The 58% Lie

Everyone claims they learn from experience.

Almost no one does.

Because experience without a record is just a story you tell yourself. Usually wrong.

Experience doesn't teach. Records do.

I tracked my decisions for 6 months. Noted what I decided, how confident I felt, what I predicted would happen. Then I checked back.

My "90% confident" calls were right 58% of the time.

That gap is invisible without data.

The pattern was clear once I could see it. I was overconfident on people decisions, underconfident on technical ones. I rushed reversible choices and agonized over low-stakes ones.

None of this was visible while living it. All of it was obvious in the journal.

Judgment isn't intuition that improves with time. It's a feedback loop. Without data, it's an open loop, learning nothing, repeating everything. The Speed of Being Wrong only works if you can see what went wrong.

The problem isn't your judgment. It's that judgment is invisible until you write it down.

Decisions compound like interest. But only if you can see them. The Momentum Engine shows how to build the loop.