Annie Duke
Annie Duke is a former professional poker player, a decision-making expert, and a special partner at First Round Capital. She is the author of Thinking in Bets (a national bestseller) and Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away and the co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education.
Career (separate track) Skills
Mental time travel helps you regain perspective by imagining how a current problem will be viewed as an insignificant or funny story in the future.
"One of the things that I used to try to do with my kids all the time was mental time travel, which is actually a very good decision tool. So they would be really upset about something and it could be..."
Operating Cadence & Communication Skills
Maximize meeting efficiency by ensuring information discovery happens beforehand and final decisions happen afterward, leaving the meeting time solely for discussion.
"People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
You can effectively shorten long-term feedback loops by identifying and measuring intermediate signals that are highly correlated with your ultimate goal.
"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?"
To overcome the emotional difficulty of quitting, define 'kill criteria' at the start of a project to make the decision to stop objective and pre-planned.
"So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals."