You Are Not Your Last Commit

You shipped a bug.
You broke the build.
You said the wrong thing in review.

And now a voice says
that's who you are.

It's lying.

You are not your last commit.
You are not your worst day,
your one bad estimate,
the outage with your name on it.

A single failure feels total
only because it's recent.
Give it a week.
Give it a fix.
Watch it shrink
to what it actually was —
one moment in a long line of them.

The engineers you admire
have a graveyard of mistakes
behind their calm.
They just stopped
mistaking the mistake
for the person.

Fix it. Learn it. Move.
The next commit
is also you.

– Serguey Asael Shinder