Success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking they cannot lose - Bill Gates

I am glad that we got Ashgo (Ashish Goel, co-founder of Urban Ladder) to join us for the last ROTW Live session. I know that many of you would have missed attending the session, but it was amazing talking to him and hearing about various facets of the Urban Ladder journey.

I have always been a proud Urban Ladder customer and a long time well-wisher. Listening to Ashgo talk about so many things that they got right, like creating a strong values-driven culture and building a guest-centric DNA in the company, and knowing the end outcome (which has certainly not been commensurate to the tremendous effort put in by the team, over the years) reminded me of a concept I read about long back - The phenomenon called Resulting (the tendency to equate the quality of the input with the quality of the output). And how most of us, especially the tech media falls prey to Resulting.

Most of us equate the quality of the decision with the quality of the outcome too tightly. You had a bad outcome, so it must have been caused due to bad decision-making is the story that makes the most sense. But it is not always so. Sometimes, good quality decisions end up getting bad results. 

Consider this example. Imagine you are driving to a friend’s place for their birthday party. Usually, you take the highway; but today, Google Maps shows some congestion, and you are already running late for the party. You don’t want to miss the cake-cutting, so you take an alternate route that has a chance of landing you at their place right on time, but you have never taken that route previously. You decide that it’s worth the risk and take a chance with the new route. To your terrible luck, halfway through the way, you run into a bus stuck in the middle of the road. You eventually end up reaching the party even later than if you had taken the highway with congestion.

Having known the result now, it certainly seems like a bad decision in hindsight (you should have stuck with the familiar choice, the highway). But at the time of making the decision, knowing the options available at that moment, it seemed like a perfectly good decision. Don’t beat yourself too much if such choices lead to bad outcomes. In conditions of uncertainty, outcomes aren’t entirely within your control.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure, once said, “Failure hovers uncomfortably close to greatness.” The same decision that produced a failure in one scenario can lead to triumph in others. In an alternate universe, and a different roll of dice, Urban Ladder could have raised a large round instead of selling out cheaply; the critics would have been applauding Ashgo for building a phenomenal company, a brilliant business, and a potential unicorn in the making.

The thing is - sometimes, in life, the difference between success and failure, luck and skill, bold and reckless is just a very thin line and is often visible only in hindsight.

Remember, not all success is due to hard work, and not all failure is due to sloppiness.

Best,
Kaddy

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