Battle Scars Make You Calm

Brandon Chu on weathered perspective: 'Once you've had a few battle scars of things that you thought were going to ruin everything, your career, your reputation, and then actually nothing happened, you just start to raise the bar about what's actually important.'

New parents treat every fever like an emergency. Every sleep regression like a catastrophe. Every playground incident report like a harbinger of future criminal behavior.

The first time baby falls and hits their head? Terrifying. By the third kid? Check their pupils, give them a popsicle, move on.

This isn't callousness - it's calibration. You've seen enough 'emergencies' that resolved themselves. Enough 'disasters' forgotten by next week. Enough 'failures' that became funny stories.

The goal isn't to stop caring. It's to save your panic for when it's actually warranted. And the only way to calibrate is through the scars - the accumulation of false alarms that teach you what a real alarm actually looks like.

Experience doesn't make you numb. It makes you accurate.