It’s Okay To Flop.
Sometimes we need a little reminder that failure creates resilience.
Description: Four Appleflaps (Apple Turnovers) baking inside a convection oven on the same wire rack. The pastries are drooping down the edges and between the rack wires. The oven's interior is visible, with a rotating glass plate at the bottom and red heating elements glowing at the top.
Description: Three golden-brown fully baked, Appleflaps, are cooling on the same small wire rack on a speckled kitchen countertop. The pastries are slightly hanging off the edge of the rack and between rack wires. In the background, a black electric kettle and an orange paring knife.
This morning I decided to bake the “premade, all you need to do is bake them” Appleflaps (aka Apple Turnovers) that I bought from the grocer. I love Appleflaps and the fact that in Dutch they’re called Apple Flaps makes me giggle. So I bought these premade ones because they’re cheaper, and the Sailor’s out of town so I can eat more than one in a day with no judgement 😂. I have never bought these bake-it-yourself Appleflaps before, this was going to be a first and I thought it would be really easy. The instructions said to bake at 185℃ for 23 minutes. Easy enough!
I put four of the pastries on the wire rack, thinking I was pretty smart for arranging them so they had space to puff out and balance on the rack. Our convection oven seems to take longer to bake things, so I adjusted the temp from 185 to 190 and gave it 25 minutes, plus I could give it more time if necessary after. I was doing awesome!
Then I proceeded to make coffee and my breakfast for the day. When I was done making breakfast and about to sit down, I checked on the status of my Appleflaps. OH BOY! I had really messed up — the wire rack was not a smart idea. The pastry was melting off the edge and through the rack wires (see photo 1 above). Part of me thought, how did I not see this happening?? So I’m only 10 minutes into the bake time maybe a little less, I open the oven and see if I can remove the pastries with my spatula to a plate and then place them on the glass microwave dish instead of the rack. I make an attempt with the appleflap closest to me. It gets worse! Instead I’ve managed to puncture a hole in the apple filling zone and now some apple filling is falling out. The apple flaps can not be moved, they are too soft, so they will need to just cook in the weird melty forms they’re turning into. I adjust the time on the cook to make up for the loss of heat and resume baking as is.
When they’re done baking I move the wire rack to the counter and let them cool down. Once mostly cool, I try to remove them from the rack and learn about my other big mistake. I didn’t oil or butter the rack so that the pastries wouldn’t stick. So they’re not only curved around the rack they’re also baked on to / in to the rack. 😂 I need to use a knife and gently lift them off the rack wires. A big mess of flaky pastry ends up all over the counter tops. But overall these AppleFLOPS are still edible and good enough. Lessons were learned this morning.
BIG FLOPS
Math is hard y’all. Math with letters is freaking impossible…for me. In college I studied Business with a major in Marketing. I had to do 5 math related courses as part of my course load:
Financial Accounting
Managerial Accounting
Principles of Microeconomics
Fundamentals of Finance
Business Statistics
I started off alright. I passed Financial Accounting with an A+, it focused on the business accounting cycle, I had some business experience already so I had been exposed to some elements and really felt like the course was about understanding how to complete accounting forms accurately. I even built my own Excel spreadsheets to complete the final project, the full year accounting for “Daisy’s Doggy Daycare.” Excel was my calculator.
I remember struggling with Fundamentals of Finance, that digs into mortgages, interest rates, loans, asset valuations, it’s math with letters and little numbers to the power of. I passed on the first try. The teacher could see that I was trying so hard and I think even when my mathematical equations weren’t exactly right, if I got to the right answer in my own way, he passed me. I’m not sure, I just know I was pretty surprised I passed the final exam.
Principles of Microeconomics is about money in the bigger picture, it’s about inflation, demand and supply, it’s about bell curves, more letters and numbers. I understood quite a bit of the theory in this class and found it really interesting. But I couldn’t figure out how to get the math to match the logic in my head. I passed this class on the first try but it wasn’t from math. The teacher gave us an assignment and said she would be awarding an extra 10% to one person. To compete for this extra 10% we needed to pitch an idea that the College could implement that aligned with what we were learning in class, an idea that the teacher would pass on to the college decision makers. We needed to back up our idea with math. I pitched an idea that was really good, it was forward thinking, sustainable, and aligned with the values of the school and this particular teacher. However, I could not explain the math behind my idea. I added math, I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know how. On the day the teacher announced the winner, she said there were two winners this time because two ideas were really good but one of them didn’t have the right math behind it. However, it was such a good idea she planned to share with the college, so two winners. And I was one of them! That extra 10% is what I needed to not fail that class.
Then came Managerial Accounting and Business Statistics. I failed each of these the first time. Managerial Accounting is about inventory, pricing, profit margins — money in a strategic sense. There’s more numbers and letters and power to the… It is so hard. The second time I took this class, it didn’t get more clear to me, I tried, I tried harder, and my brain couldn’t comprehend the equations. I can understand the theory, I can understand the basic principles behind it. You want to know how much the ingredients cost you to make the cupcake, you want to include your time, your rent, your energy bill, and then you want that cupcake to be priced right so that it covers all these expenses and gives you a little extra in your pocket. But you also need that cupcake to be priced right so that people will buy it. And in its most basic format of that cupcake, I can probably get your answer for you. But I remember the teacher using the example of Lego, imagine doing this for the company Lego, each brick needs to be priced right and you need to think about factories and having inventory, etc. Then, I’m lost.
So I failed. I took the class a second time and I passed but I didn’t pass enough 😩 I got a D that means I made it over the 50% mark but not into the 60%. I needed 60+% as a prerequisite to get into another class which I needed to graduate. Cue crying in agony — so close but no potato!
Business Statistics is really about understanding data to find patterns, how to conduct research to learn about patterns, finding correlations in your patterns, etc. I failed that one the first try.
I was really frustrated and mad at myself during this time. These courses shouldn’t be so difficult. I was a focused student, I sat at the front of the class and paid attention, I did my homework. Sometimes I wanted to give up, maybe it would be better to study something that didn’t have any math classes involved? When I would feel like this, I would think about a story Grandpa Jean used to tell. Grandpa Jean had dropped out of high school and later in his 20’s he went back. He needed to pass his English exam (this is English in the sense of analyzing books and essay writing) and he failed over and over again. I believe he said he took that exam 6 times before he passed. The last time, the time when he passed, oh boy, he was either super sick or super hungover (I can’t remember which it was, maybe both), the last place he wanted to be at was this exam, this time he bullshitted his way through the exam. And that made all the difference, he passed! 🤣 He didn’t think highly of English after that, haha! His story is what I would remind myself every time I had to repeat a math class. And trust me, I was looking at doing Managerial Accounting a 3rd time! I told myself that one day, I would laugh at this experience because Grandpa did.
I also realized I needed to do something different, like Grandpa on his 6th exam, although being super sick wasn’t going to help me. I tried taking my second attempt at Statistics during a summer semester, so it would be condensed, 4 month course into 2 months. I thought maybe if it was condensed the equations wouldn’t have time to fall out of my head. This turned out to be a smart choice. It was also in this summer semester that the teacher shared that there was someone posting flyers on the bulletin boards with tutoring services for statistics and other accounting classes. She wrote the person’s contact info on the board. I decided to try a tutor for first time.
I was really nervous about hiring a tutor. I was worried that I would feel dumb, that they would be the type of person I don’t click with, that it would be awkward, and didn’t I mention that they would make me feel dumb. But I went out of my comfort zone and I called the tutor, her name was Lynn, I saved her name in my phone as Lynn Tutor. I met Lynn Tutor for the first time in the evening after one of my classes (I worked full time and went to college full time, so I remember it being quite late), she was already at the meeting place tables, I approached and could see who I suspected was the tutor. My first reaction was “I could be friends with her.” That immediately put me at ease. She has a down to earth, hippie vibe. I felt that from across the room. I sat down and we introduced ourselves and started talking. It turned out we had SO MUCH in common. We had both been backpacker travellers, we were both in relationships with someone from another country, we had both lived in other countries, spoke different languages, and the list goes on. We spent over an hour just talking about ourselves before even looking at Statistics. That first meeting was meant to be an hour and it turned into three. Talk about clicking!
I passed Statistics because the condensed class did help and most of all because I hired a tutor. Lynn Tutor explained to me how to read math questions and figure out which equation to use. She gave me all these tools to understand more than statistics but also math in general, tools that would come in handy for Managerial Accounting the third try.
When I was done my Statistics course, I asked Lynn Tutor if she’d like to go for coffee sometime. I wanted to take this relationship to the next level… maybe friendship? She said yes! That first coffee also turned into lunch and sitting outside on a pier in the sun for hours having easy flowing conversation.
To this day, Lynn Tutor remains one of my closest friends. I never would have met her if I hadn’t flopped so badly on all my math classes in college. And sometimes I still ask her to help me with statistics, like that time I needed to analyze the Business Development efforts of a company I worked at and create a report. Eeeek! She saved my butt with some amazing Excel formulas.
IT’S OKAY TO FLOP
My AppleFlops this morning served a good reminder that I needed to hear, it’s okay to flop, it’s okay not to get it right the first time. I can try again, I can use what I learned from the first attempt, I can try something different, I can do it better next time. And I can probably laugh about this in the near or far future.
And here’s the thing: the stories where we failed the first time, had to pick ourselves up, and try again—those stories of resilience—are the ones we love to share. In writing and marketing we love to use stories of transformation - I was like this (terrible) and then I did this (action) and now I’m like this (amazing) - those make good stories and most of those might be “I got it right the first time” stories. I was sick, I went to the hospital, and now I’m cured.
Great stories are the ones where we add extra elements of challenge - I did this (action), I failed (underdog, challenge), I tried again but different (resilience, action), and I succeeded (win, celebration, hero). Great stories share vulnerability, motivate, encourage, and maybe even have some humour. Like Grandpa Jean’s story about finally passing English, at that time for him, I’m sure he wasn’t happy or laughing. But then it became a story he liked to tell often while laughing and it motivated me when I struggled with my similar challenge.
Think about your arsenal of great stories that you share about your life — do most of them have an element of flopping and resilience?