Don't Become the Victim
Pierre Teo · Published · Mental models
I've been dealing with some setbacks recently, and an old Travis Kalanick interview helped me process them. His advice: don't get into the victim mindset.
Before Uber, Kalanick had Scour, which got sued for $250 billion and went bankrupt. Then Red Swoosh, which nearly died several times and paid him almost nothing for years. A lot of bad things happened to him, but his point was that the story we tell about them decides what we do next. If the story is "this was done to me," the natural next move is to defend, resent, and wait for justice. If the story is "this happened, and some of it I can act on," the next move is to act.
The victim mindset isn't about whether we've actually been treated unfairly. We may well have been. It's a stance toward events — one where we locate all the causes outside ourselves. It feels protective in the moment, because it means we're not at fault. But it quietly hands away our leverage.
The way out isn't to flip the story to "actually, it was all my fault." It's to drop the question of fault entirely and ask a smaller, more boring one: what specifically happened, and which parts of it are mine to change?
Whatever the setback made us feel — resentment, embarrassment, anger, plain disappointment — is probably valid and real, not a character flaw. Getting close and missing hurts more than missing by a mile, and rejection after real effort is a legitimate thing to feel bad about. The warning isn't "don't feel it." It's "don't move in." We feel it, then we go back to the smaller question.
"Take total ownership" is easy advice from people who ended up winning. There are real situations where the game was rigged from the start — the decision made before we walked in, the rules written for someone else, the timing simply wrong. The useful version is to act as if the parts we can influence are the parts that matter — because those are the only parts we can do anything about.