Jamie Oliver, a television chef, has openly discussed his failures following the demise of his restaurant empire and offered advice on how to recover.
Jamie Oliver says his restaurant empire went bankrupt because he didn’t get the basics right and was “conceptually thick”. The TV chef and healthy food campaigner once ran dozens of UK restaurants with other eateries around the world. His TV series also played out globally and it looked like nothing could go wrong.
However, a severe financial crisis in 2019 caused the group of Jamie Oliver’s UK restaurants, including Jamie’s Italian and Barbecoa, to close 22 of his 25 UK restaurants.
Speaking about the highs and lows of his career in a new podcast interview with Davina McCall, 50-year-old Jamie, who is dyslexic, said: “There’s a certain degree of life’s a bit of a numbers game and you gotta have a go otherwise you never know, and I think failure comes in various forms and shapes, but it’s an incredible educator.
Failure can be understood as having a variety of meanings for different people. I mean, you could have suffered a burn or a cut, or you could have lost something you’ve spent all of your savings on. You might be letting down someone you love.
“I also believe that failure can be very painful, and that the idea of pain can become more prevalent as you age because it is always perceived as a negative thing, but in reality, pain is a remarkable gift as a whole.” If you didn’t have that, you would have been dead thirty years ago when you hit your foot, splinter, or get burn. Therefore, I believe it to be a genuine gift.
Although I’m trying to protect myself and perhaps being philosophical, I believe that suffering and failure are all a part of how your peripheral vision and senses are really shaped. And I believe that whatever you’re trying to accomplish might not have been successful because you made the right choice; in some cases, it’s because I’ve failed because I’ve tried too hard and people weren’t prepared. Sometimes I’ve had too late for me to succeed.
Because I spent my entire life refusing to accept responsibility for math and numbers, which goes back to school, I know I was in the worst group for maths because I didn’t pass math at school, I sometimes have failed and I get all the hard bits right. I also got the basics wrong.
Conceptually speaking, I’m thick within that. When it comes to math, I have a negative outlook on myself. So when I lost my restaurants, you know, all the hard work we did, all the work that most people struggled to get right, we did it right, we were really good at the hard stuff, and it was really the basics.
In 2000, Jamie and Jools married, and they have five children, with their son Buddy, a self-taught chef. Jamie praised his “Fifteen” project, which for a number of years taught young unemployed people how to cook, calling it “the best thing I’ve ever done.”
He continued, “She’s quite in the background and she’s done that on purpose,” talking about his partner Jools, who has kept the family together throughout Jamie’s decades of campaigns and business ventures. She is without a doubt the star. She is incredibly kind, kind, and funny, and has incredible instinct.
“I adore her to pieces. She gives us the way we are, and I’m very grateful for Jools’ incredible parenting.
* Davina McCall’s most recent Begin Again podcast, which is available now, includes the full interview with Jamie Oliver.
Source: Mirror
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