? And she said, two things to me, I'll have well, I've put so much time and energy in, you know, medical school, and like internship and residency and trained for my job as a doctor, if I quit, you know, I'll be wasting all of that. And then she said a second thing, which was quite interesting, which was an also what if I quit, and I take the new job, and I hate that one, too. Ah, so I said, Oh, okay. Well, the first problem was a sunk cost issue, right? Which is, well, look, you already put that stuff in, like, got got everything for it. But the second one is this sort of loss aversion problem, which is, oh, she's really worried about the downside that might occur from the switch, in a way she's not worried about it for the things she's already doing. So the way I got her to sort of see through that problem was I said, okay, so imagine it's a year from now and you stayed in your current position, what's the probability you're happy? And she immediately said, 0%. And the reason she said 0%, is because she could see the semi in front of her it was overturned, there wasn't any uncertainty about it. It had been three years that she was unhappy in this job. So she said, 0%. I said, Okay, imagine you take this job with this insurance company, it's this year from now, what are the chances that you're happy in that job? So I'm not sure because I haven't done it yet. But I think it's 5050. Oh, well, it's 50% greater than zero. And she laughed. And it was like, all of a sudden, she could see it. Because I just focused her on the upside, right? So she was so worried about what if I take this new job, and I don't like it, and instead I just turned it and I said, Will you be happy in the job you're in? Will you be happy in the new job, that would be the upside. And once she saw it, she quit the net and she literally quit the next day. And last time I checked, she was very happy. So you know, and I think that you hear this all the time from people like in relationships, what if I don't find somebody new, but you hate the person you're with? Right? What if I take the new job and I hate it? What if I get off the road and there's traffic there too. And it just stops people from making these switches because they're just so loss averse, but not for the thing they're doing for the thing they might switch to.

Zack Arnold: All of these are essentially a simplified version of this concept that I think so many people are familiar with, which is, well, the glass could either be half full or half empty. Versus Well, I know the glass is empty, and it will always be empty. never, it's never going to have anything in it again. But all you're focused on as well, that other glass is half empty, and you're like, but it's also half. Oh, right. Right. It's so obvious once you start talking about these things, but when you're in it, when you're part of your own decision making process, there's just no objectivity. And you're so lost in your emotions. And I think another thing you get lost in that we haven't talked about too much is this stigma of, I'm enforcing the identity that I'm a quitter, right. And that's something that you're obviously so adamant about is that we need to get away from that stigma. And in a similar fashion, I don't know if there are parallel, but I think they're in similar conversations, what I've talked about as far as how to become successful, what I was talking about was my peers, when I speak or on the podcast, or I'm on panels, I say the only real difference between me on the stage and everybody in the audience is I have failed so much more than all of you, I have turned failure into a skill. And I want to make sure I'm failing as fast as humanly possible. That's where my progress comes from. And I think even though, like I said, they're not analogous, in parallel failure, in quitting are kinda sorta in the same conversation, are they not?

Annie Duke: They are, I actually don't even like to really use the word failure. And the reason is exactly what you said, like, look, in order to have a successful life in motion, go back to range, you have to sample a lot of stuff. And some of that stuff you're gonna stick to, and some of that you're not. And when you look at the balance of those teams, you're mostly going to not stick to things. So you're mostly going to try stuff, and you're not going to like it or not gonna be good at it, or things aren't gonna go well. And the goal is to sample a lot of stuff, figure out the stuff that isn't working, quit all of that, and then stick to the rest. And sometimes you start something and it is working, but then it turns around, and it starts not working. And you should quit that stuff, too. And go do something new. And I don't consider really any of that failure, right? Because you're discounting the progress that you've made along the way you're discounting the learning. It stops you from being a sampler. Because I mean, in the extreme, obviously, if you never quit anything, how many things could you ever start in your whole life? Right? Like very few. So you have to, in order to be able to innovate in your own life. And that's the way that you're going to really achieve like an outsized result in your life, that just try a lot of stuff. And I don't if that stuff doesn't work out, I don't even think that's failure. I just think it's like you tried a lot of stuff. So you could go learn more things about the stuff that you actually really want to stick to? Right. Like, look, I tried piano, I stunk at it. Did I fail at it? I don't think I would call that a failure. I would call that figuring out that I wasn't good at piano, and I should go try something else. And so I did, I went to gymnastics instead. There you go. I was pretty good at that. You know, I think that in some ways, this idea of like, we're gonna celebrate failure like that the way that Google talks about it, right, we're going to sell you celebrate failure. In some ways, I think that reinforces the idea that quitting is bad. I think it reinforces the idea that trying something and having it not work out is bad, because failure has such a negative valence to it. Right? It means that you you did poorly. But I think the way that I think about it is, hey, if you figure out something that isn't working for you, and you quit it, and you quit it faster than other people would have, that's a success. Because it means you stopped doing something stupid, so that you could go do things that were better. And that sounds like success to me. So it doesn't sound to me, like you've done a whole lot of failing. It sounds to me like you've done a lot of sampling. You figured out what worked and what didn't work, you've learned from all of it. And that's gotten you to figure out like, what are the things that I really want to do? And down the road, you may figure out that the thing you're doing now, and it's, you know, used to be great, now, it's not so great. I wonder that anymore. And that doesn't mean that you failed it, it means that you you know, things change, and you learn something new, and maybe you'll go go do something else. That's awesome. And I think that's, that's amazing.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I love the way that you framed all that. And it's very similar to the way that I frame it, where I always say the failure is just feedback. I literally have a picture that's framed in my other room that my team made me, which is a picture of me climbing the steps on the first obstacle of American Ninja Warrior with the big logo in the background and the Superdome. And it just they quoted me failure is feedback, right? The funny thing is what you don't see in that picture is two steps later, I fell in the water and I was done. Right. So it's like the quintessential picture of me taking small steps towards success and immediately failing on the right side of the photograph, right so people don't see that part of the story. But one of the most formative lessons that I've ever learned in my life that came from my father is whenever I would fail or do something stupid or be down on myself, he'd say, what you just got was a very valuable education, which I didn't realize at the time, especially when I was younger. And even in my 20s, I was like, would you just stop saying that, like, it made me so mad. But now I see that he was teaching me how to frame everything with a growth mindset and gathering the information. So for me, and it's funny, because you just basically talked about the trajectory of my daughter from she went from piano was really her thing went to being doing dance wasn't really your thing. Now, she loves gymnastics, and she's obsessed with it. So it's not just well, you quit piano, and you quit dance, and you're just jumping into the next is

Annie Duke: To go do another thing. And then you found that thing that you love. You know, look, here's the thing. And I think that this is part of the problem with this fear that we have of, you know, well, I failed. It's like, well, what's the definition of that? So, you know, one of my favorite stories is about this woman, Shavon O'Keefe, who ran was running the 2019 marathon. And a mile eight, she experiences really horrible pain in her leg, and her fibula bone snapped. So she broke her leg. Okay. So you know, as you can imagine, the medical tent was like, hey, Shavon, you should stop running this marathon. But she didn't. She kept going. And she ran and finished the marathon and 26 point, you know, the 26.2 miles. So first of all, look, as much as intellectually you can say that was done. I know, everybody emotional is kind of like, Oh, she's a badass, I kind of wish. But you don't really wish you did that. Because if you're running that far, and a broken leg, you could literally never run again. Right? Walk Again, or walk again, there's there's lots and lots of marathons that you can that you can run in your life. Why are you continuing to run this one? This is the problem, right, is that we don't like to walk away from things. So let's think about why did she do this? Because this is really gets into why do we all do this? And it has to do is sort of what's our definition of failure? How does our mental accounting work. And the way that our mental accounting works is that when we're what we call in the losses, we do not like to close accounts in the losses, it's really helpful way to think about names. So we would like to think about all the marathons that we can run. But when we start that marathon, we open up a mental account for that marathon. Now, how do we figure out whether we're cognitively in the losses or in the gains? Well, because we measure ourselves in comparison to the finish line. And the finish line is whatever goal we have. So in this particular case, we know what it is, it's 26.2 miles, so nevermind that she ran eight miles. So from that sense, she's in the game, she's eight miles more than she was at the big when she opened the account. At the moment, she breaks her leg. She's 18.2 miles in the losses. So therefore, she must continue to run because otherwise she's going to close the account in the losses. Why do we know that? That's the problem? Because we can all do this thought experiment. If she was running a half marathon, Zack, how long would she run for it,

Zack Arnold: She would run for over half of it. She's almost there.

Annie Duke: Yeah, so she was doing a half marathon, she would have gotten 13.1 Miles 26.2 Miles, if she was running a 20 mile race, she would have stopped at 20 miles, right? It didn't have to do there was nothing magic about the 26.2 Miles except that that was the goal. So this is how we get into trouble. Because the way that our mental accounting works is we judge failure by sort of the goal, we do not judge ourselves by progress from the starting line. And that causes us to run a whole bunch of marathons with a broken leg, when actually what we should say is, hey, that was pretty good. I ran eight miles, I broke my leg, I'm gonna stop so I can. So I can do this again in the future. But we won't do that. Because we have a goal, we have a destination, and we're just going to barrel headlong to that, right. And this stops us from being willing to stop things that are not working for us. And that is such a huge issue for us. Like when people are saying like, I don't want to stop my career now. It some of it is for sure. You know, all the energy and time and everything. And I'm gonna have to start over. But a lot of it is but I haven't finished yet. I had a goal, right? I wanted to be a writer on an Emmy Award winning TV show. So if I quit writing to go do something else now, then I will never be able to achieve that goal. That is failure. No, it's not what about all the great stuff he did along the way? Of course it's not failure just means like, I'm gonna go switch and go do something else that I can achieve greatness that but it's not the way that we can process the world. And we all end up like Shovan O'Keefe.

Zack Arnold: It's funny because I'm very similarly in almost exactly this position now. So I'm actually going to hijack the next few minutes of this conversation to actually work through where I'm stuck and What I want to do is I want to break this down so I can help other people get stuck. And I want to walk you through the current process that I have with my students. And I want you to tear it to shreds, and tell me how to make it better. But I'm totally going to hijack our conversation from my own personal needs, knowing that I hope it also helped my students. So the goal that I've had for it's been about five years now, I decided in late 2017, where I was quite overweight, very out of shape. And I was winning DadBod competitions, not literally, but figuratively. And I was watching TV with my kids. And I said, You know what, that looks cool. I'm going to become an American Ninja Warrior. no business doing this. And I decided that for the next five years, I was going to completely change my nutrition regimen and sleeping and exercise. And it wasn't just about getting in shape it was how do I develop grip strength. And at 40 years old, how do I learn how to do an eight footless Shea from one bar to another, and I'm doing parkour with teenagers, all these things. And if we look it over the grand scheme of five years, if this were a matter of like you said, like investing in stocks, I've just been putting money in stocks, and my portfolio is just growing and growing and growing. I've gotten healthier, I've gotten stronger. All of my biomarkers, when I go to my doctor who's a holistic integrative medical practitioner, this looking at the full gamut. He's like, these are the labs of a 25 year old professional athlete. So I look at all of these benefits. However, the only thing that I continue to focus on is the lack of not achieving the goal. And the goal is that I want to be featured on the show going through the course and making it through obstacles. And I've literally, if we're talking about a marathon is 26.2 miles, I've made it about 28 or 25.7. Where I if I tripped, I'd almost touched the finish line and that I had been on the course twice with the cameras with everything going. But I didn't do well enough that I got featured on the show. And about a month ago, I was invited by the show itself, because I've done a lot of networking, and again, more of that portfolio, building amazing relationships, all these great things in my life. I was invited by the producers to come test, I wasn't invited to be on the show. But they're like, why don't you come test the obstacles with us at our warehouse? And I did. And I hurt myself. And for the last month up until about two days ago, I couldn't lift my arm higher than this. And I'm thinking I'm 43 years old. What am I doing? Why am I putting myself through this? I can't even grab a dish off the shelf and I can't open or I can't close my car door. But I haven't crossed the finish line. So I've been going through this debate of do I keep training? Do I keep pushing through this knowing the outcome is very, it's a very low probability that I'm going to reach the goal. But I have achieved so many amazing things where if this were poker, I play five years of poker and I made millions of dollars, but I didn't win the grand championship.

Annie Duke: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: How do we work through this?

Annie Duke: Yeah. So essentially, this is where I love sort of two frameworks. Okay, so one of them is called Kill criteria. So one of the things that we need to recognize is, it is hard to quit when you're 300 feet from the summit of Everest. That's when people die.

Zack Arnold: I appreciate that, by the way.

Annie Duke: 300 feet from the summit of Everest,

Zack Arnold: I am I literally can see it. I'm like, there it is the clouds part. And I'm like, you know, half an hour away. Yep. That's where I am right now.

Annie Duke: So a good thing to do is basically set criteria, which is to say, I'm going to be pretty bad at making this decision right now. Because you probably are, right, it's like it's so close. And it's so hard. And I'm going to be pretty bad at that. So this is best done, not just by yourself, but with someone who you feel like you value their opinion on the topic criterias. And what you do is you say how much longer am I willing to continue to try it this intensity to achieve that particular goal? So you set yourself a deadline, right? So for you it might be I'm willing to put another year into this, or I'm willing to put another six months into trying to do this thing. And then having done that you say, Okay, let's imagine that it's a year from now, and I failed to get on the show, what were the early signals that I wasn't going to be able to do that. So it could be you've tried this many times, or your times are consistently not getting better at some point or you're getting injured or but you figure out what those signals are, those would be your criteria. And when you discover them, you say, it's not going to be my goal anymore. Now, that doesn't mean and this is I think what's so important that people need to understand, it doesn't mean that you're not trying for the goal while while you're going right. So you set the criteria, you say if I experienced this many injuries trying to get there and my times aren't improving. You know, if I've gone on three more times, and I've still can't get featured or I still can't get through the course in a way that's going to get me featured. Let's say that those are your kill criteria. You also say to yourself, What do I need to do in order to get to a good version of the world? So you're still putting in the effort, but this gives you a deadline with very clear signals. that you're committing to in advance, that will help you to stop. So this is the equivalent of like when you're climbing Mount Everest, they have something called a turnaround time, which is, so eight times as many people die on the way down as the way up on Everest. I don't think most people know that. But it's true because you're descending in darkness with hypoxia, and, you know, you're cold, and tired, and all sorts of stuff. So I, so they have something called a turnaround time, which is on summit day, no matter where you are in the mountain, whether you've reached the summit or not, you have to turn around, you're supposed to turn around, not everybody does. But you're supposed to turn around at 1pm. And that's to make sure that you're descending the mountain when it's not dark. And that saves a lot of lives. Because it stops people from continuing up when they're 300 feet from the summit, but it's 2pm. And they're going to die if they try. So that's a good example of a turnaround time. So we so that's, that's, I'm sorry, a good example of criteria. So you can set kill criteria for anything, you can do it for your situation, it's really good if you do that with someone who is a coach of some sort, right? Who can say, Look, if you're not reaching these times, or you're not, you know, or you're getting injured in this way, or whatever, like this isn't for you, right, so that can help you to sort of understand how long should I keep at it? And, and, you know, what are the signs that I should quit? Now, I do want to say that if you enjoy the pursuit, and it's not taking away from other opportunities, like it's not taking away from your dad time, it's not taking away from your job and those kinds of things. So you like the pursuit itself? Then your kill criteria would be I don't care. I'm gonna keep doing this forever. But it sounds like you're sort of at the point where you're like, I'm not sure right? Like, do I like to do I liked the pursuit or not of this particular goal. Sounds like you like the actual physical exercise, which you wouldn't give up. But maybe give up that goal. So kill criteria, a really good way to do this. The second framework that you can apply something that I call monkeys, and pedestals, which is to figure out what is the What's the hardest part of the problem? What's the bottleneck here? So monkeys and pedicels, comes from Astro Teller over at x, which is Google's Innovation Hub, and it just goes like this. i Let's imagine that you want to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in the town square. There's two parts of that thing that you need to accomplish. One is can I train the monkey to juggle the flaming torches? The other is can I build the pedestal, one of those things is really easy to pedestal. The other one is an unknown, it's the bottleneck to the act, right? So monkeys and pedestals tells you that you should try to train the monkey first before you build the pedestal. Why? Well, because first of all, you don't need the pedestal, if you can't train the monkey to juggle flaming torches. That's number one. So there's no point in building it. If you can't actually do the hard part of the problem first. The second thing is that the building the pedestal actually represents false progress. Because you know, you can build it. So if you already know you can build it, then the process of building it doesn't tell you any new information. The thing that you don't know is whether you can train the monkey to juggle those flaming torches. And so you should try to tackle that unknown first. Because otherwise, you'll you'll have the illusion of progress. And this is the third insight is that once you have that illusion of progress, then it's like I can't quit. Now, I already built this beautiful pedestal, even though I can't train this monkey to juggle flaming torches. So we can apply that to you to your situation, which is you can say, what are the pedestals right? So the pedestals might be certain things having to do with like, your workout schedule, like designing your workout schedule, doing certain parts of your workout schedule that you already know, you can do like those kinds of things, it's not that's not to say that they're not worth doing, it's that they're not going to tell you any information about solving the particular problem that you're in. Instead, what you can do is say, I actually want to get on this TV show, and get featured, what's the monkey, what's the thing that I really have to do. So it could be like break a certain time, for example. Alright, so if that's the monkey, then everything that you do has to be let me try to figure out as quickly as possible, if that's something that's achievable for me. And if it's not, then you say, Okay, I'm gonna go figure out a different call.

Zack Arnold: Oh, I love all this. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that, first of all, I'm understanding it, and I want to apply it to my situation. And then I want to, I want to give you a sense of where my mind is right now with this decision to see if I'm on the right track or having to kind of break it down differently. And then I kind of want to finish up with a kind of a brief breakdown of my current process with my students. So then you can also tear that apart. I'm feeling very good about a lot of this because I think without having the exact terminology or the frameworks, I've already done a lot of the thinking that you're talking about. So where I currently am with a decision as of recording this is that I know for a fact that they're not going to be casting for people for another two years. It's not even one year it's two years, because they're bulk shooting two seasons right now as we speak, and where I I left it is when I was testing those obstacles, I was more confident and more skilled than I've ever been, which is why it's so demoralizing because it wasn't a matter of, I suck at this, and I shouldn't be here anyway, and I got hurt. And it was a sign that maybe it's time to hang it up. It was, I've spent five years and I'm exactly where I want to be. And I've gotten good at this. And they're inviting me to do it. And now I'm injured. And I'm being kept from knowing that I could test these obstacles for weeks right in the actual set of the show. So that's the point that I'm at now as far as skill and training and relationships and whatnot. But I know for a fact, I've got two full years before they can cast me again. So the thought process is that there are so many amazing benefits I get from just the process from training the people, I surround myself with all the health benefits that we've already talked about. However, the area where it's really challenging is the level of intensity and the frequency with which I have to train, which causes the injuries. So what I thought to myself as far as kill criteria is and I don't know what this looks like, exactly. But in general, I want to take a year off, so to speak, it's a very specific high intensity training, and focus on other forms of exercise and skills that I've had to say no to. Because I've said yes to ninja training, meaning I want to get a little bit better. It's slow twitch and my mobility, because I spent so much time on upper body strength, really tight upper body, what if I focus on mobility and yoga, and things that are more Yin energy than young energy, knowing that in a year, there's no opportunity to be on the show. But then I give myself one more year, that's the killer criteria from a year from now, until the next casting of the show I get I give it everything I've got. And if I don't get on the show, well, then I say I tried my best I left it on the field, I've developed amazing skills and unbelievable network of people, all this knowledge of how to achieve difficult goals and break it down and I move on with my life. That's where I am now.

Annie Duke: So I love that. So let me sort of point out two things. So one thing is that you just pointed out really beautifully, that one of the reasons why knowing when to quit, or what you just described, which would be a pause, right, which has quit for a period of time is such an important skill. Because whenever you're doing something, you are losing the gains that would be associated with other things that you can do. So this is a problem called opportunity cost neglect, which is that there's a cost of not being able to pursue other opportunities, because there's other opportunities that have gains associated with them, by using your resources on one opportunity that you're pursuing. Those are resources that you can not use to pursue other opportunities where you might have gains. So you just described that really perfectly, right? I've been doing this intense training, but the time that it takes and the intensity of it stops me from doing other things like yoga, where I'm working on my mobility, working on slow twitch working on whatever, right, so you're saying I'd like to go pick up those those gains that are associated with this out opportunities and stop neglecting them for a period of time, because I think that would be really interesting for me, and I'd like to go explore that stuff. So that's amazing. So this comes into this idea of what we call explore exploit, which is that when we find something that we love, and we're continuing to do it, it's called exploiting that opportunity. So if I am blockbuster, and I'm selling DVDs at at stores, and that's working well for me, as long as I'm doing that I am exploiting that opportunity. So this isn't like a bad version of the word exploit, which I know has some sort of negative valence to it. But it's just the idea that I'm exploiting things that are working for me. But what it means is that I can't explore other opportunities if that's what I'm focused on. So I can't explore streaming, right. And if we don't explore streaming, maybe we go out of business like Blockbuster did, right. So if you can explore the other things that you might do, maybe you go out of business, because you haven't explored this other stuff that might you might actually find out that you really enjoy that might improve your fitness and other ways might reduce the chances that you get injured. And then so so that's sort of the same idea. So don't be blockbuster, right? We don't want to just exploit something, we want to also explore other opportunities, so we can find out if we liked them. So that's the first thing. So I love that part of what you're talking about for the first year. Look, there's no point I can't find out what I need to do and whether I can actually do this in the next year, because the opportunity isn't available to me. So I'm actually going to use this time to go explore a bunch of stuff that I haven't done before. Love that. Then what I love that you did after that was you set a turnaround time you said I'm gonna give it a year. If I can't do it, I'm gonna quit. And the thing that's really good about that is that you've been pursuing this for five years, but you've never actually set a kill criteria. And so what happens is that you're always so close. It's sort of like you know what they say tomorrow is always tomorrow. Right. So you're in this situation where each year you're like, I'm so close, I can't stop. Now, I'm so close, I can't stop. Now, I'm so close, I can't stop now. And that could literally go on for another 20 years, where it's just, I'm so close, I can't stop now. So by setting a deadline, and saying, Okay, once I come out of this year of exploration, I'm going to go back, and I'm going to try for that year, and I'm going to set a deadline of the end of the next year. That's perfect. Now, the one thing I would like you to add, though, is this, I'm gonna go explore a bunch of other stuff. If I discover that, that brings me more joy than this goal that I was pursuing, I don't need to pursue the goal just because I'm short the goal. Because if I find out that I love yoga, if I find out that I love other forms of exercise, I love developing my lower body strength. And I feel as healthy and fit maybe even fitter, and maybe even more psychologically healthy, that that, if that is the case, then you can set kill criteria around that and say, then I'm going to actually kill the other bowl. And that's fine, too.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I can already tell you that emotionally, I'm having a bigger version two, as soon as you said that, which is going to kind of get me into another area that I know you talked about in your previous book, everything that we talked about right now a very rational, very analytical version, a version B version, see, right? But there's another part of this, this scary word, called intuition. And my intuition tells me, but I was meant to achieve that goal, how dare I spend a year off, and I do some running, and I work on slow twitch, and I get better at yoga. And then I decide that I want to, quote unquote, quit on this thing that my intuition is telling me I need to do, how do we bring intuition into this conversation?

Annie Duke: So here's the deal. Intuition is kind of like, you know, a clock is right twice a day, even if it's broken. Now, the more expertise you have in something, the more likely that your intuition is going to be in a more accurate place. But the problem is that people's intuitions are very often wrong. And if we don't expose those intuitions to some sort of query, we're not actually going to discover when those intuitions are actually quite wrong. So I'll give you an example. Like a pretty obvious example of where intuition is really bad. For anybody who's lived in a place that has ice on the roads, steering away from the skin is a terrible thing to do. But your intuition will tell you to do it. So there's all sorts of times when we're steering away from the skin when we should be staring toward it. But we don't actually notice that our intuition is bad. Because we don't actually allow it to have some sunlight shine on it. So I don't I don't really have a problem with good decision making, particularly if the decision doesn't matter very much. What I have a problem with not allowing yourself to query that what your intuition is telling you. So this is a good example, right? Your intuition is telling you like, this is what I was meant to do. I'm supposed to achieve this goal, that's fine. And you're acting on it right, you're setting up a pretty good process. But what you have to understand is that often you don't know your own preferences. I mean, we can go back to range right with David Epstein. You don't necessarily know your own preferences until you've explored the other things. You How can you know whether you really love yoga or not, if you haven't done it, so you may go do yoga, and you might discover that you have a preference for that. And that's fine. It doesn't mean that your intuition about what you're doing now was wrong. What it means is that given the information you had you're sitting on the couch one day or watching a TV show you were overweight is that I'm going to do that that became a great way for you to get in shape and get all your biomarkers, like into a much better place. And isn't that all great? You're way more than eight miles past the finish line? Fastest starting point. That's amazing, right? The thing is, though, that if you, if you break your leg, you don't want to keep going. And in your case, what break your leg would be is I go and I do these other things. And I find out they bring me much more joy. And I'm just as healthy. But I'm like, happier, I'm calmer. Things are great. Maybe you go do that you say you know what, this has been great. But I also love the other thing. So I am gonna go do that for another year. And all of that is fine. It has to do with the flexibility to say, just because my intuition told me that something was great. And so I started it doesn't mean that I have to stick to it doesn't mean my intuition was wrong. It doesn't mean that the initial decision was wrong. What it means is that I thought about it, I found out new information, I did a process and I discovered that you know what, I like something else better. And that's fine. That's the thing. It's great. I mean, I'll give you an example of of from from my own life of this. So that similar to what's happened to you with this injury. So I used to travel for work a lot initially Willie, I obviously traveled a lot for playing poker. But then when I stopped playing poker, I was giving lots and lots of talks to groups, and had to travel to go do those since pre pandemic. And I really thought I loved it, I thought, I get so much fulfillment from doing these talks and being in front of audiences, and you know how it is like you're giving a talk to an audience, it's used, you see light bulbs going off, and you really feel like you're doing good in the world. And, you know, this is what I was meant to do. This is amazing. And then the pandemic came along, and I figured out that all my talks were gonna cancel. And one by one, you know, like dominoes, they fell, and they all canceled. And the day, the last one canceled was one of the happiest days I've ever experienced. I was so happy. I just realized, Oh, my God, I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to go get on a plane. I mean, obviously, the world was turned into crap. And I wasn't happy about that. But there was this thing I was very happy about, I don't have to get on a plane, I don't have to go be in a hotel, or I don't know, anybody go into a city for 24 hours to go give an hour long talk. And as much as I love that, all of the stuff that I have to do around that is making me miserable, then I don't like being away from home, actually, I want to be home with my husband and my dog and my kids. And I don't want to do that. And then of course, all of those talks rehired me virtually. And I found out Oh, there's another way to do it. It's kind of like I thought that I could only be healthy by being a ninja. But it turns out, I can also be healthy by doing yoga. And I found out that, oh, I can give the talk and get what I love out of that without actually getting on a plane. And since then, I have not got I mean, I just don't travel for work. If you're not on the acel quarter, I'm probably going to say no, I'm not going to do it. And that's because I discovered something about my own preferences that I couldn't have discovered had the pandemic not happened. And so then I quit doing something because of that, because I found out that my intuition about what made me happy was actually wrong. And that's something I think is very hard for people to sort of wrap their heads around that you don't really actually know your own preferences that Well, we think we know ourselves pretty well. But we actually don't. So I would have actually done much better to say, well, let me actually explore like, what if I don't travel for three months of the year. So this would have been pre pandemic, I could have discovered something about myself. So post pandemic, I worked all through the pandemic just work towards work towards work, there was nothing else to do, all I did was work. And last year, I took a three month sabbatical to see what it felt like. And then I was like, You know what I actually do like working on gonna go back. Right. So that's kind of what you're doing. And I think that's like a really good way to sort of think about how do you actually approach these things, so that you can query your intuition in a way to find out what actually is true and what's not.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love that. You bring this up now, because this again, is going to be the perfect transition to the final area that I want to go. Because I had the same conversation. I don't know if you're familiar with you connected with Anthony clots. He was the one that had coined the idea of the great resignation. And I did an extensive conversation with him about this huge perspective shift that we just collectively had as humans when the pandemic hit and how it forced us to reevaluate what we find as far as work that's fulfilling this not fulfilling, not wanting to go back to the way things were before all that you're talking about. And I workshopped this process of how do I debate if an opportunity is one I should take? Or when I shouldn't take, which is almost the same as Should I quit or not quit? But it's not necessarily I already have it in my business. Every three months, every six months, every year, you're starting fresh, I've got a new thing that I could say yes or say no to. And he was talking about this pros cons list. And I challenged him and I said I actually have a process that's not pros and cons. We go through a process that's called a cost benefit analysis, because I feel there's more. There's more emotion, but also more analysis between what is this costing me and how does it benefit me versus the good versus the bad? So I wanted to go through both this a little bit with you to get a sense of am I on the right track given this is your entire life's work is knowing when you should quit? So if somebody comes to me and they ask, so I've got this opportunity, should I say yes? Or should I say no, we do a cost benefit analysis. But the reason I wanted to bring intuition into it is that what I'm trying to do is educate their intuition. So it's kind of a combination of both. So it's a matter of let's talk about the cost of this potential opportunity. Let's talk about the benefits. But then when it comes to intuition, I always ask the question, do you feel nervous about this? Or do you feel anxious and they're like, I don't get it. What's the difference? Is your intuition saying this is scary and I've got butterflies and this is new and I don't know if I can do it versus giant black 100 pound pit in my stomach saying run, run run. So given that I am not an academic Look, I don't have years of experience, I don't have dissertation. I've done all of this just based on the school of hard knocks. So tear apart my process of the cost benefit analysis and this educated intuition. Where am I on the right track? What do I need to fix?

Annie Duke: Okay, so first of all, you're you're definitely on the right track on pros cons list, not good decision rules. So pros and cons lists or bias amplifiers. And you can think about it sort of this way, right? It's like, well, how do you weigh the pros against the cons? Like, what if one Pro is, I make it some ice cream, and economist, I might die, those look exactly the same on the left, one item on the list. So we can think about it like look, it gets, it gets you into some selective attention, if you kind of want to do if you want to do the thing, if you're gonna sort of list out more pros, if you don't want to do it, you're gonna list out more cons. It's what I would call flat, it doesn't tell you anything about magnitude, what's the magnitude of the pros versus the magnitude of the cons doesn't tell you anything about probability? What are the chances that those pros occur or the cons occur, right? Everything is sort of a what if that sort of looks the same. And basically, what pros cons list tend to do is get you to the answer that you already wanted to get to, but make you much more confident about it, which is something that we don't actually like to have happen. So I'm not I don't I tend to reject pros cons list, and so do scientists.

Zack Arnold: Now, because I feel good about at least not going that direction,

Annie Duke: Cost benefit analysis is a totally different thing. Because in order to understand the cost, or the benefits of something, now, you actually do have to think about both magnitude and probability. Right? So we have to think about, what are the payoffs? What are the things that I can gain from it? And what are the chances those things occur? That's going to give you an expected value? And then what are the things that I could lose? What's it gonna cost me? And what are the chances that that could occur, and that's going to give you an expected value. So we leave out, for example, climbing Everest, right, I'm going to achieve something that no other human has achieved. So that would be on the Pro, but it might die. So that's going to be on the con that looks even. But it's not because the chance of death is actually quite small. And maybe the benefits are worthwhile, at least as you start up the mountain. There are things that could change that that's why you should never turn around time and kill criteria. So that's quite good. Where you're getting into sort of this idea of like, does it make it nervous? Or does it make you anxious? That's I wouldn't actually put under intuition that I would put under sort of trying to help to inform the costs and benefits. Right. So if you understand, like, I have this feeling that this is like I should run away, it's making me feel really sick to my stomach versus I'm kind of scared but excited. That tells you something about your values and your preferences. And one of the things that I want to make clear that I think that people get wrong in this is that when you say something an expected value, they think that you're it's all objective, and you're doing a math equation, and then they'll say, but how can I know? How could I possibly know what the costs are? And the answer is, you can't You're guessing at it. Because a lot of these things are subjective. And they all have to do with values. So the cost benefit analysis for you climbing Everest might look different than the cost benefit analysis for another person. climbing Everest, because you made value by doing something that no other you know, very few humans have done differently than that person does. You may value your own comfort more than another person does, or less than another person does, I would suspect for you, it'd be less for you the cost of maybe getting frostbite and losing digit. That might be something that you value like that you would be like that would be so horrible compared to somebody else who said not a big deal. Right? So these things all have to do with what are our own goals? What are our own values, and what you're allowing somebody to do is sort of access that part of it, to put into the cost benefit analysis. So I think that that's included in there.

Zack Arnold: I love the way that you frame that. And the funny thing is that what you've done without knowing it is you brought me to the reason that you're here in the first place. So I'm gonna I'm gonna quote I'm gonna quote your own writing. And the one sentence that when I read it, technically, it's two sentences. But the one phrase that when I read it on your book, I'm like, Oh, Annie is going to be on my podcast. Oh, yes, she will be on my podcast. And I want to recite it word for word, because it's so perfectly in alignment with the work that I do, which is that expected value is not just about money. It can be measured in health, well being happiness, time, self-fulfilment satisfaction and relationships or anything else that affects you. And it's so much more than I'm going to win the Oscar or I'm going to get the Ferrari or I'm going to make all this money. When you're doing this cost benefit analysis. It has to be about what do I truly value more than anything? So given that this is what brought me here, and it's also where we're leaving, because I want to be very respectful of your time. Is there anything else? That's super important for us to share that we haven't to help people better understand when Should I grit? Or when should I quit?

Annie Duke: Yeah, I mean, so I think that the the thing that I would say is this that the trap that you really want to avoid. So I am not anti grit, I'm a super gritty person. Um, you know, I stuck it, you know, in situations that were very psychologically challenging and very high stakes for 18 years in poker, before I decided there were other things I could do, as you know, to finish a book is a gritty exercise, it's really awful and anxiety producing, and you're exposing yourself to the world. And there's a lot of research, it's a lot of stuff. But I've also started books that I have quit, because I've realized that it wasn't the right book for me. So it's a balance between the two, the great thing about grit is that it gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile, even if they're really hard. So that is a very good quality to have. The problem with grit, is it gets you to stick to things that aren't worthwhile, also, so we want to be able to tell the difference. So the one thing that I want to leave people with is about something called survivorship bias. Because the thing that you need to realize is that these forces that work against us walking away from things are so strong, that we can incredibly nimbly come up with rationalizations for why we shouldn't quit. And it's going to be something like this, right? Well, what about so and so and maybe you can fill in the so and so what about so and so who was toiling away, trying to become famous as an actor, you know, was a waiter and such and such and such, and then at 60 years old, they hit it big. How can I quit? Because maybe I'm that person. And this, like, one of the things I get told all the time is, but what about James Dyson, who made you know, 20 million different vacuums, and all of them didn't work. And he kept going at it until the bitter end, and then finally made a great vacuum, and we know who he is. But this happens in like, acting all the time. Right? Well, what about this person who was at it for 25 years? And then, and this is something called survivorship bias, which is, obviously, retrospectively, there's going to be somebody who beats the odds, there's going to be that one person who at 60, finally made it. I don't, I do not disagree with that. But you can only know that in retrospect, the question is, is it worth it prospectively? And the way that you would figure out if it's worth it, prospectively, is sort of what you're doing right? Like, look, if you're super happy, being a waiter, and going out on auditions. And if that was the only thing you ever did in your life, and you would find fulfillment, and that more power to you, then it's like, look, then I'm sort of free rolling, right? Like, if I happen to make a bid and like, you know, get on an Apple TV show, or like, get an Oscar or whatever, then, you know, at 60 years old, then hey, that's great, because I was super happy being a waiter and just like hanging, and that was great. But if you're not happy doing that, then you have to set deadlines. Right? Then you have to say, I don't want to be 60 and not have made it and look back and say what was my life? Because that is what is going to happen to you if you fall into this trap of saying, but look at that one person who made it after 30 years of trying. Right? So then you have to go into your situation and say, How long am I okay? Continuing my life as it is, let me set a deadline. Let me figure what a good version of my life looks like at that deadline. What does the bad version of it look like? What do I have to do in the meantime, to try to make that good version materialize. And if it doesn't, I have to go shift to another plan. Because otherwise, I will be 60 years old, I'm still going to be a waiter, I'm not going to have made it because it doesn't really happen to anybody. It happens to the one person that you can point out, and I'm going to look back on my life and say, I'm sad. I'm sad that I didn't quit and go do something else that would have made me happier.

Zack Arnold: And this can very quickly get existential. And talking about that the way to really wrap this up is if it's not about the journey, if it's about the destination, that's probably not a path to fulfillment, which again, when I'm looking at my situation, at least right now, I love the process. I love the journey. I love the people. But I need to change some of the specifics. So it's not so highly intense. And it's something that's not leading to more injury than it is leading to progress. But right now, if I'm answering the question, Do I enjoy the journey and the process I still do, which makes it worth it to stick it out for two more years? But if more if I weren't, I would say no, I'm done and I'm out.

Annie Duke: If it's about the destination, then you're just Shavon O'Keefe.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. I would hate for that to happen,

Annie Duke: Right? But if it's about the journey, it's fine. So like I say, if you're if you're saying, Look, if I'm 60, and I look back on my life, and I was a waiter, and I hung out, and I was hiking and Runyon Canyon, and I was whatever, I had more power to then do that, and maybe something great happens on the side. But if you if you put yourself into that future you and you say, if I look back on my life, and that was my life, I'll be unhappy, I will be sad, then you have to say, here's my deadline. And this is what I'm going to do. And otherwise, I'm gonna go do something else. And during that time, you can pursue your dream. But you can also start to sample like you are, and figure out what are the other things I like, right? Maybe I like teaching, maybe, you know, maybe I should go look into being on the production side of things, maybe whatever. And you can start sampling that while you're still pursuing the other thing. So that you can start to figure out like, what does it look like afterwards?

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of destinations, we have far surpassed our destination of finishing this one, I thought we would. But you kind of egged me on and said that as long as we can have a fun, engaging conversation, let's go. And I don't know about you, but the last 90 minutes disappeared for me. And this was just immensely valuable. I feel like I've learned so much, I'm really excited to see how this affects the students, and my community and those that are listeners and those that are followers. But just to book in the shameless self promotion, I'm just going to put it out there, people need to buy and read your book. So if people either want to find your specific book, or they just want to learn more about you, in general, where's the best place to send them.

Annie Duke: Um, so a couple of ways. I mean, you can go to annieduke.com, you'll, you'll find a bunch of stuff about me there, I have a sub stack called Thinking in Bets. I read on there pretty regularly. So love the community there. And then I also founded, co founded rather, the Alliance for Decision Education. And what we're trying to do is take the kinds of things that we're talking about that have to do with becoming better decision makers, and get that into K through 12. Education. You know, we teach a lot of trigonometry, we don't actually teach people how to make decisions, I think how to make decisions is the better skill. And so we're trying to start as early as kindergarten getting these these skills, you know, into our education system so that our kids can grow up into adults who are better decision makers. So that's the Alliance for Decision Education. I would love it. If everybody check that out, too.

Zack Arnold: I love it. I love the you're taking your work and making sure that it has a very positive impact on people. And I'm very happy in my decision to decide to reach out to you and make sure that this happened because I knew my intuition said she needs to be on this podcast. And I'm so excited that we now have this resource for my students in my community. So again, one more time, I cannot thank you enough for you also making the decision to be here and give us 90 minutes of your time and your expertise. So thank you.

Annie Duke: Well, I'm happy that we made it work. It was a fun conversation. Thank you. No more injuries.

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Zack Arnold

How to Know (Without a Doubt) If It’s Time to Quit | with Annie Duke

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