Rule #1: don’t throw stones! Two great examples of Stibbe-fallibility this week.

First, I ran a seminar about writing in business. Lots of cool people came and we had a great discussion. One of the points I stressed was that you had to proofread everything really carefully. Within two hours of the seminar finishing, I had an email from one of the attendees politely pointing out a typo on my website.

Second, I’m writing an article for an IT security magazine. To cut a very long story short I made a complete bozo out of myself by not realising that these two PR people I was talking to were in fact the same person. D’oh! No wonder PRs think journalists are a bunch of semi-housetrained monkeys.

If either of these situations were reversed and happened to me, I’d blog them. So it’s only fair that I indict myself when it’s richly deserved.

I remember the old Woody Allen gag where he describes an alien invasion of Earth in which the Martians beat humanity by the simple expedient of being ten minutes early for everything. The moral: you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be better (and put your hands up when you’re wrong).