For years, I was much more certain about other people’s decisions than I am today. Not because I know less today, but because enough times I later learned what lay behind a decision I had initially considered wrong.
From the outside, we usually see only the final move. We see that someone left a job, but not the two years they spent trying to stay. We see that someone ended a relationship, but we do not know how many times they tried to save it. We see that an owner turned down a job and think they missed an opportunity, without knowing what price their company would have paid had they accepted it. We see someone’s “no”, without knowing how much their previous “yeses” cost them.
And then, with only a few per cent of the story, we form a complete judgment of the person.
That is probably one of the things experience changes most in us. It does not make us less capable of assessing a situation, but more cautious about believing we have all the facts. Circumstances change a great deal. They do not erase responsibility, make every decision a good one or mean we should justify everything someone does. But they can completely change how we understand why a person did something.
It is much easier to be brave with someone else’s money, principled in someone else’s marriage, decisive in someone else’s company and rational about a problem whose consequences we will not bear. The real weight of a decision usually begins where our opinion ends and someone’s actual life begins.
That is why I say “I would never do that” far less often today.
Because I have seen enough people say it, only to do exactly what they once condemned a few years later. Not because they had become weaker, but because they had the whole story for the first time.
Perhaps that is why, before judging someone’s decision, it is worth asking a much fairer question:
What else do I not know?
Because sometimes what stands between condemnation and understanding is not great wisdom. It is simply the part of the story no one has told us.
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