You Are Not Underprepared. You Are Depleted.
Why reserves matter more than technical preparation in leadership
We feel stressed while preparing for an important “thing” coming up in the next few days to be as calm and prepared as possible – but somehow we end up stressed nevertheless. What’s wrong here?
I see the same mistake again and again in tech leadership, and because it is dressed up as diligence, people rarely question it.
Someone has a difficult meeting coming up. A conflict. A presentation. A pitch. A decision with political weight. So they prepare harder. More notes, more arguments, more details, more slides, more possible answers for every possible objection. They keep drilling on the technical side because that feels measurable, and because technical preparation gives the comforting illusion of control.
Then the moment comes, and they still fail.
Not because they lacked intelligence.
Not because they lacked expertise.
Not even because their idea was wrong.
They fail because pressure hits them at the human level, and they do not have enough reserves left to intervene between impulse and action.
That is the part I learned late in my life, and I would like to help others understand that one earlier – it saves so much hassle.
Self-control is depletable.
You cannot stay composed, patient, clear, and emotionally regulated all day just because you decided in the morning to be disciplined. That is not how it works. There will always be weak moments. There will always be hours when your system is thinner, your ego louder, your reaction faster.
And when you enter an important situation already exhausted, you are vulnerable from the start – you get to a starting line of a race refreshed as well, right?
This is why I lost so many leadership moments when I was technically prepared for it. I knew the topic, but I could not hold myself. I knew the argument, but I could not carry it with calm. I knew the right answer, but I reacted defensively, even aggressively at times, when challenged or became smaller when pressure entered the room.
Roy Baumeister popularized the idea that self-control behaves like a finite resource1. In his early ego-depletion research, the core claim was simple: after one act of self-control, people often perform worse on the next one.
That model became influential because it matched lived experience so well; anyone who has spent a full day regulating stress, suppressing irritation, and carrying responsibility knows that composure gets more expensive over time. At the same time, the research around ego depletion became contested, and later replication work did not always find the effect reliably. So I would not use Baumeister as proof that willpower works like a battery in a literal mechanical sense.
I would use him for the broader and still useful insight:
self-control is not something you should assume is endlessly available on demand.
Leadership gets harder when you are mentally and emotionally spent, and that is exactly why reserves matter.
In practice, leadership rarely breaks in the technical layer first.
It breaks in the human moment.
Someone questions your judgment. Someone pushes back in front of others. Someone gives feedback in a tone you do not like. Someone stronger, louder, or more dominant enters the room, and your body reacts before your reason does. You want to defend, interrupt, explain too much, justify yourself, retreat, or attack.
And the tragedy is this: you can be correct and still lose credibility in that exact moment.
Because credibility is not only built by correctness. It is built on how you handle pressure. That is why I care so much about reserves. The more reserves you have, the easier it becomes to intervene when something hits you. The more regulated you are, the more space exists between stimulus and response. And inside that space is leadership.
This is not a soft idea. It is an operational one.
It was about inner readiness. You do not wait for the hard moment to discover whether you can govern yourself. You practice beforehand.
A lot of people think preparation means accumulating more content. I think preparation begins earlier than that. Preparation means becoming someone who can remain usable under pressure. Someone who can think while challenged. Someone who can notice emotion without surrendering authority to it. Someone who can be hit by friction and still choose a response instead of merely having one.
The Stoics understood this better than many modern professionals do. They did not train calmness as decoration. They trained it because life would test them, and they wanted to remain sovereign when it did. Preparation, in the Stoic sense, was never just about plans. It was about inner readiness. You do not wait for the hard moment to discover whether you can govern yourself. You practice beforehand.
This is why practices like reflection, journaling, solitude, walking, or voluntary discomfort matter. Not because they sound wise. Not because they make a nice morning routine post. They matter because they build a stronger baseline. They help you process what would otherwise accumulate. They reduce internal noise. They make you less reactive, less brittle, less easily thrown off course.
That is also why I often say discipline is not only for output. It is also for recovery.
Angela Duckworth’s work2 is useful here, not because it proves that people can grind forever, but because it sharpens the difference between short-term intensity and long-term steadiness.
Her definition of grit, “passion and perseverance for long-term goals,” points to something many leaders miss: sustainable performance is not built from constant emotional strain, but from staying oriented, returning to the path, and continuing the work over time. In that sense, reserves matter because they protect continuity. If you are constantly depleted, you may still win isolated moments, but you become less capable of showing up with consistency, especially when leadership asks for repeated calm under pressure.
That is where grit becomes practical; not as macho endurance, but as the disciplined ability to keep going without constantly being knocked off course.
You Need Discipline To Calm Down Sometimes!
Many disciplined people misunderstand this. They use discipline to force themselves through work, but not to restore themselves for work. They spend all of their strength on execution and then wonder why they become fragile in meetings, impatient with people, or emotionally chaotic when something small goes wrong. They think the solution is even more pushing. Usually, it is not. Usually, the problem is that they are living on too little reserve.
You do not need discipline only to work. You need discipline to restore your ability to work well.
For me, one part of that is going outside. Running, walking, being away from screens, away from artificial urgency, away from all the manmade problem space we keep building around ourselves in tech. Another part is writing. My mirror-book practice is exactly for that reason. I do not use it as some decorative journaling habit. I use it to process the day, to surface reactions, to sort thoughts, to clean up what would otherwise remain unresolved inside me.
If I was irritated, I want to know why. If I felt envy, defensiveness, fear, anger, pride, hesitation, I want to see it clearly. If something wounded my ego, I want it on the page before it governs me in the next room. That is the point. Reflection is not self-expression. Reflection is self-regulation.
That is why the mirror-book helps so much. It gives me a way to notice patterns before they become identity. It helps me reduce residue. And residue matters. Because what people call burnout, chronic stress, leadership insecurity, or loss of confidence is often not just one dramatic event. Often, it is an accumulation. Unprocessed days. Unspoken fears. Repeated small humiliations. Suppressed reactions. Avoided truth. Compounding noise.
If you do not process your experience, it begins to process you.
And once that happens, technical preparation becomes less and less effective. You can keep compensating with knowledge for a while. Many smart people do. But at some point, the compensation fails, because what is missing is not information, it is inner order.
I see this often in senior people. Engineers, leads, even CTOs. They are highly competent but unstable in confrontation. They hesitate to challenge difficult personalities. And so did I.
I avoided the necessary conflict.
I became too political, too defensive, too eager to be liked, or too eager to dominate.
Not because we are weak by nature, but because they are underprepared in the deeper sense. We have not built enough reserves to meet the human difficulty of leadership.
That is why I think this topic matters more than yet another argument about tools, frameworks, or migration strategies.
Yes, those things matter.
Yes, architecture matters.
Yes, methodologies matter.
But we solve technical problems much more effectively once they are no longer blocked by fear, ego, emotional fatigue, and self-protective behavior.
The real bottleneck is often not capability. It is interference.
So, what do you do with this practically?
First, let us stop confusing more technical rehearsal with total preparation. You can know your topic and still be unprepared if you are exhausted, reactive, and thin-skinned.
Second, build a reserve on purpose. Not randomly, not when life allows it, but as a discipline. Sleep better. Walk more. Train. Journal. Reflect. Reduce unnecessary chaos. Accept that recovery is not indulgence when it serves responsibility.
Third, practice the intervention. When emotion rises, do not worship the first reaction. Notice it. Delay it. Name it if needed. Then act. Not perfectly, but consciously. This is where credibility grows. Not when you impress people with flawless knowledge, but when you remain steady in an imperfect moment.
Because that is what people remember. They remember whether you became smaller under pressure. They remember whether you rushed to defend yourself. They remember whether you stayed calm enough to think. They remember whether your presence stabilized the room or destabilized it further.
This is why reserves matter so much. They do not make you invincible. They make you more available to your better self when it counts.
And that is what leadership is in practice, again and again, not a title, not a theory, but the repeated ability to meet a difficult moment without handing yourself over to it.
So if you have an important meeting, a conflict, a hard conversation, a pitch, a presentation, then yes, prepare technically. Know your material. Clarify your thoughts. Do the work.
Marcus Aurelius opens one passage with a practical form of preparation:
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
The point is not pessimism.
The point is rehearsal.
If you prepare for friction, you are less likely to be controlled by it when it arrives. That is stoic leadership in practice.
But do not stop there.
Ask the more uncomfortable question: Do I have enough reserve to stay in control when the room pushes back?
Because if the answer is no, then you are not underprepared.
You are depleted.
And depleted people do not lead well.
—Adrian
https://www.apa.org/topics/willpower-limited.pdf
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-Angela-Duckworth-looks-beyond-grit-predict-success