Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
117. Quit - The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away: Dr. Annie Duke (National bestselling author of "Thinking in Bets" and "Quit" | former professional poker player)
Dr. Annie Duke is a former professional poker player, an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space. She is the author of the national bestseller, Thinking in Bets, and, the topic of today’s interview, 2022’s Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. “Quitting’s for the weak” reverberates through today’s culture. Of course, quitting just because something is hard is not a good idea. However, we don’t tend to evaluate whether what we spend our time on is worth “buckling down” for. We highlight the journey, not the destination when it’s really the destination that we should be focused on.
In our last episode (116), with Dr. Adam Alter, we mentioned Dr. Angela Duckworth’s Grit and Dr. Annie Duke’s Quit. Having already dived into Dr. Duckworth’s work with her in episode 21, I wanted to hear what might initially seem like a conflicting view.
Topics:
- Is quitting a counterargument or a compliment to grit?
- Strategies for assessing when to quit
- "Explore and exploit" mindset: how does that connect to quit and grit?
- How to apply exploring/exploiting seasons in life
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Annie loves to dive deep into decision-making under uncertainty. Her latest obsession is on the topic of quitting. In particular, she is on a mission to rehabilitate the term and get people to be proud of walking away from things.
Annie is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. Annie’s latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, was released in 2022 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker. During her career, Annie won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She retired from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2023 Annie completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at UPenn.
Annie is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. She is a member of the National Board of After-School All-Stars and the Board of Directors of the Franklin Institute.
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Dr Annie Duke is a former professional poker player, an author, speaker and consultant in the decision-making space. She is the author of the National Best Seller Thinking in Bets and the topic of today's interview. 2022's Quit the power of knowing when to walk away. Quittings for the week reverberates through today's culture. Of course, quitting just because something is hard is definitely not a good idea. However, we don't tend to evaluate whether what we are spending our time on is really worth buckling down for. We highlight the journey, not the destination, when it's really the destination that we should be focused on. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe.
Speaker 1:On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In our last episode, episode 116, with Dr Adam Alter, we've mentioned Dr Angela Duckworth's grit and Dr Annie Duke's quitt. Having already discussed grit with Dr Duckworth in episode 21, I wanted to hear what at first might seem like a contrasting opinion and Dr Duke's quitt. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at Aiming the Number 4 Moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Dr Duke's full bio and links to our website, AimingForTheMooncom and our podcast sub-stack Lessons from Interesting People, as well as the links to our conversations with Dr Duckworth and Dr Alter.
Speaker 1:Alright, with that, sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. Welcome, annie, to the interview. Thank you so much for coming on Well. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so I just finished your book Quitt, which released last October. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, wonderful. Which released last October, and it was a fascinating insight into, I believe, a counter-cultural kind of movement. So of course, you have Dr Angela Duckworth's book Quitt, and this is almost a counter-argument to why you should quit as well. So, to kind of start off, why should we even consider this as a topic to discuss?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I wouldn't necessarily say it's a counter-argument to Quitt, as a compliment to Quitt. And the reason why is that you can sort of look at this decision that you have through two frames, and the decision that we have at any moment is, for anything that we've started doing, should we keep doing it or should we stop? And that, when you think about it, that stick or quitt decision is actually it's one decision, right? So if you stick to something, you're choosing not to quit it. If you quit something, you're choosing not to stick to it. So Angela's work happens to come through the frame of what the advantages of sticking to things are. That being said, she wouldn't say that you're supposed to stick to things, period. What she would say is you're supposed to stick to things that are worthwhile. So then the question, of course, is and it's a pretty obvious answer what are the things that you're like? What are you supposed to do with the things that aren't worthwhile? And the answer, of course, is to quit those. So the reason why I really felt the need to write this book is that I think that our natural tendency is to think that it is a sign of character, of good character, to stick to things. But it's so obvious, once you think about it for a second, that sticking to something that isn't worthwhile like staying in a job with a toxic boss right.
Speaker 2:Or like if you go to college and you choose a major and then you start taking, you know, some classes and you're trying your hardest and you're putting in the work and you have a tutor and you're doing everything you can and you hate it and you're not doing well, why should you stick to that?
Speaker 2:Right? Like you've gotten information that you're miserable. You shouldn't stay in that situation. All sorts of situations like if you're in a relationship where you're not being treated, while you obviously shouldn't stick to it. If you're climbing a mountain and the snowstorm comes in and you don't have any visibility and the conditions have become dangerous, you shouldn't stick to it. So, even though we can see that it's obvious that there are things that we shouldn't stick to, I still think that we see quitting as like a sign of a lack of character and sticking to things as a sign of good character, and I felt like somebody needs to write a book saying, actually, you should be quitting most things at some point and only stick to the stuff that's worthwhile and that set of stuff that's worthwhile to stick to is actually going to be pretty small.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that was interesting is we interviewed Dr Duckworth towards the beginning of this podcast and, of course, I'll ask you this question later on but we asked her what advice do you have for teenagers? And we'd been talking about grit. The entire episode in Will Power and her advice to teenagers was quit, which I found very unique, and she gave a story behind why you should do that and what you should focus on, and I just thought, for someone who's studied all of her life the science of Will Power, what are you need? That's very unique advice, and so it's definitely something that people kind of gloss over because it's not as good of a headline as quit or something like that. Yeah, I think that you know?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that people really I mean I don't want to speak for her, obviously, I already spoke to her, but I think that people misinterpret her work, right? Which is they say, you know, they think she's saying you should stick to things because that will create success. And it's not as simple as that, right? You know, it's not that you have to just overcome hard things and, like, stick with them and then all of a sudden you're going to be successful. It's that you have to figure out is the thing that I'm doing worth it? Because if it's worth it, it shouldn't matter how hard it is. I should be able to get through the hard stuff because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is sitting there for me and I shouldn't give that up. But if there's no pot of gold, there's no reason that you ought to stick to it, right? So we can think about, like if you're in high school, you know a lot of kids struggle with algebra. It's like a really big hump and when we look at some of the statistics on like dropout rates, they're occurring at the point where people are confronting algebra Because it's really hard. Now, in this particular case, we can definitely you know pretty definitively say getting over that hump is worth it, because the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow which is your high school diploma is certainly worth achieving. It's going to create all sorts of benefits throughout your life, and so the kids who have the ability to grit that out and be able to stick to it and actually pass algebra are, on average, like going to do way better than the kids who actually drop out. So, like there, it's pretty obvious.
Speaker 2:But you could imagine thinking about a sport, right, where you try a certain sport and you hate it and you're not particularly good at it, but you've given it enough time. That it's not just that you don't like it because you're a beginner, right, so it's like that balance, right, so you've done, you've done enough of it. That it's not just like I'm a beginner, I don't know what I'm doing, so I hate it because I feel stupid. You've actually put in the time, you've put in the work, you've tried your best, and now the question is should you quit or not? And I think that Angela would certainly say yeah, she'd say yeah, let's go find something else to do with that time. That's going to actually be more fulfilling. So you know, but what happens is that and I hear this from people all the time is like, well, why are you still doing that?
Speaker 2:If you hate it, they'll say because I'm not a quitter, right, because we just sort of people interpreters, work is saying like grit is good.
Speaker 2:But that is a way it's like way oversimplified to say just grit is good. And you have to say is this thing that I'm doing, that's hard, that's taking you know? That's where I'm having to use my willpower to continue doing. Is it, in the end, going to be worth it? And if the answer to that is yes and it's not just is it going to be worth it, but is it going to be worth it in comparison to other things I could be doing with that time? Right, and if the answer is yes, it's going to be worth it, then by all means like, then you really need grit, and the people who are grittier are going to tend to be more successful because they're going to be able to stick through those hard times. But quitting is just as much of a skill that you have to develop, and you know, and you know you have to buck society in order to do that, because people will call you a quitter, which, by the way, is not a compliment in our culture.
Speaker 1:Then one of the questions that immediately arises is what should I quit Like? When I look at my life and I look at all the different areas in which I'm spending my energy and my time, how do I know which ones are worth continuing Like? How do I think forward enough in order to assess that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is actually a really big problem, because one of the things that we know that we're really bad at is kind of imagining how we're going to feel about things in the future, and hand in hand with that, separate from sort of imagining how things are going to be in the future. We're bad at making decisions in the moment that we're actually facing the choice. So the best analogy that I have for that it's what? So Daniel Kahneman would say, who's the Nobel laureate in economics? He would say we're bad at making decisions when we're in it. So what does in it mean? Like? The analogy I would have for that is if you decided that you want to eat really healthy, it's really hard to make a decision about whether you want to eat healthy if there's cupcakes sitting in front of you. It's much easier to make that type of decision if you've decided in advance that you want to eat healthy and then you've done things about putting yourself in positions to make that easier in the future, so that you're not deciding in the moment that you see the cupcakes in front of you. And so it's a lot of thinking about how do I advance plan, how do I create pre-commitment contracts that are going to help me stick to the things that I know that are worthwhile, and if people are interested in that world of work, I think Katie Milkman is a great resource. She has a great book called how to Change and you can go sort of see that idea of like you have to be planning in advance. So this comes for grit and quit decisions as well.
Speaker 2:So what we know is that when we're in the middle of something and you're not, so we're not talking here about children, we're talking here about people who are, you know, getting into college age or older. When you're in the middle of something, we're going to have a bias against stopping it. So in the same way, we're going to have a bias toward eating the cupcakes If they're sitting right in front of us. We're going to have a bias against stopping. And there's all sorts of reasons for that there and we can cover some of them if you want, but a simple one would be the sunk cost fallacy, which is that we feel like if we quit, we'll have wasted our time or energy or money or whatever we've already put into the project. And you'll hear people say that all the time. I can't quit now because of everything I've already put into it. So when you're in the moment you're going to, that's when you're most vulnerable to falling prey to something like the sunk cost fallacy, which is going to make you lean toward not quitting.
Speaker 2:So how do you overcome sort of what's happening when you're in it, and that's to think in advance. So what I always recommend to people who are facing down like a stick or quit decision is don't make the decision today. Instead, imagine it's some time in the future, and that time in the future would be determined by how long you think it's reasonable to continue to do the thing that you're doing. So let's say that you're let's say you're in a job you hate. The first thing I would ask you is well, how long are you okay with the status quo? Like, how long are you kind of okay, sort of putting up with it? So let's say they say two months. So I'll say, great. So two months from now, what would a good version of the world look like? So what? How would things have had to have changed where you would say I'm happy in the situation that I'm in, write down that list. And then, two months from now, what would be the signals that would tell you that things are still really bad and write down that list and then commit in advance that in two months you're going to assess this and you're going to see what whether you're sort of satisfying the good version of the world or the bad version of the world. If you're in the bad version of the world, then you're going to walk away. So that's the simplest thing that you can do. It's employing something called kill criteria. So a really simple example of kill criteria would be like for mountain climbers.
Speaker 2:They, in advance of ascending, they set what's called a turnaround time, and the turnaround time is just a time that, no matter where you are in the mountain, whether you've submitted or not, you're supposed to turn around and go back to where you came from, and the reason is to stop you from generally from descending the mountain in darkness. So, for example, on Mount Everest, on summit day, they set a turnaround time of 1pm. It means, even if you're not at the summit yet, even if you're 300 yards from the summit which actually is quite far because it's pretty steep, but doesn't matter you have to turn around and you have to go back to the camp that you came from. But they're doing that so that you don't have to make the decision in the moment whether you're supposed to continue or not, and so, in advance, you've already got this plan that, at 1pm, you're going to turn around. So you could imagine, like in a job, if you're unhappy because you don't, for example, like the way that the boss is interacting with you, that you could say if the boss is still treating me in this way, and write down very specifically what those things are, then I'm going to leave.
Speaker 2:Now, what's really important, though, is that, when you make that set of kill criteria, that you don't just sort of set the kill criteria, fold your arms, sit back and wait, because you do have agency in the world. What you should say is okay, if I look at this, and I look at the bad version of the world in two months, or the good version of the world in two months, what are the things that I need to do in order to create the good version of the world? So, if it's the way that your boss is treating you, you need to sit down and have a conversation with your boss. You can't just sit there for two months and see let's see if it continues this way. Right, you have to actually figure out what are the things that I need to do to make it better.
Speaker 2:So if we take the example of picking a major and let's say that you're pre-med and you bump up against organic chemistry and you're really struggling with it and it's horrible and you're thinking maybe I shouldn't be pre-med, maybe I shouldn't be dropping this class, maybe I shouldn't be doing this, you should say, well, what's making me miserable? Like maybe if I don't understand the material, I'm not getting good grades. I'm kind of lost in class. Okay, how long am I okay with that continuing? Let's say I'm willing to go to the end of a month or maybe to the end of the semester and actually try to complete the class before I decide whether I'm going to drop out of the pre-med program or not.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you set all of those things up, but then you have to say what are the inputs that can help me? And one of those would be can I find a tutor? Am I going to office hours and talking to the professor? Am I getting a study guide? Do I have a study group in the class? And then you have to create that right, so you can't just set the kill criteria and then sort of set it and forget it. You have to say what are the things that I need to be doing that can help me realize the good version of the world, because if you don't do that, you don't actually know whether it was worth it or not or whether you were capable or not.
Speaker 1:Another one of the interesting topics that comes up in your book. Then I've also read about in different works, such as Dr Adam Alters' recent Getting Unstuck book, and that's actually how I found your work. You mentioned in our interview and there's a term that I hadn't come across before. It's the idea of exploring and exploiting. You have different seasons of your life in which you explore, and then in those also exploiting, where you say no to things and kind of dive in. So how does quitting and grit all connect to that idea?
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually, angela Duckworth talks about summer is for sampling, which is exactly what that is right. Summer is for sampling stuff that you want to try. So the thing is, look, when we make any decision, we're making that decision under conditions of uncertainty, meaning that there's a lot of luck involved in the way that things turn out, and we're always making the decision with limited information. So one of the things I think about is when you go out on a date right, like you're going on a date you don't really know how it's going to turn out. You don't know a lot about the other person. You don't know if you're going to be a good match. You know all of those things right. So that's made under uncertainty. When you choose a major in college, do you really know that you're going to love that major? Of course not. You have some idea that maybe you'll like it.
Speaker 2:Where does the idea about what you're going to try come from? Well, it comes from exploration, right, I'm going to sample a bunch of different things. Like in high school, I'm going to think about I took lots and lots of different classes because you're forced to, right, you have to take, you have to sample from all sorts of different disciplines and that sampling is helping you to get an idea of what is the thing that I might want to concentrate on. All right Now. So that's allowing you to gather information about the things that you might want to start. So it's like little smalls, like I go out on lots and lots of dates, because then that helps me figure out who I might want to commit to. But once we've committed to something like we've committed to a job, we've committed to a project or we've committed to a sport what normally happens is then we sort of stop the sampling and generally that's a bad idea. So the reason why is that sort of twofold. The first is that the world can change and if you aren't continuing to sample some other things, you're not going to be able to react very well to the way that the world has changed. And I think that we're seeing this like, for example, with you know what is AI going to look like in terms of job opportunities. Right, you're committing to a particular type of career and there is some possibility that the main part of your career might get displaced from AI. We don't know, but those types of displacements can happen and we don't necessarily know that they're going to happen, right? So there are all sorts of jobs that people used to do in the past that kind of like don't exist anymore. And then there's all sorts of jobs that exist now that didn't exist in the past, which is why you kind of don't want to get stuck in a rut.
Speaker 2:You want to continue some exploration, because it's good to have those plan Bs, but also sometimes when you're exploring things, you find out that you like it better than the thing that you actually committed to, right. So you know, maybe during the year you would really committed to soccer as your sport in a particular season, and during the summer you did a bunch of sampling of volleyball because you were playing volleyball with friends on the beach and you really loved it. It occurs at the same time as soccer, but you figured out you liked it a lot better than soccer. So you actually then will switch them out and you wouldn't be able to do that if you hadn't done the sampling in the first place. So one of my favorite sort of examples of like what's the power of sampling, right? What's the power of exploration Actually comes from forager ants.
Speaker 2:So forager ants. So when you look at an ant colony entering into a new territory, you'll see that the forager ants, which are the ones that are supposed to go and find the resources for the colony, are kind of scattered around, and all the forager ants are just like sort of milling about right, and what they're actually doing is exploring the territory, trying to find food sources. So once an ant, one ant finds some food, it will bring that food back to the colony, and when it's bringing the food back to the colony, it lays down a pheromone trail, and that pheromone trail attracts other ants to it, and those ants will then follow the pheromone trail. So they'll follow it to wherever the ant had come from, and if there's still food there, they will also grab food, bring that food back to the colony, and they'll also lay down a pheromone trail. So if it's a really good food source, you can see that the trail that scent trail, chemical trail is going to get really strong, and then the ants are going to start kind of going one by one to wherever the food is, which is kind of that image that we have of ants marching one to one, one by one.
Speaker 2:So if you actually, though, look at a colony of the way, that for it, sorry, if you actually look at the behavior of forager ants, what you'll find is that well, yes, it's true that about 85% of the ants are going in a single file, basically like back and forth, to this food source. About 15% of the ants are kind of wandering around what looks like a, mostly, and the question is like what's the deal with those ants? Why aren't they following the pheromone trail? Are they like slackers? What's the deal with them? And it turns out what they're doing is exploring, and this, of course, is a really good example of what they're doing.
Speaker 2:The balance of explore exploit is that you have 85% of the colony who's that are exploring the food source that has already been discovered, but you have 15% of the colony that's continuing to explore for other food sources.
Speaker 2:Why is that important? Well, the food source that they're exploiting might go away, and so you don't have to go to the food source that's already been discovered. And that's how you have to think about your own life. Right, it's like I've got a good thing going, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be exploring other opportunities at the same time, because otherwise you can have the rug, or you can have the plant, or you can have the field, or you can have the plant, or you can have the plant, or you can have the plant. And that's a good example exploring other opportunities at the same time, because otherwise you can have the rug pulled out from under you also. You might change Something that you used to love. You might decide that you don't love and you might wanna end up doing something else, and if you're not exploring, you're gonna be left without anything to go do instead.
Speaker 1:On a practical level. So let's say we want to look at the week and let's also put it during the school year, because I am a student and so that's the busiest time of the year and so you've committed to all of these different classes. Do you have time to explore during those periods or how do you fit this into a practical kind of day by day, week by week frame?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean, first of all. I mean like again going to what Angela Duckworth says like the summer is for sampling, right? So we recognize that kids are really busy during the school year. They tend to be jam-packed in their activities. As you get older, you tend to already have started concentrating on things. So there's an easy way to do it with kids who are younger, which is their after-school activities should be across a wide variety of things, and that helps not just the child to explore, but the parent to also be exploring along with the child, so you can start to figure out, like, what are the things that your child really likes, what are the things they don't like, so that after-school time is like really good for that.
Speaker 2:As you get older, into your high school years, obviously you tend to already be committing to sports or theater or whatever it is that you like, but you do have electives, and the electives are a really good moment for exploration, where you can start to explore things, and obviously that's a little bit like how it's going to be once you're sort of later in your education and your K through 12 education. The summer is, though, a great time for sampling, so you don't necessarily need to be exploring and exploring at the exact same time. Sometimes that's very difficult to do, particularly because you're only one person, you're not a colony of aunts. It's easier for a business to do because the business can have a certain percentage of its employees exploiting something that's going really well and a certain percentage exploring, and that makes it a lot easier. So it's about finding those moments. So that's either going to be through after-school activities, where you add in something that you haven't tried before, through electives, where you're looking for electives that are going to broaden your horizons, and it's really good to try something that you don't know whether you're going to like or not, right, so, to try something new, because you're going to get a lot of information out of that.
Speaker 2:I think one of the keys, though, to doing that is that if you're going to do exploration, particularly when you're very busy, you have to be really good at quitting. So the thing that you don't want to do is sign up for an expert care, for example, and then, two weeks in, when you figure out that it's not for you continue. You want to quit and move on to something else. So when you enter into something that you where you do know that you're coming in with an exploratory mindset because you think, well, I just want to try this and I want to see if I like it. You should set out pretty quickly, like right in advance of starting it, you should set out what are the signals that would tell me that I ought not to do this, and you should be willing to quit and move on to something else. So maybe you decide you're going to try a musical instrument and turns out not for you, okay, great, like, stop as soon as possible and then move on to something else. And that's really important.
Speaker 2:It's true, like you obviously read a lot of books. I hate it when someone tells me that they read a book that they hated, because I'm always like well, when did you figure out that you hated it? Well, pretty early on. Well, why'd you finish it? Well, because I finished books.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a waste of time. You could have spent your time reading a book that you actually liked, right, that was actually going to teach you something. So, whenever you, you know, and I would say, and I would say that, like, reading books, for example, is putting you in exploration mode, right? So, if you read a book and after the first couple of chapters, it's just not landing with you. Please put it down and don't read the rest of it. Even if it's my book, I don't want you to waste your time with it. So, one of the things to be a good explorer, you also have to be a very good quitter, because otherwise you end up going in an exploration mode and then you're sticking to it, which isn't really exploring, once you've discovered the information that you don't like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, another route of exploration is, yeah, reading. Of course I was going to mention that and then I found a lot of interesting things by interviewing people. I got into like some AI stuff and programming after talking to some AI people and that was fascinating. There are different outlets now, especially with the internet, youtube and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:You can read YouTube, you can read substacks. Just look at what people are writing. You can get things in bite-sized bits and it's really nice because then you can sort of start to feel out like, is this something that I want to go farther on? And I think that that is the most important thing. But I'm sure, as you know from what you do, it's like then you have to be good at quitting, because you can't waste your time on something, particularly if it's long form writing. I don't want you to watch a two hour YouTube that you started. If after the first 20 minutes it's just not for you, Don't finish it just because you started it, Because that's the whole point of exploration is I'm going to poke around at stuff to try to get information about the stuff that is worthwhile for me to stick to.
Speaker 1:Draw into a close. Unfortunately, that books have had an impact on you.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it depends on what we're talking about fiction or nonfiction, so little known fact. I was like an English major in college. That was one of my two majors, and so there's lots of fiction books that have had an impact on me. I will stick to nonfiction for right now, though, the book that I think is probably has the biggest impact on me, and I wish everybody would read, is Super Forecasting by Phil Tetlock and Dan Gardner. Just Phil Tetlock and I collaborate together, so I just want to say that for full disclosure.
Speaker 2:But the thing about Super Forecasting is and obviously I'm a little bit biased because it fits in with my worldview is that it shows you how to think about the world probabilistically.
Speaker 2:How do we think about, how do we predict what is going to occur in the future and actually get really good at that.
Speaker 2:And I think that that's one of the most important skills that we can have, because, at its core, every decision involves a forecast of the future, and it really ingrains in you that when you start something, it is it's both predictable and unpredictable what's going to happen, in the sense that if I flip a coin, I can tell you it will land heads 50% or tails 50%. So that's predictable, but I can't tell you what it's going to land on the very next flip. So in that sense it's kind of unpredictable and it allows you to understand that, like you know, things are going to turn out well, things are going to turn out poorly. Your job is to be as good as possible at predicting, across the set of possible outcomes, what could occur, so that you can make the best decisions and not to get yourself too caught up in like any one outcome that occurs. And I think that, just in terms of training, the way that somebody thinks super forecasting would be the book that I would want everybody to read.
Speaker 1:Huh, that's really interesting. I'll definitely have to check that out. It sounds like a very like useful and insightful book about decision making.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really. I mean it fits in with a lot of the work that I do. But it's basically saying, like, look, when we're thinking about anything from like monetary policy, right, like think about inflation, which was so high last summer, right, started really shooting up last summer and fall. So let's say that you're the government and you're trying to think about what are the interventions that we can do that's going to bring inflation down. That's a forecast. It's if I do this, I believe this is the effect that it will have on inflation. If I do this, I believe this is the effect it will have on inflation.
Speaker 2:When you're thinking in high school, right, as you're thinking about, like, if I applied to this college, what's the probability I'm going to get in? How many colleges do I need to apply to? What's the best type of essay for me to write? What's the type of college that I even want to go to? Do I want to go to a small liberal arts college? Do I want to go to a big university? Do I want to go to an Ivy League? Do I want to be in the north, the south, the? You know the southwest, you know that in California, like, all of these things are forecasts, where you're trying to predict what the state of the world is going to be in the future, given different decisions that you might make. It is the absolute core skill that you need to develop, and Super Forecasting is an amazing book for helping you to understand that particular process.
Speaker 1:Bridging off of that. What advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:Read Super Forecasting no.
Speaker 1:That's fair, that's fair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know. My advice to teenagers is it actually sort of fits in with this is that be open-minded. Don't Imagine you should be trying at this point in your life. You should be trying to keep as many options open as possible.
Speaker 2:And I think that when I talk to teenagers including my own teenagers what I found was that they had a sense that they were supposed to know what they wanted to do already and have their future figured out right Like to know. Like this is what my career is supposed to be Like when you're 16, right Like that you know. They get a sense that they're supposed to know what their future is supposed to hold. And what I wanna say to them is be comfortable in not knowing Like. This is the time that you cannot know, because I can tell you it's. You know you have no idea what you're gonna really like and not like at 30 or 40 or 50. And right now, at this point in your life, you have this amazing opportunity that's sitting in front of you, which is the luxury to be able to try a lot of different stuff with a real open mind and to understand that there is no reason whatsoever that you should know for sure what you wanna do in your future. First of all, if you think you know you don't and you'll find that out when you're older, right, and you just, and also it's like the future's pretty unpredictable anyway. So, just like, keep your options open more.
Speaker 2:And I think that you know, for me, when I was young, I kind of felt that, right, I felt that I was supposed to have stuff figured out.
Speaker 2:And I look back on my life and it's just so hilarious that I ever thought that I knew what I was gonna do, because, you know, I went to college thinking, you know, I was gonna probably end up being a teacher. I went to graduate school to end up doing that, and then I ended up being a poker player and then, from being a poker player, I ended up being an author and then I ended up being a business consultant. Like, business was never in the set of things that I thought that I ought to be doing. And it turns out that I'm good at it and I really like it and I find it fulfilling. So, yeah, and I feel like a lot of, even as an adult, I've just always had an open mind to other opportunities and I wish, when I was younger, I was more open-minded and explored more stuff. When I was in college, I wish I had taken a broader range of classes, for example, but I thought I had it figured out.
Speaker 1:What I find very compelling about that advice is first off, it connects to your work. It connects to Dr Duckworth's work and, as well as another guest, David Epstein's work on range oh.
Speaker 2:I love David so much.
Speaker 1:It's so incredible, like that's one of the best books really ever that I've read, and it's yeah, that's an incredible book as well. People check that out as well as the interview.
Speaker 2:Yes, please range is such a good book. He's such a good writer, he's so compelling.
Speaker 1:It's incredible, but that's also the number one advice that I've heard across a hundred episodes of this podcast is expand, try lots of things, explore. You don't have to have it figured out. Actually, most of the people on this podcast went into college and switched their majors completely. David Epstein mentions that in his book and it's just something that I think is often overlooked in high school. That apparently is a common thing of advice, just not often said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So I feel like I was. I actually was kind of lucky because I went to Columbia, which has a core curriculum, so they force you to actually do quite a bit of sampling because they have some pretty broad requirements in philosophy, literature, art, music like so and so forth, so I did have to try those. The thing that I never tried, and nobody advised me to try, was like anything that had to do with business or finance or anything like that, and it would have never occurred to me that I was supposed to be sampling those things. And I probably I mean in retrospect it's very clear that I should have been sampling those things. So I just wish that, like if I could go back and do college over again, I would be taking a much broader range of classes beyond what the core curriculum was asking me to do. And that's always the advice that I have for people is just like sample, sample, sample, sample, sample.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. We spanned from quitting to why you should quit. Tools, kill, criteria covered a wide variety of things. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for having me.
