You Just Got Lucky
Admit it and learn from it
Luck is real and it’s dangerous. For instance, you could bet on the Lakers to win the championship because they have Lebron James. Then he gets injured but they still win. You got the outcome you wanted but not because you made a good decision. It was luck. If you don’t stop to realize how lucky you were, you might think “I’m good at sports betting. I’m gonna bet more next time.”
We do this all the time in less obvious situations. For instance, people start a specific diet (vegan/plant-based, intermittent fasting, keto…), lose weight and believe the diet is magic. In reality, the diet just stopped them from overeating or from eating highly processed foods food. They got the outcome they wanted but not because they had an iron clad decision-making process. They could still learn from that decision, even though they got the result they wanted.
“You can only control the process you use to make the decision. It’s that process that determines whether a decision is good or bad.” (Parrish, 215)
Trick to learn from decisions:
Make your logic as visible as possible. We usually think through decisions in our heads and the process is unclear in review. That makes it hard to objectively criticize and learn from our past decisions. When we look back, we tend to misremember the process in a way that helps our egos (self-serving bias).
Personally, I like to write down my decision-making process on paper as if I’m explaining it to a friend. That way I can reread it the next day and see if what I wrote was clear and simple. This has two advantages:
If it wasn’t, there’s probably something I don’t actually understand very well.
It also helps me review the decision later. Whether I get the outcome I want or not, I can literally look back at my written decision-making process and see where I was right and where I was wrong, then improve.
Question of The Day
Look back on your most recent decisions. How many times were you lucky and how many times were you smart?
Learn something today. Pick one idea and really meddle with it. Chew on it until you could explain it well to a friend.
Your Friend,
Noah “Big Nerd” Sochaczevski
PS. We start our first book of 2024 on January 1st — Letters From a Stoic. As always, you don’t need to follow along in the book but if you do, BEWARE! You might accidentally become smart, happy and good.