How to recover when you make an expensive mistake

Not all mistakes are created equal.  If you can roll with it and recover quickly you’ll do better than someone living with regret.  Here’s how I do it.

A mistake 365 days in the making

Normally my mistakes have instant karma attached.  This trap took unusually long to spring.

A year ago I added SSL security to the Marginally Clever website.  That’s the lock icon on the address bar.  Even though we don’t take credit card information on this website, I wanted people to feel safe shopping.  At the time adding security was an experiment and I didn’t know if we’d keep doing it.

I didn’t set a calendar reminder to renew SSL before it expired, I didn’t check my contact email when I paid, and I try to not look at my website on weekends.  I didn’t know it had expired until Sunday afternoon.

This is the Google Analytics graph for the last two weeks.  Friday night at 5pm the SSL cert expired, and over the weekend traffic took a nose dive.  It hasn’t been that low since… July 26, 2014.  (Thanks, Google.)

Philosophy

When I make a mistake or have an accident, my brain reviews the problem time and time again while I feel bad.  That’s natural – my brain is using chemistry to reshape itself so I avoid the mistake in future, and the chemicals happen to be the same ones that make a person feel bad.

But what about lingering feelings?  I’m 37 now, and I need all the brain power I can get.  I don’t want to obsess over old mistakes, so I’ve developed to tactics that help me finish and move on.

The first is the cost of the mistake.  “What a setback!”  No.  That cost is the fee I paid to learn a lesson, same as tuition in a good school.  A valuable lesson is an investment.  I paid the price, learned the lesson, and I’m never going to need that class again.

That’s going to be more true if I learned every lesson, did my homework, squeezed all the juice from that fruit, got that A+.  Years ago someone told me every accident starts with three mistakes.  I try to find – and fix – three things that could have been done better.

Case in point, I’ve updated my contact email so I get the automatic reminder and I’ve set a calendar reminder 365-7 days into the future.  I’m also looking into an automatic service that warns me if the website is unreachable for any reason.

Beyond that, there’s nothing I can do so there’s nothing to feel bad about.

Final thought

“That which does not kill me…has made a grave tactical error.”