Failures can be a great thing in the long-term

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

I can recall many times in my life when I’ve failed and I’m not afraid to share them with you. It taught me a lot about what I wanted the direction of my life to go in.

When I was a teenager I was quite tall, lanky and incredibly clumsy (I am still clumsy now). My first job as a waitress in a pub at 16 involved cleaning and shining the cutlery, laying tables and taking out plates to people when food was ready. I was always mixing up the table orders customers would get incredibly pissed off.

I was too busy daydreaming, hoping the head chef who was 18 and had a nice car and was good looking would notice me. The chef never noticed me, but the fat and really old (25 y.o) duty manager did like me and would be quite flirty and follow me around which I really found extremely cringey.

When a really irate customer came in one evening after a busy day of work and ordered a bottle of shiraz and a spaghetti bolognese I set the table for him. He swore at me and demanded new cutlery because it wasn’t clean.

Later on in the night I tripped up on a bit of loose carpet and spilled the spaghetti bolognese half onto his white shirt and half onto the floor near the table. He was furious and began a tirade of swearing. I didn’t have very good ability to control my facial expressions and ability to control my emotions so I laughed a bit, maybe out of nervousness and maybe a bit because he was an asshole. Anyway he complained and I got fired for that. I was mortified at the time as a distant family member had wrangled me the job. But I was relieved as well. I hated coming home smelling like raw meat and dirty dishwater it was disgusting. I absolutely love thinking back on this story though I find it absolutely hilarious 😂

So that’s how I learned the lesson that food service wasn’t for me and that if I wanted to not work in food service or directly with the general public who were known to be grumpy, rude and ungrateful I needed to get an education. I realised that if I didn’t try harder I would be taking shit like this from people for my whole life. I changed my attitude massively to school after this, I stopped taking the piss and worked hard, went to Uni.

Not that there is anything wrong with working in food service, some people are exceptional at it and run excellent establishments. I was just personally not cut out for it, I was clumsy, disorganised, prone to long bouts of day dreaming which they must have assumed was laziness, but it really wasn’t, it was just the wrong job for me.

After Uni I thought the world would fall my feet and everything would be easy which was an illusion sold to me by the education system. However with yet more determination I was able to steer myself into a career I wanted for myself.

What about you, have you had any pivotal moments like these? Let me know, cheers.