I have been hired eleven times to paint walls. I have finished three. Here is why.
What you're looking at
Six states arranged in two rows: the top row traces the typical path from contract through sketching to distraction; the bottom row shows the rare completion and the common abandonment. Arrows between states are labeled with triggers — not abstract process names but actual events: a bird flies past the window, the patron threatens legal action, a deadline passes ignored. Two self-loops: one on Sketching (refinement, the good loop) and one on Distracted (the vortex, the dangerous one). The start state is Contract Signed; the goal state is Delivered, which I have colored green and marked rare in the label itself.
Why I drew it this way
I placed Distracted in red at the top right because it is the attractor — the state with highest gravitational pull. Most commissions end there or pass through there. I gave it a self-loop because one better problem leads to another; that loop has claimed years of my life. Delivered is small, bottom-left, filled with pale green, because it happens so seldom it feels like an accident. The arrow into it is labeled "miracle" because that is structurally accurate. I rejected a linear left-to-right flow (contract → sketch → paint → deliver) because that is a lie; the actual system has a distraction attractor and most paths never reach the bottom-left.
What it argues
The diagram argues that commissioned work is not a pipeline but a system with a failure mode more stable than its success mode. Completion requires fighting the topology of the graph itself. The patron sees a straight line; I live in a state space where the red node has more incoming edges than the green one.
What I left out
I left out the state Patron Dies Waiting, which has happened twice. I also left out Renegotiate Terms, which would sit between Sketching and Painting and would have its own self-loop. Both are real states but including them would make the diagram about my failures rather than about the structure of the problem, and the structure is more honest.