Book 350 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Expected Value!

Book – Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke (Part 2/2)

Book Description:

In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll learn:

How the paradox of quitting influences decision making: If you quit on time, you will feel you quit early. What forces work against good quitting behavior, such as escalation commitment, desire for certainty, and status quo bias. How to think in expected value in order to make better decisions, as well as other best practices, such as increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting contracts,” anticipating optionality, and conducting premortems and backcasts

Reflection:

Why is quitting so damn hard…because we want to know! Not just we want to know…we must know!

It is so hard to walk away from something we’ve invested ourselves in without seeing the conclusion. We crave certainty and clarity, even if it detrimental to us.

This is the reason I quit playing poker about 13 years ago.

Once upon a time, I fancied myself quite the poker player. I LOVED playing poker, and I was pretty damn good at it. I loved reading players, scenarios, and putting that all together to try and make the right decision at the right time. Talk about an activity that naturally brought out all of my emotions and a rush of endless energy, that was poker for me. I could play poker for 24 hours straight with laser focus without hardly even trying. It was natural, effortless, fun, and I could do it forever. More than a time or 2, I seriously considered trying to become a professional poker player back in my early twenties.

However, I’m not a professional poker player today for a reason…because I had to know! That desire to know broke me mentally, ruined the game for me, and I never recovered.

Poker became the most frustrating activity I’ve ever done in my life because I couldn’t accept not knowing. Even if I knew the right play was to quit and walk away, I just couldn’t do it. I had to know what the outcome of the hands that I had invested myself heavily in. I just couldn’t walk away and quit without knowing, and it cost me dearly.

As Daniel Kahneman is quoted in the book, “The hardest time to make a decision is when you are in it”. Ain’t that the damn truth. At the start of each game I sat down at I would tell myself to leave a hand if I saw x,y,or z happening. Inevitably, at some point in every game I found myself in this situation and I couldn’t walk away. It was like I would black out when these moments happened and I would snap back to reality when the hand was over saying, “what did I just do?”. I couldn’t stop myself and eventually this compulsion to be right turned poker into a nightmare for me. Poker went from something I loved more than anything to something that was making me absolutely miserable. I couldn’t even recognize the person I saw staring me back in the mirror some mornings as I saw who I was becoming. So, I made the ultimate decision to quit poker, and all forms of gambling, all together when I was around 25 years old.

You might think there was some rock-bottom incident that forced the decision out of me, but that wouldn’t be true. I’m glad I quit poker and it fills me with pride to say that I’ve stuck to that decision to this day, but the truth is that I dodged a bullet by walking away when I did. I didn’t have some grand plan or alternative vision for my life, I just got lucky. I didn’t like how I felt playing poker anymore and wanted to stay away. It pulled me back in a few times, but I quickly put a stop to it. 13 years later, here we are. I successfully quit poker, but it was pure luck that I was able to walk away and not come back.

These days, I think of quitting quite differently.

Just like everything else in my life at this point, all decisions are filtered through the same criteria to decide if I say yes or no. If this next action in my life doesn’t help propel me toward the values, purpose, and mission of the life I want to live…than I quit. It is that simple.

To accomplish this, I ask myself these 2 simple questions.

Question 1: Does my immediate next action help further my connection to my daughter by living a life of values together in our shared purpose that I call Living for 2?

Question 2: Does my immediate next action help me take another step toward my life’s mission of helping others to life fulfilling lives with an equal balance of meaningful work and meaningful relationships?

With using this criterion, I always know if my next action is worth doing or walking away from regardless of the outcome. Quitting poker today for me would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. Back then, it wasn’t…believe me. I struggled with it for years and often romanticized the idea of going back.

With all decisions today, If I can’t answer yes to either of those questions, then the expected value that I hope to receive by taking that action isn’t enough to continue forward which means…I quit!

Question: Is the expected value of your next action taking you toward your purpose or away from it?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? - An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Quit by Annie Duke