Hi Reader,

Last week I missed my own event by two hours.

I wish I could blame the traffic or another force majeure. I cannot. I was sitting at home, finishing my meditation, about to journal when I saw an email from one of the 20 people who signed up for the event. They were waiting for the podcast club gathering I had organised, were excited about, and then... did't show up.

Timezone confusion. A calendar entry set to the wrong city. A human, irreversible, very embarrassing mistake.

I still feel the shame when writing about the incident. I've missed calls and messed up before and still, this feels different. While wondering why, I figured that it was the fear of being labeled #unprofessional.

Isn't it ironic?

I've spent the last year arguing that the professional mask we've all been wearing is costing us our humanness. That the performance of having-it-together is not the same as actually being together. That mistakes, owned honestly, are where trust actually lives.

And then I missed my own event and the next thing I notice is the fear of people using this against me.

It has happened before. "No wonder you write about unprofessionalism."

Since writing about unprofessionalism, the stakes I put on me became even higher because any mistake wouldn't just be a mistake but a potential evidence against an argument I care deeply about.

Having sat with my discomfort for almost a week now, I see that having a thesis about human imperfection does not make me immune to human imperfection. Advocating for something doesn't have to mean that I have already arrived. I advocate for candid feedback culture and still feel a clench in my chest when someone shares their candour. I advocate for owning mistakes without performance. And when I made a real one, my first instinct was to calculate how it would look.

If I can only talk about unprofessionalism from a position of having figured it out, I'm just building a shinier version of the same performance. The whole point is that we're all still in it. Including me. Especially me, apparently, when it comes to calendar management and time zones.

And interestingly, that's also the point of this week's guest: Alex McCann arrived at the same conclusion — just with considerably less time wasted getting there.

🎤 Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:

Alex McCann is 25, openly unqualified, and building an AI career coach for everyone who still doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up — himself included.

He got fired from a cinema for watching films instead of serving popcorn. He quit a six-month internship after a few weeks. Then he started talking to hundreds of people about their careers, figuring it out alongside them, in public.

We talk about what happens when you stay so close to a problem that the distance expertise usually creates simply never forms. And why that might be exactly what makes the difference.

🎧 Click here to listen to the interview

📥 Download my 1-page summary

​UP_008_Summary.pdf​

🎧 The workshops work Podcast Club

If you missed last week's gathering, you still sign up here to join the retake.

Our March theme is: Learning from Game Design

​Click here to find out more and sign up for free.

That's it from my side. I hope to see you next week!

Myriam