When people look at my teaching and learning awards today, they often see the medals, certificates, and recognition. What they rarely see are the years of uncertainty, self-doubt, countless revisions, and competitions that ended without the results I had hoped for.
My journey did not begin with winning.
It began with a simple question: How can I make entrepreneurship education meaningful beyond the classroom?
In 2018, I started EntrepWeek with a vision that students should not only learn entrepreneurship but experience it. Instead of relying solely on lectures, I wanted them to build real businesses, face real customers, make real mistakes, and learn from authentic experiences.
At first, the journey was far from easy.
Many ideas seemed too ambitious. Managing hundreds of students, coordinating industry partners, collecting impact data, and ensuring academic quality required far more work than a normal course. There were moments when I questioned whether all the effort was worth it.
Then came the competitions.
I quickly realised that having a good innovation was not enough. Every competition expected different evidence, different formats, and different stories. Sometimes I submitted the same project, but the results were completely different depending on how well I aligned the submission with the judging criteria.
There were applications that did not progress.
There were moments when I spent weeks preparing documents only to receive disappointing news.
There were times I wondered whether my innovation simply was not good enough.
But each rejection became feedback.
Every unsuccessful submission forced me to improve the project, strengthen the evidence, collect better impact data, refine the framework, and tell the story more effectively.
Instead of creating new projects every year, I chose to continuously improve one ecosystem.
EntrepWeek evolved from a classroom activity into a comprehensive entrepreneurship ecosystem. Physical bazaars were combined with digital commerce. Students learned through social media marketing, business modelling, financial planning, pitching, and community engagement. The programme kept growing because every year I reflected on what could be improved.
The biggest lesson I learned was that innovation is never finished.
Winning came gradually.
A silver award became another silver award.
Special Mention recognitions encouraged me to continue.
Eventually, those years of refinement led to Gold Awards, Best Teaching Innovation recognition, and national and international acknowledgements for the work.
Looking back, the awards were never the destination.
They were milestones that reminded me I was moving in the right direction.
What makes me proudest is not the trophies displayed on a shelf.
It is seeing students who once had no confidence become entrepreneurs.
It is watching students generate real business sales.
It is knowing that a classroom idea has grown into an ecosystem that has trained thousands of students, generated over RM1.7 million in cumulative student sales, and continues to create opportunities for communities.
The competitions taught me resilience.
The setbacks taught me humility.
The revisions taught me excellence.
Every rejection quietly shaped the innovation that judges later recognised.
If there is one message I hope other educators take from my journey, it is this:
Do not stop because one competition says "not yet."
Sometimes success is simply the result of improving your work one submission at a time.
Behind every award is a story filled with unseen drafts, late nights, failed attempts, constructive criticism, and the courage to try again.
And perhaps that unseen journey is the greatest achievement of all.
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