What a Curve Ball Looks Like Six Years Later — a retrospective sequel to my 2020 post, written from the other side.

Back in 2020, somewhere in the strange early weeks of lockdown, I sat down and wrote a blog post about curve balls.

I opened it by reminiscing about the Australia 2020 Summit — that moment in 2008 when we all gazed toward the year 2020 as some mystical far-off time when anything was possible.

Self-driving cars. Landing on Mars. A cure for every disease (I noted the irony even then).

I poked fun at my own track record as a prophet, having once confidently predicted that camera phones would never catch on.

And then I wrote this line: 2020 has just been the mother of all curve balls.

Well. Here we are, six years later. The world has moved on so thoroughly that it's easy to forget how it felt to be inside those weeks. So I recently did something both humbling and fascinating: I went back and re-read what I wrote. I decided to grade my own homework.

Here's how past me did.

What I got wrong

Let's start with the easy marking.

At one point in that post, thinking out loud about how long the whole thing might last, I wrote: maybe another 3 months, maybe another 6 months, probably not going to last another 12 months.

Mate. Bless you.

I wasn't alone — nearly everyone's clock was wrong in 2020, usually in the same optimistic direction. But there's a more interesting error hiding underneath the bad timekeeping, and it took me years to see it.

The whole post was built around the end. Two of my four key factors were literally "Prepare for the end" and "Look forward to an inspiring future" — a future defined as the time after, when life was "back to normal." I imagined the curve ball as an event with an edge. A siren would sound, the crisis would be declared over, and we'd all walk back onto the field.

That's not what happened, is it? There was no siren. No final whistle. No morning where we woke up and it was officially finished. It didn't end so much as dissolve — it faded out of the headlines, then out of conversations, then out of our habits of thought, until one day you realised you couldn't actually name when it had stopped being a thing.

Which taught me something no amount of positive psychology in 2020 could have: big curve balls don't end. They metabolise. They stop being an event and become an ingredient. The world after doesn't snap back to the world before — it becomes a third thing, a mixture, and you adjust to it so gradually that you forget you're adjusting at all.

I wrote back then that the effects would reverberate for much longer than the disease itself and leave a scar that none of us will ever forget. I'll award myself half marks. The reverberating part was dead right. The "never forget" part was dead wrong — forgetting is precisely what we did. The scar is still there, but it's the kind you stop noticing. It's in the way people work now, where they work, what they'll queue for and what they won't, what they quietly stopped taking for granted. We carry 2020 around in a thousand small habits while barely ever mentioning it. That's what a curve ball looks like five years later: not a dent you can point at, but a shape you've grown around.

What I got right

Now for the part of the homework I'm happy to hand back to myself.

The core four held up. Accept that these things happen. Embrace the now. Prepare for the end. Look forward to an inspiring future. Even the two "end"-shaped ones, wrong about the mechanics, were right about the psychology — the people who fared best through those years were, almost without exception, the ones facing forward. Waiting mode was the real trap. The people who treated the whole period as an intermission — life paused, resume when the lights come up — lost the years twice: once to the crisis and once to the waiting.

Nothing lasts forever was right, even though my clock was comically wrong. It's worth noticing that both things can be true: you can be completely wrong about when and completely right about whether. In the middle of a crisis, whether is the only one that matters.

And the one I'd defend most fiercely, five years on, is the acceptance piece. I wrote then about the trap of thinking I just need to survive this and then nothing like this will ever happen again — and warned that the next time something hit, that person would be right back where they started. Five years later I've watched that play out in real time, over and over. The years since 2020 haven't exactly been a gentle glide. The people who took the lesson as that was a one-off got blindsided by the next thing. The people who took it as the world does this sometimes were bruised but upright. Same events. Different operating system.

The replay, revisited

There's one more thing in that old post I want to come back to, because it's the piece I've thought about most.

I used an analogy back then about watching a footy game on replay when you already know your team wins. The opposition scores early, your best player gets sent off, it's 18–0 — and you're not worried, because you know the score. I said that having an inspiring vision for your future works the same way: when you "know the score" of your life, the setbacks along the way lose their power to rattle you.

Five years later, I still stand by that analogy. But I'd add something to it that only hindsight could teach me.

In 2020, I thought knowing the score meant knowing the scoreline — the specific vision, the detailed picture of where you'd be in two, three, five years. And here's my honest confession: almost nothing about my life right now matches the picture I would have drawn in 2020. The game I was watching and the game that got played were different games. Different opposition, different injuries, different weather, and a few tries scored from moves I didn't know were in the playbook.

And yet the deeper claim was still true. Because what actually carries you through isn't knowing the scoreline. It's knowing the team. Knowing that whatever gets thrown, the response is going to show up — the tenacity, the adaptability, the refusal to stay down past the count. That part I did know in 2020, and that part didn't let me down. The vision changed a dozen times. The person holding the vision is what held.

So if I could send one amendment back to the bloke writing that post in his lockdown lounge room, it would be this: hold the vision, but hold it loosely. It's not a map. It's a compass. Its job was never to predict your future — its job was to keep you facing forward while the future sorted itself out.

For the next one

Because there will be a next one. That was the whole point of the original post, and it's the point I'm doubling down on now with five more years of evidence in hand.

I don't know what it will be, and neither do you. Past me spent an entire summit-load of national optimism failing to predict 2020, so I won't embarrass myself with specifics. But some year — maybe soon, hopefully not — something is going to arrive that turns the tables over again. And when it does, the cycle will restart: the shock, the bad predictions, the aching for "the end," the slow dissolve into a new normal nobody voted for.

So this post is partly for you, and partly, honestly, for me. It's a letter left in the drawer for whoever's standing in the next 2020 — a note from someone who has now watched a curve ball across its whole arc, from the moment it left the pitcher's hand to the point, years later, where you can barely remember which dents in your life it's responsible for.

The note says: it will not end the way you imagine, on the schedule you imagine, and you will be wrong about nearly every detail. None of that will matter. Accept that these things happen. Embrace the now. Face forward. And trust the team — because five years from now, you'll be the one looking back, grading your own homework, and discovering that the game you lost track of was one you were winning all along.