For about a decade I owned dividend stocks. Five+ percent a year, landing in my account, reliably. Tax-free too, for Singapore dividend stocks. I still love ’em – it just works.
It was also wrong, and those two facts sat side by side for years without me noticing. Because the money kept arriving, and money arriving feels exactly like being right.
Outcomes are a bad teacher
Almost everyone grades a decision by how it turned out. It’s the obvious method. It’s also wrong often enough to be dangerous.
A bad decision that works teaches you to do it again and again…which explains why many people do the wrong things to get what they want…as long as they dont get caught. Seen too many of this, and experienced this “performative play” in person too many times too. It does work…short term.
A good decision that fails teaches you to stop doing the thing that was correct.
Both lessons get filed.
Neither is true.
And you can’t tell the difference afterwards, because the outcome looks like proof either way.
The part that’s actually yours
If it were only luck, you could live with it. But there’s a second mechanism, and this one isn’t luck.
By the time the outcome lands, you no longer have the reasoning you actually used. You have a reconstruction. And the reconstruction has been quietly edited to match the result.
- It worked, so I was shrewd and smart.
- It failed, so I was unlucky — or careless, depending on what I need to believe that week.
I’ve caught myself doing this.
Your memory isn’t lying on purpose – it’s just that nothing in your head is holding the original, so there’s nothing to check the edit against.
So write it down before you know
The fix is boring, which is why it works and it sucks cos it’s boring. Write the reasoning down at the moment you decide, while the outcome doesn’t exist yet. Date it. File it where you’ll find it again.
Then when the result arrives you have two separate things to look at — what you thought, and what happened — instead of one fused thing that only tells you how it ended.
That’s the whole method. There isn’t more to it.
Only for the ones you can’t take back
Most decisions don’t deserve this. Make them fast, move on, be wrong cheaply.
The ones that earn a written record are the ones you can’t reverse — the lease, the hire, the price, the partner. For those I write five things: what I’m deciding and what undoing it would cost, the one belief underneath it that could turn out false, what five people who don’t think like me would say, how this looks twelve months from now if it failed, and the line at which I walk away.
That last one is the one I skip most often, and it’s the one that matters most.
Two of my own
The dividends paid for years.
If I graded on outcome, I’d still own them. The reasoning was the problem: I was treating a distribution as if it were creation, and calling concentration in one small market “defensive.”
Good result…or at least, I liked this result.
Wrong thinking.
It took me far longer to see it than it should have, precisely because the result (dividends) kept vouching for it.
The other direction: I wrote down a rule that no new clinic opens until the last two have twelve months of data. Things have since slipped in a way that makes the rule look obviously right. But that’s not why it was right. It was right when I wrote it, with no evidence either way, which is the only time writing it is worth anything.
What it’s really for
Not accuracy. You’ll still be wrong plenty.
It’s so that being wrong teaches you something. A decision graded on reasoning gives you a correction you can use next time. A decision graded on outcome gives you a story about yourself.
One of those compounds.
I put the five questions on a single page, with one of my own decisions worked through end to end. It’s here if you want it.