Mistakes look huge from the inside and tiny from a year away. Walk a year away in your head before you panic.

Distance does to embarrassment what it does to everything else, which is reduce it to its real proportions. Inside the moment there is no sense of scale, because the mistake fills all the available space and you cannot see next month behind it. A year out, it is a detail somebody has to remind you of.

When something goes wrong, ask what this will look like next September. If you cannot picture it, check how much weight last year’s disaster carries now.