Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 2 - Where are the Other Two Marks

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

CHAPTER 2 – Where Are the Other Two Marks?

For most kids, moving from infants to primary means new classrooms and bigger playgrounds. At Rye Park Public School, there was none of that. Just two rooms, the Infants Room and the Primary Room, sitting on five acres of wind-swept ground at the edge of town, surrounded by paddocks and the low hum of country silence. The world didn’t suddenly get bigger; it stayed exactly the same size, but the expectations inside it sharpened. The rules felt harder. The discipline thickened like winter mud. And it was here, in that little two-room schoolhouse, that the real expectations, the silent ones, started to take shape in the background.

Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight and a life’s worth of unpacking, I can see that this was the chapter where the seeds of FOMO weren’t just planted, they were fertilised, watered, and given a timetable.

Because this was the era of the report cards.

I still have them, Years 3, 4, 5, and 6. Four years’ worth of neat grids and handwritten comments in fading biro, each page marked by one of two principals who couldn’t have been more different. Peter Day, who oversaw the first two years, was sharp-edged and quick to raise his voice, a man who believed discipline was something you applied first and explained later, if at all. And then there was John Beales, who took over for the final two years: quiet, measured, almost reserved. The kind of principal who didn’t need to shout to make a point because his disappointment, calm, deliberate, and neatly delivered, cut just as deeply.

Across those years, the record is strangely consistent. Within every subject block, reading, writing, spelling, maths, social studies, science, even behaviour and effort, there’s row after row of top marks. Perfect marks. Except for two. Two marks missing from an otherwise spotless four-year run.

Two marks.

You’d think that should have been a triumph. A pat on the back. A “well done, son.” Or even nothing at all, quiet acknowledgement would have been enough. Just a moment of someone seeing the effort.

But the only time my father ever spoke about schoolwork in that entire period was the day he looked at the report, nodded once, and said:

“Where are the other two marks?”

My mother said even less.

That was it. No smile, no softness, not even disappointment. Just a blunt, matter-of-fact observation that perfection had been available and I’d somehow failed to collect it.

And it’s funny, or sad, how a sentence like that, dropped in passing, can wedge itself deep into your wiring. You don’t feel it at the time. You just absorb it. You tell yourself you’re fine. You tell yourself it’s just a comment. You get on with the day.

But something shifts.

A little part of you decides that anything less than perfect is failure. A little part of you starts scanning every horizon for the next thing you might fall short on. A little part of you learns to chase every shiny object because maybe the next thing, the next win, the next achievement, the next bit of external proof, might finally be enough.

Spoiler alert: it never was.

School, for all its quirks and its tiny two-room simplicity, had rules I could work with. You learned them early, you stuck to them, and if you coloured inside the lines, you generally stayed out of trouble. By the time I reached the primary room, I could read the rhythm of the place, when to speak, when to stay quiet, how to keep my head down and avoid becoming the example of the day.

Fitting in was almost easy there. Predictable. A system I could navigate.

Home wasn’t like that.

As I got older, the discipline at home hardened. The reactions became sharper, the consequences more sudden, and the stakes felt higher in ways a kid can feel even when he can’t articulate them. At school, stepping out of line, if I ever did, meant standing at the front for a while and admonishment by the teacher. At home, it was different, louder, quicker, and without the clear boundaries you could rely on in the classroom.

So I learned to excel at school not because I was particularly brilliant, but because the rules made sense. They were consistent. They had edges you could see. It was the one place where effort and behaviour had predictable outcomes, a currency I could understand.

School, especially in those years, was built on rote learning. Memorise your times tables, your spelling lists, the state capitals, the rules of grammar. Recite them back. Get the tick. Move on. There was a strange comfort in that. A + B always equalled C, no surprises, no hidden twists. It didn’t matter who you were, what kind of morning you’d had, or whether your world felt steady or shaky, the answer was the same for everyone.

There was no emotion in what you had to deliver. Just output. Just correctness. Just the steady, mechanical progression of getting things right.

Home was nothing like that.

At home, emotion drove everything, the temperature of the room, the tone of the day, the consequences that followed. There were no formulas, no predictable outcomes, no clean lines connecting action and response. A small slip could be brushed off one day and detonated the next. A comment, a look, even a silence could change the whole direction of an evening. You learned to read moods, not rules; footsteps, not timetables.

So school became the place where my world made sense. The place where I could achieve, where being correct actually counted for something, where the mark on the page reflected the work I’d put in rather than the weather of someone else’s emotions.

And in that environment, discipline wasn’t corrective, it was expected. It hung over all of us like weather. But at least it was predictable weather, the kind you could pack for. At home, the storms rolled in without warning. And at home? The message was even clearer: close enough isn’t good enough. If others had done better, why hadn’t you? If perfection existed, why didn’t you reach it?

So begins the chapter where the need to be better, to do more, to chase the next thing took root. And not in a healthy, aspirational way, but in that quiet, hollow way where you’re not striving for success, you’re running from failure.

Because when the only comment you ever hear is “Where are the other two marks?”, you don’t grow up celebrating what you achieved.

You grow up worrying about what you missed.

And that worry becomes part of your internal operating system, silent, persistent, always humming away in the background. It follows you into the yard, onto the bus, into every classroom, every conversation. It becomes the lens you look through without even realising you’ve picked it up.

I don’t think I ever truly wanted to be a farmer. Not in the way some kids did, where they dreamed of owning land or running stock of their own. But growing up where I did, you didn’t get much of a vote on the matter. When shearing came around, or harvest, or holidays, you were roped in, an extra pair of hands expected to pull your weight. It wasn’t passion; it was obligation. Duty by geography. In essence you were “voluntold” into servitude.

And a lot of that time on the farms, especially with my cousin Phil, became less about learning the trade and more about escaping the reality waiting back home. There was a safety in the distraction. You could lose yourself in the noise of the shed, the dust, the dogs, the routine. You could be useful without being judged. You could breathe without listening for the next emotional shift in the house and still manage to have some fun in total escapism.

What looked like “helping on the land” from the outside was, for me, a temporary reprieve. A reset button. A chance to exist in a world where effort was physical and straightforward, not emotional and unpredictable. On the farm, if you worked, you contributed. If you contributed, you belonged. There were no sudden outbursts to navigate, no moods to tiptoe around, no shifting ground beneath your feet. You knew your job: open the gates, muster the sheep, keep the shed moving. It was simple. Linear. Breathe in, breathe out, get it done.

And in the middle of that simplicity came the first real acknowledgment of my “value”: my grandfather pressing eleven dollars, actual paper notes, ones and twos, into my hand as payment for mustering and shed-hand work during shearing. Eleven dollars. It might as well have been a fortune.

We never received pocket money at home. Money wasn’t something handed out for existing. You only ever earned it, through labour on the farm or, later, through equestrian events and the prize money that came with them. Everything was transactional in that sense, but not in a cynical way. More in a way that taught you early that reward followed effort, not emotion. And perhaps more importantly, that effort could be your way out.

Looking back now, that simple envelope, awkwardly stuffed, folded, smelling faintly of lanolin and dust, was probably far more significant than I understood at the time. It wasn’t the amount. It was the message: If you work, you can have something of your own. If you have something of your own, you can make your own decisions. If you can make your own decisions, you don’t have to live at the mercy of anyone else’s moods.

That was the first hint of freedom I ever tasted.

Being on the farm wasn’t a glimpse of the life I wanted, it was a glimpse of a life where I wasn’t constantly assessing the emotional weather. A world where the rules didn’t change mid-sentence, where consequences matched actions, where people didn’t lash out just because they could.

That clarity, that predictability, shaped me more than any classroom or report card ever did.

And even then, even as a kid stacking bales or sweeping the shearing board, I think I knew that freedom wasn’t going to come from following someone else’s path. Not the family farm. Not a future boss. Not a life where someone else held the lever and I had to guess when it might pull.

Over time that formed the quiet logic that would later carry me into entrepreneurship: If I can work for myself, I don’t have to answer to anyone else’s volatility. If I build the rules, I don’t have to fear them. If I run the show, no one can move the goalposts on me mid-game.

It was never really about wanting to “succeed” in the traditional sense. It was about creating a life where the ground beneath my feet finally stayed still.

It wasn’t farming I was drawn to.

It was freedom.

And the older I got, the clearer it became: freedom was only ever going to come from having a life where I answered to myself, and no one else.

School revealed another truth I didn’t have the words for at the time: I thrived where the rules were clear. Where you could work hard and get the result. Where the outcome matched the input. Where people didn’t change the goalposts based on their mood.

That kind of certainty didn’t exist at home. And it didn’t exist on the land either.

So, somewhere in these years, buried between spelling tests, standing at the front of the class, and the sting of two missing marks, the idea of being an employee started to take shape. Not out of aspiration, but out of logic. A job meant structure. A boss meant boundaries. A workplace meant someone else defined the rules, and as long as you met them, things stayed even.

It was safe. It was predictable. It was the closest thing to the simplicity of rote learning: do the work, get the tick. But even that had a shelf life.

Because once you learn to chase the next thing to outrun failure… once you learn that perfection is the baseline, not the achievement… once you’ve wired yourself to look over your shoulder for the thing you didn’t do quite right… being an employee stops being enough too.

You start looking around and thinking, “Why am I doing all this for someone else?” “Why am I letting someone else decide where my marks go?” “What if I could control the whole system myself?”

That’s the part people mistake for ambition. But really it’s fear, dressed up nicely. Fear of being judged. Fear of being found wanting. Fear of missing the marks someone else is counting.

By the time I finally took on the world on my own, years later, the foundation had already been poured in this tiny two-room school. In the rote learning. In the predictable rules. In the contrast with a home where predictability didn’t exist. And in that single comment that echoed louder than any praise ever could.

It turns out you don’t need a big school, or a big town, or a big moment to set your life’s trajectory.

Sometimes all it takes is two missing marks.