The plan you made with care deserves a fair review, even after an unfair result.

Outcomes are noisy, and judging a decision only by how it turned out means learning the wrong lesson half the time. A careful plan can be undone by weather, by someone else’s choice, by luck. If you scrap the whole approach because the result was bad, you throw away the parts that were sound.

After something goes wrong, review the decision separately from the outcome. Ask what you knew at the time and whether the choice was reasonable with that information. Change what was genuinely a mistake and keep what was simply unlucky. And be as fair to your own reasoning as you would be to a friend’s.