Early in my career, I spent six years running the Gold Coast Section of Future Business Leaders of America, overseeing high school chapters across Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties. It was a second full-time job stacked on my real one, for a small stipend. I loved it.

The biggest event came every March. One Saturday, two thousand students, forty competitions, hundreds of volunteers and judges. And me, in my early twenties, in charge of all of it.

I locked the venues, recruited the judges, and built a scheduling system that kept dozens of events from colliding. The first half of the day ran at a local high school: dozens of events at once, students rotating room to room. Then the whole conference loaded up and headed to Six Flags Magic Mountain, where the awards ceremony happened that same night. So while two thousand students rode roller coasters, my team raced to finish grading, finalize results, and get the theater doors open like the day had gone exactly to plan.

Then the Scantron machine broke. Mid-grading, it started spitting ink across the answer sheets, with thousands left to score and a curtain time that wasn't going to move.

So I kept back the one chapter that wasn't all that interested in Six Flags anyway and turned them into a human grading machine. One person read the answers, the rest scored by hand. Loud and chaotic, but it worked. We made the ceremony on time.

Looking back, it feels slightly insane it worked as often as it did. But it's an early version of the work I love most: hand me a giant, messy thing nobody wants to deal with, and I'll figure out how to make it happen.