The Result Is Not the Whole Account

 We are often too quick to judge the past from what eventually happened.

When someone succeeds, we look backwards and find the qualities that seem to explain it. Hard work, intelligence, courage, good judgement or determination. When someone fails, we often do the same thing in reverse and find poor planning, weakness, bad decisions or lack of effort.

The trouble is that the result can make everything that came before it look far more obvious than it really was.

This is one of the ideas behind The Luck Illusion. I became interested in the way we use luck to explain success, failure, opportunity, misfortune and timing, particularly when the word allows us to stop asking what actually happened.

Someone leaves home five minutes late and avoids an accident. We call that lucky. Someone works for years to build a business and then loses it after illness, debt, a change in the market or one badly timed problem. We call that unlucky.

The words may feel right, but they do not tell us very much.

What they often do is reduce a long sequence of events to one simple description. That matters because we usually see only the end of the sequence. We see the promotion, the successful business, the comfortable life or the failure. We do not necessarily see everything that helped to produce it.

A promotion may have followed years of work, but it may also have depended upon encouragement, useful contacts, good health, confidence, family support, money, geography or simply being noticed by the right person at the right time.

A business failure may involve mistakes, but it may also involve debt, illness, pressure, poor timing, limited choices or one setback that could not be absorbed because there was no money or support left to recover from it.

The person has not necessarily become wiser or more foolish. The circumstances around them may have changed.

Responsibility still matters. People make choices and those choices have consequences. But choices are made within conditions, and decisions are based upon the information available at the time.

That is easy to forget once we know what happened next.

A decision can look foolish afterwards because we are looking at it with information the person did not have when it was made. We know how the story ended. They did not.

The same thing happens when we judge ourselves. We look back at something that went wrong and think, I should have known. I should have seen it coming. I should have chosen differently.

Sometimes we are right. We may have ignored something, made a poor decision or taken a risk that should have been avoided. But sometimes hindsight gives us knowledge that simply was not available at the time.

The result carries great weight because it is visible. Once something succeeds or fails, it becomes easy to believe that the outcome proves the quality of everything that came before it.

I do not think it does.

Success should not automatically be treated as proof of superior judgement, just as failure should not automatically be taken as evidence of personal weakness. Some people succeed with considerable support around them. Others struggle after that support disappears or was never there in the first place.

Timing, health, money, family, education, confidence, relationships, geography, opportunity, delays and small unexpected events can all change what follows. Some of these influences are obvious. Others may never be noticed at all.

We often gather them together under the word luck because tracing every cause would be impossible.

But if we stop there, we may miss the more interesting part of the story.

The Luck Illusion questions simple explanations of success and failure. It asks what is lost when we judge a life mainly by where it ended up, and whether the result sometimes gives us too much confidence in our explanation of how it got there.

Results matter. They affect money, confidence, reputation, relationships and what becomes possible afterwards.

They simply do not tell us everything that came before them.