I Thought Failure Was My Destiny Until I Realized It Made Me Who I Am Today
Reflecting and sharing lessons I’ve learned over the last 20 years
It’s 2001 and I’m a senior in high school with relatively good grades, acceptances into my universities of choice, and a bright future ahead of me. I was also a young, misguided idiot who managed to make a series of decisions that cost me a decade of my life.
After not graduating from high school, going on a multi-year bender in the company of other lost souls, experimenting with various substances, and cultivating a proclivity to misuse and waste time in any manner that presented itself to me, I’ve learned that there is no shame in starting over and over again.
But if I could go back and tell that that young Harpreet something, it’s this: Homie, all you have in this life are your decisions and their consequences. So, decide accordingly. And stop doing meth, for Chrissake!
Maybe I would have begun to think more clearly and act more purposefully?
Maybe.
Whether it’s going back to school, learning a new skill, overcoming defeats, omoving to a new there are some lessons you have to learn the hard way.
Sometimes you just have to start where you stand.
Start where you stand and never mind the past,
The past won’t help you in beginning anew.If you have left it all behind at last,
Why, that’s enough, you’re done with it, you’re through.
There were a lot of reasons that contributed to my not graduating high school. The most embarrassing of which was a decision to continually skip physical education classes to go smoke weed with my friends. This choice cost me to be short two credits, which lost me my graduation and college admissions.
Eventually those two credits were made up, a GED was awarded, and I emerged from a haze hell-bent on starting over.
I enrolled at a local community college; ironically, this is the same community college that was directly across the street from the high school I failed to graduate from. And certainly not far enough from the things that got me in trouble the first time around. Because, when you’re an idiot, it’s hard to shake idiotic tendencies.
After taking six years to complete a four-year program, I left the university armed with a bachelor’s degree backed by an abysmal GPA and no skills whatsoever. No life skills…no interviewing skills…no technical skills.
Nothing.
It was late-2007, the economy was crumbling, and no company wanted to hire a skill-less fresh graduate with a 2.2 GPA, whose resume had only one prior work experience: Pizza Delivery.
And when you find yourself in a position like this, then it’s on you to look at what skills you have managed to accumulate up until then, find an opportunity where you can leverage those skills, and double down on making your own lane.
You have to to ask yourself: What could I uniquely do that could at least make me feel like I was a positive, contributing member of the human race?
It’s not going to be obvious, it won’t happen overnight, it will take a lot of introspection, painful soul searching, and serendipitous encounters…but eventually opportunities will emerge.
For me it was a combination of being kinda at good math, having impeccable street smarts, and a natural desire to see people succeed in their own version of triumphant glory. This culminated in an opportunity to be a small group math instructor at a charter school that was serving students who have fallen behind in school.
And for a while I thought this would be my path: Make a living teaching math.
I can’t say that it felt like my true path, or that I was good at teaching, or even felt passionate about it…but it was a job. And a respectable career could be out of it. My family might even feel proud of me for a change! At the very least, maybe this sinking feeling of having no purpose would dissipate.
But…is this where I should invest the next 40-ish years of my life?
I know what that numfortable (numb + comfortable) feeling is like. The feeling like you’re too old to try something new, with the inertia of a lifetime of sunk costs behind you. The feeling of wanting to stay in that one lane because it’s what you know best at the moment.
But is the path you’re on enough for you?
“Everybody wants to stay where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going up to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path they’re on…
After nearly two years of teaching math to the “at-risk” student population — kids who were just like me when I was their age — it dawned on me that I love math more than I realized. This childhood love of math and science was reignited inside of me.
And with that feeling came another feeling: that of not living up to your own potential. Knowing that there’s more out there that could be done with this skill. There’s more out there for me.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting more for yourself.
There is something wrong with getting half way up a mountain but not wanting to climb back down to find a better path to get to the top just because you’ve already climbed half way up.
The hard parts are not the learning, it is the unlearning. It’s not the climbing up the mountain.
It’s the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over.
It’s the beginner’s mind that every great artist, or every great business person has, which is: you have to be willing to start from scratch.
You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero. ”
— Naval Ravikant
After hitting the internet in search of careers that made a lot of money using mathematics, I stumbled upon a field called actuarial sciences.
Becoming an actuary became my new goal and again, it was time to start over.
This is another chapter in the book,
This is another race that you have planned.
I didn’t know any actuaries, didn’t know what was needed to know to make it happen for myself, and sure as hell didn’t realize just how tough it would actually be.
After joining some forums, engaging in communities, and sharing my story with people, someone convinced me that it would be easier to break into the field if I went to graduate school.
Of course, no graduate school would accept me because my absolutely horrendous undergraduate GPA.
Realizing that graduate school applications consider only the last 60 credits of undergraduate course work, I devised a plan to ensure all 60 of those credits were math courses with at least a 3.7 GPA.
Time to start over again. Back at square one. Time to go back to community college, take every class from precalculus through linear algebra, then every undergraduate course in probability and statistics at UC Davis through their open university program.
It ain’t easy going back to square one. Especially when you’re in your mid-to-late 20s.
In fact, it can be embarrassing.
You know what it’s like, running into folks when you’re out and about and being asked “What are you up to? What are you doing nowadays? Where are you working?”
You’re chasing a pipe dream while everyone else is living their dreams.
But it doesn’t matter what other people think about what you’re doing, as long as you have a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve. All that matters is that you’re trying to make a better life for yourself, even if everything up until this point felt like failure.
Don’t give the vanished days a backward look,
Start where you stand.
As a 27 year old first semester graduate student who was in a rush to get to the finish line, I decided it would be a good idea to take on as much as I could.
The result: nearly flunking out of graduate school in my first semester. With a 1.6 GPA, placed on academic probation, on the verge of losing my post (and scholarship) as a graduate teaching assistant, I had frustratingly found myself in a familiar situation…again.
I returned to California for Thanksgiving break in 2011, feeling like the future was a burden not worth bearing, completely defeated, lost, purposeless, and wanting to throw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.
How am I supposed to ever make it in life if I keep fucking everything up?
I’ll never forget that cold November morning when I sat on the beach next to the bridge smoking (what could have been) my last cigarette and sipping on an Irish coffee, deciding if I was going to do it or not.
Was this going to be it?
Was I going to let myself go out like this?
Was this the answer?
Was I going to climb up this mountain only to throw myself off of it?
I couldn’t win a fight if I deliberately chose to lose it.
The burden of the future…It’s heavy, man.
That’s when a little voice echoed in the back of my mind: It’s not a burden, it’s a set of possibilities.
The world won’t care about your old defeats,
If you can start anew and win success.
And so, it was time to start over again.
The second semester saw me repeating nearly all of my classes from the first semester, going hard during summer school and every semester after that before eventually raising up my GPA and doing well enough to graduate.
The real struggle was during that last semester of grad school, trying to make it in the real world.
And to make it in the real world, apparently you’ve got to interview…a lot. On-site interviews, second, third, and final round interviews.
I was once so confident I got the job that I went to Express and bought an entire wardrobe with money I didn’t have just so that I could look sharp at work.
Nothing panned out.
The future is your time, and time is fleet,
And there is much of work and strain and stress.
During one of my interviews an interviewer mentioned they needed someone who was good at SAS Enterprise Miner.
Not knowing what the hell that program was, having no previous technical skills, and only knowing they wanted someone who knew this thing, I committed to learning it.
So I bought a course, studied hard, incessantly emailed the hiring manager every time I completed a module to share my progress, and eventually got certified.
Three days after completing the certification I had a job offer that was 15k less than most of my peers.
Didn’t matter.
Another chance to start over again was earned.
This cycle repeated itself many times over the years. Every time I try to do something new there seems like a tremendous amount to learn up front, and so many ways that I could fail at it.
Whether it was becoming a biostatistician, transitioning into data science, starting a podcast, becoming a writer, or a professional content creator — Every iteration of the cycle involved realizing that what I’ve already learned, already know, and was already doing, was actually an impediment to my full potential. The realization that the only way I could know, do, and become more was to start, fail, and persist and persist and persist more.
My hope is that you’re able to confront that comfortable feeling that’s holding you back from your potential.
You know what it’s like, staying in a job longer than you should because it feels like you’re already all you could be.
Going through life not learning anything new.
Growing older instead of growing in your skill set.
Stagnating instead of progressing.
Quiet desperation instead of rational optimism.
The feeling that this is going to be your life forever.
And when that happens, ask yourself: Did I really come this far, to only come this far?
Forget the buried woes and dead despairs,
Here is a brand new trial right at hand.The future is for him who does and dares,
Start where you stand.Old failures will not halt, old triumphs aid,
Today’s the thing, tomorrow soon will be.
Don’t you know that no one is going to give you anything? Will you not take control of your own destiny?
It’s a lesson that’s echoed many times throughout my life:
When it comes to YOUR goals, YOUR plans, or YOUR desires — you can’t rely on anyone else except YOU to make them happen.
Choose your damn self.
Because no one else will.
Get in the fight and face it unafraid,
And leave the past to ancient history.What has been, has been; yesterday is dead,
And by it you are neither blessed nor banned.Take courage, man, be brave and drive ahead,
Start where you stand.
It’s not easy having to start over, begin something new, change directions, find a new path.
But when you embrace that uncomfortable feeling like a friend you haven’t seen in years, forget the pain of past failures, and retain the lessons learned, you’ll discover the things that you were meant to do.
I wish I could tell you that I know exactly what I’m meant to do, that I know exactly where I’m headed next, or what the future looks like.
I don’t.
But I do know that whatever happens, I’m going to start where I stand.
Note: Interspersed through this post are parts of Berton Braley’s poem, Start Where You Stand. You can read the poem here, or listen to this amazing poem brought to life through the music of Akira the Don.
And remember my friends: You’ve got one life on this planet, why not try to do something big?
