I was walking to the coffeeshop recently and I misread a message written in chalk on the sidewalk:
I saw “Embrace Near Misses” before my brain read “Embrace New Memories.”
As I acknowledged the misread, I realized something: “Embrace Near Misses” is not something most people would say.
But it is something I would think and say.
I've had a lot of these kinds of near misses in my life, from bullets to wrecks to plane flights to missed proposals.
Some of those near misses were outside of my direct control. In those cases, embracing near misses amounts to being thankful about what didn't happen and examining what I did that may have made that near miss more likely.
Thinking of my deployment, I couldn't control if insurgents were preparing to ambush convoys along the routes we were driving; all I could control or influence is timing my convoys road time for when attacks historically were less likely. There were too many occasions where the convoy before or after us got hit. Whether it was smart tactics, dumb luck, or Providence, I knew to embrace the near misses.
Some near misses, like my non-proposal to Angela in Greece during our college European backpacking trip, were under my control. Even though we both knew the time was right and what the answer would be, I let my brain get in the way. I didn't have a ring. I wasn't sure I could provide the type of life she was used to. And so on.
My head won; our hearts lost.
Embracing these kinds of near misses amounts to preparing yourself for the next time. In the case of the proposal, I learned to discern when head should follow heart. (This was before I knew of the power of regret — H/T Dan Pink — as a heuristic.)
That exact circumstance hasn't come up for me again, thankfully, but I saw the same thing in my best friend as he was falling in love with his partner. His head was leading him to a near miss. I was happy to be there to tell him to lean in.
I officiated their wedding in early May 2026. The same impulse is likely why I've been the godfather of a lot of books and businesses, as well as a catalyst of romantic relationships.
This kind of near miss happens a lot, too, and likely provides just as much of a learning opportunity as the other version. People focus on the fact that it almost wasn't a hit rather than that it was a hit. A last-minute success is still a success; a just passed is still a pass.
Our negativity bias has too much weight on these kinds of near misses. For this kind of near miss, the ‘embrace' should apply to the success, not the ‘near failure.'
I recently facilitated a conversation with a leadership team that was a near miss of this type. In my excitement to guide the next steps and create a bridge for the next phase of the work, I shared something at the end of the meeting that needed more setup and context.
The addition of this undercooked overview nearly drove an otherwise great session off the rails. And, unfortunate for me, I responded to commentary more curtly than I normally would because I realized after the fact that I was also at my cognitive limit.
We all recovered well enough to frame it as an intent rather than a specific assignment right now and the team walked away feeling confident and supported with the planned content and discussion. I followed up with the person I was curt with to apologize and do some repair.
It'd be easy to dwell on the fumble, but that we were able to recover, rally, and realign is what's worth embracing.
As I shared with the three levels of success in Start Finishing, the rigid binary of success or failure often leads people to either make the stakes of a project too high or unable to accept near misses (that were hits) precisely because we reduce the options to extreme success or failure. I didn't meet my own high standards of extreme success, but that also doesn't mean the whole facilitation was a failure.
And for too many people, failure becomes character failure. I wasn't curt because I'm unwilling to hear feedback or dance with the group; I was curt because my early excitement stretched my and the group's limits.
The first rule of these kinds of near misses is to embrace the success/hit. Yes, that means a victory lap is still warranted. It took me a minute to get there with the facilitation, but I got there nonetheless when I realized that the recovery was as laudable as the misstep.
Then assess what was under your influence or control that may have compromised the level of success or made failure more likely. When you do this, don't attribute all the failure modes to your or your team's efforts, nor all the success factors to luck or providence.
“Embrace New Memories” is fine advice.
But I'm keeping and sharing the message I saw rather than the one I read.
