Leadership Quote by Nancy Johnson

The brilliance here is how Johnson smuggles a performance philosophy into plain talk about pressure. She’s describing shooting, but she’s really arguing against the politics of scarcity: the mindset that treats every moment as your last chance, so every mistake becomes catastrophic. By breaking “one forty shot match” into “forty little matches,” she reframes the same contest as a sequence of recoverable episodes. That’s not motivational fluff; it’s a tactical change in how attention works. Narrow the time horizon, and you loosen the grip of self-surveillance.

The intent is practical: to build a mental structure that makes resilience automatic. “It makes all the difference in the world” sounds like exaggeration until you catch what she’s pointing at: the body obeys the story the mind tells it. If the mind narrates a single, fragile do-or-die arc, the shooter tightens, chases perfection, and starts shooting at the memory of the last miss. If the mind narrates discrete starts and resets, you get permission to return to fundamentals.

The subtext is surprisingly political for a politician: competence isn’t about never failing; it’s about containing failure. “It’s easier to just forget about a not so good shot” isn’t denial, it’s disciplined amnesia, the kind required in any high-stakes arena where the public (or the scoreboard) keeps count. Contextually, it lands as a rebuttal to our cultural fetish for defining people by a single error. Johnson is insisting on process over drama, a stance that feels quietly radical in an age built to archive every miss.