A Few More Mistakes

"I burnt my arm twice when cooking pizza in a brick-oven... never a third time." - Joe the Pizza Man

Which of the following three scenarios is true?

1. I accidentally deleted 2 years' worth of research at a startup by syncing a deletion from my laptop to the company-wide cloud. The CTO caught it just in time.

2. I sent a test email to the entire user database: irrelevant, unnecessary, filled with nonsense. Many unsubscribes, uninstalls, and spam reports followed.

3. A work-in-progress version of an updated website was pushed to production, overriding the live site (unbacked-up). We ended up with a new, incomplete website.

Drum roll... all three.

But you knew that, right?

Looking back, all three were painful and stressful, and I wouldn't wish any of them on anyone. Luckily, I had a good team around me who understood that mistakes can happen, even big ones. We turned panic into fast, focused mitigation. And those incidents taught me concrete things: automated, frequent website backups; a test email group before any send; a dedicated synced folder I control completely.

Some of those safeguards look obvious in hindsight. But I hadn't encountered those specific errors before, so I wasn't prepared for them. Thanks to the mistakes, I could learn and fix accordingly.

Don't go deliberately deleting your company database to test team loyalty or manufacture a lesson. But whether we like it or not, we will make a mistake... and another... and another.

We can plan ahead to minimize errors. We can't avoid them entirely.

Accept the mistake when it happens. Clear your panic and find a way to fix it. And once it's fixed, think about what safeguard, process, or preparation would stop that exact mistake from happening again.

By the way, I'm still making mistakes. Frequently. :)