There is no such thing as a good decision

Or a bad one.

You make a decision as best you can.

Then, you find out the result.

If the result is good, that's nice.

If the result is bad, that's a shame.

But the result has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your decision.

To say, "I made the right decision," after the consequences, is silly.

And vice versa.

But there's more.

Many results which seem good at first turn out to be bad.

And vice versa.

Obviously, you're trying to get the best results every time you make a decision.

Which makes every decision the best one you're capable of at a given moment.

And, therefore, a good decision — no matter what the outcome.

On a related note, ever since I was a young boy listening to baseball games, I've been struck by the incorrect ordering of reality employed by announcers.

For example, a guy tries to steal second, and he's thrown out.

Then the batter hits a double.

The announcer says, too bad the runner tried to steal and was thrown out, because that double would have scored him easily from first.

Wrong. Completely wrong.

If the guy had not tried to steal but had stayed on first, the pitcher would not have thrown the same pitch the batter hit for the double.

For one thing, he'd have been pitching from a stretch, keeping an eye on the runner.

And the catcher's choice of pitch called might well have been different, as well as the pitch's location.

So it's much more likely than not that the batter would not have doubled to score the runner.

The fallacious assumption that events are somehow going to be the same regardless of intervening occurrences is at the heart of much of the misery we bring on ourselves and others.

To blame yourself, or someone else, for creating a bad outcome is to ignore the even worse outcomes that were avoided because of the bad one that did happen.

To cite an extreme example: people delayed on their way to the airport who miss a flight that later crashes.

You simply cannot know if an event is good or bad when it happens.

It is only afterward that you assign a value to it.

I offer nothing new here: William Shakespeare, four centuries ago in "Hamlet," put it far more succinctly: "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."