How to Tell a Good Decision From a Lucky One
About this episode
Phil McKinney discusses the difference between good decisions and lucky ones, using personal experiences to illustrate the importance of accurate self-assessment in decision-making.
You trust your gut because it's been right before. But "right" is exactly the thing you've been measuring wrong. A hitter never has this problem. His batting average is honest. It counts hits, nothing else, across a whole season, and he can't argue with the number. Your gut is supposed to work the same way: every decision an at-bat, every result feedback, a career sharpening your instincts the way a season hands a hitter a real number. But you keep your own scorebook. You mark every win as good judgment the second it lands. The trouble is that a skilled call and a lucky one produce the same win. In your book they look identical. Train your gut on that for thirty years and it grows certain about things that were never true. I know, because I trained mine that way. The Award and the Bankruptcy At twenty-eight, I won, and the win felt like proof. I was at a company called ThumbScan, and I took a piece of government security technology and repackaged it for the business PC market. We called it PCBoot. PC World named it Security Product of the Year at COMDEX in Las Vegas, in front of the whole industry. I drew the obvious conclusion. My gut was good. I could see what the market wanted…
More episodes of The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney podcast page.