I love podcasts, I’m also relatively quite active on LinkedIn but if you really pay attention to almost any business podcast or scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes, you will inevitably hear a story about a catastrophic failure.
Someone will talk about the startup that went bankrupt, the launch that completely flopped, or the partnership that went up in flames. But almost without fail, before the story is over, we will hear of a neatly packaged mess and a beautiful bow around the package. They will look back and declare that losing everything was actually a blessing in disguise, the ultimate catalyst for their current greatness, and the best thing that ever happened to them, and to be honest I’m someone that does that too.
We love this narrative, we applaud it.
We have absorbed the structure of movies so completely that we apply it directly to our messy, unpredictable lives. Act One is the ambition. Act Two is the catastrophe. Act Three is the triumphant redemption. We expect this arc so deeply that when real life refuses to provide Act Three on schedule, we start writing one ourselves.
We force the resolution. We turn our actual grief into a PR exercise.
Humans have always created stories to impose order on randomness; narratives help us tolerate chaos. If something awful happened for a grand reason, the world feels slightly less arbitrary. But I feel modern media didn't create this instinct; it commercialized and accelerated it.
Most platforms reward stories with resolution. Admitting, “My company failed, I’m still devastated, and I honestly don’t know what it means yet,” is honest. But it’s an awkward piece of content. Because an unresolved story is socially inconvenient.
Whereas “I lost everything, and here are the five lessons that made me who I am today” is perfect content. Crisis. Redemption. Takeaway.
What this creates is a culture of retrospective inevitability. Once someone becomes successful, we rewrite everything that happened before the success as though it were secretly leading there all along. It was meant to happen; the bankruptcy becomes necessary. The rejection becomes destiny. The health crises was the catalyst; The wrong turn becomes the road that "had to happen."
I am certainly no exception to this.
Not too long ago, I wrote an entire piece extracting neat, digestible lessons from a business of mine that didn't last.
Even more deeply, when I talk about the major heart attack I had a few years ago, I sometimes find myself saying, "It was the best thing that ever happened to me." I frame it as the ultimate catalyst, as though my heart failed specifically so it could lead me to where I am today, building Oops to Opportunity.
In retrospect, it sounds so neatly stitched together.
But honestly, it only looks like that in the rearview mirror. If I look at it through completely unbiased eyes, without the pressure of a narrative arc: it wasn't destiny. It just happened. It was a terrifying, painful health crisis, and it just happened.
For every person whose disastrous startup or health scare became Chapter One of an extraordinary comeback, there are thousands of people whose disaster was simply... a disaster.
That doesn’t make their experience less meaningful. It just makes it less cinematic.
The problem here isn’t that we try to find meaning in our failures. Sometimes a terrible experience really does change someone for the better. The problem is demanding that meaning on a deadline.
We put an incredible amount of pressure on ourselves to perform our resilience before we have actually healed. But you can let the lesson arrive two years later. Or never. You don’t owe anyone an immediate motivational Talk about your heartbreak.
Maybe resilience isn’t the ability to turn every failure into a victory. Maybe it’s the ability to let something remain a failure without allowing it to become a verdict on your life.
Maybe some stories earn their third act eventually. Some don't.
Perhaps maturity is learning that we don't have to manufacture one just because the second act hurt.