The gift of (personal) disaster?

Moments of crisis, of personal disaster, can sometimes prove to be the impetus for necessary, positive and transformational change in your life.

“It’s in the discomfort that you grow.”

These words are spoken by the instructor in a core strength yoga video that I “do” twice a week. Each time I hear these words, their simple and direct wisdom strikes me anew. We spend so much time trying to avoid discomfort. But discomfort will find us one way or another, and it has so many lessons to teach us.

Comedy producer and writer John Lloyd shares some wonderful words on the lessons we can take from discomfort and tough times in a January 2026 book club edition of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (aka RHLSTP). Lloyd’s appearance on this podcast links with the recent publication of The Meaning of Liff is 42. This is the 42nd anniversary re-release of an excellent book that Lloyd originally co-authored with Douglas Adams.* Lloyd speaks with great warmth and affection about his days working as a close writing partner with Adams, and the hilarity and joy of finding the precise words to express and give flight to their ideas. Lloyd’s writing partnership with Adams seemed heaven-sent. However, a falling-out with Adams saw Lloyd effectively sacked from his co-writing role.**

For Lloyd, this turn of events was sudden and seismic. His world seemed thrown upside-down. He reacted in anger. “It was because of that event that I resigned from radio in a tremendous tearing”, Lloyd says. “I was absolutely furious.”

While it felt like everything was coming to an end for him in that moment, it appears in retrospect that quite the opposite was true. The main part of his career was just about to begin. Lloyd says:

“I have this saying: ‘Disaster is a gift.’ You know, you look back on a thing that at the time was horrible – like the girlfriend who gave you the boot – and think ‘Thank goodness we didn’t get married, that would have been a disaster.’ I’m a very lazy person and if Douglas hadn’t sacked me, I’d have been the guy on his coattails forever.”

Facing an uncertain future, Lloyd went in search of another job, ultimately moving into the role of producer. From the perspective of 2026, Lloyd sees his work as producer on Not the Nine O’clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image (among others) and as the creator of QI as something that only happened as a direct consequence of his professional split from Adams.

The path I needed to find all along

Should disaster be seen as a a gift? “Most metaphors don’t bear close examination”, as one character says in an episode of The Young Ones.*** It would probably be more accurate to amend Lloyd’s saying slightly to something like the following: “Personal disaster is sometimes a gift (but it will likely take years for this to become apparent)”. But then it would no longer be Lloyd’s saying, and the impact of his economical choice of words would be drained away.

For me, personal disaster has often proven a gift. For example, the second time I was made redundant. This happened in early 2000, just over a year after I first moved to London. The job I lost was in the City. The offer of that job had given me the chance to move to London that I had been seeking for years. Looking back, it is as clear as day that it was just not the job for me. I was never happy there. Neither the work nor the culture of the place fitted me. But this truth was anything but clear to me at the time. I was desperate to cling on to the job that I thought was my one and only foothold on life in London.

That particular life felt as if it had come to a crashing halt with the notice that I was being made redundant. It felt wrenching, shocking at the time. In retrospect, it was by far the best thing that could have happened to me. That misguided moment in life had to end so that I could find my way on to a new path entirely.

The path I started on that day has lead me to today. By coincidence, I met the woman who is today my wife within a day or two of losing that job in the City of London in early 2000. I am so happy to be where I am now. That was the path I had needed to find all along.

Each day has the potential to be a whole new lifetime in this one lifetime, or to herald the start of one. Life is always changing, always refreshing and renewing itself. Moments of crisis, of personal disaster can sometimes prove to be the impetus for necessary, positive and transformational change in your life.

A really badly scripted B-movie

If the upside of moments of crisis only becomes apparent in retrospect, what can we do while we are in the midst of tough times? Elsewhere in his chat with Herring, John Lloyd talks about how to deal with the world as we currently know it:

“My current philosophy is that, like, the news at large and in one’s own life, and what’s happening to one’s friends and the people who improbably die, out of the blue unexpectedly – it doesn’t make any sense. And so the metaphor that I’ve adopted is that we’re in a really badly scripted B-movie. It’s so badly edited. The great thing about acting – being cast in this movie – is that an actor can do a brilliant performance in a terrible movie. And that’s our job: to be a stand-out, good at what we do, regardless of what happens. That’s all you can do. There’s nothing you can do about it, so getting exercised, angry and depressed about it is just a waste of your life. Get on and do something properly.”

All the best to you as you seek to the best of your abilities to perform your role in the badly scripted B-movie that is this world as it presents itself to us today.

May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.

IMAGE

• The Tempest MET DP244964 via Wikimedia Commons.

FOOTNOTES

* The number 42 of course being a rather significant number in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lore, although it is not publicly known how the late Adams Douglas Adams first alighted on this number. I once read an interview with Stephen Fry in which he said that his dear-departed friend Adams had personally told him the true significance of the number 42. But Fry also said that he will respect Adams’s wish that this intelligence remain a closely-kept secret.

** Lloyd notes that his friendship with Adams would heal not long after (even if it was never quite as warm as before), although their writing partnership was never restored.

*** The Young Ones character in question was probably Mike, but I am not 100% sure which character nor which episode.