The meeting ran for ninety minutes. The part that mattered took about ninety seconds.

The work I had been on for eighteen months was stopping. I would be moving to do something else. There were reasons, and they were reasonable ones. Priorities had changed, and I could follow the logic without any difficulty at all.

I said I understood. I asked a couple of questions, although I knew that the decision had already been made. Then the call ended, and I sat at my desk for a few minutes, and then I joined the next meeting on my calendar, because there was a next meeting on my calendar. I don’t think I contributed anything useful to it.

That evening I thought about not mentioning it at home. Not because it was a secret, but because saying it out loud would make it true, and I wasn’t ready for it to be true yet. I told my wife anyway, somewhere between the front door and the kitchen, in the flat voice people use when they are trying to sound fine.

She let me finish. Then she asked whether I was angry about the decision or sad that it was over.

I said I didn’t know. She waited, the way she does. I said probably both, and that the second one was worse.

That question was more useful to me than any advice would have been. Anger about the decision would have been a problem with the company. Sadness that it was over was a problem with me, and it was the honest one. I wasn’t upset that a judgment call had gone a particular way. I was upset because I had put a part of myself into something and it had stopped. Those are not the same thing.

I stayed disappointed for about two days. I think that was roughly the right amount.

There is an idea that resilience means being unaffected, that you receive a bad news at 10 a.m. and being completely unaffected by 10:05. I have never met anyone like that, and I am not sure I would want to work with them. What I have noticed in the people I admire is something else: they feel it properly, and then they are finished with it sooner than most.

Those first two days were not spent thinking clearly. When something you have worked on stops, your mind does not leave it as a decision about a piece of work. It grows. Was the effort wasted. Did I fail. What does this say about me, at this stage, after twenty years. None of those questions came up in the meeting. I brought all of them in myself.

A few days later my wife said something in passing that I have thought about since. She said the last eighteen months were the most engaged she had seen me in a long time. Then she pointed out that the engagement had not come from the project. It had come from me, and I was taking it with me.

I have had a lot of professional advice over the years. Very little of it has landed as squarely as that.

Once I stopped arguing with the decision in my head, there was room for better questions. Not why did this happen, which had an answer I already knew and could do nothing with. But what now. Where does the effort go. What did I actually learn in eighteen months that I did not know before. What was in front of me that I had not looked at, because I had been looking hard at one thing for a long time.

Some of what I learned was technical. Some of it was about how decisions get made at a certain altitude in a large organization, which is knowledge you only acquire by being close enough to watch it happen. Some of it was about my own judgment, including a few calls I would make differently now. None of that stopped when the work stopped. That is the part I keep.

I used to think of resilience as toughness. I think of it now as recovery time.

Early in a career, a setback can take months. Later it takes weeks. Eventually, if you have been paying attention, it takes days. Not because it matters less. Because you have been here before, you know the shape of it, and you know from experience that the disappointment is temporary and the work is not.

Setbacks are not optional. Projects stop. Priorities move. Decisions go against you. You cannot build a career in which this does not happen. What you can build is a shorter distance between the news and the next thing.

Mine is down to about two days. I am fine with two days.

Disclaimer:

• The views expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of my organization.