July 14, 2026 | Issue Archive
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Are you judging by the snapshot? Or the movie
A reporter famously asked Giannis Antetokounmpo if a season without a championship was a failure.
He didn’t get defensive, but he was clearly bothered by the premise.
“Do you get a promotion every year on your job? No, right? So every year you work is a failure, yes or no? No. Every year you work towards a goal... It’s not a failure. It’s steps to success.”
Then he pointed to Michael Jordan. Fifteen seasons. Six championships.
Were the other nine “losing” years failures?
It made me think... You can run the same math on Kobe Bryant. LeBron James. Tom Brady. The pattern is the same.
Then there’s Marta.
Six World Cups. Six Olympic Games. Widely regarded as the greatest women’s soccer player ever to step on a field.
She spent two decades chasing the biggest prizes in soccer—and never held either one.
By the logic that only the trophy counts, her entire career was a failure.
Of course, no one who has ever watched her play believes that.
This Ends Now
End the habit of judging your life by the snapshot.
A snapshot is one frame.
Today.
This quarter.
This year.
Zoom in that close and life feels like a roller coaster—up when things are up, down when things are down.
Zoom out and you get the movie.
The greatest competitors who ever lived spent most of their careers—sometimes all of their careers—without holding the trophy everyone remembers. That didn’t make those years failures. They were the years the greatness was being built.
None of this minimizes the hard years.
That deserves to be said again:
None of this minimizes the hard years.
They still hurt.
Marta still walked off six World Cup pitches without the trophy.
Jordan still lost playoff series.
Brady watched Super Bowls from home.
You still feel the disappointment of the year that didn’t go the way you hoped.
The point isn’t to pretend those moments don’t matter.
It’s to remember they aren’t the final frame.
My 2008 journal reads: lost, empty, depressed. An unhealthy marriage. A business being crushed by the recession.
My 2018 journal reads: grateful. Our best year in fifteen years. A year removed from the divorce that made a different future possible.
Same person.
Different chapter.
Had I judged my life by the 2008 snapshot, I would have completely misread the story.
I’ve found this to be true:
We overestimate what we can do in a year.
We underestimate what we can do in a decade.
This Moment Matters
Whatever this year’s snapshot looks like, don’t grade the decade by it.
And don’t pretend the hard parts didn’t happen.
Ask yourself the question hiding underneath Giannis’ answer:
What’s keeping me from the next level?
A belief?
A habit?
A story you’ve been replaying for too long?
Name it today.
Not because it fixes the whole picture.
Because it’s the next frame in a much longer movie than you can see right now.
I’m better today than I was yesterday.
So are you.
Up we go—
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