One task after the next

 Fairy tales and myths are often frank about what we can expect from life. The story I've been telling my son at night—because I can add a lot of "No, no, no's!", which he likes, and chants to, because "no" is his favourite thing right now—is Rumpelstiltskin.

A girl is in a bind. She has a silly dad who tells a lie: That she can spin straw into gold. Loose-lipped parents, beware! The king hears about it and locks her in a tower, charged with performing the task overnight under pain of death.

It's impossible. But help arrives: Rumpelstiltskin, who offers to do it in exchange for a ring she's wearing. She makes the trade, the task is done ... but her reward is another night in a bigger room, with a bigger pile of straw to spin, and it goes on like that, so she keeps making these deals until she has nothing of value to mortgage but the future: A child, which she might have if she completes all the tasks and becomes queen.

She takes the deal, mortgages that future. Years later, when these events take on the filmy countenance of a dream, that mean elf comes calling, demanding the baby in her arms.

The story ends well. The girl follows her intuition—negotiates with him, 3 days to learn his name—and gets lucky: She happens to see him in the woods, preemptively celebrating his victory and singing his own name to himself. The harm abates, the elf defeated. She keeps her child and gets a kingdom.

The story is potent because of the precariousness of that outcome. In life, we muddle through impossible tasks, only to be rewarded by harder, worse tasks. We scrape through again, negotiate, mortgage things we don't have because what are the odds, what does it matter right now?

Sometimes those deals bear out and sometimes they don't. It helps to know who and what you're negotiating with, and you can't always know that. Sometimes you just get lucky.

There's so much on LinkedIn about how we are the engines of our own success. That's never really the case; "success" is a moving target composed of constellations of events, actors and luck we can't imagine ... and sometimes what we perceive to be someone's success isn't success at all. What we're looking at is an apparently good outcome, for now, mortgaged against the future.

It helps to remember that so we don't get into our heads about who's winning and who's falling behind. We don't know if the kingdom will fall into our hands, or whether somebody else is holding the kingdom or an IOU.

The best we can know is, once this impossible task is done, we can expect a tougher next task. It will probably require help—sometimes compromising, sometimes freely given (as in Cupid and Psyche, who enjoys relentlessly generous help for impossible tasks). That's the game we're in and it's the same for everyone, regardless of what their story looks like.

So do your thing as best you can. Don't fall under the illusion you don't need help. Mind what's asked in exchange, and remember all futures hang on a coin toss.