You won't always get what you want, but you might just get what you need.

This week was a turbulent one for me. Due to unforeseen circumstances, a planned website launch on Tuesday had to be rolled back and postponed twice. And even though we successfully delivered on the third go and everyone involved is super happy with the end-result, the question remained: What happened and why?

When I do a personal post-mortem of any project or undertaking, I'll try to analyze how I specifically have lived up to my promises and where I have fallen short. I don't want to bore you with the specifics, so let's jump straight to my conclusion: To speed up the release of this project and to meet its deadline, I have agreed to too many shortcuts and compromises that made the technical setup complex and failure-prone. And while each little compromise on its own would have not been too much of an issue, in totality they have left us vulnerable to a vast array of eventualities that could go wrong.

To make things worse, I was well aware that we are pushing our luck, but in my mind (and in agreement with the customer) it was a temporary solution anyways and we already had plans to fix all loose ends right after the launch was concluded. So no problem right? We do the launch and fix the rest later.

Well, I was wrong. Shit hit the fan, mission critical technical issues arose and we had to abort. Twice. Not the most comfortable situation to be in.

That was two days ago. Now after reflecting, zooming out and looking at the long-term view, we certainly didn't get what we wanted (a smooth release), but I think we might have gotten what we needed (a wake up call to re-evaluate the whole legacy infrastructure that's been in place for years and a bonus lesson in proper risk mitigation management).

And isn't that the case so often in life? When things go wrong, we have to take responsibility for the situation (the first instinct is often to look for someone else to blame and so it was the case here). And when each of us actually takes the time to look under the hood of what happened and why, we find a valuable lesson for our own life hidden in plain sight. And it's on us to learn from that lesson, or we might find ourselves in a similar situation again very soon.

To me that is true for business, relationships, hobbies, finances, you name it.

Life gives us what we need. Sometimes it coincides with what we want, and sometimes it doesn't.