December 21, 2020 • 17 mins
This is the story of a lesson my father taught me about failure. I’ll also introduce you to a sheep farmer who, to everyone’s surprise, signed up for an ultramarathon with zero racing experience. But what came next was even more surprising...
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Today's stories about a father's love, herding sheep and pineapple pastry.
It's also about me, your host an Opum Care, But
mostly it's about making you smile. Welcome to an Opum Cares,
Chapter eleven. Sweet Failure. One day, early into my eleventh grade,
(00:41):
my father arrived at my school and he asked that
my teacher excused me from class. This was highly unusual.
You see, life with my family was consistent. Being released
early from school without notice. I never happened to me before,
(01:02):
and it was all the most significant because it was
my father who came to retrieve me. My father was,
as I told you in the bread Sellers story, a
man of habit. He never skipped work, intelligently stuck to
his routine. So I was curious why all of a
sudden he was here at my school. As we left
(01:25):
the school building, my father asked, do you want to
eat something? Of course I did. Always as a child,
my favorite restaurant was Alpha Restaurant, but Alpha was our
place for special occasions. My family only made two visits
(01:45):
to Alpha year, and our next visit was four months away.
So instead, I suggested, maybe we go to the Little
Sweet Shop in the Lower bazaar. But to my surprise,
my father said, you don't want to go to alpha.
This was getting more interesting by the minute. When we
(02:15):
sat down, my father proceeded to order our favorite items,
a mutton samosa, a pineapple pastry and an espresso. I
watched him with awe. Why were we here enjoying this indulgence.
Had my father received a promotion, did he win the lottery?
(02:37):
Was he leaving the family? And this was my goodbye meal?
But as the waiters brought us our food, he started
to talk. But two, he said, This morning I went
to the education board and I found out through a
(02:57):
friend that you have failed in the metricalation examination. As
I have mentioned in my youth, I was not very
focused on school, so I never received high marks and
even extracurriculus like sports or debates did not stir my interest.
Although my mother always encouraged me to study, I must
(03:21):
admit I did not try my hardest. In India, secondary
school is divided into two phases. The first phase concludes
with a very important exam at the end of tenth grade.
But things were a little different in Shimla. Because the
winter months were so extreme in our little town. We
took our exams early in December to spare students and
(03:43):
teachers from traveling to school during the cruelest winter months.
Why is this an important distinction, Well, this schedule was
not standard across the country, and so in order to
keep in a relative cycle with other schools, students in
Shimlak continued to advance to the next grade before their
(04:05):
annual exams were graded. In fact, students in Shimla but
typically two months into the next term before they got
their test results back. So if a student failed the
Metriclaian exam, they were pulled out of eleventh grade and
thrown back to ten and they would have to repeat
the grade with kids who had just been their juniors.
(04:30):
Welcome back. How humiliating. It's an imperfect system, and so
you can imagine it was the most modifying thing that
could happen to a student in our little town. And
now it was happening to me. As my father related
the news to me, my mind started racing. I was
(04:53):
trying to come up with excuses, ways to defend myself
from the schooling I was about to get, but the
schooling never came. Instead, my father said, you are probably
wondering why I brought you here to our favorite restaurant,
Alpha to have our favorite meal. I did this so
(05:15):
that you never forget this failure or any other failure
you will encounter in your life. He continued, I want
you to remember that failure is an event, never a person.
Failure is an event, never a person. I can't tell
(05:36):
you how many times I have repeated that line to
myself over the years. Failure is an event, never a person.
I have told it to others. It helps reframe the
world and gives you permission to take risks because failure
is the circumstance, not you. But that was my father,
(05:58):
Push or not care That day is celebrated failure with
a sixteen year old boy, and it has made me
the person I am because with those words, it took
the fear of failure away from me. My father was remarkable.
(06:22):
When he passed away, my brother and I opened a
trunk of his Inside, along with some other prize possessions,
I found clippings of my plays and my film reviews,
drama certificates, letters I had sent home, and in some cases,
just my name mentioned in a publication. Each time, the
words unopened care were proudly underlined, the truth is we
(06:48):
all have setbacks. I've had ups and downs, and those
downs can hurt. Because of my father, I know those
little failures will never define in who I am, and
when I feel down, I reach it in the same
way he lovingly taught me. I ordered one mutton samosa,
(07:14):
one pineapple pastry and an espresstrom and I basked in
his memory and his words, knowing failure is always an
event and never a person. Speaking of people who refused
(07:41):
to see themselves as failures, let me tell you about
Cliff Young. For his entire adult life, Cliff lived as
a potato farmer in rural Australia. In fact, by the
time he was sixty one years old, he was still
living with his mother on the old family farm. But
Cliff didn't want to be defied by his circumstances, so
(08:04):
in he decided to do something bold. He signed up
for a marathon. But this wasn't just any marathon. Cliff
entered an ultra marathon race between the big cities of
Sydney and Melbourne on a coast, stretching nearly five and
fifty miles. If you're like me and not an ultra marathon, runner.
(08:29):
Let me put that into perspective. A standard marathon, which
is already an impressive fate, is roughly twenty six miles,
so this ultra marathon was more than twenty times that.
In general, it takes elite runners about a week to
finish a coast that long, but in order to do so,
they need to jog more than seventy eight miles a day.
(08:53):
Needless to say that these races are not for the
faint of heart. Most ultra marathon runners are young at
taking machines that eats, sleep, and breathe their training. And
then there was Cliff. Cliff had almost no experience racing.
In fact, he had never completed a real five k before,
(09:14):
let alone a standard marathon. He didn't subscribe to any
fancy running magazine or use any training apps. He didn't
even own a pair of running shoes. But Cliff wasn't
afraid of failure, and he wasn't afraid to try. While
Cliff had never formally run a race or had any training,
he had been running all his life. When he was
(09:38):
a young boy, his family owned nearly two thousand sheep
on their farm. The family didn't have enough money to
buy a tractor. They didn't even have enough money to
keep a herding dog, so Cliff's family corrilled the sheep
on foot. Cliff spent his whole life running after sheep,
and he was good at it. Un After two thou
(10:01):
sheep across a two thousand acre farm taught him to
operate on little sleep, and sometimes he would jog with
his sheep for three days strade without stopping. As the
race grew near, Cliff decided he should fit in a
(10:22):
little practice before the big day, so he began to
train a little on his farm. Because Cliff had no
uniform or running shoes, he wore the only things he
had big rubber rain boots and overalls. His training consisted
of him chasing his cows around the backyard. The other
(10:43):
thing you should know about Cliff, because he had never
been trained to run, he shuffled around awkwardly. In fact,
he hardly bent his knees and his arms dangled straight
by his hips. It was his site. As you might imagine,
Cliff's unusual running form immediately caught the attention of the
(11:05):
local media, and most newspapers treated Cliff's quest as some
kind of a joke. But Cliff was determined. On the
day of the race, Cliff stomped up to the starting
line and looked around. They were world class runners and
(11:26):
flashy sneakers. Cliff had just received his pair of running shoes.
They had corporate endorsements and big brand locos covering their jersey's.
Cliff was wearing a pair of tattered wind pants to
cover up his purple protruding veins. They were bouncy with
youthful energy. Cliff I had to remove his dentures because
(11:51):
they rattled when he jogged. And then it was time
the runners took their places and started. Confied, heif pumped
his legs and swung his arms and immediately fell to
(12:11):
the back of the pack. In fact, it only took
a few seconds before the top runners were out of
cliffs right. But Cliff wasn't out of the race yet.
You see, most of the runners planned to joke for
about eighteen hours, then they would sleep for six and
start again. But on the very first night, Cliff's morning
(12:34):
alarm was set for the wrong time. The buzzer went
off hours earlier than planned. Cliff woke up and didn't
seem to notice the time, so he started running and
running and running, and he never looked back. Remember how
(12:56):
Cliff used to hurt sheep for days at a time
on his farm. Ends up, that was his superpower. Years
of sheep herding had given him tremendous stamina, so after
that first night's sleep, he never really stopped to rest.
For the rest of the race. He averaged about two
hours of sleep every night. Whenever he did take a
(13:17):
brief pit stop, he would eat boiled pumpkins and tins
of cold spaghetti, and he would drink milk out of
empty vegem my jars. And unlike the other runners who
were followed by professional entourages traveling in magnificent caramanas, Cliff
was followed by his friends in a rusty old van
driven by a guy named Wobbles. It wasn't long before
(13:44):
the media sheepishly changed their minds about Cliff. They nicknamed
his awkward running style the Cliff Young Shuffling. Over the
course of the week, Cliff went from a joke to
a national hero, and naturally, he gave interviews without his
teeth in. When the journalist asked him to divorge his
(14:04):
secret to success, Cliffs simply said, you just keep going.
When another reporter asked Cliff what he was going to
do when he crossed the finish line and Melbourne, Cliff said,
I'm going to the toilet first. By the time Cliff
reached the outskirts of Melbourne, the crowds of adoring fans
were so large that Cliff needed to be surrounded by
(14:27):
a police escorts, and as promised, when he crossed the
finish line, the first thing he did was ran for
the toilet. When he got out, camera surrounded him. Cliff
had finished the race in five days, fifteen hours and
four minutes. Not only had Cliff one, he beat the
(14:49):
course record by two days. As the first place winner
of the Ultra Marathon, Cliff was given a cash prize
of ten thousand dollars. Instead of keeping it, he gave
it all away to the next five runners that crossed
the finish line after him. He didn't take a penny.
(15:15):
Cliff was never in it for the money. He just
ran the race to prove to himself that he could
do it. Sometimes taking a chance and breathing failure allows
you to achieve unbelievable success, and sometimes it ends with
(15:37):
a pineapple bastry, And when you look at it that way,
either way, it's always a sweet ending. That's it for
today's episode. I'm an open kid. Be kind to yourself
and thank you for listening. A pump Cares is a
(16:09):
production of I Heart Radio. I'm your host A Pump Care.
Our executive producer is Ma Jenior producer Julian Weller, Associate
producer Morgan Lavoy. Sound design and mixing by Julian Weller
and Dan Bauza. Music by Aaron Kaufman. Production support from
(16:31):
Emily Maronov and Married You. Writing by Lucas Riley, Matt Riddle,
Margon Lavoy and Julian Weller. Lucas Riley and Matt Riddle
are our story edis thanks to Skin Paru, Hermandy Suza,
Godwin Amana, Sidium Studios, Cornel Byrne and Poppet. I think
(17:00):
you can't relax, You're gonna keep the pressure on. You can't.
It's not easy to top to tough on the pressures
they were all the time.
Today's stories about a father's love, herding sheep and pineapple pastry.
It's also about me, your host an Opum Care, But
mostly it's about making you smile. Welcome to an Opum Cares,
Chapter eleven. Sweet Failure. One day, early into my eleventh grade,
(00:41):
my father arrived at my school and he asked that
my teacher excused me from class. This was highly unusual.
You see, life with my family was consistent. Being released
early from school without notice. I never happened to me before,
(01:02):
and it was all the most significant because it was
my father who came to retrieve me. My father was,
as I told you in the bread Sellers story, a
man of habit. He never skipped work, intelligently stuck to
his routine. So I was curious why all of a
sudden he was here at my school. As we left
(01:25):
the school building, my father asked, do you want to
eat something? Of course I did. Always as a child,
my favorite restaurant was Alpha Restaurant, but Alpha was our
place for special occasions. My family only made two visits
(01:45):
to Alpha year, and our next visit was four months away.
So instead, I suggested, maybe we go to the Little
Sweet Shop in the Lower bazaar. But to my surprise,
my father said, you don't want to go to alpha.
This was getting more interesting by the minute. When we
(02:15):
sat down, my father proceeded to order our favorite items,
a mutton samosa, a pineapple pastry and an espresso. I
watched him with awe. Why were we here enjoying this indulgence.
Had my father received a promotion, did he win the lottery?
(02:37):
Was he leaving the family? And this was my goodbye meal?
But as the waiters brought us our food, he started
to talk. But two, he said, This morning I went
to the education board and I found out through a
(02:57):
friend that you have failed in the metricalation examination. As
I have mentioned in my youth, I was not very
focused on school, so I never received high marks and
even extracurriculus like sports or debates did not stir my interest.
Although my mother always encouraged me to study, I must
(03:21):
admit I did not try my hardest. In India, secondary
school is divided into two phases. The first phase concludes
with a very important exam at the end of tenth grade.
But things were a little different in Shimla. Because the
winter months were so extreme in our little town. We
took our exams early in December to spare students and
(03:43):
teachers from traveling to school during the cruelest winter months.
Why is this an important distinction, Well, this schedule was
not standard across the country, and so in order to
keep in a relative cycle with other schools, students in
Shimlak continued to advance to the next grade before their
(04:05):
annual exams were graded. In fact, students in Shimla but
typically two months into the next term before they got
their test results back. So if a student failed the
Metriclaian exam, they were pulled out of eleventh grade and
thrown back to ten and they would have to repeat
the grade with kids who had just been their juniors.
(04:30):
Welcome back. How humiliating. It's an imperfect system, and so
you can imagine it was the most modifying thing that
could happen to a student in our little town. And
now it was happening to me. As my father related
the news to me, my mind started racing. I was
(04:53):
trying to come up with excuses, ways to defend myself
from the schooling I was about to get, but the
schooling never came. Instead, my father said, you are probably
wondering why I brought you here to our favorite restaurant,
Alpha to have our favorite meal. I did this so
(05:15):
that you never forget this failure or any other failure
you will encounter in your life. He continued, I want
you to remember that failure is an event, never a person.
Failure is an event, never a person. I can't tell
(05:36):
you how many times I have repeated that line to
myself over the years. Failure is an event, never a person.
I have told it to others. It helps reframe the
world and gives you permission to take risks because failure
is the circumstance, not you. But that was my father,
(05:58):
Push or not care That day is celebrated failure with
a sixteen year old boy, and it has made me
the person I am because with those words, it took
the fear of failure away from me. My father was remarkable.
(06:22):
When he passed away, my brother and I opened a
trunk of his Inside, along with some other prize possessions,
I found clippings of my plays and my film reviews,
drama certificates, letters I had sent home, and in some cases,
just my name mentioned in a publication. Each time, the
words unopened care were proudly underlined, the truth is we
(06:48):
all have setbacks. I've had ups and downs, and those
downs can hurt. Because of my father, I know those
little failures will never define in who I am, and
when I feel down, I reach it in the same
way he lovingly taught me. I ordered one mutton samosa,
(07:14):
one pineapple pastry and an espresstrom and I basked in
his memory and his words, knowing failure is always an
event and never a person. Speaking of people who refused
(07:41):
to see themselves as failures, let me tell you about
Cliff Young. For his entire adult life, Cliff lived as
a potato farmer in rural Australia. In fact, by the
time he was sixty one years old, he was still
living with his mother on the old family farm. But
Cliff didn't want to be defied by his circumstances, so
(08:04):
in he decided to do something bold. He signed up
for a marathon. But this wasn't just any marathon. Cliff
entered an ultra marathon race between the big cities of
Sydney and Melbourne on a coast, stretching nearly five and
fifty miles. If you're like me and not an ultra marathon, runner.
(08:29):
Let me put that into perspective. A standard marathon, which
is already an impressive fate, is roughly twenty six miles,
so this ultra marathon was more than twenty times that.
In general, it takes elite runners about a week to
finish a coast that long, but in order to do so,
they need to jog more than seventy eight miles a day.
(08:53):
Needless to say that these races are not for the
faint of heart. Most ultra marathon runners are young at
taking machines that eats, sleep, and breathe their training. And
then there was Cliff. Cliff had almost no experience racing.
In fact, he had never completed a real five k before,
(09:14):
let alone a standard marathon. He didn't subscribe to any
fancy running magazine or use any training apps. He didn't
even own a pair of running shoes. But Cliff wasn't
afraid of failure, and he wasn't afraid to try. While
Cliff had never formally run a race or had any training,
he had been running all his life. When he was
(09:38):
a young boy, his family owned nearly two thousand sheep
on their farm. The family didn't have enough money to
buy a tractor. They didn't even have enough money to
keep a herding dog, so Cliff's family corrilled the sheep
on foot. Cliff spent his whole life running after sheep,
and he was good at it. Un After two thou
(10:01):
sheep across a two thousand acre farm taught him to
operate on little sleep, and sometimes he would jog with
his sheep for three days strade without stopping. As the
race grew near, Cliff decided he should fit in a
(10:22):
little practice before the big day, so he began to
train a little on his farm. Because Cliff had no
uniform or running shoes, he wore the only things he
had big rubber rain boots and overalls. His training consisted
of him chasing his cows around the backyard. The other
(10:43):
thing you should know about Cliff, because he had never
been trained to run, he shuffled around awkwardly. In fact,
he hardly bent his knees and his arms dangled straight
by his hips. It was his site. As you might imagine,
Cliff's unusual running form immediately caught the attention of the
(11:05):
local media, and most newspapers treated Cliff's quest as some
kind of a joke. But Cliff was determined. On the
day of the race, Cliff stomped up to the starting
line and looked around. They were world class runners and
(11:26):
flashy sneakers. Cliff had just received his pair of running shoes.
They had corporate endorsements and big brand locos covering their jersey's.
Cliff was wearing a pair of tattered wind pants to
cover up his purple protruding veins. They were bouncy with
youthful energy. Cliff I had to remove his dentures because
(11:51):
they rattled when he jogged. And then it was time
the runners took their places and started. Confied, heif pumped
his legs and swung his arms and immediately fell to
(12:11):
the back of the pack. In fact, it only took
a few seconds before the top runners were out of
cliffs right. But Cliff wasn't out of the race yet.
You see, most of the runners planned to joke for
about eighteen hours, then they would sleep for six and
start again. But on the very first night, Cliff's morning
(12:34):
alarm was set for the wrong time. The buzzer went
off hours earlier than planned. Cliff woke up and didn't
seem to notice the time, so he started running and
running and running, and he never looked back. Remember how
(12:56):
Cliff used to hurt sheep for days at a time
on his farm. Ends up, that was his superpower. Years
of sheep herding had given him tremendous stamina, so after
that first night's sleep, he never really stopped to rest.
For the rest of the race. He averaged about two
hours of sleep every night. Whenever he did take a
(13:17):
brief pit stop, he would eat boiled pumpkins and tins
of cold spaghetti, and he would drink milk out of
empty vegem my jars. And unlike the other runners who
were followed by professional entourages traveling in magnificent caramanas, Cliff
was followed by his friends in a rusty old van
driven by a guy named Wobbles. It wasn't long before
(13:44):
the media sheepishly changed their minds about Cliff. They nicknamed
his awkward running style the Cliff Young Shuffling. Over the
course of the week, Cliff went from a joke to
a national hero, and naturally, he gave interviews without his
teeth in. When the journalist asked him to divorge his
(14:04):
secret to success, Cliffs simply said, you just keep going.
When another reporter asked Cliff what he was going to
do when he crossed the finish line and Melbourne, Cliff said,
I'm going to the toilet first. By the time Cliff
reached the outskirts of Melbourne, the crowds of adoring fans
were so large that Cliff needed to be surrounded by
(14:27):
a police escorts, and as promised, when he crossed the
finish line, the first thing he did was ran for
the toilet. When he got out, camera surrounded him. Cliff
had finished the race in five days, fifteen hours and
four minutes. Not only had Cliff one, he beat the
(14:49):
course record by two days. As the first place winner
of the Ultra Marathon, Cliff was given a cash prize
of ten thousand dollars. Instead of keeping it, he gave
it all away to the next five runners that crossed
the finish line after him. He didn't take a penny.
(15:15):
Cliff was never in it for the money. He just
ran the race to prove to himself that he could
do it. Sometimes taking a chance and breathing failure allows
you to achieve unbelievable success, and sometimes it ends with
(15:37):
a pineapple bastry, And when you look at it that way,
either way, it's always a sweet ending. That's it for
today's episode. I'm an open kid. Be kind to yourself
and thank you for listening. A pump Cares is a
(16:09):
production of I Heart Radio. I'm your host A Pump Care.
Our executive producer is Ma Jenior producer Julian Weller, Associate
producer Morgan Lavoy. Sound design and mixing by Julian Weller
and Dan Bauza. Music by Aaron Kaufman. Production support from
(16:31):
Emily Maronov and Married You. Writing by Lucas Riley, Matt Riddle,
Margon Lavoy and Julian Weller. Lucas Riley and Matt Riddle
are our story edis thanks to Skin Paru, Hermandy Suza,
Godwin Amana, Sidium Studios, Cornel Byrne and Poppet. I think
(17:00):
you can't relax, You're gonna keep the pressure on. You can't.
It's not easy to top to tough on the pressures
they were all the time.
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