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I Screwed Up

Brief Overview

After this, I definitely deserve jerk of the day. I totally screwed up and I’ll tell you exactly what happened in this episode.

Story

[01:00] I recently hosted an online fundraiser called the Marketing Forecast Live to help support 2 team members who were greatly affected by the the Hurricane that ripped through Houston and Florida. To help raise some money, we decided to reach out to our network to create some high value content and offer it up for sale. We got a whole bunch of online influencers to participate. People like Jeff Walker, Ryan Levesque, Russell Brunson, James Wedmore, Amy Porterfield, Carrie Green, Rachel Miller, and Kevin Rogers. It was a star studded line up!

[02:47] While promoting the online event, there was an old picture of Ryan Levesque that I knew he didn’t like, that accidentally got used by my team. As soon as I saw that was the picture my team had selected, I messaged them right away and said, “Hey, we need to swap this out for one of his most recent pictures.”

Unfortunately, somebody had already shared the Marketing Forecast Live page on Facebook. Ryan immediately responded. He’s like, “Really? That picture? It’s so old, please can you swap that out?”

I messaged him right away to let him know that our team is in the midst of doing that right away and…” As a joke I said, “But we were thinking about using this one…”

[04:00] We had this ongoing running joke. There’s this old picture of him where he’s making a weird face. He looks like he literally just came out of the gym and I bugged him about it all the time. And well, this is where I put my foot in my mouth because as soon as I sent that message, he wrote back right away and said, “Stu, I know that you love that photo based on how many times you’ve brought it up 🙂 But, what you should know is that that photo was taken at the hotel across the street from the hospital when my second son had to be medevac’d to a level three NICU when he was born not breathing. We hadn’t slept for 48 hours and I still managed to do the interview. Feel free to use this photo but now you know the context.”

[04:52] As you can imagine, I felt like an absolute idiot. I wrote back right away and said, “Man, I deserve jerk of the day.” Obviously I had no idea about that and here I was poking fun at him in regards to this picture. Ryan is a great friend and we kid around all the time, but I just didn’t realize the context around the situation as well as I thought I did. He accepted my apology and we’re all good, but there is a lesson to be learned from this story that I want to share…

Big Idea:

[05:40] We can never assume that we know all the facts. I thought the picture of Ryan was of him just getting back from the gym. But there was way more to it. It wasn’t just him getting back from the gym. He’d been up for 48 hours with his wife while their second son was having all kinds of trouble breathing after he was born.

The lesson, is that we never know what’s going on in other people’s lives. Think about how that could be applied to your business. We never know what’s fully going on in the lives of our customers, our business partners, our affiliates, our team members, etc.  

At the end of the day, context is everything. When you know the backstory, it puts everything in perspective. So there’s my screw up. I learned my lesson and I hope you don’t have to screw up to learn it too!

Memorable Quote

“We just never know what’s going on in other people’s lives.” – Stu McLaren

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