A wrong turn doesn’t make you lost forever. It just adds a few minutes to the drive.

Most mistakes are smaller than they feel in the moment right after you make them. The panic comes from imagining the error as permanent, when almost everything is correctable at some cost in time. Being off route is a position, not an identity. What makes people lost is stopping, or refusing to look at where they are.

When you get something wrong, work out the actual size of the correction before deciding how to feel about it. Usually it is smaller than the feeling suggests. Then take the next turn rather than rehearsing the last one.