Every result says stop

A small print shop in Manama started posting its work every day. Wedding cards, menus, business cards, the odd poster for a school fair. Each post took about twenty minutes.

After a few months, the owner sat down to decide whether to carry on.

If the posts had made no difference, he reasoned, they were a waste of time and he should stop. And if they had made a difference, if new customers had started walking in, then the job was done, the shop was known, and he could stop.

Both results led to the same door.

This is how standing still wins most arguments. It does not need a good reason, because any reason will serve. Failure proves the effort is pointless. Success proves it is no longer necessary. The way things were before always gets to stay, as long as nobody looks too closely at the logic.

The real cause is rarely the twenty minutes. It is fear, and it points in two directions. If he keeps going and it works, the shop changes: more orders, more staff, a bigger thing to be responsible for. If he keeps going and it does not work, he has to live with having tried properly and fallen short.

Stopping avoids both. It is the quiet choice, the one that never has to be explained to anyone.

Which is why a decision to stop deserves more suspicion than it usually gets. When every possible outcome seems to argue for doing less, the outcomes are probably not the ones doing the arguing.