Wednesday, October 14, 2020

On the uneven scales of judgment................

       It's possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise.  But in the real world, day to day, we simply don't.  We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.

      After spending years around investors and business leaders I've come to realize that someone else's failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk.  When judging your failures, I'm likely to prefer a clean and simple story of cause and effect, because I don't know what is going on inside your head.  "You had a bad outcome so it must have been caused by a bad decision" is the story that makes the most sense to me.  But when judging myself I can make up a wild narrative justifying my past decisions and attributing bad outcomes to risk.

-Morgan Housel,  The Psychology of Money:  Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, And Happiness

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