Photos: Daniel Bornstein, Francine Boer.
There’s one word that crops up more than any other when Jake Bailey talks about what’s happened to him in the last decade.
It’s not cancer, which struck when he was 18 and nearly claimed his life. Nor is it resilience, which is the topic of a book he’s written.
The word Jake, 27, can’t help using over and over is “lucky”. He knows he’s fortunate to have survived cancer and grateful because it changed his life for the better.
“Luck has been the defining factor of everything that has happened to me in the past 10 years,” he says. “I survived a very aggressive cancer. If It’d left me with long-term effects, I would have felt differently, but I was lucky that I wasn’t.
“I was lucky I had access to great healthcare, and the support of an incredible family and girlfriend. And I was lucky that I got to share my story and had what at times felt like the backing of the whole country.”
Jake hit headlines in 2015 when a video of him giving a speech from a wheelchair at Christchurch Boys’ High School went viral. Then the school’s senior monitor (head boy), he’d left his hospital bed where he was having chemotherapy for stage four Burkitt non-Hodgson’s lymphoma to attend the prizegiving.
Doctors told him a week earlier when they diagnosed him that if he didn’t have treatment, he had two or three weeks left to live. They also informed him that there was no guarantee the chemo would work.
One particularly moving sentence in his speech went on to be voted as the Kiwi quote of the year in a nationwide competition. It was: “Here’s the thing: None of us get out of life alive. So, be gallant, be great, be gracious and be grateful for the opportunities you have.”
It was pure luck that someone recorded the speech.
“The school had only set up cameras so I could watch it from hospital if I couldn’t make it. I actually nearly didn’t, I was so sick,” he recalls. “And then when it gained media traction, that was down to luck.
A reporter went to the school to write another story. Somehow, my speech from a few days earlier came up in conversation. A very small piece ended up on page six of The Press and then things kind of took off.”
After going into remission, Jake received requests to give talks about what cancer had taught him. Public speaking became his full-time job. He has talked to everyone from chief executives and elite sports people to prisoners and schoolkids locally and internationally. And yes, he feels very lucky to get to do that.
Out of that work came a drive to focus on resilience and how to develop the skills to deal with whatever life throws at us.
“I became passionate about trying to understand what creates resilient people,” he tells. “Are you born this way or do you build resilience? How do we teach people, especially young people, to succeed in the face of the adversity and challenges we all experience?”
Jake combined studies in psychology and evidence-based research with tactics he used while going through cancer to come up with what he calls the Four S Model. He goes into detail about those strategies – Slow down, Salvage, Streamline and Stand alongside – in his book The Comeback Code. The guide also features insights from notable Kiwis like All Black Will Jordan and politician ChlÖe Swarbrick about becoming resilient.
“I thought, ‘Imagine if we could put a generation of young people on the front foot by providing them with tools they can use to make them better at dealing with life’s ups and downs.’”
There are plenty of ups in Jake’s life at the moment. He and girlfriend Jemima Tennekoon moved to Arrowtown last year after living in Australia for eight years. Jemima went to university over there.
Now fitter and healthier than ever, Jake enjoys skiing, trail running and endurance sports events. He’s recently been to Antarctica as part of a programme that helps young people to understand the resilience of explorers like Robert Falcon Scott.
He feels very privileged to have experiences like that and that’s why he wouldn’t change anything about having had cancer.
“What’s happened to me has given my life a depth and richness. I’ve earned lessons I otherwise might not have learned,” he explains. “I’ve tried to take what I can from that and turn it into something positive that can hopefully help others. I feel so, so lucky.”
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