Having read a few of Seth Godin’s recent blog posts, one in particular stuck with me.
Decisions and outcomes.
Good decisions are still good decisions because the odds were in your favor, even if the outcome was terrible.
If all the data and information you’ve gathered point towards choosing one option over the other. It must be a good decision.
But in the unlikely event that a good decision leads to a bad outcome, many will be quick to call the decision bad, completely ignoring the favorable data.
Deciding to go through with a surgery because not doing it would otherwise cause irreversible damage is a good decision. The surgery, however, led to health complications, and your decision resulted in a bad outcome. The odds of the surgery failing were low, but it did.
Still, the decision was sound.
In Ryan Holiday’s book, “Ego Is the Enemy,“ he dedicates an entire chapter to this thought.
In the chapter, he shares the story of a Roman general whose reputation was tarnished throughout his life, despite having achieved numerous successes in battles and saving Rome on several occasions.
In the end, the Roman general’s legacy was preserved, and historians would later use his life as an example of how value lies not in the outcome but in the decisions made.
Activists rarely see the world they envisioned. But they chased after their goals anyway because they understood someone had to plant the seeds. They trusted future generations to carry the torch.
Attaching yourself to the outcomes is unnecessary— things will never go as you would like. Anticipate the several outcomes, but focus entirely on your decisions and efforts.
The irony is that by caring less about outcomes, we often get better ones.
What matters to the active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him.
Goethe