fail-meme1

It’s a tradition for me to tell you all of my mistakes at the end of the year. Catharsis? Confession? Just simply TMI? You tell me!

Here are some of my biggest mistakes of 2015. If you’d like to see some of my previous big mistakes, here they are! Here’s my mistakes of 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.  And 23 of my fundraising career mistakes, too!

It’s time for me to show you how I fell on my face this year!

Whoeeee. SO many ways.

dammit this book is almost done and I haven't finished it!
This is one of my many procrastinations!

I wanted to create a book about self care

I made the cover.  I even got collaborators to write different chapters. But I blew past all of my deadlines to actually publish it. To all my collaborators, I am So So Sorry!

In the end, I just didn’t want to edit it so that it hung together like a cohesive book. BTW, if you know a good book editor, can you give me their website or email address? I clearly need some help in getting this book together.

ALSO

I WANTED TO REWRITE TWO BOOKS and procrastinated instead.

I wanted to rewrite my book, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Social Media, and update it for 2015. And I didn’t finish that project either.

ALSO, I’ve been wanting to rewrite The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising for the last 3 years. Have I done that yet? Um NOPE. 🙁

I made some technical mistakes

For my career conference, I made so many mistakes. For example I didn’t ask for help! I didn’t test the paypal button at first and got my domain marked as spam. Then I had to buy a new domain and try again. I messed up the time difference on the conference signup page and people got upset that they didn’t get the conference sessions when they were expecting them.

learn from my fail

I made some partnership mistakes

One of the ways I fell on my face is that I had scheduled a free webinar with a consultant. Then they disappeared for 3 months, then a week before the webinar came back. Then 3 days before the webinar they told me they got sick a month before. It was too late to cancel the webinar, but in retrospect we should have, because after the webinar, they felt entitled to do a paid webinar with me. It was really stressful for me to have this uncertainty and so I decided not to do the paid webinar with them. It was their responsibility to tell me they got sick and then I wouldn’t have expected to hear from them. So they went into attack mode and called me a lot of names, boundary crossing names, and then blocked me from ever contacting them again.  I feel sorry for this person. I couldn’t read their mind and didn’t know they had gotten sick. I wish I hadn’t worked with them at all.

What I take from this mistake is that I needed to have a speaker contract and a speaker process, so this is now what I am doing. Anyone who wants to speak for me in the future will need to follow the speaker process so we don’t have a mistake like this again.

girl wrecks on bike jump gif

I made food mistakes!

I made a sprouted cashew vegan cheesecake… but then I liked it so much that I ate it all myself, and I got sick! 🙁 Right before a big international speaking gig. ARGH!

 

I didn’t make enough new friends this year

I didn’t go out enough. I didn’t work on building relationships here where I live enough. I stayed in and did my work, but I didn’t get out a lot to meet new nonprofits and chat with them. 🙁 I want to do better on this in 2016. A hero of mine, Paul Nazareth, constantly networks in the mornings, and it seems like everyone I know in Canada knows him. That is no small feat! We’ve networked over Skype and it was super fun. I want to do more reaching out and meeting people in 2016. How about you? Are you always looking to expand your network too?

 

I did some MORE Procrastination!
I made an e-course in the spring on crowdfunding and it was consistently late in delivery each week as I wrote and rewrote it. That was a mistake!

What I take from this mistake is that I should create the course beforehand.

 

I made a free website for a family member and they decided to not use it.

I put TONS of time and energy into this website. I wrote some pretty fabulous copy, spent some time designing it, got more of a customer focus, and had lots of calls to action, and I even bought hyperlocal domain names that would point to this domain for them. After having it up for about a week, they wanted to go back to their weebly site. 🙁

What did I learn from this? Sometimes people talk. Sometimes they say they want to succeed but they don’t actually want to succeed if it means they have to learn about marketing. Sometimes they just don’t want to do things differently than they have done before. Sometimes people daydream about how nice it would be to have success in some area. And they keep doing the same thing in the hopes that it will work.

 

I worked with a career consulting client who did not respect my time

This consulting client was CONSTANTLY emailing me, outside the scope of our work together. Sometimes I would get 7-8 emails per day from this person.

What did I learn? Don’t work with this person, and warn off my consulting friends from working with them as well.

 

Biting off more than I could chew

I uh, I got 10 books out of the library at once and ended up owing a lot in library fees.

Lesson learned: no more than 3 books at a time!

OK, well, looking back, I think at least I made some new mistakes this year.

What mistakes did YOU make this year?

0 Responses

  1. Thanks for sharing, Maz! I am pretty sure that I will never make and eat a sprouted cashew vegan cheesecake, but I have done most of the other “mistakes” you cite here. This year I again unsuccessfully listed my house for sale, and didn’t sell it. (Pricing and a flat buyers market.) I went on an interview with an abusive domineering ED even though I had already heard about his act from a friend who interviewed with him previously. Waste of time and a most unpleasant experience that set me back emotionally. (Listen to your friends!) I didn’t spend as much time doing my artwork as I wanted to (but I did do much better than in the past) or take a class. On the plus side, I did continue to take Focusing classes, and that saw me through a lot!

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