A restaurant becomes wildly popular, and suddenly its unusual menu seems like an obvious stroke of genius. A business owner makes an unconventional decision that pays off, and the choice is celebrated as evidence of exceptional judgment. An artist receives recognition, and work that was previously dismissed as strange is reconsidered as groundbreaking. Nothing about the original decisions has changed, yet their outcomes have transformed how those decisions are understood.
Success has a remarkable ability to make the past appear more deliberate than it was. We identify intelligence in decisions that worked and questionable judgment in nearly identical decisions that didn’t. The outcome becomes evidence not only that something succeeded, but that the reasoning behind it must have been sound. This creates a curious problem: we may be learning our lessons from results without ever distinguishing the quality of a decision from the circumstances that allowed it to succeed.
Inquiry
What have you accepted as proof of good judgment simply because it produced a desirable result?
