There was a time when winning work was simply good news.
We land a project, secure a major contract, a new opportunity opens up, and those first few minutes are truly filled with joy. You feel that your efforts have paid off, that what you’ve been doing makes sense, and that things have finally started moving in the right direction.
These days, good news almost never comes on its own for me. It arrives with questions.
Do we have enough people? How long will it take? What do we need to buy in advance? Who will take on the job? How much money do we need to invest before we get paid? What haven’t we taken into account? Which other project will have to wait because of this?
All of this races through my mind so quickly that sometimes I don’t even notice how joy has already given way to calculations.
I didn’t realize this right away. It wasn’t until one day that I noticed the people around me were happy about the job we’d landed, while I was already mentally sorting through the obligations that would follow.
I didn’t like that.
Not because I didn’t understand how I’d gotten there. Experience teaches you that behind every good job there’s still a lot of invisible work. After making enough mistakes, you start to see, even before it happens, the places where things could go wrong. You learn that good news often means new expenses, additional responsibility, and a whole series of decisions that still need to be made.
All of this is useful. The problem arises when caution takes up so much space that there’s no room left for that initial, simple satisfaction. When you no longer see winning work as something to enjoy, but rather as a series of things you now have to deal with.
Lately I’ve been trying to reclaim those first few minutes for myself. Not to forget what comes next, nor to be any less cautious. I just don’t want experience to turn every success into an obligation right away.
When good news arrives, I try not to break it down into people, deadlines, costs, and risks for a while. I let it be what it is. Not because the rest isn’t important.
But because, whether I like it or not, those other things will come up very soon anyway.
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