This week's Failsume is the time I thought I could design my website and it turned out...I really couldn't. I chose The Friends of Distinction's "Going in Circles" because if you don't ask for the right help and hire the right technical expertise, you'll end up going in circles trying to get things done!
that time i insisted i was going to build a website
Do you use technology in your Purposeful Hustle? It's an awesome tool and with it, we can really grow individually and grow our businesses. Technology can also lead to failure -- I know because I've had a ton of technology fails.
Not too long ago, I wanted to design the www.DeannaSingh.com website. I had been working on this website for over 20 years and I wanted to make sure when I update the design, it had everything that I wanted. I thought, "well, why not? Why don't I just go ahead and create my own website?" After all, I done things like this before for smaller initiatives and used other people's templates.
This won't be that big of a deal, right?
I knew I was heading into an area where it was going to require technical expertise that I didn't have. So I tried working on the site.
It was an epic fail.
I tried another again and that was a fail.
I realized the level of sophistication required somebody who had more than the little bit of web design knowledge I had. So what did I do? I dug deeper; I was just going to keep on working.
One time, in the middle of the night, I was putting in actual code onto this website when I finally stopped and said, "why am I doing this? Technology is so important and we want the website to be really lovely, but me putting my time in this space is not the most efficient use of time or energy."
It also is not resulting in anything beneficial. In fact, it was resulting in negativity.
#1 - I was wasting time.
#2 - I was wasting money.
#3 - I was frustrating my team and slowing them down.
The team couldn't move on to other things because the website wasn't up and we kept having to say "hey, the website's coming. It's coming. It's coming. If Deanna would just get out of the way." I had to realize that if I wanted to move forward, I needed to step back and step away.
Instead of stepping completely away I decided to take some classes read books. Even though ultimately, I needed to hire a team that did a fantastic job -- in a third of the time it would have taken me to do a terrible job -- I was learning and I was able to learn alongside them.
Would I ever tried to make a website that's as dynamic as what www.DeannaSingh.com one looks right now? No! I probably will never get to that level of expertise but did I build up my capacity to talk about it and explain what I was looking for? Absolutely!
The fail for today is not bringing in the technical expertise when it was needed. Eventually, I was forced into a corner, but I wished I recognized the need for a designer, earlier.
Is there something now that has holding you up technologically? Could you take a minute and find somebody who has the expertise to get you past this hump?
Would it just take so much off your plate and so much off your shoulders if you said, "you know what, not my area of expertise. I want to continue learning this space, but in the meantime, I'm going to bring somebody else in who can get past this technology glitch." If that's you, don't waste any more time! There's amazing people out there who know how to get you through this moment.
THE FAILSUME
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