I think everyone would seriously benefit from learning poker. I used to play professionally and the idea of looking at things as probabilistic bets, and in terms of expected value is so deeply rooted in my mind

Investments are bets. Most sane investors aren't putting it all on one thing

Startups are bets

Applying for jobs. Sales. Dating. Health. Basically everything

You risk $X money and time for a payoff of $Y that comes Z%

You can make the best decision and have a bad outcome because there are so many unknowns. This isn't chess

You can play everything wrong and still hit it out of the park

I mean this is one of the range of outcomes that could've happened. You can't declare yourself a success or failure from one project

Just keep making good decisions and don't risk it all, and you'll more than likely end up fine

I studied poker a lot in high school, and it still influences how I think today.

Probabilistic thinking about the EV of your decisions is a good framework, but "Just keep making good decisions" is the hard part. Same as in poker, though, the hard part about making a decision in life isn't the middle-school level probability math, but about making the right estimates about payoff potential and success rate based on incomplete information.

Analyzing things as they are rather than how you wish they were, being able to separate useful information from noise, and taking a step back to look at second-order effects are all useful skills that will help you make better decisions the more you develop them.

I read about mathematical expectation in a poker book for the first time a long time ago and it's really an interesting way to think about the world. In real life, it's a bit different though since there are other factors than just raw percentages like poker hands. For example, you could do everything right and still fail while someone else (like a nepo hire) can do everything wrong and still succeed.

Life's odds are rigged.

One of my favorite star trek scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4A-Ml8YHyM

If you want me to ruin this for you, look up Bertrand's Paradox and The Problem Of Priors.

I recently had to deal with this, ugh, I just pick a prior or two and see what the outcome looks like. I'm not sure we can calculate probability of success, but rather use probability to find losing ideas that should never be done.

> You risk $X money and time for a payoff of $Y that comes Z%

Unlike in poker where you know those 3 numbers if you are paying attention, in real life you know only X, and sometimes not even that. The rest is a guessing game, and that estimation is the hard part.

See also The Book of Risk by Dan Borge.