For most of my life, I moved through the world with a baseline assumption I didn’t even know I had: that the world was, on balance, glad I existed. My parents loved me well. That isn’t a complicated thing to say. They were married. They stayed married. They came to the school plays and clapped at the right moments. They told me I could do anything, and they meant it. My father worked, my mother worked, and the house was warm and reasonably loud and full of brothers.

For most of my life I treated this as a piece of luck and left it there. The luck of a steady home is real, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But somewhere in my mid-thirties I started noticing that this kind of foundation, this quiet good fortune of it, had built into me a particular blind spot.

The confidence I didn’t know I had

The first thing it gave me was a kind of casual confidence that I assumed was just a feature of being a person.

Walk into a room. Apply for a job. Ask a girl out. Pitch an idea. Disagree with someone older than you. None of these things felt to me like they required any special courage. They felt like ordinary moves. The cost of failure, in my body, was small. If it didn’t work, I tried again somewhere else. There was a baseline assumption running underneath it all that the world was, on balance, glad I existed.

I genuinely thought everybody had this baseline.

Meeting people who didn’t

Living in Saigon has helped me see how wrong that was.

My wife’s family lived through a war. Then they lived through what came after the war, which in some ways was harder. My mother-in-law grew up hungry. My father-in-law spent years doing work that was beneath him because the alternative was no work. They built a life out of caution and frugality and a refusal to assume that good things would last.

When I first met them I read their carefulness as a personality trait. I thought they were nervous people, or modest people, or particularly Vietnamese people. It took me a long time to understand that the carefulness was earned. It came from a foundation where you couldn’t assume the floor would hold.

I also started noticing this in some of my colleagues and friends. People I had quietly judged for being timid, or hesitant, or reluctant to take risks. I had been measuring them against a starting line they had never been given.

What encouragement doesn’t teach you

Constant encouragement is a kind, generous thing to give a child. I want to give it to my daughter. I think most of us should give more of it, not less.

But it has a side effect. If you grow up being told that your effort matters and your voice matters and your dreams are worth pursuing, and if the people around you keep showing up to back this up, you can end up believing that the world is essentially set up to recognise effort. That if you do the work, the work will be seen. That decent people get decent outcomes.

This is a beautiful belief and it is not entirely true.

I didn’t learn until embarrassingly late that some people work very hard and are still not seen. That talented people get passed over for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. That sometimes the room just doesn’t want you in it, and there’s nothing you can do that will change that.

A child of relentless encouragement reads these moments as personal failures. He thinks: I must not have worked hard enough. He doesn’t know that the structure itself can be the problem. His foundation didn’t include that information.

The story I was telling myself

For a long time my private story was that I had built my life myself. I worked hard. I started a business with my brothers. I made my own choices.

All of that is true and none of it is the whole truth.

What I see now, at this stage of my life, is how much of what I call my drive was actually a feeling of safety. I could take risks because the soft net was always there. If the business failed, I had a family who would not let me starve. If I made a mistake, the world would not, in any final way, abandon me. The space inside me where worst-case scenarios live is small, and most of that smallness was given to me, not earned.

That’s not nothing. It might be the most useful inheritance a person can have. But to mistake it for a personal virtue is to misread your own life.

What I’m trying to do with it

I’m trying to do two things, neither of them clean.

The first is to give my daughter the foundation I had, while finding ways to introduce her, gently, to the fact that the world is not always going to mirror her parents’ belief in her. I don’t know how to do this well. I suspect no one does.

The second is to be more careful in how I read other people. The hesitations of someone who grew up without a soft net are not character flaws. They are accurate responses to a world they understood earlier than I did. When I find myself thinking that a colleague is too cautious, or a friend is too anxious, or my wife is worrying about something I would not worry about, I try now to ask myself a different question.

What did they learn that I didn’t have to?

It usually changes how I sit in the conversation.