Sometimes injuries can have a silver lining. Just ask Michael Caine.

The Cider House Rules star reflects on looking on the bright side after being hospitalized from a pothole injury in his new memoir Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over. “A few years ago, we were in New York, and I was walking down Lexington Avenue, and I literally fell into a pothole,” Caine writes. “It was a proper tumble, I needed stitches and everything. So poor Shakira [my wife] rushed to see me at the hospital and she was upset, as you’d expect. I must have looked a right state.”

Caine says that he surprised his family with his even-tempered response to the accident. “I think everybody was expecting me to feel very sorry for myself — and then suddenly I realised, ‘Hey! This is great! Now I don’t have to go to bloody Paris to do movie publicity!’” he remembers. “Which, to be honest, felt like pretty good news at the time. It’s funny, looking back.”

Though he doesn’t mention which movie he skipped out on promoting in his book, Caine was almost certainly referring to The Dark Knight Rises, as Daily Mail reported that the actor missed multiple premieres for the film in 2012 after falling into a pothole on Lexington Avenue and receiving stitches. However, Caine didn’t miss the film’s premiere in Paris because the event was canceled altogether following the tragic theater shooting in Aurora, Colo.

Despite the tragedy and Caine’s unavailability for promotion, The Dark Knight Rises ended up becoming the biggest box office hit of the actor’s career, grossing $1.085 billion worldwide and outpacing its better-reviewed predecessor, The Dark Knight, by over $70 million.

Caine says that his positive attitude toward his pothole debacle is a “left-field example” of his mantra, “use the difficulty,” which he employs whenever “things don’t go right” in life. “It’s a good practice to really examine the scene of a setback for the thing that is going to help you: nine times out of ten, it’ll be there if you look hard enough,” he writes. “Reframe the crisis as an opportunity and turn it to your advantage, even if only slightly. Remember, you’re not on your own, but at the same time, nobody is going to make it happen for you.”

The Youth star encourages his readers to take active steps to better their circumstances. “Just being angry about your lot in life won’t achieve anything,” he writes. “There are victims in life, but not as many as the modern world encourages people to think! It’s a really important aspect of this whole discussion – not walking into the elephant trap of self-pity and victimhood. It’s a hard place to escape from once you’ve convinced yourself that you have no control over your own destiny, and the system has been rigged to ensure that you will fail.”

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Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over is on shelves now.