Resulting can misinterpret events

Resulting is the term that is used by poker players to describe when they use the outcome of the hand to judge their decision. If they win, they assume they made a good choice. If they lose, they assume they made a bad choice.

But poker, just as in life, contains risk. This means there are factors that are unpredictable. There are elements that are beyond our control and beyond our ability to know ahead of time.

In other words, poker (and life) contains elements of luck. This doesn’t mean luck is the root cause of anything. It means an element of chance will always be present.

When you use resulting, you may overvalue a poor decision because you got lucky. Or you may undervalue a good decision where bad luck influenced the outcome.

This doesn’t mean we ignore the outcomes. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn something when we fail. It doesn’t mean we use luck as a scapegoat when things go wrong.

It means that we need to understand that chance aspects are uncertain. We can’t eliminate that uncertainty. We must manage it and live with it.

Recently I experienced this. I made an important life decision. I did my research and investigated areas that I thought had the potential to go awry. After all my due diligence I was confident I made the right choice.

Shortly after I made the choice, I came to realize that I picked the wrong option. It was frustrating. I started to think about the process of choosing and what I did wrong.

I kept coming up with the same evaluation. I asked great questions. I followed up on areas of concern. Going back to the moment when I made the decision, if I didn’t know how it all turned out, I would still make that choice.

In hindsight, it wasn’t the best option. But without hindsight, there wasn’t anything separating it from a better decision.

It wasn’t fun. I had to live with this decision and the consequences. I had to suffer through months of second-guessing and worrying about the effects.

Luckily, I was able to face a similar decision shortly afterwards. I followed my due diligence process and was faced with a choice. The choice looked very similar to the previous one that didn’t work out. I couldn’t separate it in my mind.

But I trusted my gut and pushed forward. This time, I got lucky. It worked out much better than I could have imagined. In fact, I couldn’t have known just how well it all worked out.

The decision-making process for me was almost identical. Making the same choice twice resulted in two extreme outcomes, one positive and one negative.

If I used resulting, I would have held off on the second decision, assuming it was flawed like the first one. But I knew about resulting and understood that I couldn’t judge the decision solely by the outcome. I knew I made a solid decision that contained risk.

This also helped me keep my ego in check with the second decision. Instead of letting the positive outcome go to my head, I knew I got lucky. Just as I was unlucky last time, I was lucky this time.

Life is full of chance. There is luck in almost anything we do. The key isn’t to always have good luck. The key is to understand and manage risk in a way that provides a more likely positive outcome over time.

So, don’t be hard on yourself when you follow a good process but get a poor outcome. And don’t let your ego inflate when something positive happens. Even if you used a good process, know that there is still luck. A positive outcome means that luck aligned and your process worked, not that it is infallible or unable to fail.

For more on resulting, check out Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets