How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars | 1,045 ratings

Price: 13.78

Last update: 02-24-2025


About this item

Through a blend of compelling exercises and stories, the best-selling author of Thinking in Bets will train you to combat your own biases, address your weaknesses, and help you become a better and more confident decision-maker.

What do you do when you're faced with a big decision? If you're like most people, you probably make a pro and con list, spend a lot of time obsessing about decisions that didn't work out, get caught in analysis paralysis, endlessly seek other people's opinions to find just that little bit of extra information that might make you sure, and finally go with your gut.

What if there was a better way to make quality decisions so you can think clearly, feel more confident, second-guess yourself less, and ultimately be more decisive and be more productive?

Making good decisions doesn't have to be a series of endless guesswork. Rather, it's a teachable skill that anyone can sharpen. In How to Decide, best-selling author Annie Duke and former professional poker player lays out a series of tools anyone can use to make better decisions. You'll learn:

  • To identify and dismantle hidden biases.
  • To extract the highest quality feedback from those whose advice you seek.
  • To more accurately identify the influence of luck in the outcome of your decisions.
  • When to decide fast, when to decide slow, and when to decide in advance.
  • To make decisions that more effectively help you to realize your goals and live your values.

Through interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments, this audiobook helps you analyze key decisions you've made in the past and troubleshoot those you're making in the future. Whether you're picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide is the key to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF of interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Brendan M Lawler
    5.0 out of 5 stars simple and effective
    Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2024
    The process laid out non only leads to better decisions but to an awareness and understanding of our own weaknesses. All of these things together help make us better at all we do.
  • Jaakbus
    4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent content, excellent tools.
    Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2021
    Annie Duke compiled a trove of insight, tools and hacks for sound and rapid decision making. There is something useful for everyone. It is so good, I read it twice and culled out tools and methods which I now use regularly. My only complaint is the writing is tedious at times.
  • Mike Stewart
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read -- Great Clarity -- Superb Tools -- Outstanding Suggestions
    Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2020
    Annie Duke knows her stuff. She writes clearly, provides important ideas, recommendations, along with the tools to implement all of it.
    My favorite is the use of a journal. Unless you make a contemporary record of your reasons & thoughts leading up to and at the time of a decision, you cannot (at least I cannot) rely on memory well after the fact.
    Another useful tool she illustrates is the use of bounding, using the process of getting to a rough estimate of the weight of a bison in a photo.
    This author is extremely talented - and entertaining.
    I even enjoyed the acknowledgments - seemed to have more life than most. The footnotes and bibliography are also very useful & informative.
    So there are 3 things I'd like Ms Duke to consider:
    1. Flash Cards for the definitions in the book.
    2. A laminated outline similar to BarCharts Quick Study series
    3. Finally - I want to know the alternative titles suggested by Prof Kahneman!
  • Jose Diaz Suarez
    5.0 out of 5 stars realmente useful
    Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2024
    There is no hardest task in life that taking desicions. Sometimes it seems that it is impissible to hold the reins of our life. This book is a valuable tool to help with this responsibility. It is really worth to read.
  • divide
    3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful decision frameworks but don’t need a book to explain it
    Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2020
    Plenty of actionable decision frameworks. Talks about the role of cognitive biases in decision making and how to mitigate them. But I think a few long formed blog posts would suffice in explaining the core concepts
  • AmazonCustomer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent exercises
    Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2021
    An excellent read. And, the text includes examples. Well, it includes exercises that are, in effect, personal examples. I am an engineer. Theory is fine. But examples and problems to solve are what works for me.

    At first I was put off by the exercises. They struck me as overly simplistic. At first. But, I made an effort. And, I made them very personal and very specific. And, when I did, the text started making sense. Just like working math or physics. For me, theory never really makes sense until I can solve problems.

    Annie Duke won enough at world class poker to convince me that she understands decisions -- and learning from experience. This may be her best work on the subject of decisions.
  • Mark
    4.0 out of 5 stars How to better analyze your decision-making process.
    Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022
    Annie makes a point of knowing the difference between low-impact and high-impact decisions.
    Annie cautions to Beware Hindsight Bias, as this assessment is based entirely on the decision’s outcome. It says little about the decision itself.
    & since we often forget the process that went into a decision, but we usually remember the result, most people miss the value of learning from those experiences. Annie emphasizes that it is always a mistake use the quality of a result to assess the quality of a decision. & further, it is a mistake not to consider the role of luck. In psychology, it’s also known as outcome bias. Annie calls this "Resulting" & warns that it leads to repeating the same errors or faulty decisions because we’re not assessing the decision-making process at all. We’re only looking at the outcome.

    Obviously, if we want to learn from our decisions, misremembering the facts after the outcome only confuses us on how we made the decision in the first place. Commonly, Hindsight bias had us convince ourselves that an outcome was obvious or predictable, but outcomes are very rarely inevitable.
    Also known as "creeping determinism" , the way we retrospectively understand our decisions is usually
    a distoeted & revised recollection of what we knew when the decision was made.

    Annie's antidote is to use a
    KNOWLEDGE TRACKER:
    You can’t learn from your decisions if you don’t gather sufficient data about them.
    Annie instructs us to document the information & logic of a decision as it is being made. Then to go back after the outcome & analyze what happened.
    By comparing this before-and-after knowledge, seeing what was missed or miscalculated. Gathering the data for many decisions, will reveal patterns. Eventually you can develop a sense of the common flags of biases signs and learn to spot them in real time.

    Assess your level of certainty:
    "Will" = 90-95% certain
    " more likely than not" just means greater than 50 percent certainty.
    " could happen" means 20%
    After you establish upper and lower constraints use something called a "shock test" --> ask yourself if you’d be shocked if your expected outcome ended up outside of this range.

    Some of these low-impact decisions qualify as freerolls – the drawbacks are few, but potential benefits are plentiful. You have nothing to lose, and won’t be any worse off afterward if things don’t work out.

    If a decision is High-Impact, Annie has a six-step method to reduce bias and make higher quality decisions.

    1.) List a realistic selection of potential outcomes.
    2.) identify the upsides and downsides of each particular outcome.
    3.) Estimate & quantify how likely each outcome is.
    4.) compare the probability of each outcome you like with those you dislike.
    5.) repeat the first four steps for all other considerations.
    6.) compare the preferences, payoffs, and probabilities of each option & decide

    We tend not to question our own beliefs since we collapse our identity with them. Questioning our beliefs means they could be wrong and therefore occur as a threat to our sense of self. Therefore we frequently refuse to acknowledge any bit of reality which is contradictory.

    Annie suggests using a "PERSPECTIVE TRACKER":
    An accurate perspective comes from a blend of outside view and inside view. Our inside view is the world from our perspective, according to our intuition, and beliefs. The outside view, is the world as others perceive it.
    If you want an honest response when soliciting feedback, don’t disclose your own opinion first. The author describes this as quarantining your beliefs to avoid infecting others with your contagious opinion. Psychologists know this as the framing effect, a cognitive bias that occurs when the order in which information is introduced influences the way we, the recipient, interpret and judge that information.
    In group meeting allow everyone to turn in independent opinions first, then discuss.

    Rather than positive thinking, diligently identifying obstacles to a potential outcome can help you avoid them in the first place. Psychologist Gary Klein calls this a " premortem". This requires you to generate reasons for why a particular goal fails before it even begins.
  • kkschnabe
    5.0 out of 5 stars The "Self-Help" Book Everyone Should Have
    Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2020
    Even though this book is in the Management & Leadership Category, to me this in the "self-help" book everyone should buy in paperback and work through. If only this book had been around when I was choosing a major in college, deciding whether to go to Europe or get a condo, and making major career choices.

    This book is fun with relatable and amusing examples (loved the "Dr. Evil on 4th Down" section referring to NFL coaches' dilemma). If you want to get the most out of it, you will have to do some hard work: looking at past life decisions that didn't end up well. On the other side of your introspection, you may find that the bad decisions weren't entirely your fault (whew!), and nor were the great decisions all to your credit (ah well!).

    This book will question a lot of your assumptions, and that's a good thing. You'll find that simply creating a pro-con list to make a big life decision is not a robust enough tool when what you really need to do is get out this book and examine the decision more thoroughly. Who doesn't want to make better decisions?

    My only wish for improvement is to add an index because I'll be referring to this book often.

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