The recent Willy Wonka event was terrible, but over the past few days I’ve seen the actors involved get a lot of attention. It looks like they took on a job on the side with little promise, the whole thing fell flat on its face, but now they’ve gone viral. Wouldn’t surprise me if it works out for them and their careers if they manage to build some connections off the back of it.
Has anything similar happened to you? Where you turned up at an event, or did something on the side you weren’t bothered by, only for it to become an important decision? I say “life changing” in the title, but really it could just be something that became more significant than you would have ever guessed.
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5 years ago I went through a breakup and found a free meditation group. As a complete skeptic at the time, I thought why not try it, it’s free, so I went. It was such a pivotal moment it completely changed my life and now I am leading my own meditation groups. Keep an open mind, always!
I was in Australia. We’d just emigrated there and I hated it (I was 12). When I went to secondary school the following year, the school offered Chinese and German as foreign languages. They wanted to put me in the class doing German because my primary school had done German.
I, however, *hated* it — I’d been in middle school in the UK, and studying French. I moved to Australia in June, and suddenly I was in *primary* school, and had an extra six months until year-end to boot due to how the school year worked there, *plus* my school did German. German was symbolic of everything I hated about the move, so I kicked up a fuss and got myself put into the Chinese-learning class instead.
I had no idea where China was. No idea what China looked like. Zero interest in Chinese culture. I just didn’t wanna do German.
So…yeah. 24 years later, and I speak Chinese fluently. I lived in Taiwan for almost a decade and married a Taiwanese man, and have two half-Taiwanese children. I work as a translator, working from both Japanese and Chinese into English (and I doubt I would’ve attempted to teach myself Japanese back in high school if I didn’t already have a little knowledge of characters under my belt from Chinese – and that led to a year abroad in Japan on a scholarship for exchange).
And it’s all because I really, *really* didn’t want to learn German.
Paid £25 to see a physio for half an hour about a niggling hip pain when walking/running. Spiralled into getting diagnosed with a life changing, long term condition. I just thought they were going to tell me to do squats or something.
Went to a fresher’s fair once at Uni drunk and no interest in sports. Ended up being their field hockey goalkeeper for a couple years and the local proper team tried to poach me.
Didn’t really change my life. Still no interest in sports. But it could have!
Working
I went to a local amateur drama group. I was only vaguely interested but I thought I needed a hobby, I was going to give them a try one week then the following week try helping at the local scout group.
I never got to the scouts, I ended up spending over a decade as part of that group until I moved and discovered a real passion for the stage making lifelong friends.
Gave my Mum and Advanced Driving course for Christmas present, she passed just before she turned 80, she gave me the same for my Birthday I, very reluctently completed it and passed. On the back of that pass I was invited to become an Organ Transplant Logistics driver and ended up driving 400,000 miles doing the best job of my life for 8 years until I took early retirement.
Did two weeks work experience at my old primary school after uni. Became a TA and then did a PGCE the following September.
Mate invited me to a DnD event hosted a minute walk from his place. They just want an extra for that session. Start going regularly because the people were cool and the food was nice. I completed my foundation year in computer science, and the host wife was a software engineer. She will be a supervisor for a degree apprenticeship role was about to open. She told me to send her my cv, and i got the role at a well-known bank and the highest salary in my work life ( worked in retail related roles)
I met a girl at a party and knocked her up, does that count?
She’s a horrid bitch nowadays but I have a wonderful daughter who I love more than anyone I’ve ever met and she loves me too
A friend asked me to do a voiceover for a ‘pitch video’. He didn’t get the job, but I did. I’m now a freelance voiceover artist. Doubled my income at 46.
Looking around for a new job in IT, next step up from SysAdmin which I’d been doing for 15 years. Went for an interview at a school. Never thought I’d work at any school, let alone one in one of the roughest parts of the city that was in special measures from Ofsted.
Three years later I run the DofE Scheme here, coach rugby, badminton and cricket, run an after-school skateboard club and probably do just as much extra-curricular stuff for the kids as I do being the IT Manager.
Plan was to move on after 2-3 years back into private industry for those £££ but I’m enjoying it too much here. If I move into anything, it will be working with disadvantaged kids, not IT.