The Silent Plague
On Why You Must Keep Your Problems Close
There was something inside the box, invisible. A box sitting on our shelves. There was no sound, no movement. It was growing with a reptilian stealth, just under our watch. Until we found it. A plague.
We rushed to the warehouse to find a disastrous scenario. Our supplier had sent contaminated products, and nature had quietly taken over. Silently. This was the kind of problem we feared the most. The one that doesn’t announce itself with big symptoms or shocking incidents. It was the other type, the one that is only obvious when there’s nothing left to do.
We lost all our stock. Just like that. Without a fight, without viable solutions. We just lost it all.
Fake Abundance as a Denial Strategy
The warehouse was far from our headquarters and that meant I could use distance as a shield. I avoided vulnerability by simulating separation, even the physical type. Being apart from the tangible manifestation of the problem made it easier to reframe it as abundance. I thought having extra stock was a competitive advantage. It wasn’t. Accumulation doesn’t mean value, it means stagnation and scarcity. It meant we weren’t selling enough, fast enough.
Allowing analysis and iteration to take the lead felt like losing power. Like submitting my independence to an external authority. Questioning my choices systematically would expose my mistakes and force flexibility. I would have to start all over again to ensure sustainability and it felt too difficult. That’s why multitasking, pretending and procrastination became such appealing denial tools.
I should have kept my problems like enemies, close. If I had faced them each morning, I would have given them the importance they had, and I could have worked on a solution. Ignoring them transferred my power to them. They became bigger, stronger and less negotiable, just like my competitors. I was in the show pretending to be a distracted spectator and that performative denial allowed the plague to arrive and settle, just under my watch.
I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance, Marcus Aurelius
Calculating Failure Matters
The day we discovered the plague, we lost all our stock, and yet, I decided not to calculate how many thousands of euros that had cost us. Mathematics felt like oversharing. It would be too painful to attribute a number to my failure, so I kept a vague lesson as punishment. That was another mistake on the pile of mistakes also accumulating like unsold stock.
Failing needs to be dissected, studied until the last piece of wisdom is extracted. Otherwise, pain is wasted.
From that incident onwards we changed the way we operated. We went from uncontrolled, hopeful, fake abundance to restrictive scarcity. Not only in raw materials, but in our mindset. I know, that wasn’t a very smart move either. By losing everything, I also lost hope. I didn’t verbalize it, but regret and insecurities started to undermine the work that wasn’t even done yet.
I didn’t use my failures, so they used me. They beat me up and slowly destroyed my dreams. Too many became too little, just like the boxes of stock.
Closed Doesn’t Mean Solved
The next day everything was clean, we ordered new materials and operation was flowing somewhat normally. Except I wasn’t. I let go of thousands of euros, but I couldn’t do the same with shame. It stayed inside the box – my own box, a suffocating one. At least, it looked organized from the outside. Stored, hermetically closed. Just like a broken heart. Or a very well-sealed container. Quite often, they are part of the business stock.
Oh this one is so heartbreaking 😭
But there you go, even though you didn't do anything with that failure then, you're doing it now - so well done 👏👏