Perfect peace.

It takes a lot of work to make our events happen. A lot of work. On top of the giant work that it takes to simply maintain existence as a nonprofit. All of this work is being done in the slim amounts of spare time by a few folks between soccer games and birthday parties, amidst medical issues, family drama and job pressures. And as we've typed here on Kyrie's blog many times, we are just people trying to improve the world. We are not super-people. We don't have business clout. We aren't corporate. We aren't celebrities. We don't even know what we don't know—ha! But ...

We are taking action. We aren't sitting by thinking someone else will do it. We aren't put off by the learning curve or discouraged by a few novice missteps. We aren't paralyzed with bureaucracy or politics. We don't let growing pains stop us from growing. That said, we are also a group of people who put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do good, be good. We've witnessed a lot of miracles while doing this work, and we think—and we've heard from you!—that we can put on a really nice event having no particular experience doing so. And it's just like treading water: calm and cool up top but paddling like crazy underneath.

So even if every meeting, every event, every e-mail or every post isn't perfectly perfect 100% of the time, know that, frankly, we're less concerned with perfection as we are with cancer-curing, teamwork for goodness. ;)

On that note, here's a post from marketing guru Seth Godin, offering a great perspective on our expectations of how things should go ...

Is everything perfect?

Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."

Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"

Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."

In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?

If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is..."

Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often. 

Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.

I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going-away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.