Success Quote by E. Joseph Cossman

Memory gets put on trial not by what we can recite, but by what we can no longer justify. Cossman, a businessman with a marketer's instinct for behavioral leverage, smuggles a self-help lesson into a deceptively simple experiment: name last year's dread. Most people can't. The punchline is psychological, not sentimental. Worry is loud in the moment and flimsy in retrospect, and that gap is the point.

The intent is practical: interrupt the trance of urgency. By asking for a specific date, Cossman denies you the comfort of vague reassurance ("things usually work out") and forces a hard audit. If you can't retrieve the fear, it suggests it never earned the brain space it rented. If you can retrieve it, you're invited to measure outcomes against the catastrophe you rehearsed. Either way, worry loses its aura of prophecy.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how attention gets monetized. In business and in life, there is always a pipeline of "important" problems competing for bandwidth, and worry often masquerades as diligence. Cossman reframes it as a bad investment: high emotional cost, low informational return. Coming from someone in commerce, the advice lands like a ledger entry. Your mind has a budget. Last year's anxieties are the receipts you can't even find.

Context matters: mid-century American optimism, a culture selling productivity and self-mastery, where anxiety is treated less as illness than inefficiency. The line works because it doesn't preach calm; it exposes worry as forgettable, which is far more insulting to our panic than any pep talk.