It is not events that disturb men's minds, but their judgments about these events. – Epictetus
Reflection
You didn't see it coming. A last-minute deployment failed at 4 p.m., a feature request landed after the sprint had closed, and one line of code crashed staging. Every developer runs into the unexpected, but few slow down long enough to learn from it.
Some rush to patch, others deflect or blame, and a few slow down, trace the failure, and extract the lesson.
The best developers aren't calm because they avoid chaos. They're calm because they've faced, studied, and learned from it over time. They know every surprise is a signal, every bug a breadcrumb, and every failure a mirror showing what they missed.
When things break, they expose the assumptions you didn't know you were making. That's not failure. It's feedback. The unexpected often holds more truth than the plan you trusted.
Today's Insight
Growth begins the moment your expectations break. What you didn't plan for holds the lesson you needed most.
Action Steps
- Slow the Fix - Resist the urge to jump straight to a solution and pause. Ask what broke, why it broke, and what you missed.
- Surface the Assumption - Find one expectation that proved false. Write it down, then turn it into a principle you won't forget.
- Share the Lesson - Don't just fix and forget. Post a comment, raise it in standup, or surface it during retro. Let the insight scale across the team.
- Study the Fragile - Revisit a brittle part of your codebase. Look for patterns that repeat and decisions that didn't age well. Let it show you where shortcuts turn into risks.
Consider This
How many lessons have you patched over to keep moving? What would change if you treated every unexpected event as a mentor, here to sharpen your thinking?
Today, don't just fix what's broken. Study it. Learn from it. Let it shape how you think, not just what you build.