Let’s talk about something we all do.  You know, the one where we beat ourselves up for things that weren’t really our fault.  

You know that sinking feeling when something doesn’t work out as planned? That immediate rush to figure out what you did wrong, how you messed up, and why you should have known better? Yeah, I get them too.  More times than I care to admit.  

I used to carry around this collection of “failures” like a heavy backpack—every business idea that didn’t take off, every relationship that fizzled, every investment that went sour. I’d replay the decisions over and over, convinced I was just bad at choosing, bad at seeing what was coming, bad at… well, life decisions in general.   Recently, I came across something that completely shifted my perspective.  

The Story I Was Telling Myself (Maybe You Too?)

Here’s what I used to do: Something wouldn’t work out, and I’d immediately assume I’d made a bad decision. The startup I launched that ran into unexpected supply chain issues? I should have seen that coming. The time I left early for a meeting but still arrived late because of a freak accident on the highway? I didn’t plan well enough.

Sound familiar? We’re good at this, aren’t we? Taking responsibility for things that were, honestly, just a part of life being unpredictable.  

I was discussing this with a friend the other day. She’d been beating herself up about a relationship that had gone very sour. “I should have known,” she kept saying. “I should have asked more and better questions first.” But should she have? Really?  

What If We’ve Been Getting This Wrong?

What if there’s a vast difference between making a bad decision and getting a bad outcome? What if we’ve been confusing the two this whole time?  Think about it this way. When you decided to take that new route to work because your usual path was under construction, and you ended up stuck behind a school bus for twenty minutes, was that a bad decision? Or just bad luck?  

When I decided to start my consulting business after doing months of research and talking to potential clients, but then a recession hit six months later—was that poor judgment? Or, perhaps, it was just a matter of timing, which I couldn’t have predicted?   I think we give ourselves way too much credit for controlling outcomes that are, in reality, pretty random.  

The Relief of Realizing This

My neighbour used to be a poker player (not professionally, just good at it), and she explained something to me that blew my mind. She said good poker players don’t measure success by whether they win each hand—they measure it by whether they made smart decisions with the information they had. Sometimes you make the perfect play and still lose because of the cards that come up. That doesn’t make it a bad play.  

This hit me so hard because I realized I’d been judging all my life decisions like a bad poker player—only looking at results, not process.  

Remember when Amazon decided to enter the cloud computing market? People thought they were crazy. A bookstore getting into tech infrastructure? But they’d done their homework, seen the trends, and understood their capabilities. AWS became huge, but even if it had flopped, the decision would still have been smart, given what they knew at the time.  

Or think about when you’ve made what seemed like a great hire—checked references, had great interviews, everyone loved them—and then they turned out to be entirely wrong for the role because of personality issues that only showed up under pressure. That’s not a hiring mistake; that’s just the inherent uncertainty of working with humans.  

What This Changes 

I can’t tell you how freeing this has been for me. Instead of carrying around guilt about outcomes I couldn’t control, I’ve started asking myself: “Given what I knew then, was this a reasonable choice?”   Usually, the answer is yes. And that’s… wow. That’s actually amazing.  

It doesn’t mean I don’t learn from what happens. If I took a route and hit traffic, I might remember that for next time. If a business strategy didn’t work out due to market changes, I can identify those patterns. But I don’t have to carry the weight of thinking I’m fundamentally flawed at making decisions.

When my friend finally grasped the concept of her not-so-great relationship experience, you could literally see the relief on her face. “So I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I just ran into a situation I couldn’t have predicted.” Exactly.  

A Gentle Suggestion for Both of Us

Next time something doesn’t go the way you hoped, maybe we could try asking ourselves: “Was this a bad decision, or just a disappointing outcome?”  Did you gather the available information? Did you think it through? Would other reasonable people have made a similar choice? If yes, then maybe—just maybe—you’re doing better than you think.  

I’m working on building up a collection of “good decisions that didn’t work out” to balance out that old backpack of supposed failures. Because, honestly, the world needs more people who are willing to make thoughtful choices, even knowing that sometimes things don’t work out. And that includes all of us.  

So, let’s work on building up a collection of “good decisions that didn’t work out” to balance out that old backpack of supposed failures. Are you in?