Why You Sabotage Yourself at the Threshold

You've done it before. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Months of work. Maybe years. You pushed through the resistance, survived the doubt, kept showing up when quitting would have been easier. Then, right when the finish line came into view, something happened.

You blew it.

Not through laziness. Not through bad luck. Through something that looked, from the outside, like self-destruction. A decision so poorly timed it almost seemed deliberate. A mistake so uncharacteristic it didn't make sense, even to you.

The entrepreneur who picks a fight with his business partner the week before funding closes. The salesman who forgets to follow up on the biggest deal of his career. The writer who misses the deadline that would have changed everything. The developer who has been "almost done" with his app for eighteen months, always finding one more feature to add, one more bug to fix, one more round of polish before launch.

These aren't coincidences. They're patterns. And if you're honest with yourself, you'll recognise the shape of them in your own history.