The Fail Cake: A Recipe for Serendipity (Part 1)
A year ago today, I came face to face with failure. In doing so, I also reacquainted myself with the love of my life. The way things work often makes sense only when you connect the dots backwards, just as Steve Jobs once said. Allow me to tell you how a chocolate cake and a craving for chili-flavored chickpeas led to a serendipity that would change the direction of Animo Plus Education and my life.
Earlier that day, a stop sign and a low bank balance almost wiped out my opportunity to get my Heavy Rigid license here in Western Australia. I always remind clients and the kids I educate that FAIL stands for “first attempt in learning.” But it’s hard to console yourself when you take an unpaid day off work and spend the day preparing for your driving test, only to finish in failure. The smell of perspiration, an unhealthy look of desperation, and the realization that you’ve wasted thousands of dollars hit hard. Not to mention the hours spent studying theory, just to be tripped up by something simple. What was that something simple?
Let’s STOP for a moment and reflect on that Friday last year. I’d been offered a job in the mines and bought a heap of tickets to drive different types of machines: a roller, an articulated dump truck, and a watercart. Lovely, you’d think, just like every other Irish person who fell off the boat and landed in Australia. Despite what you may think, “I had not been driving these machines back home for the last ten years.” The only piece of evidence needed to complete my onboarding and induction was that heavy rigid license.
Everything can be summed up by how I was retrained to hold and turn the steering wheel by my driving instructor, Sommer. A friendly and gregarious instructor from Punjab who had driven trucks in Australia for many years. He showed me how to feed the steering wheel through my hands to avoid losing control of the larger wheel. His words stuck with me: “you are a professional driver now, you will get paid for your job—do it properly!” My rent, visa, food, and other necessities that required money were riding on this new opportunity.
For the remainder of the day, I listened attentively, taking on Sommer’s instructions. My anxiety intensified as I constantly felt the weight of so much depending on the outcome of the test. The test was scheduled for the end of the day, and time passed quickly. Before I knew it, Sommer had wished me “good luck” in his Indian accent, and I sat to await my test instructor. A friendly, bald Scouse lad named Kevin called my name in his thick Liverpool accent. I was super conscious not to piss him off, so I avoided mentioning football, as the Liverpool-Everton debate was an assumption that could go 50:50. We climbed into the truck, and he put on the video, beginning the test, going through all the formalities. I did everything as I was instructed. The test was going well. That was until I reached the final stretch and could see the end in sight. It’s a lesser-known fact that humans generally lean towards doubt and self-sabotage the closer they get to their end goal. There is an empirical amount of research to support this.