It’s 7:00 p.m.

I just wrapped up one of the toughest days I’ve had in a while… and I feel great.

At first, that didn’t make any sense. My emotions and my brain were in a bit of a standoff.

Emotion: “Hey, we crushed it today.”

Brain: “Uh, were we at the same job? That day was a mess.”

Let’s rewind 12 hours.

My day started with me rolling out of bed and opening Slack to find more than 30 unread messages… all in one channel… all from a single member of our leadership team.

That’s never a good sign.

Turns out, after I had gone to bed (I’m on the East Coast, most of the team’s on the West Coast, and some of them work until 10 p.m. – so I wasn’t being lazy, at least not more than usual), something had blown up.

One of our top team members – someone we’d never had issues with – had completely melted down.

When I last spoke to them, they seemed happy. Solid even. So this came out of left field.

But it didn’t take long before the real story came out.

It wasn’t out of nowhere. It had been building for months, a slow, quiet pressure that finally found its release valve.

As I was processing that, I noticed something else. Stripe hadn’t sent us a payout in five days.

Payday is coming up fast.

Then our phone messaging system decided to just… stop working. No error. No warning. Just silence.

And then I had a tough conversation (one I’d scheduled earlier) with another leadership team member about their performance. Never a fun one to have, even when it’s necessary.

All of that.

All in one day.

Some of it we fixed. Some of it’s still hanging in the air.

And yet… here I am, sitting down at the end of it all, not feeling defeated.

I feel good.

Which makes no sense at all – at least not at first.

So I started writing this, trying to figure out what was going on in my head. Why was I feeling proud when the day looked like something out of a startup horror film?

And that’s when it clicked.

I felt good because I saw the proof, right there in front of me, that I had grown.

And growth, the real kind, doesn’t usually show up in big wins. It shows up on days like this, when things go sideways and you stay grounded.

That feels good.

Well, unless we’re talking about your waistline growing. Though let’s be honest, junk food growth feels pretty good too… until the next morning.

So tonight, I go to bed a little more tired, but also a little more proud.

Because I’m better at my craft than I was yesterday.

And, with a bit of luck, when the next rough day hits… I’ll be ready for that as well.