How to Tell a Good Decision From a Lucky One

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 before the market did.

Except I didn't see it coming. In early 1988, computer viruses became front-page news. The New York Times ran it on the front of the business section, the story spread to nearly every paper in the country, and overnight every company in America decided it needed security. My product was already built and sitting on the shelf when the panic arrived. I had built a solution that needed a problem, and the people writing and spreading those viruses are the ones who handed it one. It was nothing I did. I hit the timing right, and the timing was luck.

It took an honest audit, years later, to admit that, and the same look turned up the opposite story. The other ThumbScan product was the one I was proudest of. It put fingerprint security on a personal computer, the first one under a thousand dollars you could attach to a PC. Your thumb instead of your password. The reasoning was sound and the technology worked. The market wanted none of it. PCs were barely in homes yet, biometrics sounded like science fiction, and the company bled cash and folded.

That product wasn't worse thinking than the one that won the award. It was the same thinking, aimed at an idea that turned out to be twenty-five years early. Today it sits on every phone, and hundreds of millions of p