We’ve all suffered from sleepless nights—or weeks—when something important is on the horizon and is stressing us out. Maybe it’s a big meeting with an important client, an interview for a job you desperately need, or maybe your boss just texted you before you got in bed, “Let’s chat tomorrow.” (We’ve all been there.)
Whatever it is, it’s easy to let it eat us alive. But Harry Truman had a better way.
On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt breathed his last in Warm Springs, Georgia. That night, at 7:09 P.M., Vice President Harry S Truman was sworn in as President of the United States.
“Did you sleep,” Merle Miller asked in an interview with Truman years later about that day. “Of course,” he said. And right away, too.
Truman continued:
I knew I had a big day coming up. I had to sleep.
[…]
If you’ve done the best you can—if you have done what you have to do—there is no use worrying about it because nothing can change it, and to be in a position of leadership…you have to give thought to what’s going to happen the next day and you have to be fresh for…what you have to do the next day. What you’re going to do is more important than what you have done.
Miller: If you’ve done the best you can.
Truman: That’s right. That’s the main thing. A man can’t do anything more than that. You can’t think about how it would be…if you had done another thing.
“If you’ve done the best you can, there’s no use worrying about it…”
There are two takeaways from this:
- If you’ve done the best you can, leave it at that and get some sleep.
- If you’re perpetually worried, maybe you know that you didn’t do the best that you could’ve. Perhaps there’s a small part of your “worry” saying, “I could’ve made that a little better, and I didn’t.” Or “I could’ve prepared more, but it’s too late.”
If that’s the case, now you know for next time.
I guess another takeaway is the idea that –