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There's a concept from Buddhist psychology Peter Weiss uses with every client: the two arrows. The first arrow is anything that hits you — an email, a request, bad news. The reaction is automatic. You can't stop it. The second arrow is your choice. What you do with the reaction. Whether you fire back, say yes to something you shouldn't, or spiral — that's on you. Most people don't know there are two arrows. They just take both hits and move on.

There is no such thing as an idealized user. We're all distracted, temporarily disabled, with lots of things competing for our attention and if there's one thing we've learned through decades of building software, it's that we have to design around that reality, not in spite of it." — Jon Yablonski

The simple processes broadcast their failures. The complicated ones swallow them. So the debt collects exactly where you're least likely to be looking.

The delta between expectations and reality is disappointment. That's the whole thing in parenting, in soccer, and in every process rollout you've ever watched underdeliver. We had the game tape. We had the odds. We rooted for the U.S. anyway. And then we ran our operations the exact same way: wanting something to be true instead of building the system that makes it true.