Insight

"I Made the Right Call" — So Why Did It Fail?

Grace·Thursday, September 3, 2026 Edition

WHEN THE NUMBERS LIE

Forty-three. That is how many job applications Rosario Veth sent before she got an offer, and the offer she accepted collapsed inside six months when the company folded. So she started over, took the next thing available, and that one held. Twelve years later she describes the company that failed as the wrong choice. She describes the one she settled for as the right one. The numbers do not support that reading at all.

A decision is a bet placed under fog, and the fog does not clear just because you lose. What you knew at the moment of choosing is all you ever had. Outcome-based judgment feels like learning but it is closer to superstition — you are reading the result backwards into the reasoning, crediting or blaming the chooser for information that only existed after the choice was made. The world is genuinely uncertain. The question is whether you made a reasonable bet given what was visible, not whether the cards came up right.

Poker offers the cleanest illustration of this. Annie Duke, who wrote about it directly in her book Thinking in Bets, describes folding a strong hand and watching someone win with worse cards — the fold was still correct. The probability did not change because the unlikely thing happened. Duke's point is that results contaminate memory: we remember the hands we won as the smart plays and quietly revise everything else. The same move, repeated a thousand times, will lose some percentage of them. That percentage does not make it a bad move.

THE CHOICE STILL IN YOUR HANDS

So here you are with two options in front of you. One feels safer. Lower upside, lower exposure, and the kind of choice you could explain to anyone without embarrassment. The other has a logic to it that holds up when you look closely, but carries real uncertainty, and you know that if it goes wrong people will say you should have seen it coming. The question the principle puts to you is not which one will work out. It is which one was reasoned well. Those are different questions, and only one of them is actually yours to answer before you choose.

Rosario was not wrong about the company that folded. She was unlucky. Keeping those two things separate is not a comfort. It is the only way to stay honest about what you can actually control.

🎯

Try This

Before your next significant decision, write three sentences explaining your reasoning — not your prediction, your reasoning. Keep the note. When you know the outcome, read it back and ask whether the logic held, separate from what happened.

How?

Key Facts

*A decision made with good information and clear reasoning can still produce a bad outcome, and that does not mean the decision was wrong.

*Judging your past choices by their results trains you to avoid risk rather than to reason well, which makes your future decisions worse.

*Before your next significant choice, write down your reasoning now — not so you can defend yourself later, but so you can actually learn from what happens.