The Hidden Powers in Admitting “I Don’t Know”
This is a story about failure, vulnerability, and imperfectionism, and how to use all three on your journey towards self-mastery.
“Hey, Randy. Did you see the email?”, my manager asked in a direct message.
“Mmm, I did not.”
“No worries, I can catch you up. We just got off the phone with a client who reported their entire site was down. They asked if you made any updates this morning.”
“I don’t think it’s anything I did.”
“Cool, just checking”, he followed.
I was in complete disbelief — I had just lied to my manager and I couldn’t figure out why I typed those words and hit send. I sat at my desk in a state of paralysis, thinking to myself, could that have actually broken their site?… there’s just no way. My hands started to shake from being nervous, and my heart sank as I slowly unfolded the gravity of the situation.
The truth was that I actually had been in the client’s production instance, trying out several plugins which would help solve one of their own requests. But in the moment, I wholeheartedly believed that nothing I was testing could have brought their site down.
