We’ve probably all heard the saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.”
What that means to me is that when you look back on a situation with more information, a different perspective, or knowing the outcome, it’s a lot easier to see what you should or shouldn’t have done.
Something happened this past week while I had a group of boys in the car with me that made me think about this. It also brought me back to something Ashley and I have talked about for a long time, and something I thought about a lot during COVID while making decisions for the business.
There are going to be difficult decisions in life where the right answer isn’t always clear. During some of those moments, Ashley and I would remind each other of something pretty simple: We’re going to make the best decision we can with the information we have in front of us, with a calm mind.
And regardless of the outcome, if we could look back and say we would have made the exact same decision again based on what we knew at the time, we could rest our heads at night.
I think there’s something powerful in that.
It’s really easy to look back on a decision with information you didn’t have at the time and judge yourself for it. But that’s not really fair. The better question is: Given everything I knew in that moment, did I make the best decision I could?
The boys in the car were acting up a little bit. I addressed it, but afterward I found myself thinking I should have said more or handled it differently.
But when I really thought about it, given the situation and what I knew in that moment, I would probably handle it the exact same way again.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from it. There usually is. Maybe next time I’ll have more information, more experience, or a different perspective, and I’ll make a different decision because of it.
But I don’t need to beat myself up over the decision I made before I had those things.
So I guess that’s the takeaway this week: Give yourself a little grace when you look backward.
If you made the best decision you could with the information you had, and you’d make that same decision again knowing only what you knew then, there’s not much to regret.
Learn from it and keep moving forward.
