The Crashed Fighter Jet and the Problem With Expectations

The other day I was driving home from practice with my son when he mentioned a newly built fighter jet that had crashed. I had not heard about it, so he started explaining what happened, then said, very matter-of-factly:

“It was a huge waste of time to build it.”

What struck me was not the comment itself. I say versions of that kind of thing all the time.

What struck me was hearing it from him.

I told him that was one way to look at it, but maybe not the only way.

The people who built that plane got paid while they built it. They fed their families. They practiced their craft. They learned. And if mistakes were made, those mistakes would help make the next plane better and less likely to suffer the same fate. If all of that is true, then can we really call it a waste?

He paused for a second and said, “Huh. I guess so.”

That small moment stuck with me, and as we kept driving the idea kept unfolding.

When Do We Call Something a Waste?

I think we usually call something a waste when we wanted one very specific outcome and did not get it.

If the only reason to build that plane was for it to fly perfectly forever, then yes, a crash feels like total failure. But life is rarely that narrow. Very few things produce just one result.

Work can create paychecks, headaches and connections.

Effort can build experience, disipline and confidence.

Mistakes can generate information.

Disappointments can also provide perspective, if we are open enough to it.

So sometimes things or outcomes aren’t a waste or pointless. Maybe they simply did not fulfill the original plan in the way we hoped.

That is different.

And that distinction matters more than it seems.

A Lot of Frustration Comes From Worshipping the Planned Outcome

As I kept talking, I realized I was not really talking to him anymore. I was talking to myself with him in the car.

I started thinking about how often I get frustrated by a meeting, a change in direction, a delay, a misunderstanding, or some piece of work that does not land the way I wanted it to.

Why does it get under my skin so much?

Because somewhere in my head I had already decided what should happen.

The meeting should be shorter.

The plan should stay the same.

The code should work the first time.

The person should understand my point immediately.

The effort should produce the exact result I pictured.

When reality does not cooperate, I am tempted to call the whole thing pointless. A waste of time. A bad day. A setback.

However the pain in those moments is not coming from the event itself. It is coming from my attachment to the expectation I created beforehand. Expectations that I may not have even noticed I had at the outset.

This Shows Up in Development All the Time

Even though this is bigger than code, it absolutely shows up in software work.

You spend hours building something and the requirement changes.

You refactor a feature and later realize you need to scrap the whole thing because you have more information.

You sit through a meeting that does not produce the decision you wanted, or any tangible decision.

You chase down a bug and find out the real value of the effort was not just fixing the bug, but finally understanding a part of the system you had been fuzzy on for months.

We call those things wastes when we judge them only by the original target.

But if the work gave you clarity, context, stronger relationships, better instincts, cleaner code, deeper questions, or a better next attempt, then it did more than fail.

It produced something.

Maybe not the thing you wanted most. But not nothing.

The Hard Part Is Living Like You Believe This

I said something along these lines to my son: if I really believed that my desired outcome is not always the only valuable one, it would be a lot harder for me to get truly angry about things.

Then he looked at me deadpan and asked:

“So you’re going to chill out about my class work?”

Fair enough.

We laughed, but honestly, he got right to the heart of it.

It is easy to say these things in the abstract. It is harder to model them in real life, especially as a parent, teammate, or person with responsibilities. If I want him to learn how to handle disappointment, course corrections, and unmet expectations, then I have to show him what that looks like.

Not perfectly. Just honestly.

That means when I start to get annoyed, I need to remember that crashed fighter jet and that car ride.

It means asking:

What outcome did I decide I was entitled to here?

What else might this situation be producing that I am refusing to see?

What can still be gained, even if the original plan is gone?

Maybe the Outcome Is Not the Real Problem

Sometimes the outcome is bad. I am not arguing that every result is secretly good, or that disappointment is fake, or that we should never care about results.

Results matter.

But expectations matter too, because they shape how we experience those results.

I know one person who will succeed or win and be more angry than if they lost; because they didn’t win the way they wanted.

Sometimes the thing making us miserable is not only what happened. It is the story we wrote in advance about what had to happen.

That is what I am trying to pay more attention to now.

Not just in development. Not just in parenting. In life in general.

Because sometimes the outcome is not the problem.

The expectation beforehand is.