Essays

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

I once spent four months building a small business plan so thoroughly researched, so carefully hedged against every risk, that I never actually launched it — and I've come to think that plan, the one that never became anything, taught me more about my own avoidance than any of the mistakes I made afterward with less-perfect plans that I actually tried. We tend to treat mistakes as the teacher and caution as the safe harbor, but caution has its own lessons, usually quieter and less flattering ones. My over-planned, never-launched business taught me that I use research as a socially acceptable form of procrastination, that "just one more spreadsheet" was never really about the spreadsheet. The actual mistakes I made later — a bad hire, an underpriced contract, a launch six months too early — taught me specific, useful things about hiring, pricing, and timing. But the mistake of not launching at all taught me something about myself that the specific failures never could have, because it was patient enough to let me watch my own pattern repeat until I finally recognized it as a pattern rather than bad luck.