Wanna Bet?

As I continue down the rabbit hole of inherited beliefs, I’ve been trying to double-check my thinking on just about everything. What do I believe because I’ve actually examined it, and what do I believe simply because someone handed it to me years ago?

That led me to an incredible book by Annie Duke called Thinking in Bets. It gave me a better way to look at what I believe, how confident I should be and what additional work I may need to do before making an important decision.

You may not think of your life this way, but every decision you make, and every decision you avoid, is a bet. You’re betting on your information, your judgment and, many times, yourself. If we treated those choices more like actual bets, I think we’d make fewer bad decisions and a lot more good ones.

Any questions or comments? Just shoot me a note.

JP

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Would You Bet on What You Believe?

Would you bet on what you believe?

Maybe you should. Here’s why.

Believe It and Make It Real

I talk a lot about the power of belief in Burn the Playbook. So much so that I dedicate an entire chapter to it.

My friend Scott Monty often cites the work of William James, one of the founders of modern psychology. James used the term “precursive faith” to describe situations in which belief comes before the evidence and can actually help create the desired result.

An athlete has to believe they can win before winning. An entrepreneur has to believe a business can work before launching it. A team has to believe its members will do their jobs before anyone begins doing the work. James argued that sometimes belief does not merely describe reality. It helps bring a new reality into existence.

When my wife and I launched Content Marketing Institute, I had no proof I could build and run a successful business. Pam believed in me, and I believed in myself. That belief pushed us to begin, keep going and do enough of the right things to make it work.

Believing I could do it did not guarantee success. But without that belief, I almost certainly would not have tried.

But Here’s the Problem

Belief in ourselves can propel us forward.

Beliefs about the rest of the world can send us in completely the wrong direction.

Let me give you an example. I’m friends with an Atlanta Braves fan (I know...very hard to do, right?). I’m, obviously, a Cleveland Guardians fan, although they were still the Indians when the teams met in the 1995 World Series.

We both watched every game.

I believe the umpires gave the Braves pitching including Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine far too many outside pitches as strikes. My friend believes Cleveland’s great hitting team finally met its match against incredible pitching. According to him, the umpires had nothing to do with it.

How can that be? We watched the same games and saw the same pitches, but we came away believing two different things.

I’m sure you can name a similar situation from your own life.

Politics comes to mind. Religion. Artificial intelligence. The future of work. Whether Notre Dame should have made the college football playoff.

We rarely see evidence without filtering it through what we already believe.

Annie Duke, author of the excellent book Thinking in Bets, says we imagine that beliefs form something like this:

We hear something.
We investigate it and determine whether it is true.
We form a belief.

In reality, the process usually looks more like this:

We hear something.
We believe it.
If we have the time, interest or motivation, we eventually investigate whether it is true.

Most of us, including me, rarely make it to the third step. We hear something that sounds reasonable, fits our experience or comes from someone we trust, and it quietly becomes part of how we see the world.

Why Does This Matter?

Being wrong about the 1995 World Series changes absolutely nothing in my life. I may complain about Tom Glavine getting six inches off the outside corner, but I’m not making any important decisions based on it.

Other beliefs are much more expensive.

Let’s say you believe it’s too late to make a major career change. You’re 45 or 55 or 65, and you’ve convinced yourself that companies only want younger people. You don’t have the right experience. Starting again would mean throwing away everything you’ve already accomplished.

Maybe that’s true.

But have you investigated it? Have you talked with people who successfully made a similar change? Have you tested your skills in another market? Have you tried a small project before deciding what is possible for the rest of your life?

Or did you hear a few stories, look at your age and decide the door was closed?

That belief could keep you doing work you hate for another decade.

Maybe you believe the best way to build a business is to grow your following on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok or whatever platform is working right now. Everyone seems to be there. The algorithm is sending you traffic. Your follower count keeps climbing, so you put nearly all your energy into it.

Underneath that decision is a collection of beliefs.

You believe the platform will continue rewarding you. You believe access to your followers will remain affordable. You believe those followers will remember you. You believe the company controlling the platform wants roughly the same things you do.

That is quite a bet.

If those beliefs are wrong, you could spend years building an audience you never truly owned.

Or consider artificial intelligence. Some people believe AI will eliminate their jobs, so there is no point in investing in new skills. Others believe AI will solve nearly every business problem, so they are eliminating people, relationships and hard-earned expertise as quickly as possible.

Those are two radically different strategies built on two radically different sets of beliefs. Neither side knows exactly what will happen, but both often talk as though the outcome has already been decided.

This is where belief becomes dangerous.

Once we believe something, we begin collecting evidence that supports it. We give more weight to information that agrees with us and find reasons to dismiss information that does not. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

Then we make increasingly important decisions based on conclusions we may never have investigated.

We remain in the wrong job. We build on the wrong platform. We invest in the wrong strategy. We refuse to start because we believe something cannot work, or we charge ahead because we believe it cannot fail.

When the decision goes badly, we call it bad luck.

Perhaps it wasn’t bad luck. Perhaps it was a bad bet based on an untested belief.

Wanna Bet?

This is why Annie Duke’s betting framework is so useful. Instead of asking whether you believe something, ask a more uncomfortable question:

Would you bet on it?

If my Braves friend said, “Would you bet $1,000 that an independent review of every pitch would show the Braves received more favorable strike calls than Cleveland?” I would suddenly become much less confident.

The moment something meaningful is at stake, I can’t rely on what I remember or how I felt. I would have to investigate whether the evidence actually supports my belief.

Duke argues that thinking in bets forces us to recognize the uncertainty already hiding inside our decisions. It makes us examine how much we know, where the information came from and how confident we should actually be.

When evaluating an important belief, we can ask:

How do I know this?
Where did this information come from?
How trustworthy and current are my sources?
What evidence supports my belief?
What evidence contradicts it?
What other explanations are possible?
What might the person challenging me know that I don’t?
What information am I missing?
What evidence would cause me to change my mind?

There are more questions we could ask, but you get the point.

If most beliefs begin with hearing something and believing it, we need a mechanism that forces us into the third step: investigating whether it is actually true.

“Wanna bet?” does that.

It forces us to replace certainty with probability. Instead of saying, “I know this is true,” we might say, “I’m about 70 percent confident this is true.”

That remaining 30 percent matters. It leaves room for new information, competing explanations and the rather inconvenient possibility that we are wrong.

Changing the Goal

After doing a little research, I can go back to my Braves friend and say, “I believe the Braves received more favorable umpire calls during the 1995 World Series, and I’m about 80 percent confident.”

I’m feeling particularly good after discovering that former Braves outfielder David Justice once joked that Glavine should have thanked home-plate umpire Joe Brinkman in his Hall of Fame speech. Justice added that he could have thrown a one-hitter with that strike zone.

Case closed, as far as I’m concerned.

But that is not really the lesson.

The lesson is that a betting mentality changes the goal. Instead of searching for information that proves we are right, we begin searching for information that improves our understanding.

That is a very different game.

Before your next important decision, write down the belief underneath it.

“I believe changing careers at my age is too risky.”

“I believe growing my social following is the best use of my time.”

“I believe AI will make my expertise more valuable.”

Then assign it a probability. Are you 55 percent confident? Seventy percent? Ninety-five percent?

Finally, ask what evidence would cause you to lower or raise that number.

You don't have to put $1,000 on the table. You are already making a bet. You are betting your time, your money, your career, your reputation and possibly the next ten years of your life.

The question is not whether you are willing to bet.

You already are.

The question is whether you have investigated the belief before pushing your chips into the middle.

P.S.: A reminder that I'm giving away my book, Burn the Playbook, for free. Please share it with a friend. I'm finding more and more parents are reading this and then sharing it with their kids.

This Old Marketing Podcast

In this week's This Old Marketing, Robert and I talk about how Jimothy the racoon reminds us of the week that was OpenAI.

Until next Friday, keep building something that matters.

JP (Joe Pulizzi)

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