Most Wars Look Lost Until the Last Battle
Worry isn't about the odds. It's about how little you trust yourself.
Read by an AI clone of my voice.
Something felt different this year. Not in a way I can point to on a calendar, just different enough that I noticed I was worrying more than usual, about old stuff and new stuff both. And somewhere in there I caught something: worry isn’t really about the thing you’re worried about. It’s a failure of self-trust.
Not distrust of the world. Distrust of whether you’ll be okay if it goes sideways.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect: being falsely pessimistic and being falsely optimistic cost the exact same amount of effort. Neither one is free, even though pessimism likes to pretend it’s the responsible one. I know that sounds like something a coach would put on a slide (it does, I cringed a little writing it), but it’s true. And once you see it, the choice gets a lot easier, because if both cost the same, you might as well pick the one that doesn’t wreck your week.
We spend a stupid amount of energy pre-solving problems that haven’t happened yet. If it goes wrong, I’ll already have the plan ready. Except, how many times has “wrong” actually shown up looking the way you rehearsed it? And when things do go right, we usually don’t see that coming either. Most things only work out after going pretty wrong first.
If I had to draw my goals so far as a timeline, and I’m early enough into this that I genuinely don’t know if it holds up, they look like wars that seem lost until the very last battle. Somehow you win the last one. That’s become close to a mantra for me, and I plan on keeping it around for a while.
So when something’s actually eating at you, the question isn’t how bad it could get. It’s simpler: are you worried about something you can do something about? Or are you just choosing to be gloomy, the same way you could just as easily choose to be unreasonably hopeful, for the same price. If you can fix it, fix it. If you genuinely can’t, the worrying was never doing anything anyway.
I’ve been trying to run this on the company I just started too. Every time a problem shows up, I try to treat it as the thing that’s going to make this work, not the thing that’s going to sink it. Assuming failure by default is just sabotage wearing a nicer outfit.