The stands are full of people who know exactly what you should have done.
They saw the mistake before you made it. They would have handled the difficult client differently. They would not have hired that person, would not have taken that contract, would not have expanded into that market. They have very clear opinions about all of it, and they share them freely, because the stands are a safe place to have opinions. Nothing in the stands costs you anything.
The arena is different.
In the arena you find out what you are actually made of, not what you believe you are made of. The arena is where the plan meets the real, and the real is almost never what the plan expected. The arena is where you discover that the person you thought you were under pressure is not quite the person you are under pressure, and the gap between those two things is the actual work of formation.
Most people never go to the arena. They stay in the stands and call it wisdom. They have learned from watching others fail, they say, which is true, but incomplete. Watching someone else carry weight teaches you about weight. It does not teach you about your own hands.
The stands will always be more comfortable than the arena. The stands offer the pleasure of being right without the cost of being wrong. The arena offers neither comfort nor safety, only the chance to find out what is actually in you when the outcome is real and the cost of failure is real and the people watching are real.
I have been in the arena enough times to know that I was wrong about myself in both directions. There were things I thought I could handle that I could not, and things I thought would break me that did not. The arena was the only place I could have learned either of those things.
The stands are not a bad place to be. They are just not the place where you find out who you are.
The arena is the only place for that.