Roger Federer once shared that over his career, he won almost 80% of the matches he played. But of all the individual points he played, he won only 54%!

Think about that. One of the greatest tennis players of all time lost almost every second point he played. I play a fair amount of tennis, (at 0.1% of his skill level may be 😊), but the statistic makes complete sense to me. You can play a point well and lose it. You choose the right shot, execute it well, and your opponent produces something better. You can also make the wrong choice, mishit the ball and somehow win the point.

If you judged every decision by whether you won the point, you would end up learning the wrong lessons.

I wonder if we sometimes do exactly that at work. A business performs well, so we assume the strategy was good. An investment makes money, so the decision must have been sound. A project fails, so somebody must have made a bad call. But outcomes contain much more than our decisions. Markets change, competitors react, employees leave.

Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we do not. So we need to ask two separate questions; Did we make a good decision? And Did it produce the outcome we wanted?

They are not the same thing. A good decision means understanding what we reasonably can, considering the alternatives and risks, and then exercising judgement. And then comes the difficult part; deciding without knowing how it will end.

Tennis has taught me something about that too. When you are playing a point, thinking about whether you will win it usually makes you play worse. Your attention has to remain on the next ball; movement, shot selection, execution. You desperately want to win the match. But you cannot play the outcome. You can only play the point.

Work and much of life is not so different. Think carefully. Decide with the information you have. Commit fully to what you decide. Learn from what happens. Then play the next point.