Expect the best but be prepared for the worst.
A long time ago I heard the phrase that this essay has as a subtitle, but it seems fair to say that I never fully understood it until now and of course, what happens is that, nobody learns from someone else’s experience, of course, unless you are a wise man (spoiler alert, I’m not).
Why do I say this, you are wondering dear reader, well the reason is that in the project in which I am working, things have gone from bad to good and then go back to bad, to the point of making us wonder if all the effort we have printed to this has been worth it.
I am afraid to say that this feeling of having done things wrong is my fault, for not asking more if we were on the right track with our superiors, for not validating enough the decisions we made, and for not clarifying our doubts. Doubts that we allow ourselves to be carried away by excessive optimism without taking into consideration what would happen if things didn’t turn out quite right (as it ended up happening).
The above idea is perfectly expressed in the video of Tali Sharot’s talk called “The optimism bias”, in this talk Tali expresses that having an apathetic way of seeing the tasks in front of us is a very bad way of taking things since this attitude will bring a lot of unhappiness because we will not move much from where we are and although remaining static in life is not bad at all, if it gets things to die for lack of action. In other words, apathy and pessimism are perfect ingredients so that you never grow up as a person, and that is a very bad thing.
On the other hand (and this is what happened to us) if you have excessive optimism, what will happen is that you will do things with the best of intentions and you will move on no matter what, until here it sounds pretty good because you will have enough impetus to overcome the adversities of the road. The problem will come when you will most likely not be able to overcome all of them and you end up hopelessly stuck in a blockage from which it would be easier for you to get out if you had faced this situation prepared.
As you can imagine, in my team we went ahead with the creation of a part of the project that we did not validate in time, which caused it to be just as we imagined it, but not exactly as the person who will use it needs it and this is a bad thing, since we need to go back to fix it, and this action requires time and that is an asset that we no longer have.
It is because of all the above that the only thing left to do is present the conclusion of the project with humility and knowing that we skipped validations that we should not have.
As always, I believe that if you learn from an unfavorable situation, then the biggest mistake was not made in these cases, which is to turn a deaf ear and not learn anything from what happened. It is difficult to see the future with optimism, but if we do it like this and use our mistakes as tools that help us to be prepared for future difficult situations, then everything becomes easier and that, dear friends, is what I intend to do.
