It’s Halloween today, so to honor the occasion I figured we’d explore
something thematic: ghosts.
No, not the spooky supernatural kind. The ghosts of our past.
Everyone has them. If someone tries to tell you they don’t, that
they’ve never so much as made a bad decision, they’re lying to
you or to themselves.
The ghosts of our past are those pesky decisions we wish we could fix
but can’t. There’s no way to erase them, only to accept them.
See, that’s the tricky thing about time. It only moves in one direction.
There’s no going back. There’s only the present we live today and
the future beyond it. It’s painful sometimes, and it’s easy to
experience regret, but it’s also beautiful.
Because our choices, their consequences, and what we learn from them
are how we grow. They define who we are and who we become.
The Grief Behind Making Mistakes
It’s tough to make mistakes. As a kid it’s something that breaks us
down, and though we often learn to control our emotions around them,
the consequences only get more serious as we age.
The stakes are higher for me now as an adult. There are far fewer
safety nets beneath me to help me bounce back from any consequences,
earned or otherwise. A big mistake could affect my life, my job, and
my mental health. I’m sure you, too, have felt that pressure to
succeed.
Especially when you own your business and you’re trying to get it to
grow, each mistake can feel catastrophic. What if I order the wrong
thing? What if I lose a contract with an important vendor, or can’t
close sales? When you’re trying to take something you love from 0 to
1, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.
That’s where the grief and regret of your choices creeps in. It’s
easy to keep yourself up at night worrying you said the wrong thing
10 years ago and embarrassed yourself, and that you’ll repeat the same
mistake again tomorrow.
I’m happy to say, though, that no one choice will unravel
either of our lives.
Instead, mistakes are often an opportunity to grow, provided we can
learn from them.
You’re only going to improve if you accept your choices, don’t make
excuses, and get busy trying to solve the consequences for the next
time. It’s the more difficult path, but it’s the only way to truly
own your life and keep moving.
The Consequences of Action
It’s uncomfortable to face the consequences of your own actions,
especially when they turn out poorly. When you do something and it
leads to a good outcome, it’s easy. It feels great. You’re basking in
a feeling of success.
But when it’s bad, oh how fast that changes. It's far more comfortable
to ignore the fallout and make excuses. It’s comfortable, safe,
and helps you feel like it wasn’t your fault.
But that's a big problem for learning, and it’s not fair to the
people around you.
When you’re trying to grow, you must:
Accept when you did the wrong thing
Learn how you could have done that thing differently
Implement that new way the next time
Sometimes it takes a few tries. Sometimes it’s wrong the first
time, and the second time, and even the third time. Sometimes it
takes months. If you keep it up, though, you’ll eventually discover
the right choice.
On the other hand, it’s easy to stagnate when you:
Ignore your choices and move forward without stopping to think
Blame the people around you for things going wrong instead of taking accountability
Repeat the same choice over and over hoping it’ll go better
Let’s not follow that second list. At least, not all the time.
Because I mean, listen. Nobody’s perfect. That’s kind of the whole
point. Sometimes you’re going to ignore a mistake, or repeat it, or
even misunderstand the whole situation. That’s okay. But it is worth
trying to minimize how often that happens.
When you develop a growth mindset like that, it’s amazing what you
can accomplish.
Plus, you won’t be so negative to be around for everyone else. Nobody
likes being blamed for decisions they didn’t make, and weren't a part of.
A Story on Accountability
Accepting the grief that comes along with past decisions—being
able to own them and move forward—requires a certain kind of grit.
I’ve made plenty of big mistakes this year. Some of them are over and
done with and I’ve moved on, but some of them still affect my life.
In a lot of cases, they helped me learn and improve. Business
ownership, I’ve discovered, is fraught with tiny mistakes of
judgment and the stress to perform. It’s something I’ve been
adjusting to this year.
At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t so used to it.
I made decisions that strained the relationship between me and one of
our best employees. I’d known them, and everyone else on staff, for
years, and in a lot of ways we were as much a big group of friends as
we were coworkers.
Because of that, I made bad choices, ones that don’t line up
with my own beliefs about what it means to be a business owner these
days. I’m not going to get into exactly what happened—it doesn’t
ultimately matter, and I’d rather respect everyone’s privacy.
The moral is, I was looking at the situation from the perspective of
us being a couple of people who know each other. I wasn’t thinking
about the power dynamic, or the forced proximity of working together.
I wasn’t thinking like a business owner.
I made selfish decisions because I figured we could work it out, but
I vastly underestimated how that feels coming from the business owner
rather than just a peer. And in the process I ruined a friendship.
It’s been affecting me for months. Probably them, too. Of course in
hindsight I’d go back and do things differently. I’d be more
considerate of their situation. I'd go more out of my way to keep the
problem from happening in the first place.
But that's the beauty of hindsight. It's far easier to see what I
could have done differently now after months of thinking it over than
when I was in the heat of the moment. I can't fix it, but
I can make sure I act differently the next time.
That's what owning your choices is all about.
Thankfully, it hasn’t affected the store. They're still with us
and continue to be an amazing employee, well-liked by everyone on the
team and our customers alike. They works hard, and I respect them for that.
But they and I will probably never be friends. We probably won’t really
get along, even, and will have to navigate that as we work together.
That’s my fault.
So, when faced with this situation, I really only saw three options:
Avoid the problem entirely by firing them, which proves me as a
terrible leader, undermines the trust of our team, and makes their
life worse
Convince myself it’s their fault things turned out this way so I can
rest easier, and make the minimum effort to coexist at work
Accept that the situation is my fault and use it to better calibrate
my future decision-making, leaving them to thrive in our workplace
and accepting the burden on myself of making amends and keeping the
peace
I don’t know about you, but to me, only the last one comes even
remotely close to being an ethical choice. It's harder than the
others, and that's how it should be. Doing the right thing often is.
In all the scenarios I imagined, doing anything but confronting the
problem I’d caused and taking ownership was going to make things
worse.
Workplaces are tricky things, and the last thing I wanted was to
affect the team’s morale. Especially when they're genuinely a great
employee, and doing anything to mistreat or remove them would be
completely unreasonable from a business and ethical perspective.
So if you get anything out of this post, it’s this:
You can’t control what happens after you make a choice. You can’t
control other people. What you can control, and have an obligation
to face, is how you react to that outcome.
Don’t take the easy way out. Take accountability. Accept fault when
it’s deserved. Accept credit, too, when it’s appropriate.
Our world would be better if everyone took a little more
accountability for our actions, and the only way we get there is by
starting with ourselves.
There will be more on that idea to come, but for now, let's all do
our best to be responsible, ethical leaders and face the ghosts of
our past no matter how uncomfortable they may make us.