Starting With a Screw-Up (Because Of Course I Did)
I launched a blog… and immediately earned my first post the hard way.
Today — literally today — I accidentally cancelled my own event.
Not rescheduled.
Not edited.
Cancelled.
The kind of cancellation that sends out notifications.
The kind that makes people wonder what just happened.
The kind you cannot quietly undo.
So here we are.
The Setup
The event was locked in.
Invites sent.
Registrations coming in.
Everything moving exactly how it should.
I logged in to make what I thought was a harmless backend adjustment. Just a quick tweak. One small update.
And then I clicked the wrong thing.
Or the right thing… just at the absolute wrong time.
Within seconds, the event was gone.
The Two-Minute Window
Before I could even fully process what I’d done, my phone started lighting up.
Within two minutes:
Six calls or messages.
Six.
Which is both reassuring and mildly terrifying. Because it means:
People are paying attention
People were registering
And people immediately noticed something was off
“Did you cancel this?”
“Is the event off?”
“What happened?”
“You good?”
There’s a very specific kind of adrenaline that hits when you realize you’ve created confusion at scale. I experienced all of it in about a 90-second window while staring at my screen thinking:
You have got to be kidding me.
Current Status: Active Damage Control
This just happened.
We are very much still in the “fixing it in real time” phase.
Event reinstated.
Messages going out.
Clarifications happening.
Me double-checking every button before touching it again.
I don’t yet know what the full ripple effect will be. Maybe nothing. Maybe a few jokes at my expense (fair). Maybe just a quick reset and we move on.
But I do know this: if you’re going to build things publicly, occasionally you’re going to mess things up publicly too.
Why Lead With This?
Because this blog isn’t going to be a highlight reel. There are plenty of places for polished wins and perfectly packaged success stories. That’s not what this is.
This is about building things in real time:
Events
Community
Ideas
Momentum
And sometimes that includes accidentally nuking your own calendar event and triggering six incoming calls in under two minutes.
If nothing else, it proves people are paying attention — which is both encouraging and humbling.
Lesson of the Day
There will be a time for thoughtful takeaways and nicely packaged lessons learned.
Today is not that day.
Today’s lesson is simple:
Do not click fast when you are in admin mode.
More to come. Hopefully with fewer emergency notifications.
