Everything can go wrong
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. — Marcus Aurelius
While the previous text continues explaining how to deal with those people, let’s focus on the part I’ve quoted.
One thing I felt (and still feel) in my bones is expectation. The expectation is a double-edged sword; it contributes to your motivation about a project, about going to the office to meet colleagues, or about the annual 1:1 with your manager. All of us had felt the hit of the heavy hammer of reality when things don’t go as we expected… That project has to be delayed for some reason or maybe is not accomplishing what the company wants, maybe you have destructive criticism coming from your colleagues or maybe you didn’t reach the annual objectives according to your manager.
It’s ok feeling bad in those situations, but let’s try to feel less miserable next time this happens. Stoics have a tool called premeditatio malorum which consists of imagining the worst scenario about something. It’s a simple technique that modern psychologists are using with their patients successfully trying to reduce depression. I hope you are not depressed.
Anyhow, this can be useful in day-by-day events and situations too. It can contribute to taking control of our anger for those little disgusting things that happen in life: a car crash, a pipe break in your house, a deployment, a layoff…
The main thing is to think that everything can go wrong and how you would respond to that. It’s like tracing a plan. You are trying to be prepared for life.
A good application of this principle is the pre mortem document you should be creating every time you are preparing a release. It consists of a list of scenarios in which your deployment can go wrong. Along with those scenarios should be a solution to it.
That’s the exercise: thinking about how to resolve the situation.