It Was Never the Thing
On the space between what happens and what you decide it means.
Hey, it’s been a couple of weeks. Time snuck up on me and work got heavy.
I’ve been heads down building a social media training for our company and launching some ad campaigns alongside it. I had to dial in and let a few things sit, and unfortunately this was one of them.
The good news is those projects are starting to close out, and I’m back.
But enough about me, what have you been up to lately?
Leave it in the comments, I’d like to hear about it!
- Isaac W.
A message goes unanswered. A pitch gets ignored. A number comes back lower than you hoped. The event itself is small. The story you build on top of it is not. And before you’ve even finished living it, you’ve already decided what it means.
That’s the part most of us miss. We equate the hard day to our whole life. It often isn’t. It’s the running commentary we lay over the top of it. The verdict we reach before the facts are even in.
Years ago I tried to build a business online. I launched product after product, more than ten of them, and watched almost all of them fail. I’d build an ad, send it out into the world, watch people click, and watch nobody buy. I tried a clothing brand that sold mostly to friends who believed in me more than they believed in the product. Each attempt cost money I didn’t really have.
The thought that kept sneaking up on me was “Maybe I can’t do this.”
That was the estimate. Not the data, the estimate. The numbers themselves were neutral. They were just numbers on a screen. The pain came from the meaning I stacked on top of them. Every flop became evidence in a case I was quietly building against myself.
I look at those same months now and I see something completely different. I wasn’t failing. I was learning how advertising worked, how attention moved, what made a person stop scrolling. The skills that pay my bills today were built inside those exact failures. Same events. Same numbers. A completely different estimate.
The events never changed. My judgment of them did.
Marcus Aurelius wrote something almost two thousand years ago and I believe it.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8
You have the power… to revoke it… at any moment.
The thing is, most of us already know this. We’ve all had the experience of dreading something for weeks, then living through it in an afternoon and realizing the dread was heavier than the event ever was. The fear did more damage than the thing we feared.
But knowing it and using it are two different things. Because the estimate doesn’t feel like an estimate. It feels like the truth. When you decide a setback means you’re not enough, it doesn’t arrive as an opinion. It arrives as a fact. That’s the trap. The story wears the costume of reality.
I think this is what silently guards the bigger life most people want and never reach for.
It’s rarely the actual risk that stops them. It’s the verdict they’ve already written about what failure would mean. They’re not afraid of starting the thing. They’re afraid of the story they’d have to tell themselves if it didn’t work. So they stay where they are, protected by a catastrophe that hasn’t happened and probably never will.
But that story was never fixed. It was an estimate. And the estimate was always theirs to write.
You can’t control most of what happens to you. You’ll lose things. Plans will fall apart. Relationships will become distant. That part isn’t up for negotiation.
What you can do, in the middle of all of it, is catch the moment you slide from what happened into what you’ve decided it means. Slow down right there. Ask whether the verdict is actually true, or just familiar.
Because the event was never the thing that hurt you. The estimate was. And the estimate has always been yours to revoke.