I heard Howard Marks interviewed recently. (As an aside, check out his latest memo, Time for Thinking. It’s the clearest explanation I’ve seen of what’s going on now with GDP and stock markets. And pretty impressive to see 30 years-worth of these memos sitting there).

He said something that really struck me. “Don’t confuse a bad result with a bad decision.”

I think that’s something we get wrong a lot. A cluster (an offer we take to market) doesn’t work. No one buys it. So we think we made a bad decision.

Not so fast.

In a lot of cases, it was actually a really good decision to take that to market. To run the experiment. To find out if it was viable.

By all means, evaluate your decisions. But not by the results alone.