At the start of his presentation, he told the crowd he had prepared to talk about goal-setting, achievement and how to measure success.
“Everyone has talked about that today so I’m going to talk about how to fail.”
Anyone progressing in the dairy industry would fail at some point, he said.
The best way to fail was not to beat yourself up about it and to be able to laugh about it.
“When you make a mistake, take a step back and look at what you’ve done - and most importantly, have a laugh about it.”
One of his biggest mistakes was accepting a job on a dairy farm.
On his second day on the job, he realised there was no toilet in the milking shed.
The boss told him the shed had no toilet because he did not want his staff to be toileting on the clock.
“My body adjusted to s....... on my own time,” Nicolas said.
However, one day he was working in the shed alone and a curry the night before forced a need for decisive action on the race outside the shed.
As there was no toilet paper available, he grabbed some teat wipes to clean himself.
After he finished milking the cows, his boss arrived and spotted a “vibrant patch” on the race.
His boss thought it manure of a sick calf on the loose.
The boss asked him to search for the calf and then called a neighbour to check if one of their calves had escaped.
Nicolas searched for a calf until the boss told him to stop because he had an idea of how to identify the calf.
“I’ll just check the cameras,” the boss said.
As his boss checked the footage, Nicolas wrote his letter of resignation.
Nicolas said the moral of the story was to check if there was a toilet in a cowshed before accepting a job and never wipe your behind with teat wipes because it hurts.
