Annie Duke

That someone who's born into upper middle class, upper class, stable family, goes to the best high school, goes to the best college, you know, so on and so forth, right?

Like the outcomes that are available to that person compared to you are very different.

Particularly in the probability that they're going to occur.

And that's because of this thing that literally at the beginning of your life, you had no control over that.

It's like gravity.

Is gravity good?

Is gravity bad?

I don't know.

It just is.

It's just part of the equation, right?

And I think that we do better when we don't judge it as good or bad.

I think we just do a lot better as decision makers when we say-

It's there.

I should take that into account.

As I'm thinking about the decisions, I don't want to...

you know, one of the things that happens to us, and one of the, you know, that really degrades our decision quality, like it makes us make worse decisions, is that we actually discount how much luck is in the equation.

In other words, we think we have a lot more control over outcomes than we actually do.

It's called the illusion of control, as a matter of fact.

So I think that the more that we can basically approach life in this way,

The decisions that I make, the quality of the decisions that I make are going to change my possibilities.