What makes this observation peculiar—and valuable—is that Adams isn't counseling resignation or passive acceptance. Rather, he's describing the strange arithmetic of living: the gap between our carefully laid plans and actual outcomes often contains more wisdom than the original blueprint. A woman I knew spent years training for medical school, only to wash out and become a public health administrator instead; she ultimately affected more lives through policy than she would have through clinic hours, yet this fact only became visible in hindsight. Adams suggests that our failures of intention are not merely compensatory—life doesn't merely console us—but sometimes genuinely *better*, in ways we're simply not equipped to recognize while we're still wanting what we lost.