There’s a strange, unwritten law of nature. No matter how many things you tick off your to-do list—no matter how gloriously, heroically you’ve battled the chaos—someone, somewhere will always spot the one thing you didn’t do.
It’s uncanny. You could march into your boss’s cabin, chest puffed with the satisfaction of a day spent conquering email reminders, invoices, reports, and maybe even that impossible client call. You expect applause. A slow clap, at least.
Instead, you get:
“By the way… what about those ticket reservations?”
Ah, yes. The reservations. The single unfinished box on your sprawling spreadsheet of accomplishments. One question, and poof—your 20 completed tasks vanish into oblivion, and all that remains is that lone, un-ticked item, blinking in judgment.
This isn’t limited to your office life. Oh no. The law is everywhere.
Your kid could score brilliantly in five out of six subjects. You know what you’ll still notice? That one pesky maths paper with the low grade. Not the 90s and 95s. Just the “needs improvement.”
If you think about it, this is probably some deep-rooted evolutionary quirk. Cavemen didn’t survive by admiring their nicely painted cave walls. They survived by constantly worrying about that one gap in the fence where the sabertooth tiger might stroll in.
So here we are—centuries later—still wired to focus on the one thing that’s incomplete, imperfect, or pending.
And this is how you end up becoming a human hamster on a wheel, chasing your own tail, running after a mythical finish line where everything will finally be done. Spoiler: that line doesn’t exist.
Here’s the deal. If you keep expecting other people to count your accomplishments for you, you’re going to be perpetually disappointed. Nobody’s tallying up your invisible victories. That’s your job.
So maybe it’s time to reset your mental software a little:
- Yes, there will always be something unfinished.
- Yes, people will always point it out.
- No, you don’t have to keep burning yourself out to plug every gap before sundown.
It’s perfectly okay to do things at your own pace, to draw your own boundaries around what “done” looks like. Because you, my friend, are the only one who has to live inside your mind.
Everyone else will just keep peering over your shoulder, squinting at the one checkbox you left empty. And that’s fine.
Let them look. You’ve already done enough.
0
20