The Good Stuff

Stop on your way to work for 30 seconds and look around you. What do you see? The postman is out delivering mail, people are rushing past you on the busy street to get to work, Amazon delivering a midnight order of nappies, construction workers continue to toil on, a child is throwing a tantrum with a frustrated parent, cyclists whooshing by, and impatient drivers blowing their horns in traffic like it would make a difference. 

When you stop, the world continues around you. No one has really noticed that you stopped moving. Nothing happens. No crisis at the office as happened because you took 30 seconds to breathe. Look at how insignificant you actually are in the massive world we live in.

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I love failure. Yeah, you read that right. I love failure; I live to fail. I enjoy every moment of it. But I wasn’t always like this. I hated it and I allowed it to consume me to the point of paralysis once. Never again. This is what I’ve learned…

If I received a penny for every time I failed, I’d be a millionaire by now. Most people view failure like it’s something evil. Failure means progress. It means that you’re doing something, it means that you’re working and you’re moving forward. The trick is not to let the failure consume or define you. You have to embrace it and learn from it, but if you allow it to consume you, then you really have failed. 

Hard Fails and Soft Fails

There are hard fails and soft fails, and I’ve had both. The soft fails are those I can quickly learn from and continue to refine whatever it is I’m working on, but the hard fails… those hurt, big time. The bigger the risk, the harder the fail, should you fail. Sometimes, you succeed when you risk big, but at some point, you make a decision that leads to a fail, sometimes a big fail. I’ve found that this is the hardest of them all to accept and recover from, because it blindsides you while you’re on your success high; and let’s face it, these fails humble you. 

I’ve failed a lot, but only experienced a hard, paralysing fail from a massive risk once. So what caused that fail? I listened to someone else, when I should have listened to myself; but if you’re in a partnership, you’re supposed to listen to the other partners and not be a control freak right? Sometimes, that’s not the case. If your gut screams something, listen intently. Learn from my mistake. If you’re a good judge of situations, and you’re good at assessing risk (this only comes with practice) then listen to your own intuition. Don’t be ignorant if you’re unsure. Admit to yourself that you’re unsure and let someone who is sure take the reins. Don’t get cocky because this will ensure you never recover from a fail (because you’ll be ignorant and blame everyone else but yourself); and this impacts everyone else who is affected by that fail. 

Rock Bottom is The Foundation of Success

Rock bottom is the most sturdy foundation you will ever have, because it’s full of all your fails, lessons and experience. Rock bottom is somewhere I’m uniquely familiar with. I’ve hit rock bottom, hard, more than once and I’ll continue to hit it, if only to get back up, dust myself off and try again. I’ve learned this most recently at pole dance. There are so many soft fails. I’ll try a trick or spin, and my form is shit; especially on the left side. But, the soft fails are about refining the technique until you get it right. And the interesting part is you can get it today, and not get it tomorrow, or the day after, and possibly not even the week after! You just have to keep trying it over and over until you get it again. It’s all part of the process and I enjoy it because I know that I’ll get it right the more I fail. 

This has taught me how to deal with the hard fails; the ones that cripple you. When you’ve had a paralysing hard fail and you’re done licking your wounds and feeling sorry for yourself, go do something that has soft fails so you’ll rebuild that confidence and familiarity with discomfort. And soon enough, you’ll find yourself wanting to do exactly what landed you that hard fail, but this time, you’re armed with the knowledge, experience and expertise of your hard fail process. 

Comfort is the Enemy of Success

To succeed is to have an intimate knowledge of and strong relationship with discomfort. I have the rare ability to enjoy discomfort. I don’t like being comfortable; for me, that’s a sign of complacency and giving up, settling.  I hate the idea of settling… it’s unsettling. And it’s unsettling because I know that it is the antagonist of success. Sometimes, you will have to celebrate tiny successes over a long period of failure, and other times, you will experience a great success virtually overnight. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the pain. Enjoy the suffering because you know to yourself that no matter what, you’re failing forward and failure is progress. 

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Writing this piece was difficult. It took me two days of staring at a blank canvas, not “knowing” where to start because it meant that I had to face my failures and use them as writing putty. Even now, some of the small fails hurt. And it does not help that I’m writing this after failing at a lunge via a dislocated kneecap. Failure is daily for me; but I would not have it any other way. 

If you want to support my writing and assist my journey of persistent failure and discomfort, feel free to donate 🙂 It helps me dedicate more time and increase the quality of content.

 

Stay humble. Stay uncomfortable. And keep failing. 

It sounds like an oxymoron, but I am an immigrant in my own home country; a native immigrant. When I left England at the tender age of seven, I would have never imagined the twenty year journey I would have to embark on just to get home. I’m not from a war-torn, drug-infested, or communist country, but I had so many struggles of my own that I thought would have been relieved upon my return to my homeland, only to find myself facing the same issues but on a much larger scale. I am home now, but I often feel like an alien here.

My situation is a little unique. I was born in the UK and migrated when I was seven. But I had never been back, so I had no memory of life in a temperate, first-world, politically-correct country. I spent most of my life in sunny Trinidad, where speed limits are non-existent, cellular reception is spottier than a Dalmatian and the crass use of the English language would make even the most vile people turn their heads. But life in Trinidad is sweet, with its laid-back culture, amazing food and a beach within at least an hour’ drive; the non-progressive attitude of the people is what frustrated me enough to uproot everything and transplant elsewhere.

In December 2016, there was a small window of opportunity where I could just move and start over in England. I had no commitments, no job and my business fell apart in the months prior. I had just enough money for a flight and my passport was in date. Everything seemed to just line up perfectly. So, a swift decision was made for me to start over in a new country just in time for a new year; how poetic.

Keep in mind, that I bought a one way ticket, and unlike every other immigrant, I had the benefit of a birthright, so I didn’t prepare for migration, except packing a single bag containing my clothes and most important things. I didn’t research life in the UK or mentally prepare myself for the vast change I was about to make. I just bought the ticket, said my goodbyes to a place I called home for twenty years and jumped on a plane; somehow knowing that I’ll be okay, and determined to figure this out.

Settling into a new country that is so vastly different from what you know is tough. Motorways with variable speed limits, massive shopping centres, different food, different public transportation and a different use of language are only a few of the many things you have to get used to.

The sun setting at 4pm during Winter and 9pm during Summer is still a foreign concept for me and continues to mess with my body clock. I’m so used to sunrise at 6am and sunset at 6pm all year through that when I look outside and it looks dark, my body assumes it’s 6pm and time to go home, whereas it could be 4pm or even 8pm. I have developed a clock-dependance now.

I remember the -3ºC chill that hit my face the second I got out of the airport as though it was yesterday. When I left the shores of Tobago, it was a blazing hot 39ºC and I was quite sun-kissed as I tried to soak in as much Caribbean sun as possible before I left. I probably should have spent my time sitting in cold rooms, prepping for the chill of mid-Winter I was about to face. But, I had a warm coat, so I figured I was as prepared as I could have gotten. This winter, unless it’s below 10ºC, I will venture outside in a teeshirt and thin hoodie, and if it’s single digits I’m just running to the car from the house or office, I’m not fussing with a coat as my cardigan will suffice. I do keep my winter coat in the boot of the car in case of anything. I still haven’t gotten into the habit of checking the weather before I get dressed.

Now that I was here, the first thing I needed to do was get a job. Luckily, I started that before I left Trinidad, so I was ahead of the game. Job hunting in England is vastly different from a tiny population island. It’s a numbers game, and you have to understand that you might only get a handful of interviews from two or three thousand applications. Sadly, talent gets overlooked because the pool of people looking for the same job is much larger, and the agency consultants and HR staff aren’t really trained to properly sniff out great talent and generally take the people who are self-selling since it’s the easier “fit” for the job. In a well-oiled machine like this, you’re just another cog in the wheel; nothing more, nothing less and that’s the reality everywhere.

Growing up in a predominantly coloured population, where people who were white were mainly sunburned tourists, my skin colour was never really an issue. In fact, I benefitted from positive racism in Trinidad as I am half English, half Indo-Trinidadian. So along with my intelligence and work ethic, my western accent, lighter skin and Indo-caucasian features played a role in doors opening for me. But landing in England changed that completely for me; talk about a culture shock. I suddenly, for the first time in my life, became acutely aware of how different I look, and that includes the colour of my skin.

Because I live in a part of Essex that doesn’t have a lot of people who look like me and I migrated alone, I don’t see or hear anything familiar. London is where its at if I wanted some familiarity; but even then, I don’t fit in well with Indian or Caribbean groups, since I don’t strongly identify with either. It’s complicated for me, I guess. That can be really isolating sometimes as you just want some semblance of “home”.

What do people like me do? Displaced, native immigrants? I do feel much more at home here, isolated in Essex, than I ever did in Trinidad, even though I spent most of my life there.

And so, one year post-migration, we start the chronicles of a native immigrant; it’s going to be an interesting journey…

I’ve glossed over the last year of my life, and I’ve seen mostly struggle. I’ve had a couple of great days and those were amazing days; however, most of my last year has been full of pain on levels that I’d rather not describe. How I’ve managed to go through this with my sanity just about in check, I do not know. Does anything come easy? Doubtful.

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