Chapter 19: Afraid of Making the Wrong Move
Imani had finished her novel two years ago, and it had been sitting in a folder on her laptop ever since. It was a good novel, or so she had been told by the two friends who had read it. It was about a family of fisherme
Imani had finished her novel two years ago, and it had been sitting in a folder on her laptop ever since.
It was a good novel, or so she had been told by the two friends who had read it. It was about a family of fishermen on a cold coast, and she had worked on it for six years, in the early mornings before her job. When she typed the last sentence, she had felt something she could only call grief, because it was over, and joy, because it existed.
She had meant to send it to agents. She had even made a list of twelve names. But each time she opened the document, a quiet, cold fear closed over her. What if it isn’t good enough? What if they laugh? What if I send it to the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and spoil my only chance? She read advice columns about how to write the perfect query letter, and each one seemed to contain a new rule she might break. She rewrote the first paragraph of her letter nineteen times.
Meanwhile, the novel sat there. It was safe. It was untested. As long as she did not send it, it could still be a work of promise, and no one could say otherwise.
A friend asked what she was afraid of. Imani thought for a long time. “That I’ll make the wrong move,” she said finally, “and it will be the one that decides everything.”
The belief that one move decides everything
Underneath Imani’s paralysis was a powerful and rarely examined belief: that a life turns on a few decisive moments, and that a mistake in one of them cannot be repaired. The query letter becomes the single door. The wrong word becomes a trapdoor.
It is worth asking how true this is. Careers and lives are far more forgiving than they appear from the outside. Most doors that close are replaced by others. Most mistakes can be corrected, explained, or outlived. Most rejections are not verdicts but data. People change direction at forty, at fifty, at sixty. The idea of one irreversible move is mostly a story the fearful mind tells in order to justify not moving at all.
The cost of not acting
The overthinking mind treats action as risky and inaction as safe. But inaction is a choice, too, and it has its own costs, which are quieter and slower.
In a classic 1995 paper, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec examined how people experience regret over time. They found a fascinating pattern. In the short term, people tend to regret their actions, the things they did that went badly. But over the long term, people tend to regret their inactions more, the things they did not try, the chances they did not take, the words they never said. Mistakes of commission sting sharply but heal. Mistakes of omission linger, because they leave an open question: what if?
This is not an argument for recklessness. It is a reminder that avoiding mistakes at all costs is itself a costly strategy. The person who never sends the novel has not avoided failure. They have chosen a quieter version of it.
Judgment is smaller than it feels
Underneath the fear of the wrong move often lies a fear of being judged. Imani imagined agents laughing, or worse, reading her work and finding it embarrassing. The sense of being observed and evaluated can be so strong that it dominates every decision.
But as we saw in Chapter 3, we tend to overestimate how closely others are watching, and how long they will remember. An agent who receives a hundred submissions a week does not carry any one of them in her heart. A rejection is, for the person who sends it, a few seconds of work. For the person who receives it, it can feel like a wound. That asymmetry of attention is one of the hidden gifts of the situation: your worst moment is much less memorable to others than it is to you.
Experiments, not verdicts
If the fear is that a single choice will decide everything, the remedy is to turn choices into experiments. An experiment is a small, bounded action whose purpose is to generate information. It does not need to succeed to be useful. It only needs to teach you something.
The writer Peter Sims, in his book Little Bets, studied people who build creative careers, from comedians to architects, and found that many of them did not begin with a grand plan. They made a series of small, low-risk attempts, watched what happened, and learned. A comedian tests a joke in a small club. A designer builds a rough prototype. Each little bet is cheap to lose, and each produces feedback that thought alone could never supply.
Notice how different this is from the mood of the overthinking mind. The overthinker tries to predict the outcome in advance and choose the perfect move. The experimenter says: I don’t know what will happen. Let me find out in a way that won’t hurt too much if it fails.
Try this: The smallest real experiment
Think of a move you have been avoiding. Then shrink it.
- State the question. What do I want to find out? Is my novel ready for agents? Do I enjoy this kind of work? Would they say yes?
- Find the smallest real test. Something that produces real information and not more speculation. Not a ninth rewrite of the query letter. A real action, of a small size: show one chapter to a stranger. Apply to one job. Have one conversation. Post one piece of work.
- Set a time and a limit. This week. Three people. One page.
- Decide how you will read the result. Before you act, decide what a good outcome and a mixed outcome would look like. A rejection means this one said no, not I have failed.
- Act, and collect the data. Afterward, write down what happened, what you learned, and what you will do next.
Imani’s smallest real experiment was to send her first chapter to three readers she did not know, through a writers’ forum. Two replied within a week. One was lukewarm, one was warm, and both offered specific suggestions. She was surprised to find that criticism, in the form of actual sentences about actual pages, was far easier to bear than the vague, towering criticism she had been imagining. Two months later, she sent her query letter to five agents. Four said no, politely. One asked for the full manuscript.
It is not necessary to say how that story ends. The point is that she was finally in it. Notice what her real gain was: not the request for the full manuscript, but the evidence she collected and the fact that she had entered the process at all. Had all five agents said no, she would still have learned that a no was survivable, and she would have had specific comments to work from.
Rejection is part of the data. Expect some experiments to go badly. Decide beforehand what you will learn from a no. After several small tests, many people find that the feared reaction is smaller and less personal than they imagined. Keep each experiment small, and avoid staking your sense of worth on any single one.
A THOUGHT TO CARRY
Avoiding every mistake is, in the end, one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.