Our chronology
Ned's Folly began as a private notebook of embarrassing drafts and public missteps. Over the years it grew into a gathering place for people who believe a well-documented failure is worth more than a polished success. The milestones below trace that slow, crooked path.
2016 — The first confession
The site's founding post was a kitchen disaster: a twelve-hour brisket reduced to charcoal an hour before a dinner party. The essay about that evening, written in a single sitting, drew more mail than anything the author had published before. Readers began sending their own stories of ruined roasts and collapsed cakes.
2018 — The archive takes shape
What started as personal anecdotes widened into a documented archive of historical failures: the Pisa foundation, the Boston molasses tank, a dozen forgotten architectural collapses. Each entry paired archival research with a plain-spoken reflection on what the mistake still teaches. The marginalia sketches began here, drawn by hand and scanned in.
2020 — The salon goes monthly
A reader in Cape Town suggested a live conversation about failure. The first virtual salon had eleven attendees and ran ninety minutes past schedule. The format stuck: each month, three members present a recent mistake, and the room helps untangle what went wrong without judgment. No recordings are kept, which is precisely why people speak freely.
2022 — The bookshop opens
After years of recommending the same dozen titles in every essay's footnotes, we built a small, opinionated bookshop. It carries engineering post-mortems, artists' memoirs of abandoned work, and the occasional cookbook from someone who burned dinner and wrote about it. Every title earns its place by being useful, not fashionable.
2024 — Confessions by the thousand
The reader-submitted folly confessions passed one thousand entries. They range from a structural engineer's miscalculated beam load to a potter's kiln that fused an entire firing into a single lump. Each confession is read by a human editor before publication, and the best ones receive a full essay treatment. The ledger keeps growing, one honest mistake at a time.
Our Mission
Ned's Folly exists because failure gets a bad reputation. We collect the stories nobody else wants to tell — the bridge that sagged, the soufflé that collapsed, the manuscript that took twenty years to find its ending — and we treat them with the seriousness they deserve. Not as cautionary tales to be whispered about, but as evidence that the most interesting work in any field usually begins with something going quietly, spectacularly wrong.
Every essay we publish starts with a single question: what actually happened? Not the tidy version, not the moral lesson — the messy sequence of decisions, weather, budgets, and stubborn optimism that led to the collapse. We believe the details matter more than the punchline.
We are not here to celebrate incompetence. We are here to study the gap between intention and outcome — the place where hubris meets gravity, where a sketch on a napkin meets a load-bearing wall. That gap is where learning actually happens.
Long-form essays that reconstruct failures in full context. Reader-submitted confessions that remind us we are not alone in our missteps. A bookshop stocked with titles on resilience and iteration. And a monthly salon where members dissect their own mistakes without judgment.
We want readers to walk away from each essay with a slightly different relationship to their own mistakes. Not thicker skin — that is not the point. A sharper eye. The ability to look at a failed project and see not just what went wrong, but what was learned, what was salvaged, and what might be worth trying again.
We do not offer quick fixes or tidy conclusions. Some of the failures we write about never resolved into success. Some remain beautiful ruins. Our job is to sit with the ambiguity long enough to find what is genuinely instructive — and then to write it down clearly, without pretending we have all the answers.
The Story So Far
Ned's Folly began in 2016 as a personal notebook of embarrassing missteps, scribbled between shifts at a print shop. What started as a private record of bad decisions slowly grew into something larger: a place where spectacular mistakes are examined with the same care that success stories usually receive. The timeline below traces the key decisions, the people who shaped them, and the moments that turned a private habit into a public archive.
2016 — The First Notebook
The founding decision was simple: keep a dated journal of every professional mistake worth remembering. No commentary, no lessons extracted—just the facts of each blunder, written down before pride could soften them. The first entry described a misprinted wedding invitation run that cost two weeks of savings.
2018 — The First Public Essay
A friend convinced the founder to publish one reconstructed failure—a collapsed bookshelf design that took down an entire storefront display. The essay ran to 4,000 words and was read by 300 people in the first week. The response changed the project's direction: readers wanted their own mistakes examined with the same honesty.
2020 — The Folly Confessions Open
The submission form launched with a single question: "What did you break, and what did it teach you?" Within six months, over 200 confessions arrived—from a burnt restaurant wedding cake to a municipal bridge that needed realignment. The editorial rule became clear: every story gets published, no matter how small, as long as the writer names their own role in the failure.
2022 — The Monthly Salon Begins
The first salon brought together twelve members over a video call to discuss a single question: which failure are you still embarrassed about? The format stuck—no presentations, no slides, just structured conversation where each person gets ten minutes to unpack one mistake and the group asks questions. The salon now caps at twenty participants per session to keep the discussion honest.
2024 — The Curated Bookshop
The bookshop launched with thirty titles, each chosen by a different community member who wrote a short note explaining why the book changed their relationship with error. The selection leans toward engineering memoirs, culinary disaster accounts, and architectural case studies—books where the failure is documented in technical detail, not just as a motivational anecdote.