"It is far easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake. Changing your mind is rarer than it should be."  - Morgan Housel

Making good decisions and acting upon them requires confidence. But the challenge comes when things don’t work as planned and we face the reality of having made a bad decision.

There’s a strange resistance that comes with big decisions. We develop expectations for the future that this decision will create and then do everything we can to reinforce those expectations.

This is similar to the glow of happiness that comes just after making a big purchase. We’ve committed our decision and money to this thing and we tell ourselves all of the wonderful ways why this was money well spent. This is called post-purchase rationalization.

A similar thing happens after we make a big decision.

We create expectations for the outcome and we commit to post-decision rationalization.

But there are times when reality doesn’t match the expectations. We make a bad decision and the results aren’t what we want.

Do we admit that we’ve made a mistake and correct it? Or do we carry on with the rationalization and resist changing our minds?

It’s easy to double down and fool yourself with post-decision rationalization.

Being able to change your mind and admit to making a bad decision is a rare skill worth developing.