Most people grade their decisions by the outcome. This is backwards.
A risk professional who recommends evacuating a building before a storm that never arrives made the right call. The storm staying away doesn’t change that.
A trader who bets big and gets lucky didn’t make a good bet. They got lucky.
Outcomes contain variance. Decisions contain logic.
This matters most when the outcome is bad. Second-guessing a sound process because of an adverse result is how people abandon good thinking. The process was right. Variance didn’t cooperate.
Grade on process: Did you use the available information? Was the risk proportionate to the potential gain? Did you act on what you knew, not what you hoped?
Good decisions lose sometimes. That’s the cost of living in a probabilistic world.