The Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Career Was Not Speaking English

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

I moved to Canada in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Communications, and eleven years of experience working as a journalist in Brazil. I had been learning English since I was a kid. I had traveled the world, picked up Spanish and Italian along the way, and spoke English everywhere I went. I was confident.

I was also delusional.

The reality check came the moment I landed and started looking for a job.

My first job was in the backstock at MEC — no public-facing work, just me hiding in a windowless stockroom in Calgary. Perfect, right? Not so much. We used radios to communicate and restock the store floor, and here’s something nobody tells you about learning a new language: the last sense to come online is your hearing.

I remember someone radioing in a request for a product in the “dandelion” colour. Dandelion? I had no idea. Today it seems so obvious — a yellowish colour, of course — but at the time I was completely lost. I can laugh about it now.

Then there was the time we bought our first TV — a very small, very “expensive” $100 CAD set. We took it home, turned it on, and I sat there staring at the screen understanding absolutely nothing. Not a single word.

There’s a big difference between speaking a traveling version of a language and actually living inside it. And there’s an even bigger gap when your career requires you to wield that language with precision. Journalism demands an expansive vocabulary. You need to think fast, write clearly, and explain yourself with nuance. In Portuguese, I could do all of that. In English, I was starting from scratch.

To make things more complicated, Portuguese grammar and sentence structure are nearly the inverse of English. I lost count of how many times I could see people trying to follow my thought process, politely waiting for my sentences to land somewhere logical.

So I got to work. I signed up for grammar lessons. I made a rule for myself: read only in English. My first English book in Canada was humbling — I hadn’t had enough vocabulary to read one before moving here. Painful, yes. But it was the right move.

For seventeen years, I read exclusively in English. Then, eventually, I let a Portuguese book back in. And here’s what surprised me: reading in English had become completely natural — so natural that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to read in my mother tongue. That first Brazilian book after seventeen years was effortless. Smooth. Genuinely pleasurable in a way I hadn’t expected.

But let me get back to the thread — English, journalism, a new country, immigrant life — and why failing at the language turned me into who I am today.

A year after MEC, I landed a job at a non-profit organization in Calgary. They hired me for their marketing department, and one of my first tasks was to update their website. I started poking around, their developer showed me a few things, and slowly I picked up the basics.

This was the early era of content management systems. The site ran on ExpressionEngine; WordPress was barely getting started. I learned to maintain the site, kept tinkering, and by around 2008 — incredibly, about eighteen years ago — I had built my own site on WordPress.

From there, I opened a business doing project management for websites, and gradually started building WordPress sites for clients. I kept at it for over a decade. That chain of events — born entirely from not being able to work as a journalist in a language I didn’t fully command yet — gave me a deep enough understanding of WordPress to eventually land my current role as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

If my English had been perfect when I moved here, I probably would have gone straight back into journalism. And I wouldn’t be doing what I do today: helping people, in so many ways, every single day.

The failure wasn’t a detour. It was the path.