The Freedom on the Other Side of Disappointment

I was listening to Jim Collins on Adam Grant’s ReThinking podcast this week at the gym on my cruise, and one idea stopped me cold.

Collins talked about a shift he’d made over the years — moving away from being frustrated about what people aren’t, and toward being grateful for what they are.

I had to pause the episode. It SO spoke to me.

Because there’s a colleague I’ve been quietly carrying around in my head for months — not for who he is, but for who I expected him to be.

I thought he was kind. Principled. The kind of person who would do the right thing when the right thing was costly.

I won’t get into the details — they aren’t the point. What I’ll say is this: the man I admired turned out to be a virtuoso of the commercial. The polished thirty seconds. Less recognizable in the unedited footage, when the moments came that really tested character.

For a while, I let that occupy real estate in my head. Frustration. Disappointment. The slow disbelief of watching someone reveal themselves to be smaller than the version you’d carried.

Then Collins, in one sentence, handed me the way out.

Here’s the trap I’d been in: I wasn’t disappointed in him. I was disappointed in the person I thought he was, perhaps that I’d made up.

I’d built a story about who he was. Cast him in it. And when he didn’t deliver the lines I’d written, I called it betrayal. It wasn’t betrayal. It was data.

Once I saw that, the air came back into the room.

This is the gift Collins is offering, and I think more of us should accept it.

Most of us are walking around with a quiet ledger — the colleague who let us down, the boss who didn’t see us, the friend who didn’t show up the way we needed, the leader who said the right things and did the other ones. We carry these stories like they’re requirements. They’re not. They’re choices.

You can put the ledger down. You really can.

Being grateful for what people are doesn’t mean accepting bad behaviour. It doesn’t mean keeping someone in your inner circle who has proved they don’t belong there. It means refusing to let your nervous system be hijacked by the gap between your expectations and their reality.

It means seeing people as they actually are — and being grateful for whatever is real, even when it’s smaller than what you’d hoped for.

The leaders I most respect have figured this out. They notice when someone reveals their character, and they let the information do its job. They adjust proximity, expectations, trust. They stop spending energy on the gap. They start spending it on the people who are actually who they say they are.

That’s where the real generosity lives. Not in pretending. Not in resentment. In clear eyes.

So here’s the invitation. Pick the person who’s been taking up too much real estate in your head. The one you keep waiting to be different.

Stop waiting. See them. Be grateful for whatever real thing they are. And spend the rest of your nervous system on the people who deserve it.

Less fiction. Less frustration. More clarity.

That’s the trade Collins is offering. It’s a good one.