Six months in. Are you on the path you chose, or the one that chose you?

Why this decision is harder than it looks

The mid-year period is deceptive. You are past the January energy but well before the year-end pressure. There is no deadline attached to a mid-year review, which means it is easy to defer. And unlike reviewing a specific decision that produced a clear outcome, a mid-year audit asks you to look at decisions that are still in progress — which feels uncomfortable.

The deeper difficulty is that most people do not record their decisions with enough specificity to review them later. They remember what they decided but not what they expected, not why they expected it, and not what assumptions they were making at the time. Without that baseline, there is nothing specific to compare against — and the review collapses into a general feeling about how the year is going rather than a diagnostic about how your thinking is working.

This is precisely why a decision journal matters. If you recorded your major decisions with explicit predictions, the mid-year audit becomes a concrete comparison exercise rather than a memory exercise.

The framework: Decision Journal Review with Second-Order Thinking

The core of the mid-year audit is straightforward: for each significant decision made in the first six months, answer three questions. What did I expect when I made this decision? What actually happened? And: if I knew at the time what I know now, would I have decided the same way?

The third question is the most important, and also the most commonly misapplied. The goal is not to punish yourself for decisions that turned out badly but were reasonable at the time. The goal is to identify cases where the outcome gap points to a systematic thinking error — a bias, a missing assumption, an overconfident prediction.

The second-order thinking lens adds another dimension. First-order thinking asks: did this decision produce the result I wanted? Second-order thinking asks: what are the downstream effects of this decision that I did not anticipate, and how should I factor them into what I decide next? Many mid-year reviews only look at first-order outcomes. The second-order effects are often more consequential.

For example: you made a hiring decision in January that looked correct at the time. The person joined and is performing adequately. First-order assessment: decision was fine. Second-order assessment: the hire has changed the team dynamic in a way that is slowing down two other people. The first-order view says nothing to do; the second-order view says there is a problem that will compound over the next six months if unaddressed.

The audit is not complete until you have identified one decision that needs active course correction and one decision that deserves to be reinforced or expanded. Both outputs are necessary. An audit that only surfaces problems tends to produce paralysis; one that also identifies what is working well produces constructive momentum.