In his second year of university, Sirage Saudi was told by the head of department that he probably wouldn't make it past second year and should reconsider his field (EP 3).
It wasn't a bad grade on one assignment. It was a senior authority figure telling a young man that the thing he cared about most — architecture — might not be for him.
Sirage described being "destroyed." Not embarrassed. Not motivated. Destroyed. "When you say that about my passion, and that I might be off the mark — it completely destroyed me. Game over. I didn't know what I was doing anymore in life."
He called his father. His father talked him down. This became his "burn your hand once" moment — the failure that made every subsequent effort deliberate rather than casual.
From that point on, Sirage excelled. He went on to train at Richard Rogers' studio — the practice behind the Pompidou Centre — and was one year from qualifying as an architect at the time of recording.
The near-expulsion wasn't Sirage's first encounter with academic failure. As a younger student in Marbella, he would get C and D grades and stuff the papers in his bag, never showing his parents. One day they went through his bag and found all of them.
He described this as a turning point: hiding the grades meant accepting them. Later, when he struggled at university, he told his entire family and made a public commitment to do better. Transparency replaced concealment.