Frank
It’s the bottom of the eighth in a game the Braves are losing by four runs, and I’m already in the parking lot.
That was me, more times than I want to admit, across too many seasons to count. Not just at games, either. That’s just the example I keep coming back to because the 2021 season put it in the sharpest focus it’s ever been in for me. If you were paying attention to Atlanta baseball that summer, you know exactly what I mean. If you weren’t, here’s the short version: at the All-Star break, the Braves were 44-45. Dead even, leaning slightly toward mediocre. Half the roster was hurt. Ronald Acuña Jr. had just torn his ACL. Most reasonable people had mentally moved on to football season already. I was one of them.
Then they went 44-22 the rest of the way, won the division, and eventually the World Series.
I watched most of the playoff run from my recliner, guilty as hell.
The lesson people usually pull from that story is something about persistence, or never giving up, or trusting the process. Fine. That’s not wrong. But that’s also not the thing that hit me hardest. What hit me was something more specific and more uncomfortable: I didn’t leave because the Braves gave me a reason to leave. I left because staying was inconvenient and I couldn’t tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing how it was going to end.
That’s a different problem entirely.
I do this with a lot of things. I quit a project about three months in when I can’t see clear progress. I’ve walked away from a home lab build that was 70% done because the last 30% felt tedious and the next idea already had more shine on it. I’ve left PowerShell scripts half-finished because they were working well enough and debugging the edge cases felt like it would take forever. And more than once, I’ve driven home early from a game I paid real money to attend because the score looked bad in the sixth inning.
The gas money thing is not a metaphor. I’ve literally burned gas leaving Truist Park before the game was over and then watched the comeback happen on my phone at a red light on I-75.
What I wish I could tell myself five years ago, before the 2021 season rewired something in my thinking, is this: your discomfort with uncertainty is not the same thing as information. I treated the feeling of “this doesn’t look good” as if it were actual data, as if my gut read on a situation at halftime or at the six-month mark of a project was a reliable signal to cut losses. It isn’t. Sometimes it is, sure. But most of the time, that urge to exit is just friction avoidance dressed up as pragmatism.
The 2021 Braves were not secretly great the whole time. They were genuinely struggling. The turnaround wasn’t inevitable, it was earned, pitch by pitch, through August and September. Eddie Rosario hit .560 in the NLCS. That’s not something you could have predicted in July. It just happened because the pieces were still on the board when the moment came.
I think about that a lot now when I’m three hours into something that isn’t working yet. The pieces are still on the board. That’s not nothing.
What I’ve actually changed, practically speaking: I finish things now. Not everything, I’m not a saint. But I set a clearer bar for what “done enough to walk away” looks like before I start. If I’m building something in the home lab and it gets hard, I write down what’s left before I step away, because stepping away without a map means I’m probably not coming back. I stay until the final out on a game I’ve already driven an hour to attend. And when I catch myself mentally checking out of something that isn’t over yet, I at least ask whether I’m leaving because the situation warranted it or because I just hate the feeling of not knowing.
Half the time the honest answer is the second one.
The 2021 World Series banner hangs at Truist Park. I’ve seen it in person. Cost me about twelve bucks in gas to get there and I sat through all nine innings. It felt right, and a little bit like penance.
