Failure with a Side of Garlic Bread! I Ted-Ed Talks By Priyana Sachdeva

What if failure wasn’t the end of the story… but the beginning of something better?

In this TED-Ed style talk, 14-year-old Priyana Sachdeva shares a heartfelt and relatable perspective on failure, self-growth, and learning to laugh through life’s messy moments — sometimes with a side of garlic bread! 🍞✨

Through personal experiences, humor, and honest reflection, Priyana explores how setbacks can teach us resilience, confidence, and the courage to keep going even when things don’t go as planned.

🌟 Speaker: Priyana Sachdeva
🎤 TED-Ed Style Talk
📌 Topic: Failure, Growth Mindset & Self-Discovery

If you’ve ever felt afraid of making mistakes, this talk is for you.

About Speaker : Priyana Sachdeva, 14 Years Old
I’m Priyana Sachdeva, a curious 14-year-old who loves exploring ideas, stories, and creativity. I’m passionate about understanding the world around me and expressing it through writing, art, and meaningful conversations.

About my talk: Some stories start in classrooms…mine started next to a stove. From cheese-covered nachos to kitchen chaos, I realised failure tastes a lot better when you season it right. This talk isn’t about food…it’s about life, mess, madness, and the magic of turning disasters into garlic-bread victories.

The Bookosmia TED-Ed Club is a youth-driven public speaking and idea-sharing initiative aligned with Bookosmia’s mission: “Every young voice matters.”

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos, to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 650,000 teachers. TED-Ed has grown from an idea worth spreading into an award-winning education platform that serves millions of teachers and students around the world every week.

Email to sara@booksmia.com

Most people see cooking as something ordinary, something you do when you’re hungry, something with recipes and ingredients, or something that smells delicious bubbling on the stove. Wait, now I’m hungry. But jokes apart, for me, it’s never been just that. Cooking has always been my own escape, my own experiment, my own art form. It’s that one place where I don’t have to follow any instructions, where I can make mistakes and where somehow everything feels like home. Ever since I can remember, the kitchen has been my favorite place in the house. While most of the kids spend their free time watching television or playing games, I would always leap onto the slab right next to my mom. The first time I ever cooked, I spent hours on it. By the end, my hands were a mess. I had ton of flour on my face. And I felt like I had just finished preparing a fivestar meal. The effort, the focus, the dedication, I was ready to open my own restaurant.

Well, here’s the truth. All I did was put nachos on a plate with some melted cheese and chopped vegetables. Seven star dish, right? I even plated it like a master chef finalist. I still remember my grandmother’s reaction when she saw sit. She looked shocked, impressed, maybe even a bit emotional.

For a moment, I thought she was about to nominate me for a cooking show. But instead, she reached into her purse, smiled, and handed me 500 rupees.

My first salary as a chef. Who knew all it took to earn money was arranging nachos on a plate? That moment stayed with me. Not because of the money, but because of what it meant. Cooking wasn’t just about food anymore. It was about creating something from the start with whatever you had and making it work. And isn’t that what life is? You’re handed a bunch of ingredients. Some you like, some you don’t. But still, you have to figure out how to mix them into something you can live with. Maybe even love. How to survive, how to adapt, and how to thrive. These skills are not only for the kitchen. These skills are for life. And that’s exactly why I believe cooking should be taught in schools. And no, I don’t mean the once a year home science project where you make a fruit salad and call it cooking. I mean real cooking. Knives, stoves, spices, burnt fingers, the full package. Because honestly, how are we supposed to survive in the real world if we can’t even boil an egg without YouTube’s help? We’re taught how to calculate the area of a parallelogram and how to find eggs, but not how to find food where our parents aren’t home. Schools prepare us for everything except hunger. Imagine if Master Chef was a real subject. You’d have group projects where everyone fights over who gets the whisk and exams where the biggest challenge is not alerting the fire alarm. It sounds funny, but think about how useful it would be. We’d learn patience when the dough won’t rise, teamwork when the curry burns and someone needs to fix it, and problem solving when the whole recipe goes for a toss. And everyone needs to come together to fix with what they have. Cooking teaches you how to stay calm under pressure to make do with what you have and still create something beautiful or at least edible.

Imagine it’s real life training disguised as fun. And yes, I honestly think it should be graded. Imagine the report card. Math 88%. English 91%.

Cooking slightly overs salted but full of potential.

That’s the kind of feedback that actually prepares you for adulthood. But beyond the humor, cooking teaches you the kind of things no classroom does.

You learn to think outside the box, or in this case, outside the recipe. you start to care about the people you’re cooking with and food becomes a way of saying, “Oh, hey, I thought of you when I made this dish.” If schools taught cooking, students would graduate not just knowing facts and formulas, but knowing how to live. I mean, come on, how will science cause tan help me?

Because honestly, once you move out for colleges or real settlements, nobody’s going to test you on Shakespeare and Pythagoras theorem, they’ll just wonder if you can make dinner without burning the house. Cooking teaches you modesty, too. It reminds you that even when you do everything right, something can still go wrong. And that’s okay. You learn to start again, adjust and try a new way.

It’s failure, but with a side of garlic bread. Now, isn’t that interesting? So, yes, I believe cooking belongs in schools, not as an optional extracurricular, but as an essential subject. Because in the end, cooking isn’t just about, it’s about resilience. It’s about learning how to take life’s ingredients, the good, the bad, the bitter, the sweet, and turn them into something that’s yours. After all, life’s a lot like cooking. You can’t always control the ingredients, but you can always decide how to season it. Thank you.