Loved this piece. so clear and quietly powerful. It really made me reflect.
I’ve been thinking about how most things in life follow a basic sequence:
1. The intent
2. The action
3. The outcome
We like to think we have control over the first two, and maybe we do (though if you go down the Robert Sapolsky rabbit hole, even that’s up for debate). But the outcome? That’s almost always out of our hands.
And yet, it’s the part we obsess over the most.
Whether we feel optimistic, pessimistic, or “just being realistic” usually comes down to how we deal with the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened.
At the end of the day, we make sense of that gap by telling ourselves stories.
We pick the version that lets us feel like a hero, or the underdog, or maybe someone too good for sour grapes in the first place.
Loved this piece. so clear and quietly powerful. It really made me reflect.
I’ve been thinking about how most things in life follow a basic sequence:
1. The intent
2. The action
3. The outcome
We like to think we have control over the first two, and maybe we do (though if you go down the Robert Sapolsky rabbit hole, even that’s up for debate). But the outcome? That’s almost always out of our hands.
And yet, it’s the part we obsess over the most.
Whether we feel optimistic, pessimistic, or “just being realistic” usually comes down to how we deal with the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened.
At the end of the day, we make sense of that gap by telling ourselves stories.
We pick the version that lets us feel like a hero, or the underdog, or maybe someone too good for sour grapes in the first place.