The Surprising Link between Poker and Career Success
Hola designers,
I recently read the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, a former professional poker player who has earned over $4 million in poker tournaments. The book is about making better decisions based on lessons from playing poker. Poker being an excellent way to learn decision-making because top players must be able to make quick quality decisions with a lot at stake.
What was interesting was how Duke explained how to become a better poker player. She writes that experience leads to expertise because you create mental models.
Mental models are "the conceptual models in people's minds that represent their understanding of how things work," as described by Don Norman in Design of Everyday Things. They help us predict what will happen if we take a certain action, which in turn helps us create better outcomes.
This aligns with what I wrote in the last issue, where I mentioned that years of experience alone don't guarantee expertise. Some people gain many mental models and improve their outcomes significantly, while others gain few mental models and improve their outcomes only slightly. What matters is using your experience to generate mental models.
How to improve your mental models
Duke also writes about what can speed up and slow down expertise. I’ll share the two main reasons.
Believing an outcome was unrelated to your actions
If you believe that something happened without you affecting it, you won't try to analyze it and find a cause and effect. This prevents you from improving your mental models. For example, Duke shares how it’s common for amateur poker players to never learn from their mistakes because they believed they lose due to bad luck, not because of how they play.
What to do: Take responsibility for the outcome, look for what you could do differently, and update your mental models accordingly.
Having wrong beliefs that prevent you from finding a cause and effect
If you incorrectly believe that something could never be the cause, you won't be able to attribute an effect to it. Duke explains how people thought SnackWell's were healthy because they were marketed as "low fat," but they were filled with sugar and contributed to rising obesity rates in the US during the 90s.
What to do: Question your beliefs and consider everything as a possible cause, as the Sherlock Holmes quote goes, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
In summary, understanding cause and effect is crucial for accelerating your career. To do this, consider your role in the outcome and be open-minded that what you believe might be wrong.
All the best,
Dan