No matter what you do, you will be wrong most of your life

Shitiz Srivastava
2 min readFeb 15, 2021

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I read somewhere a quote about J. P. Morgan which said 80% of your decisions in life are going to be wrong so to become successful, whatever 20% right decisions you are going to make, make sure that they are right in HUGE way.

This sounds similar to Pareto’s Principle which says that 80% of the outcomes in your life will come from 20% of the things that you are doing in life.

Or to be more Wiki-precise —

“The Pareto Principle states that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. The principle, which was derived from the imbalance of land ownership in Italy, is commonly used to illustrate the notion that no things are equal, and the minority owns the majority.”

Well, different people have different interpretations of Pareto’s principle.

I have personally faced this problem in my life where I would expect to be right all the time in my life no matter what I do. It was not ego, it was just that wrong decisions creates obstacles and mental pain which I tried to avoid.

But no matter what you do, you will be wrong majority of times you try to make a decision and you have to deal with that.

However, somewhere else I read that most people are wrong 60% of times in their lifetime, which comparatively, is a soothing statistics.

But let’s stick with 80% stat for the time being.

If you have read this quote for the first time, then didn’t you feel relieved that in the past the stupid decisions you have made were just natural events of your past.

There is no way to know the right from wrong before something happens, but nonetheless, you have to make a decision.

Many people spend their entire lives trying to figure out ways to make Only right decisions and for the same reasons, they are always afraid of making decisions.

Even the great leaders have no idea whether their decisions are going to be right or wrong but what makes them a leader is the fact that they still make decisions. They are not afraid or scared of whether their decisions will backfire on them. They are ready for consequences.

Once you come to terms with yourself that no matter what decision you take there are more chances of it getting wrong than right, then you are never afraid of taking them.

This unusual expectation from oneself that your decision should be right no matter what decision you will take is just an arrogant assumption in my opinion.

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Shitiz Srivastava

A Film Director|| An Author At Amazon || Quora Writer || Medium Writer || Book Reader || Film Enthusiast and Critic || Motivational Speaker. I love writing.