You get tired, then you make a mistake — but it’s not always a regrettable one.
It begins as a law of nature, immutable as gravity: you get tired, then you make a mistake.
Fatigue is the universal solvent of precision. It erodes willpower, blurs the surgeon’s line, and sharpens a lover’s tongue. Systems fail — from the human body to the vast, humming grid of commerce — not from a lack of courage, but from a simple deficit of energy. This is the first truth, the one etched in the ledger of loss.
But there is a second, more mysterious truth.
Sometimes, exhaustion does not lead to error but to surrender. We grow too tired to hold the old grief, too weary to force the familiar shapes. And in that release, we stumble into a different kind of seeing.
Alexander Fleming, his mind and lab both cluttered, left a petri dish unattended. He returned to a mess. And within that neglected dish, he saw it: a ring of death around a mould — the unplanned birth of penicillin. Jackson Pollock, fatigued by the tyranny of the brush, let paint fall and fly, discovering a unique chaos that inspired a generation of painters.
We rarely consider the effects of our tired behaviour in the moment; that vision is only granted in hindsight. The world’s great breakthroughs are often not achievements of will, but artefacts of exhaustion — happy accidents witnessed only after the guard of perfectionism falls.
There is a strange grace in this.
Fatigue dismantles the arrogant idea that mastery is the sole source of meaning. It humbles us. It forces us to create not from a place of tight control, but from a looser, more honest core — a place where the door to failure and the path to discovery are one and the same.
So yes, the law stands: you get tired, then you make a mistake.
But if you are brave enough not to look away, you might find that the mistake was not an ending.
It was the crack where the light got in.
