Nobody can count the bottles in advance

A young man in Ismailia has been making hot sauce in his mother's kitchen for two years, and he is finally ready to sell it.

The voice in his head has already decided how it ends. Shops will not stock it. People will laugh at the label. He will be left with crates of bottles and a story his cousins repeat for years. The voice is convincing because it has a good memory. It remembers every time he tried something and it went badly, and every friend whose little venture closed.

The family joins in, kindly. An uncle who has run a spare-parts shop for thirty years explains, with real affection, that food businesses always fail. He knows prices, suppliers, rents and how people behave. Surely he knows this too.

But knowing the past is not the same as seeing what comes next, and predictions of doom survive mostly by staying vague. It will be hard. People will not understand. Those are safe to say because whatever happens later can be bent to fit them. Ask the uncle for something specific and the spell breaks. Which shop will turn him down first? How many bottles will still be unsold on the fourteenth of next month? He cannot say. Nobody can.

There is no oracle, at the dinner table or in our own head. What helps is not a forecast at all. It is a few people who trust him enough to say: try it, and we are with you either way.