If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, there’s this scene where one of the players, Sam, makes a costly mistake during a game and he’s spiraling in the locker room. Ted pulls him aside, asks what the happiest animal in the world is. Sam’s got no idea. Ted tells him it’s a goldfish.
Goldfish have a ten-second memory. They don’t dwell or replay their mistakes. In their little world, every lap around the same basketball sized fish bowl is brand new.
“Be a goldfish.”
And every time I see that quote, I think the same thing: I wish I could actually do that.
The Wiring
There’s a certain kind of person who replays every awkward conversation for days. Who hears “you’re doing great!” from the people around them and genuinely cannot absorb it, because their internal voice already delivered a different verdict.
I am one of these people.
Living like this is uncomfortable and painful, so our instinct is to treat this like a bug, something to fix, meditate away, therapize out of yourself. Stop caring so much. Be the goldfish.
But I’ve started to think that the agonizing perfectionism and the being-good-at-things are the same trait.
The person who can’t stop thinking about what they said in a meeting is, almost always, the same person who stayed late to fix something everyone else walked past.
You don’t get one without the other. They share a root system.
The Equation
Most of us who carry this didn’t choose it. Somewhere along the way, through whatever nature or nurture happened to shape us, we internalized a simple equation:
$$\text{My worth} = \text{My performance}$$
Once that’s tattooed on your brain, everything becomes high stakes. A small stumble at work isn’t just a bad moment, it’s evidence. You have one “rough” interaction with someone you respect and suddenly, in your own head, you’ve “lost all credibility”. Meanwhile, they probably forgot about it by lunch.
And the logic is rigged. When something goes wrong, it confirms what you already suspected, you’re a failure. When something goes right, it doesn’t count. Fluke, luck, low bar.
You’re the defendant in a courtroom that only hears the prosecution.
To make matters worse, your brain is really good at turning “I made a mistake” into “I am a failure”. The first is a universal human experience. The other is a story your primal brain fabricated as reality to protect itself. The slide between the two is fast, and most of the time you don’t even notice it until you’re already suffering on the other side.
The Bowl
So, back to the goldfish.
The goldfish doesn’t remember the mistake. But it also doesn’t learn from it. Doesn’t grow, doesn’t adapt. It just swims another identical lap in the same small bowl. That’s the part Ted Lasso leaves out. The ten-second memory means ten-second everything.
I’d rather remember. It costs me sleep while I lie awake ruminating, but I’d rather be that person than the one swimming the same lap and not knowing it.
The agonizing and the competence come from the same place. You can’t have the growth without the weight. I don’t think I’d trade it even if I could.
I’m not going to be a goldfish. I’d rather carry all of it and get somewhere than forget everything and swim the same lap forever.