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Daniel Gold walks through the year-long arc of becoming program manager for the Friendship Circle Kansas City 5K and 1K, a race he had never built, for a chapter in its first year of operation. Six weeks before the rescheduled race date, registration numbers still didn’t justify holding the event. Daniel made the call anyway, applying the fail fast discipline he’d normally reserve for business decisions to a cause that had become personal.
What this episode covers:
* Why saying yes to an idea you only meant to suggest is often where real leadership responsibility begins
* The difference between failing fast and letting a bad initiative bleed out slowly
* Why a high-performing team runs on community, not the “we’re a family” framing
* How the Raving Fans principle, from Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, applies to building something new from zero track record
* What it means to be the spark instead of the whole engine
Related Episodes:
* Leadership Lab #5: Empowerment Isn’t a Strategy. It’s a Privilege., the foundational episode on empowerment this one builds directly from
* Ep. 12: From Ripples to Waves, the companion episode on how small leadership behaviors compound into culture-wide impact
* Ep. 25: The Power of Giving, on leadership measured by what you give away rather than what you accumulate
Pull Quotes:
“There are three lessons for all of us as leaders that I took away from leading this event. All of them already happened in the story I just told you.”
“Fail fast doesn’t mean fail painlessly. It means choosing the smaller, earlier pain over the larger, deferred one.”
“The leaders who struggle most aren’t the ones who make bad calls. They’re the ones who already know the call needs to be made and keep finding reasons to delay it.”
Substack Subject Line Options
* He handed me a race I’d never run
* Six weeks out, the numbers said cancel again
* What I learned managing my first race
* The call nobody wants to make
* Fail fast, suture quickly
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