You have to give people freedom to be able to sort of experiment along in there because that's the way that you find new paths and that's the way that you find like efficiencies that you couldn't find before or ways that things are more elegant than you could have otherwise seen or things where you can speed things up you know or places where you can slow things down. For a significant portion of her life, Annie Duke made her living on decisions. Annie is a former poker player but now she is consulting businesses on how to make better decisions. It isn't always intuitive whether you know how to make the right decision first of all and secondly whether the decision that you made was a good one. Annie focuses on exactly that. Ways of making better decisions based on information available data and not only making the decision but also evaluating decisions that have already been made. We talk about this in today's episode and if you haven't listened to the first episode in this interview I encourage you to go back and listen to that first. That's where we started this discussion on making better decisions with Annie. Annie also wrote a book called Thinking In Bet and encourage you to check it out. The paperback version of this book will be out on May 7th. That's just a few weeks away. So go and check it out. Thank you again to Annie for coming on the show. Let's get into the interview with Annie Duke. And that's obviously in terms of something really simple. If you get into something more complex like our user is going to like the feature. I mean now you're talking about something that's really probabilistic. Right. And so what happens if we start to judge people on the quality of the outcome? Right. So the users didn't like it. Therefore you made a bad decision to even develop this feature. Which makes you gun shy. Right. I think there's this interesting thing that's kind of emerging here. And you know one piece of the puzzle is you have to have properly lined incentives. You can't have a developer that's wanting to do the easiest thing. Right. In a game of poker, for example, your incentives are directly aligned with your performance in most cases. So if you win, then good things happen. If you lose them bad things happen. And not everything is going to be unfortunately not everything's going to be that cleanly separated. So for a developer, you know, it could be and I've actually heard stories of this that your incentives are actually encouraging you to do things slowly. And that's not good. You know, you have to inspect the incentives. So let's assume though that the incentives are at least roughly aligned so that success on the product means good things for the developer. If you have that as your basis, then judging these these outcomes, you know, really what you're doing is you're making people afraid to act. And so they're trying to find, you know, what is it that they're judging me for? Either they're judging me for making a decision at all or they're judging me for something that I can't really affect that I can't change. Something that's, you know, fundamental to my identity or, you know, and it's very difficult to make a better decision after that. Instead, you feel more paralyzed. Yeah. So so so there's so much good stuff in there. So it sort of makes me sort of think about two different branches. So let me let me go off on one branch first. I think that one, you know, in that, for example, you're saying like, are you choosing sort of like, are people choosing the simpler path or the slower? Like, is it slowing people down? One of the things that I try to get people to think about in terms of decisions is really imagine what's the cost to reverse? So no no no decision is completely reversible because it you use there's some time that you can't get back, right? Sadly, we can't travel back in time. But but some decisions are much more reversible than others. So we can think about, for example, like if I if I order something in a restaurant and it doesn't turn out well, it's not a big deal because I get another meal in four hours or five hours, whatever. So I'm assuming I don't get food poisoning. It's not such a big deal if the food wasn't so good. But if I move to a new city, now the cost to reverse is a lot, right? So so we can we can think about that in terms of any decision we may, but we think about that in terms of of coding, like along the way, if you break some stuff along the way, well, it's it's relatively easy for you to go back and sort of find out what was wrong and fix it, right? So what we want to do is think about when when is the cost to reverse really high versus when is the cost to reverse really low? Yeah. And when the cost to reverse is really low, you should have people acting fast and breaking things. Because in acting fast and breaking things, you're collecting so much information from the world. So now let's we can get back to how do we extract the stuff we don't know from the world and get it into the do no box. Well, part of it is by poking at the world all the time. So if we recognize the situations under which the cost to reverse is low, what we shouldn't do is start speeding up in those situations because the speed here we are and the more stuff we're trying and the more stuff we're sort of like pushing at, the more we're figuring out what works and doesn't work, which allows us now to start taking that information when it really matters, right? When you're making some change that is really really important, like you're putting a big investment in like one particular feature that that you can now make better decisions about that because you've tested a bunch of stuff along the way. So so that that can help is this is the situation of the manager really thinking about how are they communicating to the people who are working for them? I want you to go fast here because it's not a big deal, right? Like if if it doesn't work, that's actually good for us because we learn from it and the cost of it not working is low because we're still in testing. We haven't released it to anybody or maybe sometimes you release it but the cost to really but you know that the customer isn't going to be that mad and the cost to reverse is really low, right? So so that would be sort of in the agile development, right? Like you can release something and if it's broken it's not that big a deal. So so once you sort of recognize that you can start to move fast and you can start to push against the world and and get them and get the world to tell you stuff that's actually going to help you be a better decision maker which releases you from that kind of outcome dependence. So that's kind of number one is we really really go through that decision process and say how much does it cost me? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Fix this. If it's low, okay just just do it. All right so that's kind of number one. Number two is that I heard you say that I just like want to bite into is this idea of people being gun shy and people kind of starting to really the way that I would think about it is not make risky decisions, right? Not not too stuff that's new to try just be willing to try stuff. So one of the one of the one of the issues that resulting creates is this that if we know that people are going to judge us on the quality of the outcome and in general we know that what we're really going to be judged on is the quality of bad outcomes, right? I mean that's what we're afraid of. We're afraid that we're going to have a bad outcome and then someone's going to say hey you stink. You made terrible decisions. So we can start there and then we can take it a step further and say oh there's also a really interesting thing which is that sometimes we don't get mad at somebody when they have a bad outcome. There's certain times when we don't and those times are when somebody has done the thing that everybody always does. The status quo what we expect them to do? Exactly. So that's kind of that example of like if I go to a red light I mean if I go to a green light rather and I'm following the traffic laws and I go to a green light this is what everybody does this is a status quo decision like I'm following the rules and I get in a car accident nobody cares. I mean I take care that I hopefully they care they're gonna car accident but they don't care in terms of my decision making they're not saying you're a bad decision maker you should never drive again. So and we can like here I mean here is like another example like you're you you don't have ways and and you're you're going to the airport and you're with your partner in the car and you have to make the flight on time and you go the usual way that you normally go and there's an accident on the road and like literally traffic isn't moving and you end up missing the flight. I mean obviously you're both stressed but you know nobody's screaming like I can't believe you you're so stupid why would you go this way you you made us miss the flight like there's no none of that is happening but if you get in the car with your partner and you say I'm gonna take I have a shortcut I'm a new way to go and the same thing happens there's an accident I mean you don't have control of an accident the traffic is at a standstill and you end up missing your flight we know what's happening it's your stupid shortcut or if we're ways to go a different way and you say no no I know better than ways yeah right exactly so so what that ends up happening is like we don't we don't kind of gets us into this box or what we think about is well I know that when things work out poorly that I'm gonna get yelled at right I'm gonna be told I did a bad job so now let me think about how to stay out of the room when that happens so one way to stay out of the room is to take a lot of time so what you're doing is you're trying to increase the probability of a good result by by really tinkering around in it but you're costing yourself time by doing that and you're not thinking clearly about what the trade-off between time is and success yeah so like maybe it's gonna work you know if you take a week it's gonna work 93% of the time and if you take two weeks it's gonna work 95% of the time as a manager you should want the person to be willing to take a week on it right I mean that's obviously an extreme example but as a manager I would imagine by the way if they take a week on it it's gonna work 80% of the time if they take two weeks on it it's gonna work 92% of the time I assume there you would rather them take a week as well so you want to figure out like and I don't know what those trade-offs are but you sort of want if you want to have them maximize like this balance between you know success and dying and people are gonna tend not to do that they're gonna take too much time because they're trying to stay out of the way we're avoiding that they're trying to stay out of that like you did a bad job they're also gonna tend to do things in the way that people normally do it so if there's some creative way that they could actually code this that might actually create a breakthrough for your company because now there's this new way to do things they're gonna be much less likely to try especially if it's risky yeah right because if it doesn't work people are gonna be like why do you code it in this bizarre way and they know that they're gonna be much more likely to be blamed versus I did it in the usual way and it didn't work what could I do and now you're kind of putting people in a box where they don't want to take chances anymore and they don't want to get creative and they don't want to try new things and and it you know all of a sudden it takes a lot longer for innovations in the way that people are doing these things to actually come through because people don't feel like they can do that because they're gonna get resulted on and then and then the third piece of the puzzle that actually kind of drives this is that like let's say that you have some feature that that you're releasing and you have some idea about how the market is gonna respond to it and the market responds much worse than you expected you know everybody's in a room talking about like what the hell went wrong what where you know what what happened here how could we have avoided it you know everybody's kind of going through this process right there's this like big post-mortem about this you know thing that's happened but if you release a feature and you have some idea of how the market is gonna respond to it and the market responds much better than you expected there is no such me right now there's two really bad things to come from that thing number one is obvious you're telling people to avoid that out there that there isn't the same kind of attention sort of like yeah right reaction to right that you're gonna be in a room getting grilled if there's a bad outcome but if there's a good outcome it's just another Monday right but also so that that's just kind of generally from like a behavioral standpoint psychological standpoint but let's think about it from your own decision-making and your ability if we think about like those internal audits of our own knowledge you had some forecast about how the market was gonna respond if the market responds way better than you expected that means that either it would you know you had some idea of the distribution and it just was it just it was within your prediction but just at the upper end of your prediction right or it could be that your prediction the way that you had modeled how the market responded the feature is actually off in some way right so if you're thinking about future decisions for releasing features it's just as important if the market under response to the feature as if the market over-response to the feature for you exploring why it is that your prediction was different than what actually happened because that's gonna change the way that you decide about what features to release in the future how you're gonna allocate your resources to feature development because that's what helps you predict what will and will work and what you want to spend your time on so when the market over-response it may mean that you're under-allocating your resources to certain features because you don't actually have an accurate model of the market yeah wow right and that's actually really important so by not digging in and saying whoa wait a minute this was really weird we thought that we'd get this response but like people are crazy for this thing what are what were we missing were we missing anything did it succeed for reasons that we didn't think it would succeed for or was this within the bounds of what we predicted you want to ask all of those questions because that's gonna drive your future decisions right but we don't ask because if we ask it feels like we're turning a win into a loss and we really like wins we just want to say oh we did a great job we're really smart look at that like everybody did so great and by asking the question of what did we miss it feels like we're turning that into a loss and therefore we devoid it but that's like just as important a question to ask when you win is when you lose super that's absolutely critical because what you're trying to do is improve your prediction machine not improve your business and as a result in the future improve your business but if you just say hey you know this is a win I'll take it that's that's problematic because you know it's this idea that you're you're defining a floor in your prediction but you're not defining a ceiling you're saying okay anything goes as long as it's better than this right but but that doesn't give you a better prediction machine especially like you're saying if you're serially successful you could be learning more from your successes that's exactly right and and you could think about it as like again like you're the manpower the people you are working for you time you know these are all resource allocation questions and what you want to be is allocating your resources really well you also want to be thinking about what what are the things that you want to be releasing what is it that you want to be working on it on you know so so we have you know what are the options remember your beliefs are driving what your options are and if you're really digging into these kind of over-performance situations like when you over-perform what your prediction is it may open up options that you didn't otherwise see right and then it's also going to change the way you allocate your resources I mean you you can think about it this way if I have a dollar to invest right and I invested in something that I think is going to make me you know it's going to make me a dollar 50 and I actually lose 50 cents instead okay so so that's super important for me to know because it may be that I don't want to allocate my dollar to that thing anymore maybe that my model was wrong it could be that I just got unlucky obviously but but I want to sort of explore that because I don't want to over-allocate to that option again if that's what the world is telling me but think about it from the other side if I have a dollar to allocate and I allocate it to something that I think is going to make me a dollar 50 and I make three dollars well I need to know that because I don't want to think in the future that I'm only supposed to allocate a dollar to it right maybe I'm supposed to allocate two dollars to that because actually it's a much more it's a bigger win than I suspect it so I want to be able to see that so that as I'm thinking about how do I allocate my dollars how do I allocate my time how do I allocate my manpower that I'm properly allocating it to the things that are are likely to have positive returns and less likely to put it into the things that have negative returns and I can't do that unless I'm really paying attention when things go way better than expected yeah yeah and you have to balance this with resulting too right you have to be able to say okay you know maybe things just went way better than expected as a result of luck but what you can't do is ignore that altogether you can't say oh no you know who knows why it went better you need to be able to look at things and say okay this we can only attribute this to luck for all of the information that we have available all we have you know all we can say is that it was lucky right maybe that's you know that's a perfectly reasonable outcome but the the point is to actually walk through that exercise yeah I would say that actually having the willingness to dig into the wins is kind of the the anti-resulting approach so the resulting approach is I want to upgrade yeah right yeah yeah yeah like oh look we did so well like we we performed so well obviously our decision-making is awesome and we're amazing yeah period the whoa did we miss something we had this great result but it was so much better than we expected yeah what did we miss did we miss anything maybe we didn't but maybe we did that's actually the anti-resulting that's saying I'm not gonna sit and look at how it turned out right but then what what's really nice about that is that you get that on the opposite side because what that allows is that when when something under performance that you're not just saying automatically oh that was a bad decision because you're asking the same questions what did we miss maybe we didn't miss anything maybe we just got unlucky I don't know maybe we lost because we with there you know there was there was something going on or maybe something shifted in the market after we released the feature that that we couldn't have predicted right so now you're you're sort of treating it as let's sort of get to the base reasons as opposed to just assuming it was a bad outcome we all have to have our pants on fire now trying to figure you know and it was a good outcome we should all just open up the champagne absolutely today's episode is sponsored by Lynn Ode and I'm gonna go off script for a moment and say thank you to Lynn Ode. Lynn Ode has been such a huge supporter of development communities not only Developer Teabut other development communities and if you've been doing this for very long especially in a professional atmosphere if you've gone to conferences you've probably seen Lynn Ode everywhere and that's because Lynn Ode is built by developers it's a company of developers and they build products for other Developer They have lightning quick SSD servers at only five dollars a month this is such a fantastic deal but on top of that they're offering $20 worth of credit to new customers head over to linod.com slash Developer Tea and use the code Developer Tea2019 that's Developer Tea 2019 at checkout thank you again to Lynn Ode for sponsoring today's episode and plenty of episodes in the past so that's that is such a key critical takeaway from this episode I don't want anybody to miss it and uh you know if you're listening to this episode and maybe tuned out for a little bit rewind like 10 minutes because that was uh truly I think a critical point for developers not to miss here and that is to to look at your failures and successes very similarly in terms of the way that you judge them. I'd love to ask you I know we're running up on time here and I don't want to go over any further so you know perfect all right so I have I have two more hopefully simple questions for you um that first one can you kind of walk through one or two I know you have a list of of six or seven kind of practical methods to uh to kind of avoid resulting for example uh I'd love for you to walk through one or two then maybe the decision swear jar for example uh I'd love to hear more about that or so so okay so a couple things what we just talked about in terms of the way that you're treating good and bad results is actually one of the best ways to to avoid resulting it actually kind of acts as a vaccine because it changes it changes what people sort of think of as a result if that makes sense like it people think about a result that's like did I win or lose period um but now what you're doing is you're kind of changing the definition of a result to uh wasn't unexpected and that's what you care about and so that just sort of shifts people's mindset is like change changes the way that you think about the world in a way that actually can very much help you with the resulting it's excellent yeah yeah so so two thing so so the decisions where jar and then and then I'll just quickly talk about a third thing which is kind of prospective way to avoid resulting but the decisions where jar is noticing what are the cues for you that might suggest that you're resulting right so and that those cues might be different for you than they would for me but um I get a bad result and I'm like I can't believe I made such a bad mistake what was I thinking yeah right so that that would be something that I would say that would definitely cue up resulting so you're kind of rewinding back from the resulting and seeing okay what are the kind of the triggers for my resulting or the surrounding behaviors like this right the things that I think or the things that I say to other people or like you can also do that for things that that how I'm judging other people right so somebody has that you know somebody has a bad result and you're like can't believe that for such a idiot right like that would be one of those things such a awful thing to say but like look we're all human those things go to our heads right they say we say them about ourselves it's equal opportunity can't believe I'm such an idiot um you know or or you find yourself when somebody has a good result just saying like oh they're great I'm going to put them on every single project right okay well that I mean it was one really good result and they may be great they they may be great they could be the your best person but that one result doesn't necessarily tell you that right so if you think about where you're making these kinds of black and white judgments um based on outcomes you can you can actually create a list of those things that you find yourself saying make a list of them and then now that becomes like a a swear jar right which is when you hear yourself either thinking that or saying it out loud that this becomes a trigger to say hold on a second let me step back from this is that really the right conclusion to draw right like I know that I had a good outcome or I know that I had a bad outcome I know this person had a good outcome or bad outcome but is that really so connected that I can walk back and make this judgment with certainty about what the quality of the decision making is so it would be a cue to actually go and examine the process as opposed to making that snap judgment so you can do this with resulting but you can do this with other things you can do this for uh what are the cues that you're really in an emotional state of mind because we don't want to make a lot of decisions when we're feeling emotional I mean you can figure out what those things are one of them for me is like I can't believe I can't believe it it's so unfair whenever whenever I say like that was so unfair I know that I'm in the wrong part of my brains um so you can figure out what what those kinds of things are for you as well um and so you you can imagine you can do this in any time anytime any place where you feel like you know and and obviously um you know encoding you can get really frustrated you know you can get you can get stuck in a piece of code that's getting really really frustrated it's very likely that there's going to be some emotional stuff going on that there's going to be things that you're saying to yourself or out loud or to other people that are going to be pretty consistent in those situations write them down because those can then become cues for you to put a dollar in the jar and in this case that dollar is hey step back and think about the process try to think about what's rational how much is emotion driving you how much is resulting driving sort of what you're thinking so that you you get this interrupt to that that habit of mind that's a decision swear jar um but then the other thing that I just sort of want to think about is so when I'm talking about like how are you treating the outcomes good or bad and paging on unexpectedness instead that would be kind of a retro respective way to deal with resulting like how are you dealing with outcomes after the fact um and that's kind of true of of the swear jar too this is kind of an after the fact um way to help you with with with these kinds of ways that we process outcome but you can do some before the fact work so the better off you are at kind of for seeing what the range of possible outcomes are the less likely you are to take a particular outcome and put too much weight on it which is really what you're kind of doing with resulting so that just has to do with really good perspective planning and in particular when you're doing perspective planning it's really good to to do perspective planning that that stress testing so there's two things that you can do one is um to do a post a pre-mortem which is to say uh i'm releasing this feature i released this feature and it failed the market really hated it and then have people and you want them to do this separately write a narrative as to why it failed and have them do that separately and then because you don't want them to infect each other with their ideas and then come together and talk about that um and what that will do is it will get it will expose things that you might not otherwise think of by actually imagining saying it we know it failed we released it and it was like a dud or we released it in a completely broke right that would be another thing that you could do and then really have people walk through and and write a power you know their best narrative as to why that happened um so so that's called a pre-mortem the other thing that you can do which is from my friend um Dan Egan he calls it the Damian game i call it like the Dr. Evil game is to imagine that you're releasing a feature and you're an evil developer who wants to make sure it fails what are the things that you would do to make sure it fails but there's a constraint which is any of the individual decisions that you make on their own have to look reasonable obviously in the aggregate they won't look reasonable hmm interesting so any individual choice you make has to look reasonable and make people go play that very interesting yeah so right it's a super interesting game right i'm so happy Danny you can talk me it yeah right the constraint is interesting right so you could think about that for example like if i were thinking about i wanted to lose weight and i'm Dr. Evil um here's something i can do i'm too busy in the morning to put healthy food in my bag now on an individual day that that could be a reasonable choice but we know that that's gonna that's very likely to create failure if i repeat that decision over and over again right so so now i can look at that and i can say aha Dr. Evil would do that to me so how can i make sure that i don't do that so what it allows you to do is see if Dr. Evil would do that then how do i not do that and what what you'll find when you play this Dr. Evil game is that you're doing a lot of the things that Dr. Evil would do right because it has to be believable right it has to be right because it has to be believable you end up doing a lot of things that so you don't realize how much self sabotaging you're doing until you play this stuff with Dr. Evil game and then you're like oh no i'm doing a lot of Dr. Evil things to myself so what those two things in combination do the pre-mortem and the Dr. Evil game is they they allow you to see better what the future might hold where the breaking points might be where the stress points are such that that two things can happen one is that you can say okay here's all these places where i can lower the probability of these bad behaviors occurring and i can increase the probability of good behaviors occurring here's the places where luck is going to intervene and i have no choice about it so i can try to figure out ways to hedge against the luck right things that can sort of like fill in those gaps and and help me even if that unlucky thing happens or i could think about what's my reaction going to be if that unlucky thing happens so i already know in advance how i'm going to react to it so that i'm not so i'm being nimble as opposed to you know pants on fire or i could think about could i reduce the chances that that unlucky thing happens right and so and so now i have a much clear review of the future so that when something doesn't work out i'm much less likely to look at that and say oh well i must have made a bad decision i'm more likely to say this was included in my plan i saw this and this is this is so important to to i mean we've talked about pre-mortems on this show before actually the idea that you you know you think differently backwards than you do forwards it's hard to predict but it's easy to uh... to kind of reflect right and so if you can trick your brain in the thinking that you're reflecting then it maybe shifts into a different mode i'm not a nearest scientist but i imagine that there's a different process happening uh... that causes us to think differently and perhaps more effectively in those scenarios well there are in the the main thing is the the the main way that i would put it like that the the the the analogy that i like or the metaphor that i like is if you're standing at the base of the mountain um... all you can see is the base of the mountain right it's very hard to see the path that would be most efficient to get you to the top but if you're standing at the top of the mountain now you can see every the path and other paths and other paths exactly so you can see all the different ways up the mountain you can see where the obstacles might be you can see what the most efficient way up the mountain is so that's the way that i kind of view it and i and and cognitively it works that way when you're when you're thinking ahead trying to predict usually the state of the world right now and the problems that you have sitting right in front of you play a huge outsize role um... just like the base of the mountain does that makes it very hard for you to see the path beyond that or the path or the possible paths beyond that whereas uh... if you can get yourself to be standing at the top of the mountain in other words thinking backwards you're much more likely to see the the whole scope and and it'll open up different different paths this has been such an excellent conversation i want to respect your time constraint and go ahead and move make towards the end here uh... and and uh... just thank you so much for your time and then of course there are other uh... practical things that you find in uh... the the book thinking in bets and the paperback is coming out uh... it'll be coming out shortly after this episode errors can you tell us a little bit about that oh yeah so uh... the paperback version of the book is coming out right at the beginning of may um... i may seventh i should know that for sure uh... but i'm gonna go i'm just gonna go with may seven how about that um may seven wait it is it's just now may seven uh... uh... no but i think that's actually correct uh... so yeah i'm really excited about it i mean that the hardback has been out since February of 2018 um... and obviously this is going to give people a different way to consume the book and um... i'm told by my publisher something really loves paperback and so they actually wait for the paperback but um... better for playing no but i'm actually really excited i mean i'm excited in general in terms of the way that people have responded to the book and i'm very excited that it's gonna be coming out in this new format yeah and since i plan to get a copy of the paperback for the traveling portion i do have the the uh... the hardback on my shelf uh... excellent cover and just a wonderful book so thank you for that um i have a couple of very kind of quick quick fire questions for you just two of them uh... the first one is okay i wish more people would ask you about what do i wish more people would ask me about um you know it's so hard for me to answer that because i feel like very often i don't know i don't know what it is that i wish more people would ask me about because you know for example like what you told me about today about thinking about beliefs and values and sort of like conflating those and so feeling like you didn't want people you didn't want to sort of expose your beliefs to the outside world that's something that i didn't know that i wanted to be asked about sure but then i was asked about it today and that kind of opened up a new way of thinking and oh that's an interesting way to to think about it i can see how how that might be an issue for people so i don't i don't really want to it's hard for me to answer that question because i feel like that's what the world reveals to me is the things that i would like to be asked about that people don't ask me about so like as an example like in another podcast i recently did somebody asked me what's the kindest thing that somebody's ever done for me and i'd never been asked that and i didn't know that i wanted to be asked that um but i was really excited that i'd ask that because i got to answer a question about my amazing graduate school advisor who did the kindest thing anybody's ever done for me so it's kind of a meta answer then you you hope that people ask you about things that you don't expect to be asked about right exactly exactly great and and the last question that i'd like to ask you is if you could give software developers just a couple of seconds of kind of final advice no matter where they are in their careers what would you tell them interesting question let's say i think i'd be similar advice for most people which is i think that at the beginning of everybody's career and actually even when you're older you think you're supposed to have everything figured out and you're supposed to know exactly what you want to do and you have a desire to have much more certainty in your own knowledge um because i think that you you tend to equate certainty with competence if i'm sure that of what i know and and who i am and and what i want to do that i'm also competent um and what i would hope is that they would that they would be much more open-minded first of all to what other people might think particularly those people who disagree with them because i think there's a lot to be learned that people's beliefs are going to change and the more open you are to what the world sort of has to offer you uh the more quickly that you get to actual confidence as opposed to sort of perceived competence that if you sort of feel like i need to know exactly what i i'm supposed to be doing right now first of all i think that creates a lot of stress undue stress because you actually don't but also i think i can cause you to miss opportunities that might be sitting in front of you because you're so focused on a particular path um so you know i'd like for every person who's sort of at the beginning of their career to basically keep their eyes out you know be open to finding things that interest you to making shifts in the way that you think the celebrating when you change your mind um and to really redefine for yourself what competence means um to not i know everything and it's set in stone and i know what i want to do and i know that the things that i believe are right um as opposed to competences recognizing what you don't know and keeping your eyes out for that that's excellent advice and i think a lot of people who are listening to the show right now are going to find a positive sense of conviction and appreciation for what you've shared on the show today thank you so much for being with me today Annie okay thank you so much a huge thank you to Annie Duke for joining me on Developer Teato talk about making better decisions i hope you have come away with some actionable ways to make better decisions in your career in your personal life and ultimately to think better about decisions about judging other people's decision-making and this really for me this is a process of learning how little i actually know and how much i have left to learn so thank you again to Annie for reminding me that there's so much left to do thank you again to today's sponsor linode head over to linode.com slash Developer Tea and use the code Developer Tea2019 that's Developer Tea2019 add checkout if you found today's episode or any other episode of Developer Teavaluable if it's added value to your career your personal life then the best way that you can give back to the show is to tell others about the show you can do this in two main ways one is to simply share this episode with a friend and another way is to leave a review on iTunes this helps other people decide 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