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RH Ryan Holiday Ryan Holiday Author focused on marketing, culture and Stoic philosophy.

“Just because it worked out doesn't mean you're right. And by the way, just because it didn't work out doesn't mean you weren't right, because life is so much about probability. Let's say something was a good call 80% of the time and you make that call and then it doesn't work out. It still could have been absolutely the right thing to do.”

The Daily Stoic · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“Just because it worked out doesn't mean you're right. And by the way, just because it didn't work out doesn't mean you weren't right, because life is so much about probability. Let's say something was a good call 80% of the time and you make that call and then it doesn't work out. It still could have been absolutely the right thing to do.” — Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic

Context

The guest had explained a line about not being deceived by life's outcomes. The host builds on it: outcomes are a poor guide to whether a decision was good.

Transcript

The Daily Stoic Around 02:53 into the episode
Ryan Holiday

…is optional. The only thing that makes a difference is action. Michael Lewis, don't be deceived by life's outcome. And then Eric Neal, who's riffing on James Baldwin, discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance. Tell me what each of those three mean to you and why you put them on your desk.

Seth Wickersham

…You know, but I think that like now, if you ask Brady, he would say a huge amount of my career had to do with luck and all of these things. And so don't be deceived by life's outcomes means just because you accomplish certain things, like you kind of can't believe your own internal headlines.

Ryan Holiday

Yeah, I mean, I found that too. It's like, whenever you're massive, like a friend of mine said once, you know, making a contrarian bet that turns out to be right can be a brain-destroying experience. And his point is like, if you're Elon Musk and you have this idea for SpaceX and everyone tells you it's a terrible idea and then it turns out to be worth a trillion dollars, it's hard for you later on to be informed when you do in fact have a terrible idea, you know? And I think that's a good example of like, hey, just because it worked out doesn't mean you're right. And by the way, just because it didn't work out doesn't mean you weren't right because like life is so much about probability. So like, let's say something was a good call 80% of the time and you make that call and then it doesn't work out. It still could have been absolutely the right thing to do. You know, honesty is generally the best policy, right? So you tell the truth, it blows up in your face. Do you take from that like, oh, I should be a dissembling liar? Like, no, that's the wrong lesson. And so that, yeah, I think that idea that outcomes can be…

Seth Wickersham

And outcomes aren't within your control, you know? And like there's, there's two stories in the book that kind of deal with those moments, one smaller, one very famous in the sports world. The smaller one is from the AFC championship game this past year where Sean Payton goes for it on fourth and…

Ryan Holiday

Yeah.

Seth Wickersham

And they don't get it. And that ends up being kind of the difference in the game. And he's just beating himself up over it. And then the other one famously is, you know, when the Seahawks decide to throw the ball at the goal line against the Patriots in the Super Bowl and Malcolm Butler, you know…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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