Meet Annie Duke: Poker Champion
We’re proud to announce that Annie Duke is one of the most recent additions to our team. She is is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. In this blog post, she provides integral insight on self-esteem, and motivation based on her experiences.
WE CAN ALWAYS FIND SOMEONE DOING BETTER (OR WORSE)
Dan Egan, director of finance and behavioral psychology at Betterment, wrote an excellent piece, “How to lose by beating the (wrong) benchmark”, about why the standard we choose to measure ourselves against matters so much.
In general, we’re relative pricers of our happiness for the simple reason that there are few absolute measures of happiness.
When it comes to pricing goods or services, price is relative – relative to the prices of other goods or services or what people are willing to pay.
Our happiness is the same. How do we figure out what amount of “it” – money and possessions, a relationship partner and family, friends, health, work, leisure, faith, good works – makes us happy?
It’s all relative. And we choose what it is relative to.
The standards we choose – what we are benchmarking ourselves against – are often poorly chosen. We benchmark against other people. We benchmark against our own past peaks or valleys. We can always find some standard against which we are doing poorly. Or against which we are doing well.
Choose our benchmarks poorly and we will learn the wrong lessons from our experience.
Egan summed up the right way to benchmark:
“We should be benchmarking and improving on our own performance relative to our own goals. Not others.
Every day we are presented with benchmarks that have nothing to do with our goals, yet challenge us to beat them. It takes real thoughtfulness and control to craft a benchmark for yourself, and measure performance relative to it, not others.”
Egan focuses on how investors benchmark, but he applies the concept to other situations. (For example, after having resumed swimming regularly, the temptations of benchmarking against the speed of others in the pool.)
The difficulty in benchmarking against others is that it can quickly turn an exercise in improvement into motivated reasoning.
Think about it: If we want to beat ourselves up, we’ll always be able to find someone doing better than us. Likewise, if we want to feel we’re succeeding, we can find someone doing worse.
As Egan says, “If you want to find something that beat your portfolio over some time horizon, you can.”
Picking better benchmarks creates a smoother path to self-improvement.
To sum up, from Egan:
“A big benefit of good personal benchmarks is that they make beating the benchmark much more common, controllable, and rewarding …. [I]n the case that I am successful, I can attribute more of my success to my actions, rather than randomness.
And feeling good about making progress at a personal level means you’re more likely to continue to make progress. It makes personal progress itself addictive.”
Book Annie Duke Today
Annie Duke now provides her expert analysis skills to audiences of all sizes across the country. Contact The Mollie Plotkin Group today for availability, or pick up her Wall Street Journal bestseller, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.
“Risk Schmisk”
Watch Annie Duke give an insightful TEDx Talk on risk.
