PJ Fleck has “This too shall pass” tattooed on his Achilles.
It’s not just the downs that shall pass, but also the ups.
Source: PJ Fleck interview on the Next Up podcast.
We autopsy our losses but toast our wins. Both deserve the same scrutiny.
“This too shall pass” is almost always deployed as comfort during hard times. Fleck flips it: the highs are temporary too. That reframes the phrase from passive reassurance into active urgency.
But the urgency isn’t just about presence. It’s about intentionality within the moment, whether that moment is good or bad:
- We’re disciplined about examining failure. Something goes wrong, you do the post-mortem, you figure out what broke.
- We’re lazy about examining success. Something goes right, you celebrate and move on. You don’t stop to ask why it worked, what clicked, what was different.
- The real cost of an unexamined high isn’t that you didn’t enjoy it. It’s that you missed the lesson buried inside it.
What lasts isn’t the moment itself. Moments always pass. What lasts is what you build during them: relationships, self-knowledge, authenticity. But building requires examination, and we skip that step when things are going well.
The valley and namer framework established that suffering produces growth when someone names what it built. This extends that: the highs contain just as much signal as the lows, but we rarely extract it because celebration feels like enough.
Connects to The Valley and the Namer and No Regrets Decision Making.