YouSaid · the spoken record

Maria Konnikova

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-08-04
most recent: 2020-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sure, for sure. And the books that have meant the most to me that I end up going back to the most times, you always see that they're just, there's tons of marginalia and they're underlined. There's just, there's a lot going on there. And I think that that works both ways. I go back to them because I process them much more deeply and I process them deeply because I was actually going through and thinking and reflecting and I have all this marginalia. So it's this reciprocal relationship. Maybe there was a book that I read at some point that could have become a really central book for me, but I was distracted and didn't actually read it carefully. So I didn't sit the same way. And if I were to revisit it right now, I would probably say, oh my God, I can't believe that this isn't kind of one of my books. And then it would become more written in. But I sometimes wonder how many got away because you can't always be on, you know, sometimes.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fascinating that the me of five years ago or whenever I read this book last thought this at that point in time and that's a really interesting experience because you're in your own mind the whole all the time. It's your mind and this is a way that you can actually see it from the outside and see how you've changed and see what's different and kind of revisit ways that you used to think that you might not think now. And I think that that's such an important and fascinating and helpful and eye-opening sometimes experience.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One that's just a really nice hardcover that I don't write in, and then I have a soft cover where I've underlined and written. So I have kind of both one that's nice when I just want to read and have a very pretty pristine reading experience and one that I've really engaged in. And it's actually really interesting to me. I like writing in books because it doesn't just help you process things and make sure that you're going through them in a thoughtful way and actually kind of synthesizing thoughts and thinking as you're reading as opposed to being just passively absorbing it or not absorbing it as the case usually is when you're passively reading. But it actually also enables me to visit my past versions of myself. Sometimes I'll reread a book and I'll read this comment in the margin. I said, huh?”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it depends. If it's nonfiction, I'm going to be underlining and writing in the margins. So all of my nonfiction books are written in for the most part. I have some really beautiful hardcover editions that I would never in a million years write in. So I have, you know, I definitely have books that I won't touch. Fiction, I don't write in the first time I read it. If I then go back to it, like I have a version of Sherlock Holmes that's pristine because I wanted this beautiful Sherlock Holmes box set, but then I have a version of Sherlock Holmes that is just completely, you know, defaced. I've written over every single chapter because I was really analyzing those stories and really trying to take everything from it. And I have, so for some of my favorite books, so one of my favorite poets is W.H. Auden. And I've read all of his poetry many times. And I actually have two copies of his collected poem.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into just some of the greatest writers of the last century. It's a beautiful resource. And I also feel very, very free to put books down. If I open something and I'm not enjoying it and I don't think that I'm going to like it and there's no reason to keep reading, I'm just going to stop. And I don't think that that's, you know, there are people who will finish a book once they start it to me in my mind there are way too many books. I'm already not going to be able to read all the books I want to read in my life. So why spend it reading something I don't want to read?”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In these interviews, they inevitably talk about books that they read, books that have been influential for them, authors that they like, and that's actually how I often will go through my reading. You know, I went through a phase where I read everything that Joseph Brodsky had written because I really love his poetry and I love his prose. And he has lists of books that he recommends and things that he read. And so that got me into kind of areas of reading that I never considered before because he really, you know, he's a huge fan of Plutarch's lives. I've never read Plutarch's lives. So I went and I started reading Plutarch's lives. By the way, I recommend that everyone buys the Parish Review interviews and just reads them and uses that as a lot of book recommendations because they're so damn good. I mean, some are better than others, but you have insight.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ago now, I bought the collected Paris review interviews. And it's this boxed set of all of the interviews that the Paris Review has ever done. And the Paris Review has this wonderful thing where they interview writers and thinkers and they ask them just a lot of different questions.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I read a lot. I read nonfiction. I read fiction. I read poetry. And I'm actually, I'm a huge, huge believer that everyone should be reading fiction and poetry. There are so many people who I really admire who just say, oh, I only read nonfiction because all the other stuff doesn't teach me anything. And I just, I've had this conversation so many times where I try to convince them about the value of reading fiction, the value of reading poetry, the fact that all of these things have different lessons to teach us and that you can learn from all of them. So I filter by a number of things. So recommendations definitely one. If you're someone I admire whose opinion I admire, and especially if I know you and you know me, I'm much more likely to take your recommendation. Sometimes I actually, one of my favorite things a number of years ago, it must be over 10 years.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are incapable of that sort of adjustment in any realm of life. I mean, if you think about academia, where I came from, you have all of these old guard professors who have tenure, who made their reputation on some big theory, and then something newer comes along that actually forces them to reconsider some of their ideas. And it's the rare person who's actually able to say, oh yeah, things have changed. I was, this is wrong. I've got to update it. A lot of times they just double down and scream and get very mad at the newcomers. And that comes from the The fact that they don't have less certainty more inquiry as kind of one of their life guiding mottos.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is always a call, then you need to actually be skeptical of that person and definitely unthinkingly follow that advice. And that's really, I think that's such a helpful way to go through life, just keeping that lesson in your mind at all times. And it's also helps explain why Eric is just so humble and so incredibly self-effacing because that really is how he lives his life. And so he always questions and he always questions himself and he always questions whether he's good enough. And that's why he stays good enough because he keeps questioning and he's never overconfident. He just keeps asking. He keeps asking questions and he keeps learning and he keeps changing and evolving and adapting how he plays based on what he's seeing. And so he plays very differently now than he played 20 years ago.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Model, and well, the simulation says that I'm supposed to do this X percent of the time, so I'm just going to do it like a robot. And the best players realize that you can't do that. Less certainty, more inquiry. You have to inquire. You have to ask. You have to probe. You have to think, is that action applicable in this specific circumstance, even if the solver tells me I should be doing this all the time? Maybe at this table I shouldn't. You know, maybe there's actually something that I need to think through right here. And one of the things that I think is one of the most valuable lessons that Eric has taught me is less certainty, more inquiry, always be less certain and always inquire and ask questions and think through things for yourself. And if anyone is ever telling you, you know, this is what you have to do here. This is what you should be doing. No, this is always a fold. No, this is.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure, for sure. One of the things that Eric taught me, well, told me, actually, Ant taught me very early on is he described this conversation that he had with an incredibly good player. I obviously won't say who it was, but they were having this conversation and this player just very confidently was saying how you're supposed to play a hand. And Eric was just kind of quietly listening. And then he just said less certainty, more inquiry. And the player got really mad. He got really upset. Like he did not take that well because he thought that kind of Eric was criticizing him. And Eric was in a way, but very gently, he was saying, you know, you can't ever, there's no way you're supposed to play or there's no, that's kind of the, I think that's the drawback of the people who are too focused on kind of the mathematical.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My table based on what people think of me, based on what I think of other people, based on what I've been observing for the last however many hours. And having that having those tools of reflection, having knowledge into kind of what I should be paying attention to, that's what made me a much better player, not knowing which two cards to play or what to raise or when to fold.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Erica's actually taught me a lot. I know how to play this hand. I know what I should be doing because I have the building blocks. I have the thought process. And it all just kind of came together because I was learning the whole time, even though I was never given a blueprint. These are the hands that you play from this position. This is your opening range, which means like this is the chart of the hands that you're allowed to start playing with, start opening the pot with. If you're sitting here or if you're sitting there, Eric never gave me any of that. And I think that eventually I just kind of figured it out because instead of giving me the specific charts and telling me, okay, you should play, you know, this and this and this. And if you get these two cards, you fold. Instead, he taught me to always ask, okay, why would I play this? Why wouldn't I play this? How would I think about it? Let me think through the entire decision moving forward based on where I'm sitting, based on who's”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hand I was just being mad at the fact that this happened and this happened to me and he just he really I still remember this conversation so well because it hit home he was like you stop describing things this way this is bad and the fact that you're describing it this way means that's how you're experiencing it which means that you're not capable of thinking clearly right now and it just a switch flipped and you know I played so much better from that moment on because I remember that what I was supposed to be focusing on was my thought process. And it's funny that there's no kind of moment where I was like, oh, I'm becoming a better poker player. But there were just suddenly there were these, there were games, there were tournaments, there were Just moments of reflection where I thought, oh wow.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to be going through your own thought process and what you can control. And he was right, my head was just in a completely the wrong place. And having him point that out and actually kind of scold me for it and say, hey, stop doing this. Do not keep telling me what's happening. Because I would say things like, oh man, I can't believe, you know, my aces got cracked again, which means I had pocket aces, which is the best starting hand you can have. And if someone cracks your aces, it means that a worse hand ended up beating you in the end because of the run out of the cards. And that happens. And you know what? It's supposed to happen. And if you look at the numbers, it's going to happen about a quarter of the time. And Pocket Aces aren't necessarily going to win. It's going to happen even more frequently if there are more than if there's more than one player playing against you. And so when I was sending him texts like, oh man, you know, my aces got cracked again. I was not thinking about my own decision process and how I play.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't give you an answer. And it was so, you know, it's frustrating when that's happening because I would think things like, oh, I'm never going to become a good player if you don't tell me what to do. If you don't just tell me how to play this hand. And yet because he kept pushing me to examine my thought process and to be honest about it because he was not someone who just always patted me on the head and said, great job. He would actually tell me when he thought that there were problems. The biggest problems were always in my thought process. I remember one tournament where we were texting back and forth and he pulled me aside during a break and he said I'm really worried about your thinking, the way you're describing hands right now is you're telling me, you know, this happened to me and this happened to me and this happened to me and that really worries me because that means that your head is not in the right place because things you should not be thinking of things as happening to you.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think that that's absolutely accurate. That is the key to improvement. I think I was able to improve at poker and become a much better player because I had a teacher who always, that's what he stressed. That's what he taught me. He was always teaching me how to think, how to test my thought process, how to go through those building blocks. He was never telling me what to do or what was a mistake or, you know, what wasn't a mistake. It was never prescriptive in that way. And I think that that made me a much better player, even though I would get so mad. There were times when I just wanted to, well, when I did say Eric, just tell me how to play this hand. You know, what would you have done here? And he would actually say, you know, it doesn't matter what I would have done here because you're not me. And you need to realize that and you need to realize that people are playing differently against you than they would be against me because I mean and you're you and”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that that's actually really important to remember for life that luck in Luck can be a real bitch. And if it really just pummels you at the beginning the wrong way, then you might never have the chance to realize your potential. I think that sort of realization makes you a lot less judgmental about people because you realize how much of your life just ends up being luck of birth and luck of just early circumstances that you didn't really have much control over. And that can really set the scene for a lot of things to come. So a lot of the best poker players also got incredibly lucky at the beginning as well.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's all in aggregate. I think the point of the other point that the game teaches you, which I think is a really important insight into life in general, is that any given hand, anything can happen. But over the long term, skill does emerge triumphant as long as you never got incredibly unlucky to begin with. So I think that there are probably a lot of people who could have been brilliant poker players who had a horrible run of luck at the beginning and just quit because they got, you know, they were broke. And so I think that you start realizing that delusion is punished in the long term, but in the immediate term, you know, you could be deluded and win lots of money. But if in the immediate term you're not deluded and you're actually quite good, but you're being punished because the variance is against you, you might never see the long term.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So poker is Wonderful teaching tool because you have immediate feedback in the sense of, you know, do you win or do you lose? Now you need to be careful because as I said before, you need to learn to separate thought process from outcomes. So sometimes you make the right decision but you still lose. But if you have that caveat, then you do kind of start seeing right away what the outcomes of your actions are and whether you're actually learning whether you're playing correctly because over time you'll either be losing money or winning money. If you are diluted and you think you're better than you actually are and you play at a higher level than you should be playing, poker is going to punish you because it's going to take away all of your money and you'll be broke and”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a real person, so even though he's fictional, he was based on a doctor who was a mentor to Arthur Conan Dwell when he was in medical school at the University of Scotland. So Conan Dwell was also a doctor, not a very good one, otherwise he wouldn't have written Sherlock Holmes, so we're lucky about that. And Joseph Bell, who was a brilliant doctor, was the model for Sherlock Holmes. So even though Holmes is fictional, his approach to things was taken from someone who's very real.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just jump right in and start kind of playing around and trying to solve the problem. Holmes realizes that, no, first you need to smoke your pipes. Only then will you be able to really see what the problem even is. And so there were just moments like that that were popping up all over the place that just really helped inform a lot of my thinking and helped me think more deeply about psychology because when I was seeing it through the lens of Conan Doyle, I had to try to basically do what Holmes does with Watson, try to explain it, try to talk through it, try to figure out why does this work, how realistic is this? Because obviously Holmes is a fictional character. And in that, I really, I think, learned more about thinking than I had up to that point in my education and psychology. And by the way, I do want to point out that Holmes was based”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I want to. And Watson says, Oh, Holmes, you know, what are you thinking? Let's do this. Let's do that. Watson is very active. He just wants to do. And Holmes says, one of my favorite lines from Sherlock Holmes, this is quite the three-pipe problem. And he sits down and he smokes three pipes. And at the end of it, he solved the case without ever having left the apartment. There are lessons like that peppered throughout, which it's not just a beautiful line, which it is. This is quite the three pipe problem. It just contains so much insight into what hundreds of studies about creativity have taught us that sometimes you need to actually take a step back and reflect and smoke the proverbial three pipes in order to be able to see the full picture, in order to be able to let your mind work so that you can see where the solution might lie. Whereas a traditional detective would basically”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yet when you start reading the stories, you see that one of the real lessons is just how creative it is and how creative his thought process is that he doesn't go from A to B to C, that he is capable of taking all of these leaps that standard minds don't take and that he has all these techniques for how you can attain creative insight, that he has his three-pipe problem, for instance, which is taken from one of my favorite stories, The Adventures of the Red-headed League, where everyone wants to just jump in and solve this case of this red-headed guy who's been given a job just because he's a redhead and he thinks it's a little strange. And Holmes agrees that it's strange, so he decides to take this case on. And the red-headed man wants to take him to his place of work, and Holmes says, no, you know, go away, I'll get back to you.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was one of these light bulb moments where I thought, oh my God, this is just such a treasure trove of psychological insight. It's not just about mindfulness. It's about creativity. It's about rational thinking. I mean, it's about observation. It's about all of these different elements. And so that became the first book. But I think it's really interesting that I came back to Holmes when I was trying to explain a psychology concept and that I suddenly realized the stories were just peppered with insights. You know, there are things like the fact that people think of Sherlock Holmes as kind of someone who's a very, very rational A, B, C decision-making guru, you know, someone who you should look at as just the model of hyper-rationality.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in popped Sherlock Holmes, just completely unbidden. And it was the scene that I alluded to a little bit earlier in our conversation when Holmes asks Watson how many steps lead up to 221B Baker Street and Watson doesn't know. And Holmes says, well, that's the difference between us. You only see, I both see and observe. And those words actually just came back to me and I didn't remember what story it was from. Didn't remember much about it, but I just Googled it to try to figure it out. And there it was. And I read it and I thought, oh my God, this is perfect. That's exactly what mindfulness is, this difference between seeing and seeing and observing. And so I wrote the article and I liked the story so much that I thought, you know what, I'm going to go back to all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I just want to reread them for pleasure. Started reading them and it was.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What mindfulness was. I think this was, let's call it like 2010, something around then. So mindfulness wasn't a buzzword. And people didn't really weren't sure what it entailed. So I was trying to, I was writing about some psychology studies about mindfulness.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Sherlock Holmes still has Sherlock Holmes has always had a very special part in my life, unlike poker, which came to my life very late. Sherlock Holmes is one of my fondest memories from childhood. My dad would read us Sherlock Holmes stories when I was growing up. We'd have one a week and I would look forward to that Sunday night reading every single week. So they were definitely kind of in my subconscious this whole time. And when I started working on mastermind, I actually hadn't read the home stories in years, not since I was a kid. So after they were read out loud to me, I then went back and read them all myself. But then I hadn't really revisited them. And the reason that I came back to him was that I was writing an article about mindfulness. And this was back before everyone knew.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not important, so yeah, I can compromise here, even though I didn't think I could compromise here just to put everything in perspective. I think that that's actually one of the most important things that the reflection process can teach you is to force you to actually in perspective and to imagine that the situation is like a puzzle and there are all these different puzzle pieces and you can get so wrapped up in figuring out where does this specific piece fit that you forget what you know the full puzzle looks like and you don't even remember what the picture is because you've been so enmeshed in kind of this specific element of it and it can help you solve it much faster”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends. But I think In general, I try to think about the emotional elements. So how am I feeling kind of what you and I were talking about earlier to try to deconstruct why I'm feeling a certain way? But also kind of what were the factors of the situation? Who are the people? What do I know about these people? Is there something that's actually affecting me that I didn't realize because of the people involved? What are the stakes kind of, what am I even doing? What do I hope to accomplish? It's so funny how often you lose sight of what your actual goal is because you have so many intermediate goals and you forget what you're actually trying to do and then you get caught up in petty arguments or side things and kind of these emotional little dramas where if you take a step back to reflect you're like wait this is the big picture this is where I'm getting to this is what I want to do all this stuff is actually”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just pause right now and just think back. And I'm guilty of doing that a lot. And I've really tried to become better because I think it makes me a better decision maker. It makes me a better person. It makes me actually just happier because I'm much more in touch with what I'm going through, what I'm experiencing, and I'm better able to address it so that it doesn't become an issue. And I think that that's something that you can't take for granted no matter how well you think you normally emotionally regulate no matter how good you think that you know that you are at knowing yourself and knowing your mind taking those moments will make you that much better and that much more emotionally regulated and that much more just in touch with what's going on with you”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jared actually taught me to have this reflection routine where I take time to just pause and not do anything and not think about anything and not stress about anything, not worry about the hands, not worry that I'm wasting time because I'm not being productive to just actually kind of do what he called brain dump, just kind of think about, okay, you know, what have I been thinking? What am I doing? Is there anything that I need to dump out of my brain and write it down so that it's no longer occupying mental space so that I can be free to make better decisions in the future so that then I can go back to that and reflect on it for real because I've already kind of done that preparatory work. I know this is something that I need to think about. It's so easy to just keep going and just move on from one moment to the next and not stop and not reflect and not take those moments to say, hey,”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My own thought process reflecting about myself, reflecting about what was going on. I never kept, you know, I would tell people, oh, you know, to make better decisions, you should, you know, you should write things down. You should do this. You should have kind of this little decision journal so that you can then think back and look back and see what you were actually thinking so that you're not tied to the outcome. And all of these things that I would suggest to other people, but I didn't do any of them myself because I didn't think I needed them. And so what I learned is just the importance of taking moments where you're not doing anything. So turning off the computer, turning your phone to silent, you know, just actually finding pockets of time where you sit with yourself and you have kind of a daily check-in and reflection about what you're thinking, how you're doing, kind of what's going on. And I've actually, you know, I do that during poker tournaments on breaks.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've learned just how important it is to really take kind of a pause from life, to take a pause from everything that's going on and to make that kind of a regular part of your day. What I mean by that is that, you know, I'm always doing something. I always have a million projects going on at once. I love being busy. And I'm someone who's just never bored. There's always something to do. And I've written before about the importance of, you know, mindfulness, the importance of reflection. But even though I do yoga every day and have been doing that for over a decade and will meditate a little in the morning, it was always, I actually didn't put two and two together and I didn't use those techniques when it came to thinking through.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not the mental image that I want to have of myself. And it ends up that my mental image of myself was not in line with reality. I needed someone from the outside to help me come to that conclusion and to help me kind of make my peace with it so that I could then improve and become a better player. And I think a stronger person just in general.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though I might feel like a successful female, a lot of things, a lot of my insecurities would actually come out at the poker table. I didn't want to be too aggressive because I didn't want people to think I was mean. I didn't want people to call me a bitch, which they did anyway. But, you know, I didn't want them to. So I would just be more passive. I'd kind of be nicer and I would make decisions that were wrong because I didn't want to have kind of this other image. I just acknowledge it.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To you, and they call you things that are much worse than little girl, and that's a little bit easier to identify because you're like, okay, you're being an ass. And I can't believe you just called me that. Little girl, like it seemed like it was fine more or less, but it wasn't. And all of a sudden, like, my decision quality deteriorated to the point where this guy is someone who busted me out of the tournament, which means he's the one who took all my chips and I had to go home. And that really was not what I wanted to have happen. Incidents like that just peppered my poker experience and I never really realized what was going on or why. And I never realized just how much I let this gender thing get to me and how much it actually influenced my decisions. And Jared helped me identify things like that, like what my specific triggers were, what I was responding to and how. Because I also learned that”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professional poker is about 97% male. So a woman, being a woman in poker is being a huge outlier. I mean, 3% of you in any given tournament field. So I went through most of my time without ever playing with another female. And sometimes people would say things like there's one thing that really stuck out that really bothered me at the time, but I didn't actually realize how much it bothered me or why when someone started calling me little girl at the table and just kept calling me little girl over and over and over. And I just out of the tournament after being with this player for not that long at all. And I was until he made me really make bad decisions. And I didn't really realize it. And I didn't realize why. Because it's not like sometimes people are really...”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't actually a big tilting factor. Like, I was always pretty fine after that. That's why I thought, oh, I don't tilt. Because in that situation, I was like, okay, you know, I've lost a big hand moving on like let's go on from this. But there were other things that aren't triggers for other people that were really kind of that really bothered me. For instance, something that Jared really helped me put into words that I think I realized it on some level, but I'd never verbalized it because I didn't want to because it was something I didn't want to acknowledge about myself or the way that I thought was how internalized certain gender stereotypes were in my mind and how I would actually sometimes play into the role of being female when I was surrounded by all of these men because let's just do a little caveat here to say that poker”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jared taught me a lot about what went on in my head and what was tilting for me. I think what people need to kind of understand about tilt and about emotion is that there's nothing universal about how we react to things. So emotions are universal, but what triggers specific emotions, that's very specific to a person, that's very individual. So most people, you know, they go on tilt after they lose a big hand because they think, oh man, I've lost a big hand. This is terrible. I need to really kind of, I need to do something about it. And right now we can be talking about not poker, but anything else after you have something bad happen in your life, you know, after you lose a big hand, after you lose a negotiation, after, you know, you lose an argument, whatever it is, you get really angry. For me, that”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you are self sufficient and good at something, and so you don't need any help. I think that's very hubrisic. And I, you know, I fell for that when it came to emotion management. And I think I became a much better player after I realized that maybe, hey, I do need help in identifying my emotions. I do need help in identifying my triggers. I do need someone who actually pushes me to sit down and write things down and reflect and keep a decision journal and do all of these things that I suggest to other people, but never have actually bothered to do myself.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identifying your emotions, it's practice being with yourself, practice kind of taking a step back and trying to sift through your own mind. And at first you're going to be wrong, and at first it's going to be hard, but over time it gets easier. And I actually realized that I needed help with this part way through my poker journey despite the fact that this is what I studied, despite my background, despite the fact that I knew all of this. So I actually got a mental game coach as well, someone named Jared Tendler, and he helped me, he was, I don't want to say he was my Watson because he was someone who was a specialist in this, but he helped me actually learn. How to do that in a way that really applied to me. And once again, I think that basically people need help with everything and to think.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With that, it doesn't mean that I'm not making progress, it doesn't mean I'm a bad human being, it doesn't mean anything except that in this particular case, I'm still emotional. And then it's practice. It's being, I think, more in touch with yourself and learning to stop and to actually just reflect and to make this a natural part of your day-to-day life. My first book, Mastermind, was actually, it was about Sherlock Holmes, but it was really about mindfulness. It was really about kind of this process of learning to pause and to reflect and to be more deliberate, as Holmes put it, it's the difference between merely seeing and both seeing and observing. And so a lot of the book was about learning how to both see and observe, how to be more mindful. And I think that that really gets to the heart of how you become better.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like with anything else in life, it's a long process that I don't think is ever a complete. I would like to think of myself as someone who is better than average at doing this, at someone who doesn't tilt very much, as someone who's been studying this for many, many years and is very well aware of it and can be in control. And yet it still happens. And it happens on and off the poker table. I think poker has made me a little bit better, but it still happens. And what I think you need to realize, first of all, is that it's going to happen and that that's okay. A lot of people then tilt even more because they get mad at themselves for failing to identify the emotion and failing to take corrective action. So I think that first you just need to realize, okay, you know, this is going to happen and sometimes I'm not going to be in control. And that's okay. I need to kind of make my.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or is it something that's actually integral? More often than not, it's incidental. And then you say, okay, now I need to dismiss it, figure out how does this normally affect my decision process, and how do I correct for that? How do I actually take it out of the decision process? And the funny thing is just the very process of identifying and kind of going through that thought process tends to cool you down because all of a sudden you've kind of distanced yourself from the immediacy of the event. All of a sudden you're actually thinking about it in a different way. And so by the time you even get there, you're already calmer. You're already more rational. So it helps in more ways than one.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“emotions are actually incredibly relevant to a decision. It's the irrelevant emotions that you need to get rid of. There's psychological work that shows that people who can't experience certain emotions like fear because they have neural damage, they actually make really bad gambling decisions and they go broke because they just don't care. They have no risk aversion whatsoever. Well, that's also not good, right? They're completely not emotional. But in that particular case, the fear was important. It was integral to the decision. And they no longer had that emotion feedback. So what you need to learn is to identify the emotion, figure out that you're experiencing it. Because a lot of times you don't even realize, you know, you don't realize your anger. You don't realize you're frustrated. You don't realize you're hungry. You don't realize that all these things are going on. So first you identify it. Then you try to identify the root cause. Is this something that's totally...”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, learn to cool down your emotions so that you can make the correct decision. In the case of the marshmallow, don't eat the thing, wait for your second marshmallow, or in the case of poker, you know, maybe I should fold this hand or whatever it is. You can make the analogy to basically any decision that you want to make where you're being emotional. All of these things kind of came together and helped me understand that You can't ever be purely rational because you're always going to experience emotion and yet what you can do is learn this goes back to the being kind of more self-reflective and going through your thought process learning to be more mindful about the emotions you experience to say okay I am experiencing this emotion right now why what made me experience it because sometimes”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As rationally, you're not thinking as clearly anymore. What the goal should be, and this actually also relates directly to what I did my PhD on, because Walter Michelle, what he studied with the marshmallow kids was self-control and hot and cool decision-making. How do we, in the face of a marshmallow, which we can use just as a symbol for anything that is enticing, anything that we want, kind of this craving, this hot condition in the face of that, how do we resist? How do we cool it down? How do we let rational thought processes prevail when we're four years old and we just want to eat the marshmallow? And all of his work was basically centered on how do you teach self-control, how do you teach people to cool down hot processes, how do you go off tilt? How do you”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You start making decisions not because that's the right decision to make, but because you want to get those chips back or you want to punish the person who took them from you because you think that he's being a jerk or whatever it is. But it can also be positive. So sometimes there are positive emotions that also are irrelevant to your decision process. So in poker, the example would be you've won a lot of money, you've won a number of pots and all of a sudden you think you're invincible. And so you have kind of this very, you're feeling great, you're feeling so confident. And then you start maybe taking risks you shouldn't take and making decisions in a way you shouldn't be making decisions because you're letting that emotion seep into your decision process. So when you say something is tilting, it means it's something that's getting under your skin, making you emotional when you say that you're on tilt. It means, oh, you're emotional. You're not thinking.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT