What you are learning from, and how

An event fails a week before the room — on the day nobody checked what else is on at the same time. By the time people arrive, almost everything is already decided.

Clubs decay with nobody to blame. Power simply accumulates in one pair of hands until there is no one left who can say no.

You are excellent at what you can do and you avoid what you cannot — until the post requires it. The gap between what the post demands and what you do can be learned shut; it has nothing to do with character.

Your biggest plan this term will be stopped not by a rival but by someone you never considered — an administrator, a lecturer, another club. In a club, power often sits where there is no job title.

The plan was good and half of it was eaten by small things: a locked door, a speaker who did not come, a dead microphone. That is not failure. It is the normal noise of doing anything, and you can prepare for it in advance.

There are four other clubs in your faculty and a student has one free evening a week. Whether you are good decides nothing about that evening. What you are different at decides it, and it has to fit in one sentence.

The strategic plan sits on a drive while the club lives a different life. The real strategy is wherever the money and the hours actually went.

The goal list has ten items and not one sentence about what is actually in the club's way. Without that sentence, everything else is an activity plan with a grander name.

You start a conversation about the club's brand and five minutes in everyone is talking about the logo. Meanwhile the club already owns five things nobody paid for, and nobody is talking about those.

If the club defines itself by its events, it disappears the day events stop working. The question to answer is who you are for, and it is harder than it looks.

The event will be stopped by the person nobody spoke to: whoever looks after the room, the lecturer in the next hall, the club whose date you took. There is almost always such a person, and you can almost always find them in advance.