There are days when the universe seems to be in a good mood.
You leave the house five minutes late and still catch every green light. The Wi-Fi hums along without a single frozen Zoom face. The numbers in your spreadsheet balance on the first try with no mysterious rounding error lurking in cell H37.
It feels rare. Almost suspicious.
Because we’re trained to expect the opposite: a queue when you’re in a rush, an error message just when you’re ready to send, a client who delivers 60% of what you asked for and calls it “everything.”
Our instinct is to search for holes. To brace for the thing that’s going to wobble, fail, or throw the whole plan off course. And yet… every now and then the holes fill themselves. The email comes in early. The formula runs clean. The client actually delivers the full trial balance. No chasing, no drama.
That’s not luck. That’s design.
And there’s a quiet lesson stitched inside it.
Success isn’t this mysterious external force. It’s a formula:
Success = Reality – Expectations
When expectations tower above reality, disappointment follows.
When reality quietly beats our expectations, that’s when joy sneaks in.
The sweet spot? Aligning the two. Not lowering the bar to “barely passable,” and not setting it so high that no team on earth could meet it. But shaping reality and expectations so they match. So that work flows, not fights.
That’s what the best systems do.
They take the randomness out of “good days” and make them reproducible. What felt like chance becomes structure. What looked like luck becomes workflow.
Audits are no different. One clean instruction, one organised file, one tool that makes the sample appear in seconds instead of hours. That’s how you get a “stars aligned” day, not once in a blue moon, but every week.
So here’s to fewer gaps, fewer surprises, and more days where the pieces click into place.
Not because luck showed up, but because structure did.
Until next time,
Christiaan
P.S. What’s your “stars aligned” moment? That one time reality pleasantly exceeded expectations. Hit reply, I’d love to hear the story.
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