How do you make decisions? Do you carefully weigh all the factors, creating pro/con lists and weighing the risks inherent in choosing the wrong thing? Do you just wing it? Evans argues that good risk-takers have something called high risk intelligence, meaning that they know how to estimate probabilities accurately. A lot of us, he argues, are either underconfident or overconfident in our abilities to make these estimates.
Despite the fact that this was much more of a psychology or even math book, there is inherent uncertainty and risk involved with owning or running a business, which place it somewhere in a Venn diagram of business literature. That's certainly true, and some people may find Evans' focus on probabilities fascinating and useful. However, as someone who has been known to say that there's a 50% chance of anything happening (either it will or it won't), I was largely frustrated by this book. (And based on what Evans was saying, I think he'd be equally frustrated with me.) I enjoyed a few of the chapters, particularly about those about the tricks of the mind and being aware of what you actually know and don't know, but I didn't care for the heavy emphasis on mathematical equations. This was similar to Think Twice, which has also been reviewed on this blog; of the two, I prefer Think Twice.
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