I Thought I Was a Moron

🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here

“Hey, the Solo Sauce podcast is live,” I told my wife. “Have a listen.”

I press play.

Within twenty seconds I hear myself coughing.

"Huh? That's odd," I said.

Then I heard a few retakes.

Some mumbling.

“Oh for f***’s sake!”

I had uploaded the unedited files.

The raw ones.

All my outtakes were still, you know, intakes.

Obviously, it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things. Not like sending your unedited drafts to a paying client.

Nobody got hurt. The world didn’t collapse.

But there is a very particular sinking feeling when you realise you’ve proudly presented something that isn’t actually finished.

If you work for yourself, you’ll recognise this pattern.

You are not just the thinker; you are the production team, the editor, the tech support desk, the marketing department, the sales function and the finance office.

Sometimes all within the same day.

You record something in the morning, reply to client emails at midday, chase an invoice after lunch, jump on a call to scope a new brief, and somewhere in between you’re trying to think strategically about where this whole thing is headed.

Add the usual phone distractions, WhatsApp pings and half-finished thoughts, and it doesn’t take much to tip into what's called creative bandwidth overload.

When you carry that many open loops in your head, it’s not really a question of if something slips; it’s when.

A wrong export setting.
A missing attachment.
A link that doesn’t work.
A faulty calculation.

Small details you would absolutely catch if they were the only thing you were focused on.

The temptation in those moments is to interpret the mistake as personal. To think it reveals something fundamental about your capability.

That you're careless, not detail-oriented enough, or that you're not cut out for all this.

I've slipped into this.

But most of the time it has very little to do with competence and everything to do with bandwidth.

Creative bandwidth is finite.

When you operate near the edge of it, the big ideas usually hold.

You still know the direction of what you’re trying to say, but it’s the small mechanics that wobble first.

Simply cause you're stretched.

There’s an important distinction between “I am bad at this” and “my system needs tightening.”

One attacks your identity. The other improves your process.

Which one do you think serves you better?

In hindsight, the solution to my podcast mishap was system design. A simple rule like always double-check the uploaded file before publishing would have been enough.

A simple checklist would probably have prevented the whole thing.

The goal is not to eliminate every mistake. That’s simply unrealistic.

The goal is to catch them, correct them and build slightly better systems each time, without turning a normal human error into an existential verdict.

If you’ve had your own version of this recently, something small that felt disproportionately big, it probably says less about your ability and more about how much you’re currently carrying.

Tighten the system.

Protect your bandwidth.

Make it a great day.