Present and intentional.

This is perhaps the biggest place to practice. Life is not happening to us. We are learning to be in the actual current moment, to recognize where we have choice… In a terrifying twist, it turns out we always have it. So the great question is: how to be intentional, in the present moment, to take responsibility for your state of being, and for your life? Another participant-teacher in the community of practice, Jane Sung E Bai, asked us to consider, “What if I am responsible for everything?” It’s not a singular task, to be responsible for what happens in this world—we do not exist or transform in isolation

Getting into the habit of recoding the risk level in many of our activities, along with the stakes we incur in carrying them out, is a vital, life-enhancing capability. By cultivating this habit, we lighten the emotional load. We have more than enough situations in our lives where vigilance is essential; when it’s not, we can proceed in a more playful and lighthearted way—even when we’re doing things that are important to us (cooking, writing an essay, learning a new language). In consistent contexts with low stakes (folding the laundry, going for a run), a casual, business-as-usual approach is fine. Pausing to consider (or, more typically, reconsider) the stakes allows us to titrate vigilance, mitigating its emotional and cognitive tax.

Understanding Systems to Better Navigate Failure

Appreciating the dynamics of systems is the last of the three competencies for practicing the science of failing well. After self-awareness and situation awareness is system awareness. Mastering system awareness starts with training yourself to look for wholes rather than zooming in, as we naturally do, on the parts. It’s about expanding your focus, even if briefly, to redraw the boundaries and see a larger whole and the relationships that shape it.

Much of our education and work experience has taught us to diagnose and become experts in parts, shortchanging the value of looking at the relationships that tie them together. We can learn to see and appreciate systems and use this knowledge to reduce preventable failures. Don’t forget that appreciating systems helps us see that we are not wholly responsible for all the failures in our vicinity. This is not to let us off the hook for our contributions to failures, but rather to help us see that we are parts of larger systems, with complex relationships, some of which are beyond our ability to predict or control.

In most ordinary moments the situation thinks for us. We don’t realize it at the time because these moments seem so insignificant. However, as days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, the accumulation of these moments makes accomplishing our goals easier or harder.

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder. When our ego takes over and we show someone we’re the boss, we make the future harder. When we are passive-aggressive with a colleague at work, our relationship becomes worse. And while these moments don’t seem to matter much at the time, they compound into our current position. And our position determines our future.

What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them.

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today.

Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you’re thinking clearly.