If you were a subscriber to my blog before 2:59pm PDT on Thursday, 4/8, then hopefully you will be reading these first few sentences in your email. If you were a subscriber to my blog BEFORE 1:59pm on Tuesday, 4/6, then you would be giggling and would know why that first sentence is so funny! For anyone who was not a subscriber before that Tuesday timestamp, let me fill you in on the joke.
I was so happy and excited to launch my blog on March 10th and then released my ebook on March 12th. The book sales, and life in general, had me pretty busy but I was able to get a few posts up since that time. I quickly realized that my original new post notification email system was sending out the entire post to subscribers. The intention was to notify subscribers that there were new post(s) on the site and give a partial preview for the new post(s), not the whole post!
On my end, I did some research and some self education on setting up an email notification system as I had originally desired. The first email notification in the new format was now set up to go out to my blog subscribers on Tuesday, 4/6, at 2:00pm PDT. I clicked the button and sat back to wait for the email to go out. My husband had helped me set it up and we had figured it out! So we thought…
It was Tuesday, at 2:15pm and I was on work call. My husband came into my office with this look on his face like something was wrong. He held up his phone to me and this is what I saw:
I was horrified, and I couldn’t even do anything about it in that moment because I was still on the call. Thoughts were running through my head:
What happened? Did EVERYONE get that? Of course they did! What will they think? I look unprofessional. I look like I don’t know what I’m doing!
After I got off the call, I had to take a deep breath and assess the situation. I realized that I had to give myself some grace and also apply one of the lessons that I talked about in my book. I launched this blog on March 10th, exactly 29 days ago! Before that, I had no prior blogging experience so I don’t know everything there is to know about blogging. I’m going to make mistakes and I have two choices when I make a mistake:
- Let it defeat me and quit
- Learn from it and figure out how to do it correctly, or better, next time
For me, I’m choosing option two! As I had displayed in my book, you can fail and then get up and try again. It is never too late to try again. This is now my time to “practice what I preach”. Hopefully, you will join me in this laugh at what happened. And more importantly, I hope that you can, and will, apply it to something that may not have gone as you planned in your life. Let’s get up together, brush ourselves off, and try again! When life gives us lemons, let’s make lemonade!
My fingers are crossed that I got it right this time. We will see at 3:01pm PDT on Thursday, 4/8. And guess what?! If it’s another fail, I will still get another chance to fix it for the next time.
Do you have a funny story about a time that you failed but can now look back at it and laugh? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Love this story! I haven’t been blogging that long and I can totally see a mistake like this happening to me! You made a great choice to give yourself grace!
Thank you! We have to have the same grace for ourselves that we have for others. It took me a long time to learn that.
That’s my girl Kim always making lemonade out of lemons! Such an inspiration!
Thanks Michelle! Lemonade is always better than lemons! 😊