I was going through my notes this morning. In between reviewing what worked and what didn’t, I noticed something off. I was giving more attention to the notes that led somewhere. Published posts or completed projects.
The notes that went nowhere were quietly deleted. Because the outcome was bad, I assume the thinking was too.
That is not how it works.
A structurally sound decision can still crash due to hidden external variables. If I only process notes against final results, hindsight bias will trick me into deleting functional mental models just because I got a bad roll of the dice.
Here’s what I do now.
When I review a note for a project or content piece, I add an Assumption Log.
Write out the known variables. These are the hard facts, or verified data.
Name the blind spots. The assumptions I made about the unknowns, like market responses or tool limitations.
Give a raw confidence rating. An estimate of success based on what I knew at the time.
At completion, I run a post-mortem. I cross-reference the outcome against that original snapshot, not the result itself. This separates process quality from the outcome. A bad result does not delete a functional mental model.
I revisited Annie Duke on this. She has a line that keeps me thinking: Just because something did not work does not mean the decision was bad.
Just another coffee thought from Gav.
