My daughter played in a squash tournament last weekend.
In squash, each player has a computer-generated ranking that is reasonably accurate. It’s very easy to think that these numbers tell the whole story.
So, when my daughter lost her match (11-9, 12-10, 12-10 ) to a girl with a 0.10 lower rating, she was very upset.
The next morning, gearing up for day 2 of the tournament, I asked her a question: “If you had won 11-9, 12-10, 12-10 instead of lost, would you have been pretty happy with the result?”
“Yes,” she agreed, she would have.
We did the math together and noticed that the difference between what happened and what might have happened was 6 points.
6 points out of 64 were the difference between “existential crisis” (“Maybe I’m not really improving. Maybe I’ll never improve.”) and “I’m on the right track.”
There are situations in which the difference between winning and losing really matter: if your business runs out of cash but has a fundamentally sound business model, what matters is the cash. And if you “almost” hit your targets every time, then you might have a target-setting or an accountability problem.
But most of the time, we act like my daughter, allowing the space between our narrative of wins and losses to be much bigger than what actually happened.
Drawing the lucky last card feels like our just reward for playing the hand correctly. But the two events are, in fact, unrelated.
