The Law of Opposites – The Cupcake Story

Recently I witnessed a perfect example of the universal law of opposites at work.

This law states that nothing can exist without its polar opposite.

The bad cannot exist without the good, the male cannot exist without the female, the failure cannot exist without success.

The problem is, most people, because of their conditioning, tend to focus on the negative side and therefore they miss the positive side of whatever they are experiencing.

For example, most people would rather focus on the immenseness of their debts than think about how to make more money. Because of that, they miss all the money-making opportunities that come their way.

Here’s how I managed to turn something that went terribly wrong into a total success.

Where I live, in London, I know a really nice family. One day they asked me to look after their two children, a boy and a girl, because they couldn’t find any available person to do that. I agreed to stay with them and so we started planning our day. Finally we decided to bake some cupcakes and sell them to passers-by on our street.

We rushed to make the cakes and soon the first tray was loaded and shoved into the oven. We impatiently waited for the end result and we were almost certain that the cupcakes would turn out perfectly. The smell was great and whenever we looked through the oven glass, we saw perfect little rising cakes.

After the required time have passed, we opened the oven door and we saw a totally changed picture: the dough of the cakes filled the entire tray leaving no space between the cakes and the color turned from pink to dark brown. It looked like a big flat cake with deep holes where it were supposed to be the tops of the cupcakes. It looked absolutely horrible.

The boy got really disappointed and suggested to throw this unfortunate bake into the bin. He said that we should forget about selling anything today and that we should do something else instead. Fortunately I know the law of opposites, so I started looking at what hidden opportunities this seeming failure has.

I suggested to the children to think about what we can do with this cake, how we can turn this around. This encouragement awakened creativity in both of them and they started to come up with all the amazing ideas about how we can still sell the cake(s)

Finally we came to the conclusion that we should cut round each of the cupcake, place the remaining crusty bits into a bowl and mix them with half of the icing, for the filling. So we filled the cakes with with the crusty peaces mixed with the icing and put the remaining white icing on top. We decorated each cupcake in a unique way: we put berries on top, sprinkled some cupcakes with almond flakes, coconut sprinkles, chocolate chips and other decorations.

The end result was simply amazing. The cakes looked great, and they tasted great too. So we rushed to set up our sales table and prepare some lemonade to sell together with the cakes. We decided to sell one cupcake with a glass of lemonade for £1, or, if the cupcakes were bought separately, they would be £0.85 each and the lemonade would be £0.50 a glass.

The people were fascinated with the cakes and we got many compliments about what amazing cooks we were.  We sold all the cupcakes (17 of them) making £17 in less than an hour.

Although this may look like a total luck, I challenge you to try it for yourself. When something negative happens to you, don’t focus on it – look for the opportunities instead. If you do that with every situation in your life, who knows where you will be in one year’s time.

No related posts.