No amount of tears can fill the river, cry less and move on.

The reason you can not understand God is because he is a mystery.

God was not created by any body.

Sometimes the devil will come in human form, but don't be deceived.

God's purpose in your life has not changed.

Then you can make a real data-driven decision: a decision driven by all the data.

Otherwise, the best you can do is commodity-grade decision-making.

It’s also very tempting to close your eyes and pretend that the 10% isn’t coming at the cost of larger losses elsewhere, because if you speak up it might be your job that’s on the line in the next round of layoffs. It takes a lot of courage and conviction to push back against the dominant narrative. It takes research skills to form an informed hypothesis and business sense to convince people with budgets that it ought to be tried.

Validating” what everyone already believes is far easier — but it adds no value. The value of research doesn’t come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation.

And it’s easy to see how it would be. Nike is still one of the world’s most valuable brands, and chasing whales has worked well for many lesser firms. In an environment as risk-laden as 2020 was, it feels good to lean into your strengths and get a practically-guaranteed 10% (or whatever) bump in your metrics.

The fact of the matter is that this mistake was made by experienced, intelligent professionals who also thought that they were doing the right thing. It’s not enough to identify that they were wrong; we need to understand why in that moment, the wrong thing seemed like the best way forward.