Yesterday, I was thinking about sorrow, sadness, and pain that are avoidable but happen anyway.

Beyond Your Control or Human Factor?

While some things are natural, for instance, people live and die. Others are beyond your control, like regulatory oppression.

But then, there’s the incompetent doctor who threatens your life but whom you have to deal with because you can’t afford better.

There’s the friend who hurts you. The condition could have been prevented by eating right or taking care of your health.

The professionals who put you in trouble—your lawyers and accountants.

These things are avoidable but keep happening anyway.

Personal Saga

I remember an accounting issue I had to resolve by wading through one year of financial statements myself. At the time, I knew if I wasn’t obsessive about details, I would have been in trouble.

But doing things yourself is unsustainable. In a company, you can’t read every document. You will essentially be doing the quality control work of those professionals while they get full pay. This is true whether you’re dealing with staff or contractors.

Problems of Scale

Even in my organization, I’ve had to deal with problems of scale. How do we maintain quality as the team grows when each person is at a different level of professional expertise? How do we protect our clients from teething problems in IT, operations, or customer service?

In my personal life, how do I take care of other people while trying to manage my own health, well-being, and dreams?

And how do I ensure I’m not just running around putting out fires without moving forward? These things keep me up at night.

Most Insidious Problems

These days, I’m learning that the most insidious problems in life appear to be avoidable.

It’s easier to accept a situation when it’s beyond you or related to nature. But issues that are due to human factors really hurt because they seem so needless and wasteful. You even blame yourself sometimes because you didn’t have the bandwidth or the wherewithal to prevent them.

Need for Competence

In this life, you must accept that you need people, and you ought to carefully select those around you when you have a choice.

You will only thrive when you can focus on your core while other competent people handle other items. When everything is on you, you will suffer and then break.

Ask for help, collaborate, and insist on competence. It just might save your life.

For more, read What’s Stopping You?