Gillian Jones-Williams said something to me recently which has been rattling around in my head ever since. Refusing to try is its own kind of failure.
I have been chewing on it for days. It bothers me because it dismantles the one excuse I used for years without noticing I was using it.
The safest failure is the one nobody sees
Here is the trick your brain plays on you.
If you apply for the job and get turned down, you failed. People saw it. Your name went on a list and came off again. Your stomach dropped.
If you never apply, nothing happens. No rejection email. No awkward conversation with your partner over dinner. The outcome is identical... you do not have the job... but one version comes with a bruise and the other comes with silence.
So we pick silence. Over and over. And we tell ourselves we made a decision.
We did not make a decision. We took the option with no witnesses.
I did this for years
I sat on an idea for a book for years.
I had the notes. I had the stories. I had a couple of hundred conversations with leaders who told me the same things about the same bad bosses. Every year I told myself the timing was wrong, the market was crowded, my thinking had not settled yet.
None of those were reasons. They were padding. The real sentence underneath was simpler. If I write it and nobody reads it, I find out something about myself I would rather not know.
Writing it and being ignored felt like failure. Not writing it felt like patience.
Years of patience. Years of the exact same result as failure, with better branding.
The research is brutal about this
I went looking to see whether this is my own private neurosis or a human default. It is a human default, and psychologists have been measuring it since before I owned a mobile phone.
Tom Gilovich and Vicki Medvec ran a series of studies on what people regret. Their paper on the temporal pattern of regret found a clean split. In the short term, people regret the things they did. Over a lifetime, they regret the things they did not do. When one group was asked about their biggest regrets across their whole lives, 84% reported more regret over their failures to act than over their actions.
Neal Roese and Amy Summerville later pulled together 11 studies covering 3,041 people, published as What We Regret Most... and Why. Education topped the list at 32.2% of all regrets. Career came second at 22.3%. Their explanation stuck with me. Regret is strongest where you believe you still had room to move. The more opportunity you had, the more it stings.
Read those two findings together and you get an uncomfortable piece of arithmetic. The stuff you avoid to protect yourself is the stuff you will be sore about at 70.
The failures you sign up for fade. The ones you dodge compound.
Why inaction feels so reasonable at the time
Inaction wears good clothes. It shows up as:
- Timing. "Next quarter is better." Next quarter has never once been better.
- Preparation. "I need one more certification first." You needed none of them.
- Realism. "Let us be honest about my odds." Honesty is rarely so one-sided.
- Team loyalty. "I would be leaving them in the lurch." They will cope. They always cope.
Every one of those sounds like judgement. Each is fear with a cover story.
I have used all four. I used team loyalty for two solid years, and I believed myself completely while I was saying it.
What it costs your team when you do it
This is where it stops being a private matter.
I have watched a talented engineer stay quiet in a design review because she was not sure enough. The system shipped with the flaw she spotted. Six months later we paid for it, and she carried the weight of having known.
I have watched a manager sit on a promotion case for a year because he wanted a stronger example first. His person left. The stronger example never arrived.
I have watched leaders refuse to give hard feedback because the moment never felt right. The moment is never right. Waiting for right is how someone gets fired over a problem nobody named out loud for eighteen months.
Every time you avoid the attempt, someone else absorbs the cost. Your silence does not evaporate. It lands on a person with less power than you.
When I work with leadership teams at Step It Up HR, the awareness piece always arrives before the action piece, and this is why. People need to see their own avoidance dressed up as prudence before they change anything.
My own research on bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. I would bet a large slice of those bosses were not cruel. They were absent at the moment where action was required. Cruelty is loud and rare. Avoidance is quiet and everywhere.
The reframe: pick which failure you want
I have stopped asking myself whether something will work. Terrible question. Nobody knows.
The question I use now is this one. If both roads end badly, which bad ending teaches me something?
The attempt teaches you something every time. You learn the pitch was weak, the timing was off, the audience was wrong, the idea needed six more months. All useful. All purchased with one bruise.
The avoidance teaches you nothing at all. You end up in the same place, older, holding a story about how the timing was not right.
One failure has a receipt. The other has an alibi.
Make the attempt smaller, not braver
People hear "try anyway" as an instruction to be courageous. Courage is a lousy strategy because it depends on how you feel on a Tuesday.
Shrink the attempt instead.
- Not "write the book" but "write 400 words nobody sees."
- Not "apply for the job" but "have one coffee with somebody doing it."
- Not "give the hard feedback" but "ask one honest question in your next one-on-one."
- Not "launch the product" but "show a sketch to five customers."
Each of those is small enough to survive and real enough to count as trying. Do a few of them and the fear loses its grip, not because you got braver but because the thing stopped being a cliff.
I finally wrote the book by writing badly on purpose for 20 minutes a day. Permission to be bad broke the logjam.
Two questions to sit with
Ask yourself what you have been calling patience for more than a year. Be specific. Name it out loud. If it has not moved in twelve months, it is not patience.
Then ask what the smallest visible version of it looks like this week. Not the full leap. The 400 words. The one coffee. The single honest question.
You are going to fail at some of this. You are failing at it right now, quietly, with nobody watching. At least pick the version with a receipt.
What have you been calling patience?