Allergic to Failure

I started working at thirteen. While my friends drifted home after school, I went straight to a takeaway. Grease covered my hands and extractor fans deafened me whilst I fought the endless repetition of small tasks. It wasn’t romantic, but it was me. Later I tutored. Maths, science, anything I could teach; stacking every hour into my savings. Every pound earned wasn’t just money; it was proof. Proof that I was moving toward the life I had promised myself and my family: my mother would never struggle to pay a bill again. That was my oath, carved into me when I was still a boy. And the first time I came home to see her not crying over bills because I could contribute, I understood I have to earn, to protect, to provide, regardless of method.

By seventeen, it looked like that promise was becoming real. I had my own unit, my own keys. I was winding electrical items, repairing mechanical units, fixing things that felt like fixing myself. Every client was a small confirmation that I mattered. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I was useful, needed, building a life with my own hands. No partners, no staff, no safety net. Just me, the unit, and the slow grind of jobs booked and jobs completed. I carried the weight of it as though it were my own empire.

Then the first lockdown came. Clients disappeared. Calls stopped. The savings I had accumulated since thirteen evaporated. I watched it happen like a slow-motion collapse, unable to combat it. My workstations sat empty. My unit became a tomb for my tools. In a few months, everything I had built disintegrated.

I could have blamed the pandemic. Everyone else did. But I refused. I didn’t just blame myself, I hated myself. I hated myself with a passion I had never known before. I hated the thought that people would excuse me because of my age. Youth being used as a shield felt like a wound to my pride. If I had succeeded young, then I had also failed young. I felt like a fraud. Like I had betrayed not only the clients who had begun to rely on me but also the thirteen-year-old boy who worked beyond his capabilities to begin all of this. Worst of all, I almost broke the promise I made to my mother.

The disgust was overwhelming. I remember the taste of it. The sickness in my stomach, disgust so sharp it felt like a disease. It hollowed me out. At that moment, I made another promise; silent, as binding as the one to my mother. I would never let myself experience this again. I would never be this exposed, this fragile, this defeated.

When I emerged from that loss, I had no morals, no hesitation, no questions about how money was made. I would do anything, no questions asked. The optimistic ambitions of my youth were gone; only the refusal to lose remained. That refusal carried me into a venture that shouldn’t have worked; repacking flavoured water and spring water. It was an interim measure, a desperate attempt to rebuild the wreckage of what I’d lost, but it became the seed of something larger. From there I pushed into sourcing and purifying my own spring water, bottling it myself with my own preforms and caps, investing in my own blowing and filling line and selling directly to my own customers.

Each expansion came not from calm ambition but from the same internal repulsion at the thought of collapse. A premium water sub-brand. A literary and publishing company. The scaling of the core business into something greater than I had once imagined. I trace all of it back to that silent promise made in the ruins of my first business.

Looking back now, I understand something that I could not at seventeen. Success is not born from desire. Desire is fragile. It fades with comfort, it bends under pressure, it dies when tested. To be successful you must learn to hate failure with a depth that consumes you. Hatred of failure is not an emotion but a creed: it hardens your will, makes you endure, forces you to build not only for growth but for survival. It is the only foundation strong enough to outlast the shock of collapse.

I carry that same principle into every arena of my life. Big or small, I take every loss personally. Every competition is legacy-defining, and I cannot fathom defeat. In my professional rugby career, even victory never satisfied me. I could step off the pitch with a win and still replay in my head the rucks I entered half a second too late, the scrums where we lost ground, the tackles I should have driven harder, the scoring chances that slipped through our hands. Every win was shadowed by the magnitude of the bigger win we had missed.

The same is true when I fight in Muay Thai. I relive every exchange in my head: each check, each strike, each slip. Not out of pride, but out of a compulsion to find where I could have done more. Moments where I could have imposed myself better, sharper, harder.

Even in small, friendly competitions, I never let myself ease off. I don’t enter to take part. I enter to win, and if I don’t, I carry it like a sickness until I correct it. Success belongs not to those who crave victory, but to those who are so repulsed by losing that they will claw, bleed, and build until defeat is unthinkable.

Everything I have built is not a monument to winning; it is my fortress against failure. In the end, what defines me is my inability to accept loss. It is not enough for me to win; I must eradicate the possibility of failure. It disgusts me. That repulsion is the engine that drives me. That is the truth I live by.