Our lives are largely shaped by the quality of our decisions and by luck. This book aims to help us tell the difference between the two.

Something that always bothered me while watching soccer was how quickly a manager could go from being seen as a genius to a failure. One single decision, if it led to a bad result, could end a manager's successful career. The problem seems to be our strong tendency to link our decisions tightly to the results they produce. We are too focused on connecting the outcome of an event directly to the decision made before it. This habit of finding a clear connection, or rationalizing, is a big source of problems in our lives. If you ask someone about their best decisions, they usually talk about their best results instead! This seems to be the real issue.

We naturally want to find certainty and order in our lives. Rationalizing helps us feel like we have certainty and order in a world that isn't always clear. Trying to find order in messy situations can lead to many problems, like hindsight bias. This is when, after something happens, you feel like you can see a clear link between past results and actions, creating a bias that can affect your future decisions.

Life can be compared to games like chess and poker. Chess is a game where the more skilled player usually wins; logic and clear thinking work well. But in poker, skill matters, but luck plays a big role, and even a professional player can lose to someone less experienced because of chance. Life, with its many unknowns, is more like poker than chess. Rational thinking isn't always directly linked to life's outcomes. Both good decisions and luck play a part in how things turn out over time.

Wanna bet?

Our existing beliefs significantly influence how we judge new information. They create bias, and we often interpret things in a way that fits what we already believe. But when you're making a decision, asking yourself "Wanna bet?" on your new choice can help you be less biased. The usual idea is that we see something, then analyze it, and then decide whether to accept or reject it. But often, the reality is that we see or hear something, we believe it first, and only much later, if challenged, do we really examine it. This is a major flaw that helps biased decisions form.

Thinking in terms of only black and white also heavily influences our decisions. We tend to decide based on the extreme ends of what might happen, ignoring many other possibilities – the grey areas. So, thinking about probability and how likely different outcomes are can also help us make less biased decisions.

Bet to learn

A common belief in life, especially in games like poker, is the self-serving idea: "I lose because I am unlucky and I win because of my skill." Attributing wins to skill forms a self-serving bias, which can be quite problematic indeed. To address this flaw, you can start thinking in bets in such cases. You need to stop connecting your wins to skill and losses to luck, avoid a black-and-white attitude, and consider the grey zone of probability in your analysis. Despite the difficulties, striving for accuracy through probabilistic thinking is a worthwhile routine to pursue.