How to Decide

Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

By: Annie Duke

Narrated by: Annie Duke

Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

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. 

©2020 Annie Duke (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"How to Decide is a delightful, practical guide to making better decisions in a complex world. Annie Duke explains exactly how to cut through the biases that prevent most of us from making wise choices and offers readers a toolkit for learning from the past and tackling the future in an uncertain world. I look forward to assigning this book to my Wharton students for many years to come.” (Katy Milkman, Professor at The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania and host of the Choiceology podcast)

"This is a vitally important book. Simple, powerful and generous, it should be required reading." (Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing) 

"Annie Duke gives you the tools you need and tells you how to use them effectively. Smart and practical, How to Decide is the best user's guide to decision-making that you'll find." (Michael J. Mauboussin, author of The Success Equation)  

"What a phenomenal achievement! Written with zest, flair, and compassion, it's a ton of fun, and it's also packed with original ideas." (Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens)  

Read it...NOW

Annie Duke is just all out brilliant. The book gets an A+ for usability for anyone who has to make a decision or has made a decision. I could write on and on but I won't do it justice. Read it.

Very good tools, but boring presentation

I will probably buy the print version of this book because it does contain a lot of good tools to help individuals and teams make better decisions- BUT, I found it difficult to pay attention to because the presentation is rather dry. It would’ve been a lot better if it taught these tools using exciting tales from the front lines, so to speak.

Another home run

Annie’s books and topics always seem to apply to situations I’m dealing with right then. It is great to have her to review my thoughts with.

Go Slow to Go Fast

I'll start by saying I'm a fan of Annie Duke. Listened to Thinking In Bets and currently have her poker book in my library although it's taking me some time to get through it (and actually start playing poker). That said, this book is a great thinking methods book.

For someone looking for a quick process, the book may disappointment, but I think over time, one internalizes the steps and intuitively becomes a better deciderer...lol

I'm a fan of poker books, especially the memoire style ones that translates poker lessons into real life. I know it's become a little cliche, but I tend to pay attention to the cliff notes because good poker players are generally good thinkers, and we all need to be better thinkers in all parts of our lives. This book is in that genre without overtly being it. Annie only mentions one or two poker terms like tilt. Which is cool because knowing nothing of poker or that she is a poker star doesn't get in the way of these great skills she gives in the book.

Annie's voice is sometimes an acquired taste, but as I led with, I'm a fan!

Excellent book! Fascinating content.

I easily finish the book. The performance by the author as a narrator is excellent. Very thought-provoking.

Great storyteller!

The author used stories to teach how to make better decisions. This is very helpful when applying her principles to every day small and big decisions.

An amazing book for making better decisions

On my Twitter account, I asked how many people have trouble making decisions, and over 50% of people said yes. 

I fell in love with Annie Duke's work after I read her last book Thinking in Bets, and I've been eagerly waiting for this book to come out for months. Annie is a former professional poker player who also studies psychology, so her perspective is extremely unique. At first, when I started reading this book, it felt like a lot of repeat information from her previous book, but I was extremely wrong. Annie not only presents a lot of new information, but she provides practical examples of when and how we make decisions, and the physical copy of the book comes with a lot of different exercises to try out. 

Recently, I became interested in risk assessment, and it blends perfectly with learning about how to make better decisions. We make hundreds of small decisions a day, and there are opportunity costs to most of them. Then, we have to make bigger decisions about job changes and relationships, which can be extremely stressful. Annie sets the foundation by explaining how we don't have control over the results, but we have a lot of strategies we can use to make the best decisions possible.

Insightful and helpful

The book is well written and structured easy to follow. It provides tools which we can use right away and practice them overtime.
It is a good book for everybody if you want to dig deep on decision making.

Frameworks

I really enjoyed this book (though be prepared to make notes & stop). I found that it provided good frameworks for making decisions, while providing evidence to back up how and why they work.

We Are Always Deciding

Our lives are produced by the decisions we make: what we eat, read, watch, our exercising or not, our choosing to move or attend one college over another, one field of study over another, whom to befriend or marry or stay away from; all of this, the fabric of our lives is woven with the thread of our decisions. Whatever you want to do, whoever or however you want to be, you will get there by way of daily decisions.

Terrified by the consequences of my decisions, I spent years deciding from-the-hip, regretting decisions which led to bad outcomes, and spending longer and longer trying not make the wrong choices. Under the weight of particularly oppressive analysis paralysis, I decided to pick up this book. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it drastically changed my relationship to decision-making, and made explainable the former mad god of consequences, providing the tools to face uncertainty with confidence.

The outcome of your life relies in part on your decisions, and this book, if taken seriously, will improve the quality of your decisions.