Interview Notes #1
Annie Duke’s The Knowledge Podcast Appearance July 2018
Working on condensing my writing so I’ve started taking podcast notes and condensing them down into 1-page formats on google docs. Will probably post them all.
Pain as a Tool
Pain is a catch-22 in poker. You need it to affect you to drive improvement, but it can also freeze your learning if you can’t handle the effects
People freeze (making improvement impossible) because your own decisions cause the pain. Because luck and skill are involved, they attribute errors purely to luck to not compromise their personal identity
How do you handle the pain? By knowing what the goal of the game is
Solution to Pain: A Group
She thinks a social group is the best goal. People thinking you are worth talking to feels great
“Why are you telling me this? Think I want to hear this? I’ve lost a bunch of hands and heard so many bad beat stories, I have no interest in yours. If you really lost because of bad luck what’s the point of the story? There’s nothing to learn. If you have a question on strategy, I don’t care if you won or lost. Right now you are wasting my time and being annoying.” - Erik Seidel
Elite players love talking strategy to help you; that is how to get engagement. You must process the game “properly” in the moment knowing that eventually you will have to relay information through that framework. Force yourself to remember the relevant details
Recognizing correct yet difficult actions is a short term reward to help survive the pain
(waiting for response to get link)Good paper recently on political tribalism Dave ___ and Andrew Pereira out of NYU
Tribes help you feel different than other people; she would feel great noticing other player’s errors that her group works to avoid. You can be the deciding factor in making your group like this (accountability, disagree w/out defensiveness, accuracy over outcome)
Think of a “swear jar” for phrases that show an unproductive mindset. IE: “you are wrong” or “that turned out terribly” to train your internal dialogue
Further Handling Uncertainty
Poker taught her to accept uncertainty and wrap into life; you must listen to the other side otherwise progress is impossible.
Your identity should be “how good are you at listening to other side/thinking probabilistically”
Organizations stifle themselves by judging based on output: Seahawks, IBM vs. Apple, etc. Pre-mortems (5 reasons why it will fail) or red/blue team makes dissenting a team game
Playing outside of your bankroll is a mistake; think of chips as tools not money
Life Quote
“The hindsight of your future self should be the foresight of today”