The Honor of Getting It Wrong
Oops.
I accidentally sent you half an email.
Half an email. Half a foundation. Half a message — with no takeaways.
I stared at my phone when the first "Hey, I think your email got cut off" message came in.
Then another.
Then another.
My first instinct? Worry. Gnash my teeth at the embarrassment…
But then I remembered something I learned from reading Buffett's letters: making mistakes is the privilege of the active. To be totally free of mistakes is to live a life of inaction.
Here's what that specific mistake taught me:
Mistakes aren't the opposite of excellence — they're part of it.
The great leaders aren't the ones that never mess up. They're the ones that own their mistakes quickly, learn deeply, and build better systems.
Bill Gates kept a running list of Microsoft's critical mistakes — not to punish, but to learn as a team and compound those lessons into what became a software empire.
Elon Musk conducts deep-dive post-mortems on every failed launch — eleven major failures that became the foundation for SpaceX's success.
Mistakes are signals that there’s opportunity for improvement. Reframing the failures and turning mistakes into an advantage.
Transparency builds trust faster than perfection ever could.
When Howard Behar was at Starbucks, he used to say, "We're not in the coffee business serving people. We're in the people business serving coffee."
People don't connect with perfect companies. They connect with honest ones. Mistakes are the opportunities to be human.
The best family businesses are those that create cultures where mistakes are learning opportunities rather than grounds for punishment.
In family businesses, we don't get to hide behind quarterly earnings calls or corporate PR teams. When we mess up, we have to own it. When we learn something, we share it.
That's exactly what we're doing.
In a world chasing overnight success, there's something powerful about leaders and institutions that say: “We cracked. We're fixing it. We're building stronger.”
Legacy isn't built by avoiding mistakes.
Mistakes are the privilege of those bold enough to lay brick!
Let’s keep taking action and learning.
Onward,
Matt
P.S. If you've ever sent an email you immediately regretted, replied all when you meant to reply, or watched a carefully planned presentation crash mid-sentence ... welcome to the club. We're building something real here, mistakes and all.