The Cost of Wrong Assumptions

Drawing the wrong conclusion is not a small mistake—it is often the beginning of a collapse. Once we misread a situation, almost every decision that follows is likely to be wrong.

How does this happen?

Imagine standing at the edge of a fast-flowing river, trying to cross it. You must choose your footing carefully. If you misjudge and assume a large rock is solid when it is actually slippery, the decision to step on it is already flawed. Your foot slips, your body falls, the current pulls you in, and in seconds, you lose control.

But the disaster doesn’t stop there.

In panic, you look for something to grab. Rushing, you clutch a fragile branch that snaps the moment you hold it. Panic deepens. You try to swim against the current, but your energy drains quickly, and you are carried even farther away.

The first mistake doesn’t cause just one problem. The first mistake almost always triggers the next—creating a chain reaction that becomes increasingly difficult to stop.

We see this pattern clearly in investing and economics. Recently, when the Indonesian stock index dropped sharply, many people panicked. Their first conclusion was: “This is economic collapse.” That conclusion was quickly followed by others:

• “If the market is falling, it will keep falling indefinitely.”
• “Stocks are no longer safe—better pull all funds now.”
• “Cash or gold is safer than staying invested.”

Decisions were then made based on these flawed conclusions. People rushed to sell their stocks, accelerating the decline. The more panic spread, the deeper the market fell. Those who sold at low prices believed they had saved themselves—when in reality, they had locked in significant losses.

Then came this week. The market began to recover. Buying pressure returned. Sentiment shifted. What once looked like “collapse” turned out to be a normal part of a cycle. History shows that over the long term, the market recovers and grows. But those who sold in panic can only regret their actions—because everything started with a wrong conclusion.

I experienced a similar pattern in my professional life.

At our company, servers frequently struggled under heavy load. We quickly concluded that the problem lay in application-level computation. That initial assumption led to more conclusions:

• “Our application is slow and needs major optimization.”
• “The backend is the bottleneck—we should offload heavy tasks to AWS Lambda.”
• “We need a more complex distributed architecture.”

Decisions followed. We split services, moved functions to the cloud, added architectural layers, and spent months redesigning the system. But the deeper we went, the more problems emerged. Bugs multiplied. Operational costs increased. Debugging became a nightmare. Worst of all, the original issue remained unresolved.

Eventually, after exhausting time and resources, we investigated the root cause using SQL Profiler.

The result was sobering.

The real problem wasn’t the application at all—it was the database: non-sargable queries, missing indexes, and poor query design. Had we examined the situation carefully from the start, the issue could have been solved with simple fixes—not with a cascade of misguided decisions.

From this experience, I learned one critical lesson:

A wrong conclusion doesn’t just lead to one wrong decision. It almost guarantees a series of wrong conclusions—and therefore, a series of wrong decisions.

Panic and haste push us farther away from real solutions. We think we are saving ourselves, when in truth, we are digging a deeper hole.

So before drawing conclusions, pause. Look at the bigger picture. Ask yourself: Do I truly understand the situation? Am I missing something?

Because once we misread reality, almost every step afterward will be a misstep—and the fall only goes deeper.