Pre-Meal for May 20, 2026A Mistake

Happy Wednesday!

One of my dad’s favorite sayings is “Adversity is a terrible thing to waste.”

He means that even though we don’t get to choose what happens to us, we do get to choose how we respond.

When I look back on some of the hardest moments in my life, I feel a sense of gratitude, because I know I wouldn’t be where I am without them. But that doesn’t take the sting out of the fact that sometimes things just. . . suck.

When something less than optimal happens, I hear my dad in my head and try to remember two things.

One: Give yourself the grace to feel the feeling. When you’ve poured yourself into something and it doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, it hurts. I truly believe that if you don’t take a beat to acknowledge that, you’re going to have a hard time moving on.

(And if you’re leading other people, they need to see you take a minute to feel your feelings. Pretending that everything is sunshine and roses when it isn’t erodes trust. Being honest about disappointment is part of being honest.)

Two: You can’t stay down. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and figure out how you can make the best of the mistake. (The people you lead need to see that, too.)

Here’s why I’m talking about adversity. When we got our very first, hot-off-the-press copy of The Field Guide, we found a mistake. Not a tiny typo we could shrug off (though I’ve never been particularly good at that)—but a real miss.

My team had spent months building a tool for our website to complement the beautifully designed poster tucked into a pocket at the back of The Field Guide. That poster, which helps you map your customer’s journey so you can elevate it, has forty spaces.

But forty—it’s not really enough. The more granular you get, the better you can make the experience for the people you serve; it’s when you get into the weeds that you start to make magic.

So we created an infinite version of the map on our website: a tool that gives you as many spaces as you might want or need. Get ultraprecise about your customer journey, or use the tool to map other journeys—your team’s onboarding process, for example—so you can elevate those, too. You can save multiple maps, returning to them as many times as you want. And you can print the maps you make.

The problem: the paragraph on page 224 that would have let readers know about this tool didn’t make it into the book. Instead, another paragraph, from elsewhere in the book, is repeated there.

Sure, I’m frustrated that some people who bought this edition of the book will never know the tool exists—we made it because we thought it would help people! But I’ve taken a moment to be mad and sad about it. Now it’s time to not waste the adversity.

If the link to the map had made it into the book, I wouldn't be writing this newsletter. Since I am, a lot of people who haven't bought The Field Guide will now know about this incredible tool. I bet this shout-out makes people who havebought The Field Guide even more excited to roll up their sleeves and get to work. And I’ll definitely spend more time hyping the tool in appearances than I would have if that paragraph had made it in.

All of which is to say: this mistake is ultimately going to result in a lot more people knowing about and using the tool than if it hadn’t happened—and that’s a good thing.

Onward! You can find the tool here.

Have a good service,

Will