Annie Duke

"Mental time travel" refers to Duke's decision-making technique of imagining how current problems will feel years from now to gain perspective.

Nothing is as important as it seems when you're thinking about it. One of the things that I used to try to do with my kids all the time was mental time travel.

If you wouldn't start this today, then that means that everything that you're putting into this going forward is the actual waste.

When you're doing something, there's not just the cost of doing something that's not worthwhile that's direct, but there's also the cost of not being able to devote your attention to other opportunities that might be available to you.

The word alignment in terms of we're all aligned as a group, the word alignment is stupid and it shouldn't be used. People don't actually agree, they're not actually aligned on the decision. That's just the thing that makes you feel better.

By the time you quit, it's probably long after you should have. By the time you're actually even thinking about quitting, it's probably already past the time that you ought to have quit.

There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?

So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals.