You've been working on the deal for months, and three days before closing, it evaporates.

You and your wife have had conversations about it. You've already run the numbers about how the money was going to change your life, and then it's gone. Somebody who cares a lot about you stops by to ask you how things are going. Once they find out what's going on, they say the thing that a lot of people say at a time like this…

“Well, everything happens for a reason.”

You nodded in agreement. Because what else would you do to somebody like that who's just trying to help? Then you find yourself saying that same phrase over and over again on your drive home, because you're just trying to make sense of it and you're trying to take some of the weight off.

We Say This All Day Long

We use that phrase to explain a lot of stuff:

Somebody says it every time. Usually more than one somebody.

You and I've heard this so many times that we don't even stop to think about what it actually claims. It sounds like faith. It sounds like maturity. It gets printed on cards and repeated in small groups, and I'd bet you've said it at least once in the last year without thinking about it at all.

Today, I want to take it apart, because I don't think it's true, and I think believing it costs you something that you haven't considered.

What I'm Not Arguing

I will concede that – while I disagree with them – there are plenty of sincere people who believe God authors every single event. Every diagnosis. Every wreck. Every leaf that comes off a tree and lands in one particular spot.

I'm not here to debate that, and this article doesn't require you to change your theology to agree with me. Maybe He does author all of it. That's a longer conversation for a different day.

My question is narrower. What does that sentence do to the person who hears it, and what does it do to you when you say it about your own life?

Why We Reach for It

I believe that the instinct and the origin of this phrase come from a good, well-meaning place, and I think that's important that you understand that before I get into why I don't believe it's true.

When bad things happen and something falls apart, people try to explain it. We want to figure it out, and we want it to mean something, because a meaningless loss is a weight that we don't want to carry with us. What we do is we look for things to explain it away, and this sentence, “Everything happens for a reason” suggests that there's some higher plan, and we just latch onto it without considering it.

It's also important to note that sometimes we say stuff like this because we don't like the silence, this uncomfortable, awkward silence when we know that something needs to be said but we just don't know what to say.

Some friends of ours lost their son to a drunk driver. At the funeral, a woman got to the mother in the receiving line and told her that her own dog had died the week before, so she understood how she was feeling. I don't think that woman is a monster. I think she was standing in front of something unbearable and her mouth moved before her brain could stop it. So when somebody says something like "everything happens for a reason," I believe that's the same reflex this woman used at the funeral, equating her dead dog to this woman's dead son. We say something because saying nothing feels worse. (The truth is, sometimes not saying anything is the best course of action, but I digress.)

The Reason We Say It About Ourselves

We don't only just say this to other people. We also say it to ourselves.

You hired the guy you knew in your gut was wrong.

You didn't read the contract closely enough.

You kept a client three years past the point where the numbers told you to let them go.

You took your eye off the operation because the new thing was more interesting.

Then it falls apart. And a few months later you're telling somebody that everything happens for a reason.

That sentence removes all of your own responsibility, and it places it in the hands of God. If it happened for a reason, it wasn't your call. It was the plan. You weren't a participant, you were a passenger. And in a weird way, you skip all the benefits of what a failure could bring to you by dismissing your personal responsibility in the thing that went sideways.

Never mind the fact that you made the decision, you took the action, you didn't do something you were supposed to do, etc. When it all goes to crap, you just say, "Well, everything happens for a reason," as if you can explain away all of your own ineptitude, inactivity, and bad decisions.

I've watched capable people do this for years and never get better at anything, because they kept attributing to destiny something that was simply the result of their own decisions.

Follow the Logic All the Way Down

If everything happens for a reason, somebody had that reason. Somebody arranged it on purpose.

Picture a father who burns his own son and then explains afterward that he did it so the boy would know how to handle being burned someday. Nobody would call that man good. We'd call the police.

We'd never accept that from a human father, but the sentence assigns exactly that to God and then hands Him a positive motive to make it easier to swallow. When it's a lost deal, that's sloppy thinking. When it's somebody's child, it's cruel.

The Version That's Actually True

So if I'm telling you that "everything happens for a reason" isn't true, then is there any truth in it at all?

Here's what I believe instead. There's a reason to be found inside everything that happens.

This is a different claim entirely. It doesn't require anybody to have caused it. It doesn't put your bankruptcy on God's calendar. It says something can be built out of what happened, and it puts that job on you.

I spent years in Napoleon Hill's material, and this is one of the places where he was exactly right. He wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

The Word Doing the Work Is "Seed"

A seed isn't a benefit. It's the possibility of one. It needs somebody to plant it, and it rots in the package if nobody does.

Nobody in the middle of a bankruptcy stands up and announces that they're currently in the middle of a reason. That's not how any of this works. You're in the middle of a bankruptcy. Three years later, if you did the work, there may be something in your hands that came out of it.

The seed grows slowly and it grows in the dark. You don't get to see it on the day you need it most, which is exactly why the sentence is so tempting on that day.

I've had this happen. I went through an absolutely terrible storm in my life as an entrepreneur several years ago. When I was in the middle of it, it sucked. I didn't see any reason for it whatsoever, and I certainly didn't believe that God was up there somehow manipulating it to make me hurt. Nor did I believe that he was somehow doing it in some altruistic way to bring me to a better place. But what I can tell you today is that going through that storm made me stronger, more resilient, smarter, more adaptable, and certainly more cautious about similar things..which, in turn, made me a better man, a better husband, a better father, a better entrepreneur, and a better coach.

What came out of it is in The Framework That Had to Break, and I couldn't have written a word of that while it was happening.

Waiting Isn't Faith

This is where the two sentences separate.

"Everything happens for a reason" makes you passive. You sit in the rubble and wait for the reason to show up and identify itself, and you call the waiting faith. Months go by. Then a year. I've written about what that pattern costs in Later Never Comes.

"There's a reason to be found in this" sends you looking. The meaning isn't hiding inside the event like a prize in a cereal box. You build it, out of the wreckage, on purpose, over a longer stretch of time than you'd like.

I wrote about my own version of that in The Goal I Didn't Hit.

Two Things to Do With This

The first one is about you, and it will cost you something.

Pick one thing that fell apart in the last few years that you've never made anything out of. You know the one. Stop asking why it happened and go do the accounting. What did you actually decide? What did you see and ignore? What would you do differently with the same information in front of you? Then write down one thing you can build from it this week.

The second one is about other people. The next time somebody's world comes apart, don't say it. Not for the deal, not for the divorce, and especially not at the funeral. Say you're sorry, say you love them, or say nothing and stay in the chair. Job's friends got it right for exactly seven days, sitting on the ground with him without a word. Then they opened their mouths and spent the rest of the book making it worse.

Words of Wisdom

"Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart."

– Proverb 25:20

Three thousand years ago Solomon noticed that cheerful words land on a hurting person like vinegar on an open cut. Don’t be that guy.

The heavy heart doesn't need a song. Most of the time it doesn't need words at all. So just stop saying everything happens for a reason, because sometimes shit happens and there's no reason at all. But if you look hard enough, you can find a seed of an equivalent benefit that will reveal a reason worth knowing after all.

Before You Go...

What's Real? goes out every Wednesday. One lie dismantled, one truth delivered, with the research behind it. If you'd rather have it land in your inbox than check back here, subscribe at therealjasonduncan.com.

And if you run a company or belong to an association that puts on events, and you'd want this kind of talk on the stage, I'm booking keynotes for 2027. Details are at therealjasonduncan.com/speaking.

–The Real Jason Duncan

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– The Real Jason Duncan