Most people judge men only by success or by fortune.

Outcomes are easy to see and effort is not, so the usual verdict tracks results even when results were mostly circumstance. The person who succeeded is assumed to have been wise, and the one who did not is assumed to have been careless, though the deciding factor was often neither. It is how you will probably be judged, and it is how you are probably judging.

Take someone you have quietly written off after a failure and reconsider what they actually did, apart from how it turned out. Then apply the same separation to your own last defeat, which may have been better played than it was rewarded.