There's that Nietzsche line everyone half-remembers. Gaze long into an abyss and the abyss gazes back into you. He meant it as a warning. I've always taken it as an instruction. The thing you're dodging is sizing you up the whole time you dodge it, and the longer you won't look at it square, the better it knows exactly where you're soft.
I've been at this since 2007. Company after company, in more industries than I can keep straight on a given day. Some of those years I'm proud of. A good few I flat wasted, and when I go back over them the wasted ones nearly all share a thing, there was something staring me in the face that I just would not turn and look at. With other people I'm fine. A mate shows me his business and I'll have put my finger on the sore spot before he's done explaining it. Then I go home to my own and somehow I've got a dozen good reasons it's all under control.
Why your own eyes lie
Fly a plane up into cloud and you lose the horizon. Nothing out the window to fix on, so your inner ear just makes one up for you. Tells you which way's up, dead certain, and gets it wrong more often than you'd ever believe. Pilots have a name for it, spatial disorientation. Trust your body over the dials in that situation and you'll fly a perfectly good aircraft straight into a field, calm the whole way down, sure you're flying level right up until you aren't.
The fix is one line and it's a swine to follow. Believe the dial, not the feeling in your gut. Everything in your body will tell you the dial's wrong and you're fine. It's lying. I've sat looking at a number that meant a hire wasn't working, or a product was done, with my whole gut insisting the number was a fluke. The gut was the fluke. It pretty much always is, in that exact moment, and that's the one moment it shouts loudest.
The abyss is widest under the things you love
The first company you build is the one you go blind on. Mine was a media business, set it up in my twenties. I treated the thing like it was part of my own body, so any time a signal came in saying it had to change shape, it stung like somebody insulting me to my face. Took me an embarrassingly long while to work out the business didn't have a view on me one way or the other. It just did what the market and the numbers pushed it to do. I was the only one in the room having feelings about it.
Took me years to see this and I still trip on it. Whatever you're most attached to is whatever you can see least clearly, so the attachment is itself the warning sign. The more sure you are that some bad reading must be a glitch, the more likely it's bang on and your certainty is the broken part. You don't get blindsided by the corners of your life you're indifferent about. It's always the marriage, or the product you've built your name on, or your whole sense of who you are. The stuff you've gone round telling everyone you're certain of. That's where people will happily fly it into the dirt rather than turn their head and look.
It wears your own virtues as a disguise
Refusing to look at the panel almost never feels like fear. That's what makes it so dangerous. It feels like good airmanship. I once flew a dying heading for the best part of a year and the word I had taped over the warning light the whole time was loyalty. A senior hire I knew in my gut wasn't working. Turning the aircraft meant letting him go, and letting him go meant admitting I'd filed a duff flight plan, so I left the warning light covered and flew on. He'd joined when we were small. He'd stayed through a stretch when others bailed. A loyal captain doesn't throw a man like that out the door at altitude. Every bit of that was true, and I leaned on all of it, and the gauge kept reading the same regardless.
So now when I catch myself grabbing for one of those words to explain why I've not acted yet, I treat it as a light flashing on the panel. Most times it means the reading already came in days ago and I'm just stalling, dressing the stall up as something more respectable.
Not every dark patch is the abyss
The opposite skill matters every bit as much, mind. Treat every uncomfortable feeling as a true reading and you turn into the bloke who second-guesses every heading and never holds a course long enough to get anywhere. I've been that too, and honestly it's the more irritating of the two failures to be around.
Mind you, not every twitch on the dial means something. Hit a bit of rough air and the needle jumps about, then a moment later it's steady again and you were never actually off course. Pull the controls hard every time one flickers and you'll have everyone on board green and you'll still never get where you're going. The ones that matter are the readings that won't settle. You climb out of the bad air, the sky goes smooth, you've had a proper sleep, and there it still is, the same number it was showing you in the dark at two in the morning, not budging an inch no matter how calm everything around it has gone.
You spend the years either way
"Why are we still paying for this?" a board member asked me one quarter, about a software product I'd quietly given up on the best part of two years before. I started in on the usual line, that we were iterating, that it deserved a fair run, and I could hear how hollow it sounded before I'd got to the end of the sentence. He was right. I'd known he was right for the better part of a year. I'd just parked it off to one side, opening the dashboard every morning, looking at the same dead flat usage line, closing it again and getting on with something that felt more like real work. Honestly I'm not sure what I thought was going to change. Nothing was going to change. I think I just didn't fancy being the person who'd have to say it was over.
From the ground the slow death and the fast pivot look the same for a long while. Both are full of meetings and motion and people who appear to be getting somewhere. You genuinely cannot tell them apart from outside the aircraft. From the pilot's seat you can tell in a second. One of them is actually flying the readings. The other is flying on feel with a bit of tape over the gauges, because the person at the controls already half-knows what they'd say and would rather not have it spelt out at altitude.
The abyss is worse from the edge
The worst part of the worst thing that ever happened to me was the run-up, not the event. For months I could tell roughly what was coming and I kept dodging it, organising my days so I never had to sit and properly think about it. Then it landed. Freezing orders, the lot. And the strange thing is I felt steadier the day it actually hit than I had in the months before, because at last there was a real thing to deal with, a date in the diary, jobs to do, instead of this fog I'd been hauling about that I couldn't get a grip on. Smaller stuff has gone the same way for me since. A product I held onto a year too long, that sort of thing. The dread is always fatter than the problem. I just keep forgetting it until I'm in there.
How to fly on instruments
A few things have helped me get better at this, for what they're worth. The first one's almost embarrassingly basic. I put the worst number first. On every deck and every update, the figure that breaks the model goes at the top of the page where I have to walk straight past it. I learned that the hard way. For years the ugly number lived on slide forty in an appendix nobody scrolled to, me included, and a number you've buried in an appendix is a number you've already decided not to read. So now it goes first, before any of the comfortable stuff, and I make myself sit with it for a moment before I'm allowed to move on to the parts I like.
The other thing that helped was giving the dread a slot. I used to let a decision rattle around for weeks, picking it up and putting it down, never actually finishing it. Now I block out a day, sit with the thing properly, get someone outside to give me a read on it, and come out the other end having either changed course or genuinely parked it until something new turns up. There's a balance to find that took me ages. Look at the panel too rarely and you've locked yourself onto a bad heading without noticing. Check it every five minutes and you never commit to any heading at all, you just twitch.
Keep a co-pilot who'll actually call the dial. Not someone who nods along with you. Someone close enough to be blunt with you and clear-headed enough to spot which gauge you're staring at while the one that matters quietly drifts off. Your own instruments tend to fail in precisely the moments you need them most, when you're flooded with your own adrenaline, so you want a second set of eyes that aren't.
Stand next to people who fly on instruments. Watch how fast a good operator will believe a reading they hate and then act on it anyway, no sulking, no week of mourning. The reflex is learnable. Sit near it long enough and the bit of you that flinches slowly turns itself around and starts reaching for the ugly number instead of away from it. That turnaround is honestly the most useful thing I've ever picked up off anyone, and I picked it up entirely by watching it get done in front of me.
Questions
Some uncomfortable but hopefully useful ones to sit with.
– Which dial have you quietly stopped reading because you don't like what it says? – What are you flying on feel right now that you could be flying on data? – Which of your good qualities are you using as cover for not making a call? – Which project or hire or commitment is still alive only because ending it would mean admitting what it cost? – What does someone close to you already know about your situation that you're still treating as an open question? – Write the worry down as a flat claim about the world. Does it survive, or was it just weather? – If you'd seen this reading before takeoff, would you have bothered leaving the ground? – What's the smallest check that would tell you the thing you most don't want to be true?
The far side
The work I'm trying to do now is large and slow, the kind of thing you measure in decades and in billions of people, and you don't get anywhere near a target like that by being right at takeoff. Nobody's right at takeoff. You get there by being quicker than everyone else at working out when you were wrong, and the only people who are quick at that are the ones who've stopped being scared of the abyss.
So let it gaze back. Read off what it's got on you. Then turn the aircraft before the feeling has finished making its case, and fly out the far side while the people who wouldn't look are still up there circling, calm and certain and very slowly losing height.