That time you poured your heart into your moonshot, but ended up burning down 3 acres of Stanford University (with Mark Jacobsen)

Our 20th take at Client Horror Stories brings in a particularity that sets apart from the rest: there are actually no clients involved. In today’s episode, we have Mark Jacobsen, author of Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal, with an excruciating story that has us sharing his pain from the very beginning. 

Mark’s narrative brings us the point of view of a military pilot during the hottest years of war with an unstoppable will to help the Syrian refugees, which eventually led him to begin a non-profit with his own resources. His tale starts in the very beginning of the motivation for it, then goes through his innovative idea of using drones to reach places he couldn’t fly to, and eventually gets to the breakdown point: creating a 3-acre wildfire in Stanford. 

What’s so special about today’s episode, is the fact that it teaches us that, no matter how pure our intentions are, some moonshots can be achieved by just trying and trying. Among some of the many lessons that this story taught us, we shall highlight Mark’s point on being able to create and maintain healthy habits both for you and your team, and making sure you have a business plan before you start anything, even when your anything is a nonprofit. But overall, it teaches us that even though our intuition can really help us see a problem coming, sometimes other people’s intuition can also help us find the right solutions to it. 

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Morgan Friedman