When you exercise your whole life and then get hit by a bus and die early, we all agree that’s bad luck. But was exercising a bad decision? A waste of time?
Of course not.
A friend of mine smokes.
When I asked him why, since smoking is clearly terrible for health and longevity, he told me, “My relative smoked all his life and lived to 90 just fine.”
Was that a good decision framework? Or was he borrowing confidence from someone else’s genetic lottery?
This is the trap Annie Duke, the world-class poker player and decision-making scientist, calls resulting, judging the quality of a decision by the quality of the outcome. It’s one of the fastest ways to make worse choices over time, because luck always turns eventually.
Look at this matrix.
Good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. Bad luck.
Bad decisions can lead to good outcomes. Dumb luck.
But the long-term is where the quality of your process shows up.
You move to a new place, take a new job, start a new relationship, and you decide whether you’re “good at decisions” depending on how things turn out. But is that a fair evaluation?
You can study at a world-class university and still land in a dead-end career you hate.
You can move to some remote place by accident and find the happiest chapter of your life.
You can date someone who’s “perfect on paper” and end up in a miserable breakup.
So does that mean studying hard was useless?
That remote places are magical shortcuts to happiness?
That you should take zero time to think about future relationships and simply “go with the flow” with all the red signs staring at you?
Of course not. That’s the power of resulting.
You can leave early for the airport and still miss the flight because of unexpected traffic. Good decision, bad outcome. Bad luck.
You can procrastinate till the last minute, rush to the airport, and still make it because the flight was delayed. Bad decision, good outcome. Dumb luck.
But which habit do you want running your life?
Which decision pattern is more likely to give you what you want over time often?
That’s the whole point.
Good decisions don’t guarantee good outcomes — they simply increase the odds.
Bad decisions don’t guarantee disaster — they just make disaster much more likely.
It sounds obvious when we look at it calmly, and yet in the moment, when someone else wins with terrible habits or when we do everything right and still don’t get the outcome, we default to:
“They’re smarter.”
“I’m stupid.”
“I should have known better.”
That’s resulting.
Good decision-making is a process, not a prediction.
Outcomes are feedback + luck, not proof of intelligence or failure.
So, over to you dear reader,
Are you evaluating your decisions, your smarts by the quality of your process, or still chasing luck and judging yourself (and everyone else) by whatever outcome happened to show up?🍀