There’s an old parable about a farmer who loses his only horse. It goes something like this:
When the farmer’s horse runs away, his neighbors visit and say, "What bad luck." The farmer replies, "Maybe."
The horse returns the next day with seven wild horses. The neighbors rejoice, "What great fortune!" The farmer says, "Maybe."
The following day, the farmer’s son tries to train one of the wild horses and breaks his leg. The neighbors lament, "What a disaster." The farmer replies, "Maybe."
The following day, army officers arrive to draft young men into a bloody war, but they pass on the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. The neighbors cheer, "How lucky!" The farmer simply says, "Maybe."
Supposedly this parable has Taoist origins. I saw it on an episode of Bluey. And it’s subtly changed my life.
The farmer seems to know something the neighbors don’t. That it’s nearly impossible to know which events will be “good” or “bad” in our lives. Our paths are too curvy – and the future too uncertain – to simplify in such a grossly reductive way.
Yet, it’s so hard to live like that in the day to day.
Looking backward, it’s a lot easier to see it.
In high school, I stopped working hard around halfway through my sophomore year. I owned dozens of Cliff’s Notes and cheated my way through calculus. Yet, somehow it still seemed like a prestigious university was the next step. So I applied to eleven of them. I still remember my mom saying that I needed a safety school and replying to her that “I applied to ELEVEN schools – that is my safety. I’m not going to get rejected by eleven schools.”
I got rejected by eleven schools. Six rejection letters in one trip to the mailbox. That was a sting, but looking back, thank goodness it happened. I wasn’t getting the gentle message that the world didn’t owe me anything. I think I needed the loud message.
When I did get to college, I got focused. I was dead set on going to law school and becoming a public defender. When I took the LSATs, a freak proctor error cut the toughest section short by several minutes. I felt so disheartened and was so unhappy with my score that I decided to delay applying and found out about a program called Teach for America – which became one of the defining experiences of my life and the place where I’d meet the woman I would marry. None of it would have happened without the proctor error.
Three years later, when my marriage imploded and I got divorced, it felt like a major (and very public) life failure. An unequivocally bad and embarrassing outcome. But now I feel utterly grateful that it set me on a course to meet my true life partner and the mother of our child.
And so on, and so on. To look at one of those events in isolation and call it “good” or “bad” is a little silly. It usually takes a long time to know the real impact of something that happens to us. Yet, I completely lose sight of that on a day to day basis.
And so do many of the leaders I support. I see them blurring their boundaries and making major sacrifices for outcomes that feel vital and good (but whose actual consequences are much harder to know). And I see them distressed over potential “bad outcomes” (a team member resigning, upsetting a board member, letting someone go).
The point here is not that a “win” is supposed to feel bad or that someone leaving is supposed to feel good. The point is that – as hard as our work can be – we don’t need to add to that by creating overly-simple stories about what’s happening to us.
It’s so tempting to take charge of our fate and work hard to make life go our way. It’s so easy to lose sight of our feeble ability to even know when something is going our way or not. The thing we thought would be great turns out to backfire. The outcome we were trying to avoid ends up setting us free.
So the next time you catch yourself getting worked up by how “bad” (or “good”) something will be, try slowing yourself down and coming back to that powerful mantra: “maybe.”
