A Confession From My First Few Years on the Job

Early in my career, I thought the goal was to be right quickly. I wanted to spot something before anyone else did, say it out loud, and watch it play out. When it worked, it felt like proof that I understood something other people didn’t.

It rarely worked as often as I remembered it working.

The Problem With Chasing Being Right

Here’s what I got wrong. I treated a good call as evidence of skill, and a bad call as bad luck. That’s a comfortable way to think, but it’s backwards. A single outcome, good or bad, tells you almost nothing about whether your reasoning was sound. Markets move for reasons that have nothing to do with how carefully you thought something through.

I also confused speed with insight. If I reacted to something faster than a colleague, I assumed I’d understood it better. Sometimes I had. More often, I’d just reacted first, which isn’t the same thing.

The real cost wasn’t the occasional bad trade. It was the habit that came with it. Chasing quick wins trains you to look for the next confirming signal instead of sitting with a question long enough to actually answer it.

What Changed My Mind

There wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was more like watching the same pattern repeat over several years. The people I respected most in the industry weren’t the ones with the best story about a call they’d made. They were the ones who could explain, calmly and in plain language, why they’d made a decision, and who were just as willing to explain why they’d later changed their mind.

That distinction mattered more to me the longer I worked. A good decision and a good outcome aren’t the same thing. You can make a sound decision and still lose money, because the world doesn’t owe your reasoning a good result. You can also make a careless decision and get lucky. If you only judge yourself by outcomes, you’ll end up reinforcing exactly the habits you should be dropping.

What I Do Now

These days, when I look back at a decision, I ask a different question. Not “was I right,” but “would I have made the same choice again, knowing only what I knew at the time.” That question keeps me honest. It separates the decision from the outcome, which is the only way to actually improve.

I also slowed down, on purpose. Early on, I thought patience was passive, something you did while waiting for the real work to start. I now think patience is the work. Most of the damage I saw over the years, in other people’s decisions and occasionally my own, came from acting a step before the reasoning was finished.

I still read the news each morning and still check the markets out of habit. But I no longer treat a fast reaction as a virtue. If anything, I’m more suspicious of my own certainty when it arrives quickly.

A Smaller Version of the Same Lesson

This isn’t only about money. I catch myself applying the same correction in ordinary conversations, when I’m tempted to offer an opinion before I’ve actually thought one through. The pull to sound decisive is strong. Resisting it usually produces a better answer.

If I could hand one piece of this to someone starting out, it would be this: don’t judge yourself by whether you were right. Judge yourself by whether your reasoning would hold up if you had to explain it, slowly, to someone who disagreed with you. That standard is harder to meet than being right once. It’s also the only one worth keeping.