The Seasons of Life

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend. I was explaining some frustration. I said that I experienced a failure in an area where I thought I had it all together.

It caught me off guard. I didn’t expect it to end up the way it did. I was explaining that it shook my confidence and made me start to question other areas.

But as we talked, he helped me realize that I was taking the wrong approach. I was using the wrong perspective.

He said that we all experience the seasons of life. Sometimes things go the way we want and sometimes things don’t work out as we plan.

He said it wasn’t that I suddenly was a failure in this area, but that I was just going through some unexpected challenges.

As we explored this new perspective, I realized that the decisions I made were solid. If I could back, without the benefit of hindsight, I would make the same exact decision. The fact that it didn’t work out, was a combination of luck and decision-making, not just one or the other.

I learned some lessons and next time I face a similar situation, I will adjust my decision-making. But not much. Ninety percent of the decision was right, but things I couldn’t know then ended up being worse than I projected.

In poker, there is a concept called resulting. When a player makes a good decision but still loses, they might decide that they made a bad decision. Or when they make a poor decision, but they lucked out, they might overvalue their decision.

It could be that they had a 70% chance of winning, so they stayed in. They didn’t get the card that would have helped them, and they lost. They only had a 30% chance of losing but still lost.

It could be that they had a 90% chance of losing but kept staying in and putting more money in. They got lucky and caught the one card that caused them to win. The 10% chance at winning meant it was a bad decision. The fact that they won was more about luck than their decision to stay in. But if we only use the result to judge this decision, they would have said it was a great decision to keep putting money in.

In those instances, when we rely on the outcome to judge the decision, we call it resulting. The problem with resulting is that it is based too much on chance outcome. We won’t really be able to improve our decision-making over time when chance is a major factor.

And in life, we always have chance elements. We can’t eliminate it. Therefore, if the player makes the right decision but the cards go against the odds and causes them to lose, they shouldn’t change that decision-making process. Next time they should follow a similar approach because the odds are that the right decision will work out more often than it doesn’t.

For me, this meant I was judging it as a poor decision due to the chance element not working out. After evaluating my decision-making process, I realized that I followed a good process. Sure, there were things I could improve for next time, but overall, it was solid. I had an 85% chance of it working out. Unfortunately, that means that there is a 15% it fails. In other words, it means that I still could fail, which I did. This failure stung so the results were even more influential in my evaluation of the decision.

As I started to realize this, I started to think more about the idea of the seasons of life. Even when we have it all together, we can’t eliminate the possibility of the next storm.

We aren’t perfect. We can’t get to a place of perfection. If we are to keep taking risks in life to improve, sometimes things won’t work out the way we want.

Sometimes we will be frustrated. Sometimes we will be devastated. Through the ups and downs, we have to be able to keep making better decisions.

This doesn’t mean that better decision-making cuts out the possibility of a rough season. Those will still be there. But we will be stronger and better prepared to wait out the storm and fight through the adversity.

As long as we don’t give up or stop trying to improve, we will make it through this season. When the bad season shows up, we can be resilient, knowing that this too shall pass. It doesn’t have to be an indictment of who we are. It might simply be that we had a few chance occurrences that didn’t go our way.