Readiness does not guarantee success; it prevents preventable failure.

Preparation is often oversold as a guarantee, and then abandoned when it fails to deliver one. What it actually does is narrower and still valuable: it removes the failures that came from being unready. Bad luck, other people, and the world remain, but you stop contributing your own share.

When you assess a plan, separate the risks you can reduce from the ones you cannot. Spend your energy on the first group and make peace with the second. Judging your preparation by whether it produced a good outcome is the wrong test; judge it by whether the failures that remained were ones you could have prevented.