why this one exists.
Most business writing is a highlight reel. Here's what I nailed, here's my framework, buy my thing. I find it boring and a little dishonest, because the actual work is a long series of being wrong slightly less often over time.
So this is the other column. A running confession. Things I believed that turned out to be wrong, updated whenever I blow it. Consider it the outtakes.
what I was wrong about this month.
I was wrong that the bottleneck was a tool. I walked into a mess convinced the fix was better software, spent a good while evaluating options, and the real problem was that two people had never actually agreed on who owned a decision. No tool fixes an argument nobody is having out loud. A ten-minute conversation did what a purchase order wouldn't have.
I was wrong that people resist automation because they fear the technology. Mostly they resist because the last three "improvements" made their day worse, and they've learned to duck. That isn't fear. It's pattern recognition, and it's usually correct. The job isn't to sell them harder. It's to make the next change genuinely better and earn back the flinch.
And I was wrong, again, about how much to build into a first version. I over-engineered. Added handling for edge cases that hadn't happened and might never. Half of it was scaffolding for problems that didn't exist, while the one problem that did show up was something I hadn't imagined.
The goal was never to be right. It was to be wrong in smaller pieces, faster, where it's cheap to fix. A lesson I keep re-learning.
why I'll keep writing it.
Because certainty is the tell of someone who hasn't shipped much. The people I trust in this work are the ones who can tell you, specifically, what they got wrong last quarter and what it taught them.
I'll keep adding to this over time. When I'm confidently wrong about something, and I will be, it'll land here. Not because confession is charming, but because writing it down is how I make the same mistake a little less often.
If that's the only useful thing you take from any of these notes, being wrong on purpose, early, and cheaply, it's the one I'd keep.