Tales of a Tradesman - #2 What Failure Reveals About The Stories We Live By

Most people think failure is the moment something goes wrong.

A business collapses. A relationship ends. A plan falls apart.

But often failure isn’t the real problem.

The real disruption happens when certainty disappears.

I experienced this in my twenties after starting a vegan food trailer business.

At the time it felt like a completely new direction for my life. I had been working as an electrician since I was nineteen, and somewhere along the way I developed the idea that the trade was limiting.

In my mind it represented an old version of myself — something I needed to move beyond.

So starting the food business felt like a fresh identity. Something creative and different. A way to step outside the path I thought I had been placed on.

But something interesting began to emerge as the business developed.

I realised I wasn’t deeply passionate about the work itself.

And passion matters far more than people often admit.

Running a business requires a certain kind of care and dedication, especially during the moments when things become difficult. The truth was that running a food trailer needed someone who genuinely loved that world.

And I didn’t.

Eventually the business collapsed.

The result was debt, uncertainty, and a feeling that I had lost control of the direction my life was supposed to be taking. I moved back in with my parents for a while and returned to electrical work wondering how I had ended up back where I started.

But something important was happening beneath the surface.

What had actually disappeared wasn’t just the business.

What had disappeared was the certainty I had been relying on to navigate my life.

And that moment forced a question that many people eventually face:

If the plans fall apart, what do you trust instead?

A few months later...

I decided to walk the Camino across Spain. When you spend weeks walking every day with very little distraction, something interesting happens to your mind.

It slows down.

The noise of everyday life fades, and underneath it a quieter kind of clarity begins to appear.

During that time I began to see something I hadn’t understood before.

The problem had never been being an electrician.

The problem had been the story I attached to it.

Trade wasn’t something that limited my life. It was actually something that grounded it.

It gave me the freedom to support myself while exploring other interests and directions that felt meaningful.

In a strange way, the collapse of the food trailer business revealed something far more valuable than success would have.

It revealed what wasn’t truly mine.

And sometimes that is exactly what failure is for.

Not to stop you, but to remove the story you were living inside so something more honest can appear.

Over time this process led me to explore a deeper question that many people quietly wrestle with:

How do you trust yourself when certainty disappears?

That question has shaped much of the work I now share.

Because most people don’t struggle with decisions themselves.

They struggle with trusting themselves inside those decisions.

And learning how to rebuild that trust can change the direction of an entire life.