Carrying the Weight

When I walked into the hall in Kuching, I felt the weight of responsibility pressing on me. Bringing the team for the Sustainable Development Award was not just participation. It was representation. We were standing on behalf of something larger than ourselves.

When our name was not called, I thought of athletes like Lee Chong Wei. On the badminton court, he carried the hopes of a nation. I was not holding a racquet, but I carried the hopes of my team, my family, and my organisation.

Losing is heavy. It is public silence. My children might one day ask, “Why didn’t you win?” My team looked for supper as consolation. And I sat with the paradox: we had lost, yet something inside me whispered that this might be the beginning of something deeper.

I remembered the criteria of the award: measurable, replicable, scalable. Sitting there, I realised we could not yet articulate one single project that met all three. We had done good work, yes, but much of it felt like events, not movements. And I wondered: had we won on our first attempt, would we have been lulled into thinking we had already arrived?

Winning too early can make you complacent. Losing forces you to ask harder questions.

Presence Over Performance

That morning we had visited Every Nation Church in Kuching. Ryan later admitted that he had caught himself judging the worship by his own standards. The music was different from what he was used to, but then he was convicted. Worship is not about performance. It is about presence.

That truth echoed through the award ceremony. Were we chasing performance, or were we pursuing presence and impact?

Ryan shared a conversation he had at the back with Yvonne and Samuel. A half-joking, half-serious question: “Was this a waste of time?” turned into a deeper discussion. If the event felt irrelevant to some, was it because we had not yet made the impact relevant enough to our own lives and work? Were we focusing too much on the event itself, instead of the deeper transformation of people?

He reminded us of something Teo from Sabah once said about branding: branding is about trust, and trust is built through relationships. That thought stayed with me. Whether in church or business, the core is the same. It is not about performance on a stage. It is about trust built in quiet presence and faithful relationships.

Clarity in the Process

Joshua also shared his honest reflection. He admitted that when he first arrived, he did not really know why he was there. Daniel and Ryan had been part of the earlier process, but he had not. To him, it felt like just another event.

But as the day unfolded, clarity began to take shape. Joshua remembered Teo’s point that an organisation must be clear about what it is aiming for if it wants to put its best effort into it. Clarity was what he felt was missing.

The message from Pastor Balan in the church service also struck him. Worship is not just singing. It is sacrifice. In the past, it was animals. Today, it could be our time, our rest, or even the moments we guard selfishly for ourselves. For Joshua, it might be the time he spends scrolling his phone. That could be his sacrifice.

Hearing him speak reminded me: failure is not just about what you lose. It is about what you are willing to give up so that something greater can grow.

Learning to Fail Graciously

Listening to Ryan and Joshua, I felt grateful. Their reflections reminded me of truths I had forgotten.

I thought again of Pastor Balan’s message, of the Samaritan woman who searched for love in the wrong places. His words convicted me. We often think we are different, but in reality we repeat the same mistakes in different contexts. The question is simple but confronting: what are we willing to sacrifice? Our rest? Our comfort? Our pride?

As educators, the Bible warns us that teachers of the law will be judged more strictly. We know more, so we are accountable for more. That truth echoed in me. If we know leadership is about sustainability, then we cannot settle for shallow victories.

I told myself: I must learn to fail graciously. Losing the award is not shameful. It is an opportunity to model resilience for my children and my team. To show them that failure is not the opposite of success. The opposite of success is stagnation. Failure is movement. It is the first step forward.

Lessons Beyond Kuching

History is full of leaders who discovered this same truth.

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, but that failure led to Pixar and, later, the iPhone. Abraham Lincoln lost election after election, yet those failures gave him the resilience to hold America through civil war. Jeff Bezos built Amazon on the “Day 1 mentality,” the belief that you never arrive, you are always beginning again.

Nature itself teaches us the same. Bamboo grows underground for five years before breaking the soil. For those five years, it looks like failure. But in the fifth year, it shoots up 90 feet in just five weeks. Without those unseen years, the visible growth would collapse under its own weight.

So too with us. Our unseen failures are root work.

The Reverse That Redefines It All

As I wrap up this reflection, I see more clearly now. Failure is not falling short. Failure is not an embarrassment. Failure is the first step forward.

If my children ask me why we did not win, I want them to remember this: not winning does not mean giving up. It means we keep going until the impact we create is measurable, replicable, and scalable.

If my team asks what is next, I want them to see that the true award is not a trophy but the transformation of lives across generations.

We did not win in Kuching. But we learned how to fail with grace. And in leadership, that is sometimes the greater victory.