“You did the best thing you could with the information you had at the time”
A mentor said this to me after I had a quarter-life crisis about not taking the right path in life. It was mind blowing at the time because I always had anxiety over making the right decisions. It started at some point while being a teenager and then eventually grew as I had to make bigger decisions with bigger consequences.
When something would go bad, I would go ‘I shouldn’t have taken this path’. I remember preordering the GameBoy Advance when I was kid. A couple years later, the GBA SP arrived. Nintendo usually makes iterations on all their consoles and wished I had waited until the one with the backlight arrived, instead of me struggling with the Lightworm (Gen-Z, many handhelds did NOT have backlights back in the day) I had.
I recently finished Annie Duke’s Thinking In Bets. If you don’t know her background, she’s a world famous poker player. Her book argues that we can’t always judge our decision making based solely on outcomes as luck plays a factor.
In one example, she brings up a play from Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 where Coach Pete Carroll (Seahawks) called for quarterback Russell Wilson to pass in the last 26 seconds instead of a handoff. New England intercepted the ball, winning the Super Bowl moments later.
The crazier part is that the interception had less than a 2% chance of happening. For all intents and purposes, it was the right call.
The whole book dances with this phenomenon with various examples. As humans, we don’t know the unknown. Which makes life both scary and exciting at the same time, as I’ve come to learn.
We hear this countless times with stories of people who ‘could have had millions’. You know, like
Ronald Wayne the 3rd cofounder of Apple. He sold his stake for $800, which would be worth over $270 billion today. But at the time, computers were a new thing. And if we look from time-wimey point of view, it’s possible that having stayed with the company could have tanked Apple.
Life is just a game of poker. We can get better at decision making, but don’t fret if all of your bets don’t bring in the dough. A life of perfect decision making would be plain boring.
But boy do I still wish I could have gotten that Gameboy Advance SP.
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