Afraid of Running Out

Many people don’t get stuck because they fail. They get stuck because they’re afraid of running out — of opportunities, of ideas, of viable paths.

What interests me isn’t how people think they should feel, but the quieter stories they carry around and rarely examine. Stories about scarcity. About having one shot. About needing to protect the best option they have. 

There’s a familiar line people reach for when things don’t work out: When one door closes, another door opens. Most people hear that as faith, or luck, or optimism.

I think there’s something more practical going on.

Sometimes doors don’t open because we’re hopeful.

They open because something else finally closed.

Because we stopped trying to prop up a system that no longer worked. 

Because we let go of an identity, a habit, an assumption, that was taking up more space than we realized. 

Because we made room.

Making room

When I was in college, I took a short story writing class. My professor, Dr. Goldberg, once spoke not about how to generate ideas, but about what happens after you have one.

He said too many writers latch onto a single story. They keep revising it endlessly. They keep polishing it. They never finish it — not because it isn’t good, but because they’re afraid it might be the best idea they’ll ever have. 

They don’t want to waste it.

He told us that was exactly the problem.

You need to finish the story. Get it out. Be done with it.

Not because it isn’t good—but because holding onto it leaves no room for what comes next.

At the time, that felt backward. Why wouldn’t you protect the best thing you have?

Over time, I noticed  something. Finishing things didn’t reduce the number of ideas available to me. to. It increased them.

And that pattern wasn’t limited to writing.

People who committed, wrapped things up, or moved on — rather than lingering — didn’t end up with fewer options. They ended up with different ones. Often better ones.

I’ve just seen it play out too many times to ignore.

Waiting Feels Safe. It Isn't.

Years later, I see the same pattern everywhere — just not with short stories.

It shows up  in careers, creative work, strategic decisions. In people who quietly believe they have one good idea, one viable role, one real opportunity, one credible path — and that choosing poorly means there won’t be another.

That belief changes behavior.

People wait.

They wait to hear back about the job before pursuing another lead.
They wait to see if the project gets approved before starting something else.
They wait for clarity before making a move.

It feels responsible. It feels focused.

Mostly, it burns time.

While they wait, nothing new enters the picture. Momentum fades. The pipeline doesn’t refill. The optionality they think they’re protecting quietly shrinks.

When Success Doesn't Stick

There’s another pattern I notice alongside this.

Some people have been successful — sometimes once, sometimes several times — and still don’t think of what they did as something they own.

They call it luck. Timing. Circumstance. Serendipity.

Anyone could have done it.
It just worked out.

They’re often correct about the causes. Timing matters. Context matters. Serendipity plays a role. In complex systems, outcomes are never fully attributable to effort alone.

Where things break down isn’t in acknowledging luck, but in stopping there.

When success is explained entirely by circumstance, it leaves nothing to examine. No attempt to separate signal from noise. No effort to identify what — however small — was actually in one’s control.

The result is that success never turns into something reusable. It doesn’t turn into a skill. It doesn’t travel with them when the context changes.

This often gets mistaken for humility.

In practice, it’s more often an unfinished analysis. Especially among thoughtful, capable people who can see how many variables had to align but stop short of asking whether any of their decisions meaningfully improved the odds, or under what conditions they might do so again.

The Mirrors We Rely On

Part of the reason this persists is that most people rarely decide they’re good at something on their own.

They decide based on mirrors.

Co-workers. Managers. Mentors. People they trust.

And there aren’t enough of those mirrors reflecting strengths back clearly and consistently

When no one names your strengths out loud, it’s easy to assume what worked before was a fluke- non transferable, fragile, and context-dependent.

So instead of seeing skills as reusable assets, people see a narrow path that feels fragile to step off from.

Berkson’s Bits

If you don’t have a mentor — at any stage of your career — you’re making things harder than they need to be.

I’m enormously grateful for mine.

What I'm Listening...

This is a talk by Peter Kaufman, long-time friend of the legendary Charlie Munger, on what he calls a "multidisciplinary approach to thinking.” He describes his system for learning across silos and finding the simple truths in complex topics.

I’ve written before about uncertainty and the future. There are plenty of unknowns ahead. But they’re not all threats.

Some of them are simply things we can’t see yet. New ideas. New roles. New paths that only appear once something else is finished, released, or let go.

What I keep coming back to is how often holding onto things too tightly doesn’t preserve possibility. More often, it does the opposite.

Ideas don’t disappear when you finish them.
Opportunities don’t dry up because you pursued more than one.
Skills don’t vanish just because you haven’t named them yet.

Sometimes the thing that feels like restraint is the thing quietly closing doors.

Making room isn’t reckless.

It’s often how the next thing finds you.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation…
Alan