Life is a gamble.

I’m reading and enjoying Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. In it, she connects how her experience as a professional poker player can provide insight into how humans make decisions.

Her central thesis is that when you ask yourself “How much would I bet I’m right?” you’re apt to make better choices. Life is uncertain, and by acknowledging that fact you are more likely to check your assumptions and prepare for unfortunate outcomes.

From deciding where to go to college to what to write next, we’re always betting against an imagined future self. Will the Future Me who chooses X be happier than the Future Me who chooses Y? We rarely get do-overs, yet getting paralyzed by indecision is generally worse; we’re choosing to do nothing, which tends to get us nothing we want.

Unlike poker, where you can play and learn from hundreds of hands per day, I think it’s difficult to apply some of Duke’s strategies to writing. A screenplay or a book takes such a long time to complete that it’s hard to gauge the outcome and adapt. Is this a good paragraph? A good scene? A good movie? The feedback loop is too just long.

Still, I dig her approach. Just this past week I was faced with a binary choice whether or not to accept a deal, and I realized that it truly was a bet. I could control some factors (skill), but not others (luck). Once I realized there was a range of possible outcomes, my reps and I found a dollar figure that made sense.

You could phrase it as “I’m willing to bet X that this will turn out the way I hope.” The X reflects an acknowledgment that I may be wrong, and that’s okay.

Here are some other things I found interesting this week.
 

Sleeping while seated. I flew economy on an overnight flight to Frankfurt. At the airport I bought this neck pillow for $39 and lemme tell you: good call. It has straps that attach to the seat’s headrest so it can support you even when you’re not against the wall.

Netflix as a global commons. A Norwegian colleague was describing how much she loved the new Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. It struck me how unusual it is for the whole world to be able to experience a TV series at the same time. Yes, Game of Thrones is a worldwide smash, but HBO isn’t truly universal the way Netflix original programs are.

When is it okay to lie? This article by Larissa MacFarquhar on dementia and deception is a tough read, but offers a fascinating real-world example of the kind of thing Sissela Bok writes about so well in her book Lying.

Betting on democracy. Maciej Cegłowski writes how national Democratic leadership largely failed candidates in small-but-winnable congressional races. Cegłowski has been meeting and raising money for these candidates for months through his Great Slate initiative. I’ve upped my donation.

We are your narrator. I’m fascinated by prose written in the second person plural. TaraShea Nesbit looked at it in this article for The Guardian back in 2014. It’s worth noting that this collective narrator is very different than the “we” often used in screenwriting, in which “we” is a proxy for the audience and/or camera. (“We DESCEND through the clouds…”)

It’s not just Aliens. Sometimes the sequel really is better than the original. For example, Monopoly Deal is much better-designed than the board game, and Bang!: The Dice Game is more fun. Come at me!