Cognitive Distortions Insight #1: Overgeneralization
The Lie of Always and Never
Overgeneralization is the distortion that turns one bad moment into a lifelong sentence.
You fail once, and suddenly you always fail.
You get rejected, and now no one will ever accept you.
You make a mistake, and you’re forever broken.
This distortion loves absolutes:
- Always
- Never
- Everyone
- No one
It’s the language of emotional sentencing—where a single event becomes a universal truth.
But here’s the tactical truth:
Overgeneralization isn’t insight.
It’s lazy pattern-making.
It’s the brain trying to protect you by building a false forecast—one that keeps you small, safe, and stuck.
The Fixer Reframe
In business—especially in the chaos labs of early-stage startups—failure isn’t a red flag. It’s a rite of passage.
Seed investors and venture capitalists don’t just tolerate failure. They hunt for it.
Why? Because when you’re commercializing technologies that don’t quite fit the market—or chasing markets that don’t even exist yet—you’re not just building a product. You’re orchestrating a miracle.
YouTube started as a real estate video platform.
Netflix mailed DVDs and nearly pivoted to breakfast cereal just to keep the lights on.
They didn’t overgeneralize their early failures.
They adapted.
They pivoted.
They survived long enough for the world to catch up.
Every time you overgeneralize, you’re assuming the world is static.
That what’s true today will be true tomorrow.
But the pace of change is accelerating.
Technology is rewriting the rules in real time.
So don’t sentence yourself with “always” and “never.”
Celebrate the failure.
Extract the signal.
And pivot with purpose.
Overgeneralization is a costume.
It dresses up fear as logic.
It turns setbacks into identity.
Strip the costume.
Name the moment.
Move forward.
Jason Bresnehan
Jason is a fixer—of businesses, of broken momentum, and occasionally of entire spiritual frameworks gone sideways. He speaks fluent boardroom and AA, deploys Catholic doctrine with the subtlety of a scalpel, and isn’t afraid to lace his insights with both war-room metaphors and dad-sermon tenderness.
Founder of Evahan, a consultancy built on the idea that legacy and liquidity don’t need to fight, Jason draws on 30 years of commercial grit, tactical leadership, and emotional radar to help people rebuild what entropy took. He works with companies, communities, and recovery misfits alike—often using the same principles to sort both cap tables and chaotic lives.
Jason draws deep inspiration from historical figures who got results—especially those who led from the margins, built with scarce resources, and refused to be shackled by conventional wisdom. He’s known for assembling unorthodox teams of passionate experts to solve complex problems in chaotic environments. Whether in boardrooms, recovery communities, or legacy disputes, Jason’s approach is rooted in common purpose, tactical innovation, and the belief that clarity thrives when paradigms are challenged.