There’s a word in poker that doesn’t translate cleanly into everyday language: “resulting.” It means judging a decision by its outcome instead of judging it by whether it was the right call at the moment you made it.
I came across this watching a breakdown of Annie Duke’s book “Thinking in Bets.” Duke spent twenty years as a professional poker player before she became a writer, and the idea stuck with me for weeks, because it describes exactly what I do every time I look back at a business decision.
The problem with good outcomes
In poker you can play a hand correctly and still lose. You can play it badly and still win. The outcome and the quality of the decision are two different things, and our minds mix them up constantly.
If something works out, we assume automatically that we made the right call. If it doesn’t, we assume the opposite. But business, like poker, is not chess. In chess you see the whole board. In business, just like in poker, you never see every card: the market, the competition, conditions that will shift in six months.
That means my own judgment, and yours, should never rest on whether something simply “turned out well.” It needs something more honest than that.
The question to ask instead of “good or bad decision”
Duke suggests we stop asking whether we were skilled or lucky, because we’re usually both, and our self-serving bias has already rigged the answer before we even think about it. When we win, we credit our skill. When we lose, we blame bad luck. For other people we do the exact opposite.
The practical tool is simple: picture someone else making the exact same move, then place the outcome on a dial from pure luck to pure skill. 90-10, 50-50, whatever number feels most honest. Your job isn’t to punish yourself for luck you couldn’t control. It’s to audit the process you followed and take a lesson into the next decision.
Why more information doesn’t mean more certainty
There’s a study often cited alongside this idea: a researcher at Columbia set up a table with six jams for tasting in a grocery store, then came back the following weekend and set up the same table with 24 jams. The bigger display pulled in more people. But when it came time to actually buy, the people who saw six jams bought more than the people who saw 24.
More options don’t mean more certainty. Often they just mean a harder decision, and eventually an excuse not to move at all. We wait to feel certain before making a big decision, and that’s why we end up waiting forever. But every decision is a bet placed on a future you can’t fully see. If you could know it for sure, it wouldn’t be called a bet.
A tool for when you can’t see the whole board
The practical step I took from this is a two-column table. In the first column, write down everything you actually know. In the second, everything you don’t know, everything you’re assuming or hoping is true. Once you separate the known from the unknown, the decision gets clearer, even without having all the information.
The next step is a four-part framework for putting numbers on uncertainty:
- Map out the scenarios: big success, moderate success, minor failure, catastrophic failure.
- Assign a value to each one. It doesn’t have to be money, it can be time, reputation, energy, relationships.
- Assign a probability to each scenario, based on what you know today.
- Multiply value by probability to see the expected value.
The number itself isn’t the point. The point is the process: it forces you to look the worst-case scenario in the eye before it happens, write it out in detail, so your mind builds the exits before the crash, not after.
The regret that should heal, not harm
The last piece is maybe the hardest. When a decision goes wrong, anger, fear, and wounded pride take over. In poker it’s called “tilt”: the last bad hand infects the next move you make. And the worst part is everyone around you can see it except you.
Regret is unavoidable. We’ll all feel it. But regret that doesn’t improve your next bet is just wasted time. You can’t change what’s already lost, but you can decide whether it keeps you frozen or makes you sharper for the next move.
What I’m taking from this
Every time I look back at a business decision now, I try to separate three things: what was skill, what was luck, and what was simply my own mistake. Not to punish myself, but because it’s the only way to make the next decision better, even when I can’t see the whole board.
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