My experiences with failure (2020 edition)

2020

2020 has been a challenging year for most people. Almost no one could have planned for what happened this year. Goals have not been met. Jobs no longer exist. Loved ones have been lost. That has led to suffering, pain, anguish, despair among many other feelings.

I have had my own share of 2020 failures. I had plans for my career, my life, of what I will accomplish and achieve this year. Most of that did not go according to plan. In particular, being stuck inside your house for months on end with no sight of when things would change was super hard. Life was all about “waking up in the morning, attending zoom meetings for work most of the day, and going to bed”. All of this happening in the same room was even harder. And then the uncertainty that comes when people are losing their jobs all around you, and the industry your company is in makes job cuts a high probability makes things even more uncertain.

Personal setbacks (2020 edition)

This year I had 2 major failures. These were situations that happened to me and I could not predict or control most of it. These 2 distinct events this year were completely unexpected and I had no fallback plans when they hit me. Each time they happened, I felt a mixture of the following reactions

• Oh my god, my world is ending!
• How can this happen to me?
• What am I going to do?
• My life has been a failure!
• This is so shameful. How will I ever tell anyone about this?
• There is no future!

False sense of entitlement

With each year of seemingly comfortable life, of success we lull ourselves into a false sense of entitlement. We become complacent and take things for granted. As we continue on the path of success, our egos keep building up. We start expecting more from life not as a gift but as something we deserve, that success is owed to us because of our past.

While there is some merit in expecting more from life as we have gained more experience, it is still contingent on random events. Life does not guarantee increasing success. The best of people might experience their company failing, or being fired from a job, or losing a loved one. We just forget it can happen to us with each passing year of steady and improving life circumstances.

In this state of complacency, our bar of what constitutes life-ending failure keeps going up or down (depending on how you look at it). When we are just starting our careers, not finding a job constitutes a major failure. An occasional failure in a job interview, or coding interview is hard but not life-ending.

After 5-10 years of working in good companies, perhaps not being able to get 2 job offers or being rejected from a seemingly lower company seems like a life-ending failure. For someone who is used to being valued highly as an engineer, failing a coding test might seem like life-ending failure.

Failures in life

As I went about trying to digest the feelings and emotions after the 2nd major event this year, I had to really dig hard to find a place of stability. Because the 2nd event hit harder, and was probably more unexpected, it forced me to experience a lot more uncomfortable emotions. It was easy to spend hours thinking about what-ifs and what-coulds. Eventually a chain of thought led me down to think about my past failures and how I felt then and did those worries turn out to be true. So I tried noting down some moments in life when it seemed like tomorrow would never come:

• In my mid-teens, I had to move cities almost with no 1-2 week notice. I had to leave behind all my friends which was hard enough. But I had expected that my friendships would remain the same. After I moved to the new city, I pretty much lost touch with all of my friends. I felt like life could not get any worse.
• In my late-teens, someone I cared for deeply and had known for a few years told me how she had no feelings for me. I was devastated.
• In my first year of grad school, I had just entered one of the most prestigious colleges in India. I thought I was at top of the world. In the first few months of the course, I could not even pass exams for some of the courses. There was a course requiring mechanical work like carpentry etc and I sucked at it. Going from “I am one of the best minds in the country” to “I can’t even pass a math exam and shave some wood” was a crashing drop down.
• In my final year of grad school, I applied for an entrance examination for the best MBA colleges in the country. I got 99.6%ile (so I was among the top 0.4% students of the 200K+ who applied). Didn’t even get halfway to those top colleges, they rejected me flat out. Talk of giving middle fingers.
• I used to consider myself a pretty decent computer science grad. So when companies decided to come hiring at campus job fairs, almost half of the Computer science students had a job in 4 days. I was not one of them. My self-confidence was crushed.
• I went on a leave of absence from my job, at a time when things were going really well, to go be with someone I cared deeply about. I moved countries, left behind a career that seemed to be growing fast. Eventually that person decided I was not worth it. My life literally ended. I felt like I would never find meaning in my life.
• In my first few months of joining a new job, my manager asked me to take on a project to move our company’s servers from EC2 to Kubernetes. I had heard the word but had no clue of what it meant. I made a few bad decisions, a few bad assumptions and eventually the project failed. Spectacularly with months of many engineers work wasted and nothing major to show for it. It was one of the biggest failures of my professional careers. I wondered if I will be fired and if I really am a good engineer or a good manager. I was devastated by my failure.
• Event 1 in 2020
• Event 2 in 2020

Lessons in resiliency

Each of the above mentioned failures was not the end of the world. Not even close. Each of them, in hindsight, were important for me to change, to learn, to adapt myself and grow further. Without these failures, without the associated emotional turmoil and suffering, I would be living and trying to live a life trying to avoid risk and disasters.

The 2020 events were hard because I had forgotten what I had gone through and how they had helped me become the person I was. So when they happened, it felt like the biggest failures of my life. Yet, on thinking about all the things I have had to deal with, it did not feel that big. I had more support systems from financial to emotional support now (in 2020) that I had none of in my mid-teens. Knowing that I have been through worse, was useful to look at things in a new perspective.

Also reflecting on what I have been through, and how it changed me, also made me grateful. I realized that what is happening to me now is like a blessing. It is teaching me lessons that I would not have voluntarily forced on myself. One of those lessons was how we forgot the impermanence of things, of how we forget that life is full of change and unpredictability.

These events, the feelings of failures and turmoil, the reflections after that to digest and process how to find myself again made me realize that such difficult situations should not be avoided but embraced as part of life. They are as useful in making our lives beautiful as the beautiful moments itself. They help us find our core strengths, the characteristics that form us. And they help us find new perspectives in who we are and who we want to be.

To sum it up, I found a beautiful quote in a book I am reading right now.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.“