Every wisdom tradition has stories that enter the general consciousness, so I apologize if you’ve heard this Zen tale before. (Ask me about the time I heard it in a Unitarian Universalist service, complete with mardi gras beads hurled at the congregation...)
Long ago, in ancient China, a farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbors come to console him, saying “What bad luck!” The farmer responds simply: “Maybe.”
The next day, the horse returns, bringing several wild horses with it. The neighbors exclaim “What good luck!” The farmer responds: “Maybe.”
Later, the farmer's son tries to ride one of the wild horses, falls off, and breaks his leg. The neighbors gather again: “What terrible luck!” The farmer responds: “Maybe.”
The next week, military officials come to draft young men into the army, but they pass over the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. The neighbors say “What good luck!” The farmer responds: “Maybe.”
I’m about as far from the story’s farmer as you can imagine. I’m not really a “maybe” guy. Good news comes? Great! Hooray! Fist bumps all around!
Bad news comes? Queue up the inspirational speech. I tend to view the world optimistically. I see silver linings in the murkiest of situations. I eat up the pop psychology around growth mindsets and grit.
But there’s a dark side to all this optimism. While I’m responding to “positive” developments with excitement, and responding to “negative” news with words of encouragement and exhortations of resilience, there’s an energetic toll to the emotions I’m spending. When news is good, I’m anchoring on the good. When news is bad, I’m still anchoring on the good – just with a reframe, or maybe a new time horizon. Sure, we’re set back now, but this will teach us XYZ, and then we’ll accomplish some even greater thing in the future!
The problem with this approach is the lack of steadiness. Each bit of news is producing a reaction. Each reaction results in an energetic expenditure of optimism. And if there’s enough of these developments, in a short enough period of time, with enough variability before tailwinds and headwinds… my optimism collapses into a pit of despair.
I can’t fully explain why my optimism can flatline like this. I can only attribute it to exhaustion: I keep fighting the good fight, finding the silver linings for myself and others, carrying water for more senior leadership even when I question their perspective. And then I’m exhausted, and I can’t even fake anything resembling my optimistic self.
Unfortunately, as a team lead or manager, this kind of sudden drop of optimistic encouragement can produce disastrous outcomes. I go from being the bright sunshine in the office to an intense thunderstorm. Even in a remote environment, the impact is visceral over Slack and Zoom. While I’m picking myself up off the floor and rebuilding my optimistic attitude, I’m bleeding negativity to everyone around me. Months of effort at building up a growth oriented, mutually supportive attitude in a team can be undone in days.
Starting a company has put this emotional reactivity on overdrive. As another startup founder remarked to me: founders don’t have good days and bad days, they have good hours and bad hours. Responding too intensely to circumstances that can change so rapidly doesn’t exactly lead to mental health.
Yet as I’ve reflected on my experience as a founder, I’ve realized that “good” and “bad” are often the wrong lenses for viewing developments. Instead, it’s all just “information”. I used to think of the Zen story of the farmer as yet another example of the benefits of “non-attachment” and “non-reactivity”. And it is those things. But it’s also a reminder that how we interpret events is heavily biased by our extremely limited perspective.
In the sequence in the farmer’s story, any particular event’s interpretation depends on the zoom level, on the time horizon. Immediately after the son breaks his arm, it’s bad news. A few days later, when the forced conscription occurs, it’s good news. The event didn’t change – but the information did. The father and townspeople learned more, and that altered their perception of events. Maybe a future event is that the army is decimated – even better news for the farmer. Or perhaps the army is wildly successful, not a single casualty, and everyone receives a big treasure chest of gold – bad news for the farmer.
The trouble with viewing news as “good” and “bad”, beyond the fact that it’ll wreck your mental health and riddle you with stress, is that it begins to alter your approach to the world. You start to only seek out “good” news and work desperately to avoid “bad” news. You put on blinders to ignore what you don’t want to see. You hear what you choose to hear, instead of what’s actually being said. You seek out affirmation, instead of contradiction.
As a founder, these traits are all… well, bad. They’ll kill your business.
Whether at work or in life, you should be seeking truth (or perhaps “truths”, but that’s a different Substack post). Truth doesn’t care for your opinion. It’s just information. Maybe it works out for you in the short term, maybe it works out for you in the long term, maybe it doesn’t work out for you at all. How a truth manifests at any given moment in time – whether you “like” it or not – doesn’t really matter. Your wisdom and your capacity to make good choices depends on your ability to stare at truth unflinchingly. And the only way you can do so is put aside the emotional reactivity.
Responding to life’s lessons non-reactively doesn’t mean becoming a robot. It doesn’t mean abandoning joy and optimism. Instead, it emancipates those characteristics. Optimism becomes a mode or posture of existence, rather than a reaction to outside events.
We’re not dismissing our default emotional reaction to a victory or a setback. Those are what they are. But rather, we’re embracing that the victory might not last long, and neither will the defeat. We never will have the full picture in this life, and that’s ok. We should avoid idealizing as much as we avoid catastrophizing. Most events are neither absolute victories nor defeats, just steps on a continous journey.
If I were pitching this as a self-help book (or rather: personal development nonfiction), I’d call it something like “The Maybe Manifesto: how a Zen story teaches us to accept life as it is and keep on growing”. (Gotta embrace those super-long subtitles.) Joking aside, there’s great power in the word “maybe”. Instead of locking a learning in place, it opens a door to new questions. A natural response to “maybe” is a search for more answers, even if we can only approach certainty asymptotically. Instead of hiding from information that we don’t want to hear, we begin to search it out, to fill in the gaps around our countless “maybe’s” (even as we generate more of them). We become skeptical of our own opinions, and excited when we discover novel perspectives, independent of whether those perspectives seem “good” or “bad”.
Maybe isn’t about becoming emotionally detached or refusing to feel deeply. It’s about developing the capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously: that we can feel intensely about something while remaining curious about its ultimate meaning and impact. That we can act decisively while staying open to new information that might alter our understanding.
The farmer’s “maybe” wasn’t an expression of indifference – it was an acknowledgment of life's fundamental complexity. Each event exists within a web of causes and effects that extends far beyond our immediate grasp. Today’s setback might contain tomorrow's opportunity; this moment’s triumph might hold hidden challenges.
“Maybe” is not meant to diminish the moment, but to remain open to its evolving meaning. To embrace both our immediate human response and our capacity for deeper wisdom. To live fully in the present while maintaining curiosity about the future.
Maybe that’s what wisdom really is – not the absence of judgment, but the willingness to hold our judgments lightly, always ready to learn more.
This maybe (perhaps) deeply resonates. 😊