How To Split An Atom

Last year at around this time I was putting together a technology meet up in North Florida. Me and a co-organizers spent what had to have been a month arranging the venue, putting out the feelers in the community, finding speakers and basically stitching together what we hoped to be a great event for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, even the best laid plans have a way of falling apart.

Lesson’s Learned

What we failed to take into consideration was a scheduling mistake on the part of our venue, that had put us down in their books for two days after the date we orginally told them. It took a dozen calls, some good luck, and a minor miracle three days before the meet up to find a new venue and another one to get the word out to all of the people who were traveling from across Florida to come and participate.

If that wasn’t enough, the day of the meet up, the co-organizer woke up deathly ill and couldn’t make it out. I won’t go into too many more details but by the end of the event, I was dead set on never organizing anything ever again. Even so, with all the trouble that we went through to get things off the ground, we managed to pluck a few lessons from the vine:

• Confirm the venue. No matter what they tell you, make certain you look at the calendar yourself. Confusing days and dates is the easiest thing in the world.
• Plan for contingencies. Make sure that you have a way to deal with the fact that speakers will drop out, schedules will change, and that thing you think will never happen probably will.
• Keep a cool head. It’s the only thing that got us through the mess, there is a solution to almost any problem but you have to have your eyes clear in order to see it.

The biggest thing that the fiasco taught me was a lesson about mistakes. If you take any risks at all, you’re bound to run into a mistake or twelve. What you need to realize is that it’s never a problem to make mistakes but it’s always a problem to fail to learn anything from them.

You can’t be expected to know everything intuitively, but you can be expected to be willing to admit that fact. More than that, a huge part of personal growth is having the humility and the insight to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

When confronted with a situation that didn’t go quite as you would have planned it, take some time to reflect on how you would have done things differently. By giving yourself a few minutes to see your mistakes in the harsh light of hindsight, you can take a big step towards building the intuition that will save you when it really counts.

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