DUBNER: Let me throw at you then a question from a listener. This is someone named Patrick Kelly. He wanted me to ask you, “How would you translate the Billy Beane method for building a successful professional baseball club to an individual’s approach to life?”
LEWIS: I think the first takeaway in a very general way — from Moneyball for your life — is to ask why you’re doing things the way you’re doing things. And it’s intoxicating, once you start. Once you start saying, why do we have to steal a base when there’s nobody out and a runner on first? Or why isn’t anybody placing any value on a walk? Or why do we have to have a starting pitcher? Once you start asking these questions, you start to get answers that might surprise you. And then after that, it’s sort of like how do you start to evaluate the things you need to evaluate? And if there are ways to try to put numbers on things, to try to make probability judgments about things that you’ve just been not thinking about, you might get to a different answer.