Recalculating
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Your GPS never judges you for missing a turn. Why do you?
You know the moment. You’re driving somewhere unfamiliar, you miss the exit, and the GPS does something remarkable.
It doesn’t sigh. It doesn’t bring up the last three turns you blew past. It doesn’t pull up a list of every wrong exit you’ve taken since 2014 and ask you to sit with that for a while. It just says one word: recalculating. New route. Same destination. Move on.
I think about this more than I probably should. Because I don’t do that. And I’m guessing you don’t either.
When I miss a turn in my own life, some wrong decision at work or a conversation I handled badly or a quarter that didn’t go the way I planned, I don’t recalculate. I replay. I run the mistake through my head on a loop, examining it from every angle, constructing elaborate narratives about what it means about me as a person. I turn a missed exit into a full identity crisis.
And I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve watched some of the most successful people I know do the exact same thing.
A different dinner table
In Clearwater, Florida, sometime in the early 1980s, a trial attorney named John Blakely started asking his kids a strange question at dinner. Every week, he’d put his fork down, look at his daughter Sara and her brother, and ask the same thing: “What did you fail at this week?”
If they didn’t have an answer, he’d be disappointed.
Think about that for a second. Most parents want to hear about wins. Good grades, goals scored, parts in the school play. John Blakely wanted to hear about failures. And when his daughter told him she’d tried out for cheerleading and didn’t make the squad, he didn’t console her. He gave her a high five.
Sara was being trained, at her family’s kitchen table, to recalculate. Failure wasn’t the destination. It wasn’t even a wrong turn. It was just the GPS working, gathering data, finding a better route.
She would need that training. Sara Blakely wanted to be a lawyer like her dad. She failed the LSAT, studied harder, took it again, and scored one point worse. She auditioned to play Goofy at Disney World. Too tall. They offered her a chipmunk costume instead.
For seven years after that, she sold fax machines door to door in Atlanta. People ripped up her business card in front of her on a regular basis. Every one of those moments was a missed turn. And every time, she recalculated.
Then one night, getting ready for a party, she cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose because she wanted the smoothing effect without the visible seams in her sandals. She was 27, had $5,000 in savings, and zero connections in the fashion industry. Every manufacturer she called hung up on her. She drove to North Carolina and went mill to mill until one finally said yes, because his daughters told him the idea was good.
Spanx did $4 million in sales its first year. Sara Blakely went on to become the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, still owning the company outright.
The path from cutting pantyhose in her apartment to a billion-dollar company was not a straight line. It was a GPS route with dozens of recalculations.
The second wrong turn
This is the part that changed how I think about failure, and I wish someone had told me this fifteen years ago.
The missed exit, the failed launch, the conversation you handled wrong, that’s one wrong turn. It happens. A GPS recalculates and you’re back on track in seconds.
But the guilt spiral after the mistake? The week you spend replaying it? The way you let one bad quarter bleed into your confidence on the next three decisions? That’s a second wrong turn. And it’s almost always the longer one.
Most people think the mistake is what costs them. It’s rarely the mistake. It’s the recovery time. The distance between the wrong turn and the moment you start driving again. John Blakely wasn’t teaching his kids to be reckless at that dinner table. He was teaching them to shorten that distance. To recalculate in seconds instead of days.
Every minute you spend parked on the shoulder of the highway, judging yourself for the last exit, is a minute you’re not moving toward the destination. And the destination hasn’t moved. It’s still exactly where it was.
Right now, as you’re reading this, I’d bet there’s something you’re still replaying. Some decision from last month, last quarter, last year that you’ve already extracted every possible lesson from but you keep returning to anyway. You already know what you’d do differently. You’ve known for a while. But you’re still parked there.
That’s the second wrong turn. And it’s the only one that’s actually optional.
The fuel you think you need
Most of us were trained with the opposite software from the Blakely kids. We were taught that mistakes mean something about who we are. That if you fail at the thing you set out to do, the appropriate response is to feel terrible about it for a proportional amount of time before you’re allowed to try again.
High performers have a particularly vicious version of this. You’ve probably built a career on the belief that your self-criticism is what made you good. That the voice in your head tearing apart your performance after a bad meeting is the same voice that drives you to prepare harder next time. You’ve come to see self-judgment as fuel.
Kristin Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas, has spent two decades studying this exact assumption. Her findings are uncomfortable: self-compassionate people aim just as high as self-critical people. They set the same ambitious goals. But they’re significantly less afraid of failure, more likely to try again after a setback, and more motivated by genuine curiosity than the need to prove something.
(I had to read that twice. It directly contradicts the story I’ve told myself about why being hard on myself works.)
A study on NCAA athletes made it even harder to ignore. Athletes who went through a self-compassion intervention didn’t just feel better after losses. They performed better. They got faster at recovering and redirecting their energy toward the next play instead of wasting it relitigating the last one. They didn’t become soft. They became quicker at recalculating.
That voice in your head after a failure? It feels like it’s helping because it’s intense and it sounds serious and it keeps you up at night, which you’ve learned to interpret as caring about your work. But the intensity of your self-criticism has almost no relationship to the quality of your next decision. It just keeps you parked longer.
Sara Blakely still practices this, by the way. At Spanx, she runs what she calls “oops meetings,” where employees stand up and share their biggest mistakes, usually turning them into funny stories. She’s built an entire company culture around recalculating as a skill. The faster you do it, the faster you move.
Recalculating
There’s a question I’ve started asking myself that I want to pass along, because it keeps catching me in the act:
Am I recalculating, or am I just replaying?
You’ll know the difference when you feel it. Recalculating has forward motion. You’re looking at the next exit. Replaying is circular. You’re staring at the one you missed, running the same loop, going nowhere.
Your GPS has never once improved a journey by spending ten minutes lecturing you about the exit you missed. It just finds a new way forward. The destination is still there. Your skills haven’t changed. The only thing that’s different is the route.
I think about John Blakely at that dinner table, asking his daughter to report her failures like they were something worth celebrating. He wasn’t raising a kid who didn’t care about getting it right. He was raising a kid who wouldn’t waste her life stuck at the wrong turns.
Most of us never got that dinner table. But we can build it now.
Start driving.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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