Maybe: What a Taoist Farmer Can Teach Us About Setbacks
Dr Harvey Smith | Sport and Exercise Psychologist | Glasgow
There is an old Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away.
His neighbours came to console him. "What bad luck," they said. The farmer replied, "Maybe." The next week, the horse returned, bringing a group of wild horses with it. The neighbours came again, this time to celebrate. "What good luck," they said. The farmer replied, "Maybe." Then his son, trying to tame one of the new horses, fell and broke his leg. The neighbours returned once more to offer sympathy. "What bad luck," they said. The farmer said, again, "Maybe." Soon after, the army came through the village conscripting every able-bodied young man for war. The son, unable to walk, was left behind. "What good luck," the neighbours said. The farmer simply said, "Maybe."
I keep coming back to this story because it captures something most of us struggle with, particularly in sport and performance. We judge events the moment they happen. Injury, non-selection, a dropped standard, a lost opportunity. We label it immediately, good or bad, and then we build a whole emotional response on top of that label before we actually know what the event means.
The farmer never rushes to judgement. Not because he doesn't feel anything, but because he understands something most of us forget under pressure: the meaning of an event is rarely available to us in the moment it happens. It only becomes clear later, sometimes much later, and often not in the way we expected.
This matters for athletes more than most. A season-ending injury looks unambiguously bad the day it happens. But talk to enough elite performers and you will hear the same pattern again and again, that setback became the exact thing that changed how they trained, how they thought, or who they became. Not because the injury itself was good, but because what they did with it mattered more than the event itself.
This is not the same as toxic positivity, or pretending setbacks don't hurt. The farmer doesn't celebrate the broken leg. He simply refuses to collapse the present moment into a fixed story about the future. He stays with "maybe," which keeps him open, rather than closing the door on what might still unfold.
What the research says
This idea has strong backing in sport and exercise psychology, not just folklore.
Research on adversarial growth in elite athletes found that Olympic gold medallists consistently identified serious setbacks, including repeated non-selection, major failure, and injury, as essential rather than incidental to their eventual success. The determining factor was not the adversity itself, but how it was appraised and processed afterwards.
Related work on psychological resilience in sport performers shows that the ability to positively evaluate and interpret stressors, what researchers call challenge appraisal, is one of the strongest predictors of resilience among the world's best athletes, more so than the severity of the setback itself.
There is also a growing body of work specifically on nonattachment, the psychological quality the farmer embodies. Studies show nonattachment, engaging fully with a situation without fixating on a specific outcome, is associated with greater psychological wellbeing, lower rumination, and reduced anxiety and depression across both athletic and everyday performance settings.
The practice, not just the story
None of this means indifference. The farmer still farms. He still raises his son. He stays engaged with his life fully, he just refrains from deciding too early what any single event means.
That is the practice worth borrowing. Not detachment from effort, but detachment from premature judgement. Stay with "maybe" a little longer than feels comfortable, and let the event tell you what it means over time, rather than deciding for it too soon.
If you are working through a setback and want support making sense of it, drop me a message.
📞 0141 673 3973
🌐 drharveysmith.com
Give me a shout.
This post draws on peer-reviewed research. Key sources are listed below.
Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D. (2014). Psychological resilience in sport performers: A review of stressors and protective factors. Journal of Sports Sciences, 32(15), 1419–1434.
Howells, K., Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D. (2017). Can athletes benefit from difficulty? A systematic review of growth following adversity in competitive sport. Progress in Brain Research, 234, 117–159.
Sarkar, M., Fletcher, D., & Brown, D. J. (2015). What doesn't kill me...: Adversity-related experiences are vital in the development of superior Olympic performance. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 18(4), 475–479.