It was a simple dish.
Eggs, sliced potatoes, and onions – all bonded together and cooked in a skillet. Kind of like a quiche without the cheese.
The delicacy was known as Tortilla Española. I’d sampled it at restaurants across Madrid as a teenager. Now, as an adult, I wanted to prepare it in my own kitchen.
I recalled my father making the dish from scratch a few times after my return from Spain. So, I asked him for the recipe. Then I gathered the requisite and ingredients.
I peeled the potatoes and cut them proportionally. I diced the onions. I scrambled some eggs in a bowl.
I added olive oil to a cast iron skillet and fired up the stove. I poured the ingredients into the skillet and let them settle.
I took another glance at my father’s recipe. The next task was to flip the tortilla over, so that it could cook evenly.
But how?
I had a glass lid on the skillet, but it wasn’t stable enough to stand on its own while inverted. And I didn’t have a similar-sized pan to flip the tortilla.
The sizzling sound from the skillet reminded me that there was no time to run to the store for supplies. I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.
I took the silicone spatula and dug into the bottom of the tortilla. I lifted it up, rotated my wrist…and caused a mess all over the stovetop.
Perhaps the tortilla wasn’t quite set enough. Perhaps my wrist flick wasn’t all that precise.
Regardless, the solid disk had disintegrated into an incongruous pile of egg and potato bits, with some onions mixed in. Most of it was still in the skillet, but some had landed around it.
My dish was ruined.
I did my best to salvage what was left – letting the eggs cook through and then consuming some of it. The rest went into Pyrex containers stashed in the refrigerator.
I’d be having my failure for dinner for nights to come.
Not long after, I told my father what happened.
Did you consider flipping the tortilla onto a plate? he asked.
I hadn’t.
I’d made a multi-meal mess and wasted hours of prep work. All because I didn’t pull a plate out from the cabinet during the moment of truth.
I was filled with regret at first. But then I remembered another of my father’s axioms.
You can make a mistake. Just don’t make the same one twice.
This was not a failure. It was a learning experience.
It was on me to grow from the experience. To do better next time around.
As it turns out, next time looked a bit different. I never did make Tortilla Española in my kitchen again. But my cooking habits for similarly complex dishes were vastly improved
No longer was I blinded by the mouth-watering outcomes of my craft. I instead devoted extra effort to preparation.
That way, I wouldn’t panic when the burners were on. And I’d be better able to adapt.
I don’t believe I would have been able to lean into that approach if everything hadn’t happened the way it did.
The botched flip. The meals upon meals of messed up results. My father’s introduction of a ready alternative. All helped me to internalize the lesson and rise from the ashes of disaster.
The story still has its scars. I cringed a bit while writing it just now.
But I have no regrets.
What is school for?
Marketing guru asked this question at the onset of a TEDx talk some years back.
Godin went on to explain how the modern iteration of American education came about.
Public school districts and standardized tests were not the natural evolutions of one-room classrooms and reclusive boarding academies. They were the vehicles of industrialist ambition, meant to confer obedience and consistency across the youth population.
The modern system of schooling seemed sensible in the early 20th century, when scores of pupils parlayed their diplomas into factory jobs. It also served its purpose in the middle of that century, when vigilance in the face of nuclear war was paramount.
But obedience and consistency seem antiquated these days, in an era where college dropouts can create trillion-dollar companies and financial strategists tend to think outside the box.
Yet, the top-down, cookie-cutter educational experience continues to proliferate. Children are expected to maintain excellence from as early as Kindergarten. There is no other option.
It’s all a bit difficult for me to comprehend.
You see, my own youth is merely decades in the rearview. But it might as well have been in the Stone Age compared to the present reality.
My teachers gave me a fair amount of free reign in the classroom and the recess yard through elementary school. I was supervised, sure – even graded on homework I turned in. But I wasn’t restrained.
The goal was to let me stumble upon knowledge organically, and therefore absorb it fully. This meant literal stumbles were accepted, not shunned.
So, I made mistakes. Lots of mistakes. Both in the classroom and out of it.
But by feeling the consequences of these missteps, I was able to move beyond them. I was able to learn, grow, and adapt. And I was able to keep the sting of regret holding me back.
It’s a throughline that carried directly to adulthood. It drove my response to the Great Tortilla Española Disaster in my kitchen, and countless other setbacks.
And it’s becoming a novelty.
What happens when the leash is too short?
We don’t need to imagine the answer. Examples are all around us.
Many of my peers now have children of their own. And in talking with them, I get a distinct sense that they’re under a microscope.
They’re expected to provide the best experience for their kids at all times – or else risk the branding of bad parent. And they’re expected to short circuit any signs of failure in their offspring.
Failure, you see, represents divergence. It puts daylight between a child and their peers. It forges a gap between expected marks and mandated ones when it comes to reading, arithmetic, and reasoning. It’s the first skid down a slippery slope.
Modern parents don’t intuitively believe this, of course. None of them hold their infants and muse They better not screw anything up in 65 months from now, or they’re toast.
No, this edict is foisted upon parents by their children’s schools, which are chock full of militant rigor and ongoing assessment.
Add in the societal pressure to bring these values home, and parents find themselves in an impossible position. It’s as if they’re meant to choreograph their children’s lives, rather than provide sturdy guardrails for growth.
This might all seem mundane. But the long-term effects could be catastrophic.
Indeed, what happens if an entire generation is shielded from the consequences of failure? How will they develop resilience?
I shudder to think about how the next generation might handle a kitchen mishap down the road – let alone anything more substantial.
Adversity is a great teacher. It’s the only real instructor for moments like these. Moments that we will inevitably encounter in our lifetimes.
And yet, adversity is being kept out of reach. Left on the top shelf of the cabinet until it’s too late for us to locate it.
Let’s change that.
Let’s stop being so allergic to failure and shackled by regret. Let’s start reframing our missteps as learning experiences instead. And let’s teach future generations to do the same.
Sometimes wrong is the first step to right. Commit to the journey.