“Well, if there’s one thing I hope to teach my kids it’s how to make good decisions.”
“If anything, you should teach them how to make bad decisions.”
“What? Why would I do that? I don’t want them to make bad decisions.”
“Of course not, but do you think they will never make bad decisions?”
“Yah, they’ll make bad decisions. Everyone makes mistakes. I just want to teach them how to make good decisions so they make less bad decisions.”
“As long as they’ll make some bad decisions, you might as well teach them how to do that.”
“I’m not getting it. How do I teach them to make bad decisions? And isn’t that going to make them make more bad decisions?”
“Well, it’s not really about the decision-making process itself. It’s more about having a contingency plan and knowing how to recover from a bad decision. You’re not teaching them to make bad decisions per se. You’re teaching them how to minimize the negative effects of bad decisions.”
“So like to cut their losses?”
“That’s part of it. It’s also about understanding that you don’t judge a decision solely based on the outcome.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember that one hand in poker where you had pocket 8’s and Mike got a pair of the 10’s on the river?”
“Don’t remind me. That was B.S. What a rip.”
“You still made the right decision. You had the better hand, and statistically, you should have won that hand but he got lucky. Even though you lost, it was still the right decision.”
“Yah and Mike made a bad decision because he should have folded and instead he won. So he got rewarded for a bad decision.”
“In that particular instance, yes. But in the long term, he won’t be rewarded. If he keeps playing like that, he’s going to lose more than he wins. The key is to understand that you made the right decision in that instance regardless of the outcome.”
“Ok fine, but poker is easy because it’s all about the numbers. What about decisions in real life??”
“There are strategies for that too. I can’t get into that right now. Gotta get home and get to sleep. We can discuss more another time.”