All summer, my internet went out. Not all at once. Just enough to ruin the week. Every week.

They reset our modem remotely. Fixed. 😀
They sent us a new modem. Fixed. 😅
They replaced the router. Fixed. 🥹

And every time, it worked. For a day. For an hour. Sometimes for two whole minutes. And every time, we said the same thing: "it's fixed."

Then, it would fail again. I’d drive all the way to my coworking backup spot only to get a text from my husband: "internet's back, babe" 🙄

Back to square one. Every time.

You've got a router too.

When you're doing everything right and still ending up where you started, you're not behind. You're in a loop.

The last time the router went out, I lost my patience.

After hours of chatting with an AI bot, I finally pushed support to send a real person. He found it in about five minutes. A fried wire.

Here's the sneaky thing about a fried wire. It works. For a while. Right up until it doesn't.

So every time it came back on, we called it fixed. Not because it was fixed, but because it was working. And the second it worked, we stopped looking.

We were in such a rush to find a solution that we accepted the first fix.

Every reset was urgent. The wire was the priority. And nobody touched it, because everybody followed the same script.

My wire wasn't my calendar. It was my excitement.

I used to get an idea, get giddy, and tell EVERYBODY. LinkedIn post, IG story, group chat, newsletter. The promise existed before the plan did.

Then the doubt crept in. Then life happened. Then I missed it. And to make up for it? A bigger announcement. After all, you can’t disappoint someone after getting them excited.

That's how "see you next Thursday" turned into 18 months of inconsistency with “Love, your business Mom.”

From weeks to months without podcast episodes to the same with the newsletter.

I felt it for months before anybody saw it.

Back in Lesson 2, I told y'all: you feel it before you see it.

A wise person once told me that you’ll receive the same lessons over and over again until you finally learn. I’m displeased to say they were 100% right.

🗣 “HEY SIRI, play ‘I can see clearly now’ by Johnny Nash”

The tech didn't just look at the router. He followed everything connected to it, all the way back into the wall. Do the same. Zoom out past the thing that keeps breaking and look at what feeds it. For me, the missed Thursdays weren't the problem. The announcements before them were.

You can't always see the wire from inside the wall, so get outside eyes: a mentor, a friend who'll be honest, a structure that tells you the truth.

Our internet didn't keep dropping because we were bad at internet. It kept dropping because our approach was wrong.

Swap what isn't working, not what's easiest to swap. New software is a new router. A new planner is a new router. If the wire's fried, they'll drop too. If your process is wrong, you'll just automate your problems.

For me, the replacement was GHODWA. I do a LOT of things.

Media, an agency, 1:1 embedded work, creative strategy, collabs. For years, all of it ran on the same fried wire: say it first, figure it out later. When I moved back to North Carolina, I put everything under one umbrella and broke it into lanes. Now every idea gets a home before it gets an announcement.

Don't call it fixed because it's working. Two good weeks isn't proof. Watch for the shoe to drop, because there's always another shoe. Then review again.