How do you stop auditing yourself when someone leaves after you gave everything?

I worked on a project for several years. At the beginning, I was full of enthusiasm, but I felt the company culture slowly wore me down. The colleagues who had been with me from the start were laid off one by one. For about three or four months, we worked overtime every day without producing results. The project lead had no ideas of his own and mainly passed along the boss’s demands. Because he did not fully understand them, the project kept going off course. The communication was ineffective, and so was the overtime. In the end, we failed the first project acceptance, and management let a group of people go. I stayed. I could still see some hope, and I liked the new person in charge. They promoted working efficiently, and proved that this was more than a slogan. I also still believed in the hardware market. I was somewhat shaken at first, but the project eventually passed acceptance fairly successfully, and I felt a huge sense of relief. Then the operational problems became difficult. Because of the budget, the hardware product could not be updated or iterated. For a hardware company, that was fatal. After giving so much of myself to the project, I reached a simple conclusion: it was over.

I grew up hearing that when something fails, I should look for the reason in myself: What did I do wrong? What can I improve? That can be useful, but it can also become misleading. It can make every outcome feel like evidence about who you are. I remembered this because of a difficult period at a previous company. A new manager seemed determined to diminish me. At the time, I kept asking myself what I had done wrong. I assumed that if I worked hard, treated everyone well, and was capable, people would like me. But the situation was more complicated. I was one of the strongest engineers in the organization, and senior leaders already knew and trusted me. The new manager was also trying to establish authority and prove their technical leadership. Looking back, I can see that the conflict was not simply a performance problem or a failure on my part. I was young then, and eventually I decided to leave. Now I think the important thing is not to treat yourself as the dominating factor in everything that happens. The world is made of many people and many conditions, and you are only one of them. That applies to success as well as failure. When you succeed or lose, it is not just you. Remembering that makes life easier—and most of the time, better—because you do not torture yourself trying to fix what was never yours alone to control.