Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, appearing weekly in The New York Times since 2010. The following article is reproduced with permission from his weekly newsletter and his website can be found here.
Greetings, Carl here.
You can make a bad decision and have a good outcome… but that doesn’t make it a good decision.
Let me give you an example: There was a guy in his early 20s who sold everything he owned, borrowed some money from friends and family, went to Las Vegas, and bet it all on one spin of the roulette wheel.
Good decision or bad one?
I think we can all agree it was a bad decision.
But the story doesn’t end there. He actually won! I can’t remember the exact amount of money, but I remember it being a lot.
Let me ask the question again: good decision or bad? It was still a bad decision!
The fact that he got lucky does not make the decision good. It’s the process that matters.
Over time, the accumulation of many outcomes will make evident whether the process was good or not. But in the short run, focusing on the outcome instead of the process just leads to trouble.
…
-Carl
P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.
