Daydreams Lose Gracefully

I keep a list of things I want to do before I’m done. Coach hockey. Earn the Advanced Cicerone. Learn German well enough that worauf and wovon stop ambushing me mid-sentence. Open a Christmas tree farm with a brewery and a beer hall attached, which may be the most Wisconsin sentence I will ever type.

I love that list. I’ve also noticed it has weight. It rides along in the passenger seat with its feet up on the dash, humming the same four bars, and every so often it leans over to ask whether we’re there yet. (We are not there yet.)

So I’ve been running a test on it. Picture yourself losing at the thing. Not failing to start. Losing, mid-game, scoreboard lit, people watching. Then watch what you reach for next. The honest answers are short.

You get fired up and try something new. You study the loss and come back better. You call friends and ask them to come lose alongside you until you stop losing. Or you back out.

If it’s that last one, cross it off. The list was never free to carry, and every item you’d quit on still gets a plate at dinner.

“Try something new” is the slippery one. It can mean a new way up the same hill or a different hill entirely. One is persistence. The other is quitting with excellent posture.

The bigger problem is where the test runs. It runs in my head, and in my head I lose beautifully.

It’s a tasting exam where you swear the sample smells like movie theater butter and the answer key says it’s clean.
It’s a drill you ran for somebody else’s kids, falling apart before the second whistle.
It’s ordering in German and getting answered, kindly, in English.

When I looked hard at the list, every item had the same flaw, and it wasn’t money or nerve. None of them had a first physical action. Nothing I could do on a Saturday with my shoes on.

Which means I’d been running the losing test on a daydream…

So maybe the first physical action for anything on the list is the smallest real way to lose at it. Book the practice exam you expect to bomb. Ask to run one practice from behind somebody else’s bench. Then the answer comes from your body instead of your imagination, and bodies are terrible liars.

German already passed, as far as I can tell. I lose at it constantly, and my response has been to WeChat the exchange student our family hosted and make them wade through every worauf I put in the wrong place. That’s the third answer. I called somebody in.

Teams carry these lists too. Every roadmap has a someday column, and the items in it sit there like a keg nobody ever tapped, holding a spot in the cooler while everyone walks past on the way to something else.

Run the test there, out loud. Ask who would keep working on it if the first numbers came back ugly. Then ask who they’d recruit.

Saying you’d stick with it costs nothing in a planning meeting. Asking someone to come stand next to a losing project costs you something…so people only spend that on work they actually believe in.

If nobody would make the call, take it off the board in front of everybody. The team has been carrying it for you.

Losing once makes the list lighter no matter what you reach for next. The item either turns into a practice or it gets out at the next exit, and either one weighs less than a daydream.

Stay Positive & BRB, Going To Go Order A Pretzel In German