We Fear the Wrong Failures

I was watching the Netflix documentary on the James Webb Space Telescope (a $10 billion project that took decades of work). It’s the telescope NASA sent farther into space than any we’ve ever built. There’s a moment where NASA engineer Mike Menzel says something I haven’t forgotten since.

“Webb launched with 344 single-point failures.”

A single-point failure is the kind of mechanism that has zero room for error. If it fails, even once, the entire mission is over. No backup. No second chance. No fix coming.

Nearly all 344 of those single-point failures had to execute in the first 14 days after launch.

Imagine that.

Two straight weeks where every gear, latch, hinge, motor, cable release, and unfolding step had to work.

Perfectly.

If one thing misfired, the most ambitious telescope ever built—$10 billion and decades of work—would’ve become space junk.

But this is the part we don’t talk about:

Only two or three small anomalies happened. None of them mission-ending.

In other words, the most complex machine we’ve ever put in space survived a 14-day tightrope walk where the cost of failure was absolute.

And it made me realize something about how we move through our own lives.

We fear the wrong failures.

We walk around as if every decision is a single-point failure.

As if one mistake destroys the mission.

As if one wrong step collapses everything we’ve built.

As if the stakes of our choices are equivalent to a telescope floating a million miles from Earth.

But they aren’t.

Most of the things we’re terrified of breaking… aren’t mission-critical.

They shake. They stretch. They hold.

We rarely stop long enough to separate:

The things that truly break us

from

the things that only feel like they will.

Look at your life through Webb’s lens for a second:

What are your actual single-point failures?

If they cracked—or a screw became too loose—everything else would suffer.

Your health?

Your relationships?

Your money system?

Your environment?

Your integrity?

These are the few categories where failure is structurally expensive.

Everything else?

Everything else is experimentation.

Everything else is recoverable.

Everything else is learning disguised as friction.

That telescope survived 344 ways to die in two weeks.

You can survive the handful of reversible mistakes standing between you and your next move.

Because the truth is the opposite of what fear tells us:

Most of your life is not a single-point-failure system.

Most things aren’t mission-critical.

Most mistakes don’t break the mission.

We fear the wrong failures.

And once you stop doing that, everything gets easier to attempt—because you finally understand what’s actually at stake.