Success and failure begin the same way.
The difference between a journey where you reach your intended destination & one where you realise (too late) that you’re hopelessly off-course might seem obvious when you’re looking back. But when you’re in the thick of things, good choices and bad ones look much the same.
Whether we reach our final destination is a function of our performance in two dimensions:
- How well we handle the big decisions. Forks in the road that demand we choose between competing alternatives – sometimes with a clear winner, but oftentimes in murky, confusing conditions where faith + probability plays more of a part than we’d care to admit.
- How well we handle the day-to-day minutae. Not just the sweeping declarations of commitment to our journey, but micro-moves that reaffirm our dedication to doing it right – in not letting the little things pass us by.
Failure doesn’t always look like a flame-out.
Yes: there are cases where we make what’s obviously the wrong move. We don’t usually see this without the benefit of hindsight.
Absolute knowledge makes geniuses of us all, and there’s no better way to find out happens than by doing something and then observing the results.
Sadly, we don’t live life in reverse, where retrospective wisdom is enough to undo the mistakes of the past. We live looking forward. We’re always acting with imperfect information. We can only see so much of the picture – some amount of the detail is invisible to us, only revealing itself over time.
Likewise:
The decision to take a shortcut today (to spare a little effort, or to more easily attend to a nagging obligation) doesn’t seem consequential when we zoom in. But failure doesn’t always happen in a flash.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of trajectory over time.
What looks like a one-degree deviation today can compound into catastrophic misdirection over time if it’s left unchecked.
We don’t see this when we’re in it. We don’t feel it, either.
Despire the fact that we feel the consequences of decisions over both these time horizons in different ways, the surefire way to safer navigation is the same in both cases:
With all the information you have to hand, make the best decision you can.
Don’t allow yourself to take shortcuts.
Don’t make a mistake today & promise that you’ll make up for it tomorrow.
Don’t ignore the voice in the back of your head that’s subtly nudging you towards choosing the correct path (not just the easy one).
No one has infallible future sight.
We’ll never have all the information we need – or even want – to make perfect decisions.
But we can always choose what we know is right. Even when it’s hard.
All journeys – whether they succeed or they fail – start out the same…
Where they end is a function of the choices we make along the way.