Transcriber: Roaa Abaza Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
I’m a failure.
I didn’t become a good housewife.
I didn’t get married until I was 30.
And if you ask my grandmother,
she will undoubtedly tell you
that I’m a complete failure.
And it doesn’t matter how many banks I transformed,
and how many awards I won,
my grandmother's opinion never changed.
And you see, for me, failure is an opportunity to grow.
I was raised in a small area in Russia,
and it was known for one of the most dangerous mafia in the country.
Poverty, crime, violence.
I was raised by my grandma
and we couldn’t afford any technology
like an electric kettle or a washing machine.
And my grandmother, she didn’t have any education.
So in her eyes,
me being a good housewife
was the best thing that could ever happen to me.
And when I was four, I went to a hospital to visit my mother.
It was a small, dark room in a hospital.
And there was my mother.
She was young, beautiful,
and yet she was sick and completely helpless.
This is the first ever memory I have about my mother,
because I never lived with her, and I never met my father.
And it was in that small, dark room
that I made a decision,
that I wanted to have a different life.
I didn’t know how, but I knew that I would do everything possible.
But I’ll never be helpless.
Have you ever challenged yourself?
I have; I took action.
Now you may be sitting now and thinking,
why on earth does this Russian girl not have a strong Russian accent?
Because if you watch the movies, all Russians have an accent.
Just look at James Bond or the Red Sparrow.
And I'll tell you, when I was a kid,
I listened to old English tapes
and basically I would repeat sentence after sentence every day,
to make sure that I sounded like a native speaker
and it was the most boring routine,
but it helped challenge me and raise my standards,
and I challenged myself to have an education,
in fact to have three Degrees.
And it doesn’t matter what your background is,
what your family circumstances are.
It is you yourself who decide what you are worthy of.
And I failed so many times, I could write a book of failures,
but instead I have a diary of achievements.
Have you ever thought of keeping a diary?
Now, when I was 16,
I worked in a big fast-food company,
and I wanted so badly to rise in my career,
to go from mopping floors to knocking out Big Macs.
And I didn’t pass the written exam.
It was me.
I was raised to be a scientist in the best university in Russia,
and yet I couldn't answer the question.
“How many dots of sauce do you put on a Big Mac?”
I was generous, and I thought it was seven,
but it turned out to be just five.
And it was me who won the Moscow Olympiad in maths,
and I didn’t make my dream to happen
and start making Big Macs.
All of us have dreams and aspirations,
but once we find a roadblock,
we try once, twice and then we stop.
And instead of letting the failure transform us,
we self-sabotage our dreams.
We forget, we doubt ourselves, and we say that it’s so hard,
even impossible to go from A to B and we just completely give up.
It is so easy to give up when some things don’t work out.
Now, many of our generations
were taught to hide behind the mask.
And show themselves in the best way.
But when you hide your failures,
you essentially bury your failing stories
and you are not honest to yourself.
You don’t use the opportunity
to grow out of failure.
What if we look at failure differently?
What if we look at failure as a way to incentivize us,
to believe that failure is an opportunity to grow?
Challenge ourselves.
Now, I used to work unlimited hours in Russia,
and I applied on line
to jobs in the UK: I applied to 500 jobs.
And I got 497 declines.
Now, how do you deal with rejections like this?
I used to fly from Moscow to London,
and I would go
to the interview,
I would fly back overnight, and then I would just, you know,
go to work the same morning.
And I remember that in my final interview, the partner asked me,
“So how can you demonstrate that you are motivated to get this job?”
(Laughter)
And I said, “Well, I woke up today, at three in the morning,
I got on a flight,
flew for four hours, spent one hour in immigration,
and then I realized that today is a strike,
and that there is no public transport.
But still, I was on time for our interview.”
The partner gave me the job,
and he paid for my taxi, to go back to the airport.
Now, remember this today,
failure is an opportunity to grow,
and the only thing that limits us
is just our own idea of who we are.
It is you and only you who decides how to take it forward.
Do you, you know, get depressed, or do you take action?
And when I used to fly for these interviews,
I would sit in Canary Wharf,
which is the financial services center,
and I would look at the people around me,
how they talked.
They all had cash in their pockets,
they had a good lifestyle.
They had good suits, they had a job.
And this is what motivated me to keep applying.
But when I finally moved to the UK,
I faced a completely different reality.
Have you ever felt that you don't belong?
I have, a lot!
And the key lesson for me was to learn and to adapt.
I would look at my colleagues, the way they talked and walked,
how they wrote emails.
I would ask for feedback.
I would look for mentors,
and I would continuously keep working on my development points.
One Monday morning,
my English colleague comes to me
and says, “How was your weekend?”
Now, a British person would always say “fine”,
(Laughter)
even if this very day and this very morning,
his wife left him for his best friend,
(Laughter)
his bank went bust
and his favorite dog went to Heaven.
But I’m not a Brit,
so I said exactly what happened in my life.
I got kicked out of my accommodation,
my salary didn’t get paid,
I was living in a place with no shower,
no heating, no Wi-Fi, no mirror.
And I would come every day to my office in the very morning
to take a shower in the gym.
No one asked me about my weekend
for a year after this.
(Laughter)
Now, if you you’re an immigrant, you need to be agile.
You need to be adaptable.
You learn so much more from failure than you do from success.
And there is a program in the US, which is called Failing Well.
And essentially what it does, you get a Certificate,
it’s called a Certificate of Failure.
And when the students enroll, they are told here is the certificate,
and however badly you screw up, however badly you fail,
in a relationship and a test and a cookery class,
you are still an utterly wonderful,
and absolutely worthy human being.
But it all comes down to you.
It comes down to how you take failure and only when you fail there,
when you really see that it brings disruption to your life,
only then do you see the power of failure.
Failure is an opportunity to grow, and despite failure, there is a success.
Now, the success for me is to mentor
and to empower others,
to make sure that we accelerate the change in the community together.
Our paths are so different,
but our stories have so much in common.
And if somebody from my background can, you know, rise to success,
just imagine what all of you can do.
Don’t wait for inspiration.
Just get off the sofa, get off your seats
and start taking action today.
Make your dreams come true.
Now, this is the migrant story about the failures and success.
Fail, but never give up.
And even if your grandmother believes that you are a complete failure,
look her in the eyes and tell her,
“failure is an opportunity to grow.”
(Applause)