🚴‍♂️“It was just a bad day” - How one sentence can trap you for decades · 𝙂𝙊𝙊𝙎𝙄𝙁𝙔 🍓🐛🦋🌈⭐️🩷

🚴‍♂️“It was just a bad day” - How one sentence can trap you for decades

In my community "Mind Palace" we worked with a scene from "The Power of Words" today that felt uncomfortably familiar to everyone. I thought it might be worth sharing here too.

A young boy runs a school race. He starts confident, but ends up dizzy, throwing up against a tree, and crossing the finish line last.

From that one event, he builds a verdict:

“I’m no good at sports.”

That sentence isn’t a casual comment. It becomes an identity.

For decades, Mariano Sigman sees himself as “a mind guy, not a body guy”: brilliant with numbers, but with a “weak body,” “no real grit.”

Fast forward about forty years. After a cardiac scare, he doesn’t decide to reinvent his entire life overnight. He does something much more concrete: he buys a bike.

He starts small. Then longer distances. Then mountains. Then timing his climbs. He trains. He improves.

One day, he climbs Morcuera, a tough mountain with a brutal incline. At the top he is exhausted, nauseous, on the verge of vomiting – exactly the same physical state he had as a child in that school race.

But this time, something is different: he has prepared. He knows his limits. He understands what his body is doing.

He looks at his watch: 32:43. He has crushed his previous best time.

And with that number, an old story starts to crack.

He realizes it was never true that he “didn’t have the temperament” for sports.

He had turned a single bad day, in bad conditions, into a lifelong sentence.

The problem wasn’t his character. It was the story he chose to tell about that one moment.

From there, the book goes much deeper:

into the “fake news” we create about ourselves with phrases like “I’m broken,” “I’m not made for this,” “I can’t change”

into how our brain is both powerful and fallible, and how language makes those errors solid

into why good conversations, in the right setting, can act as a control tower for our thinking, catching mistakes we don’t see alone.

Sigman doesn’t say “just think positive and you’ll be fine.”

He says: our interpretations are always partial (fallibility), and yet we act as if they were absolute truths (reflexivity). That’s where words become dangerous – or deeply healing.

In Mind Palace, we turned this into a community exercise, and I’d love to invite you into the same reflection:

Which sentence have you used to define yourself that might actually be a bad translation of one specific moment?

It might sound like:

“I’m terrible with money.”

“I’m not a people person.”

“I’ll never be consistent.”

If you feel comfortable sharing:

What’s the sentence?

Where do you think it came from? Was there a “Morcuera moment” or a “race against the tree” for you?

Has anything happened since then that quietly contradicts that sentence?

You don’t need to force a happy ending.

The point is to do what this book keeps insisting on: