What To Do When Panic Feels Like The Only Option

I don’t know if it was a proper panic attack, but I sure as hell was panicking. And this terror sauce also had a dollop of rage mixed in for flavor—a delightful brew for my wife to witness. What tipped the domino that set my lizard brain afire? Technology not working like it was supposed to.

As you may be aware, I just launched a course. I had spent weeks, nay months getting all my automated sequences in order, so that when someone registered for my free workshop on Demio, their contact and webinar info would automatically be whisked into Kajabi, sending them down a prescribed email sequence so I could focus on more pressing matters.

Except, that’s not what was going on. In fact, none of my webinar attendees were “coming over'' to Kajabi, which forced me into some pre-Johannes Gutenberg world where I was manually transcribing names, webinar dates, and unique links, while kick-starting email sequences on my own. Madness!

“How did this happen?” I thought. “I was so prepared.”

Preparation is a funny thing. It’s a word that connotes omniscience. “If I’m prepared. I cannot be surprised,” we say. But anyone who has voluntarily progressed down the dark, unlit halls of their mind’s ideas knows that you cannot make a list of things that haven’t occurred to you.

It’s a literal impossibility.

This is the challenge of being a creator in the internet age.

We have umpteen ways to learn how to do something, but no matter how much knowledge we amass there is still that exposed gap of getting from here to there that we cannot avoid.

There is no teleportation.

There is no secret hyper loop pod that whisks you to your destination.

There is no hard worn path that guarantees safe passage.

No, creating is more like bushwhacking through a thicket of jungle in a loincloth and flip flops.

Welcome to your life at this exact moment. No one could have predicted it. It’s like setting sail for Lisbon only to find out that your GPS doesn’t work and you’re pretty sh!t at astronomy. Creating something out of nothing is always navigation by dead reckoning.

I re-learned this lesson when I was deep in the throes of my “Your platform is as useful as a chocolate teapot,” text barrage at Demio's chat support, before I changed tune and tried to be part of the solution. (Note: Being insufferable burns out its "empathy from others" quota in a flash, I can tell you.)

I’ll spare you the gory details but Demio did finally admit that it was an error on their end and they helped me migrate all my attendee data over to a new webinar whose automations worked correctly for all new signups.

So in the end, I “figured it out”; at least that recent iteration of “it.” No one figures it all out. Ever. And that’s what keeps things interesting—life always unfolding in ways we couldn’t have dreamt up.

An idealized future is not the same thing as a surefire plan to make it happen.

Your job is to prepare, not foretell.

When the surprises arise, you can mutter an f-bomb or three, then compose yourself and say, “There you are! Let’s get you sorted.”

Responding to the unexpected with humility and grit is success. In fact, it’s the only way through.