Should you have won that hand?

Or were you lucky?

Most people dramatically under-analyze their wins and over-analyze their losses. But to really improve, you must look at both in balance.

One of the biggest traps in decision making is “resulting,” which is when we judge the quality of our decisions by the quality of our outcomes.

There is a trap here as we evaluate our work this quarter: just because it turned out well does not mean we made good decisions.

As you begin to evaluate and turn over this quarter, try to separate out the quality of the decisions from the outcomes. You can do everything right and sometimes it still doesn’t go your way (thanks to luck, markets, and the weirdness of humanity).

So if you “won the hand,” make sure it was because of the decisions along the way, not just because of a lucky break.

(Fantastic book on this: Thinking in Bets)