Lessons from failure

Below is the text of an e-mail I wrote to my brother-in-law after I got dinged by TAS:

Hi Jiju,

I'm sorry I couldn't talk much yesterday over the phone. You were the first person I called after I came to know the result. Now that I am back to square one, I need to figure out everything once again. Honestly, TAS was my dream job, it was an opportunity I had been waiting for. While I am very disappointed after missing it by a whisker, I have taken away a lot from this failure. Maybe my success would not have taught me as much as this failure. While I will not dwell over my interview round and what went wrong, during my spare time, I have realized a lot of things about life and these 3 months of deep focus have given me a new perspective in life. I can safely say that I am much more mature than I was earlier. If I look back at the whole thing, I realize that this was the first true failure of my life. I never wanted something so bad and worked so hard to achieve it, all this while surprising myself with my own abilities. My mind still wanders in Bombay House and I am thinking of the days when I would have got the opportunity to meet Mr. Tata (I appeared for TAS partly because I wanted to shake hands with him). I had always dreamed of going there once at least and meet the titans of Indian industry. I'm sorry I couldn't measure up to what they wanted. Maybe it was my verbosity that sealed my fate.While I will take a little while to get over the feeling of disappointment, I have the following to share with you as the lessons I have learned:

1) It takes a lifetime to achieve something of significance. While Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg might have achieved extraordinary success very early, these people come from different environments and have probably spent all their lives chasing one thing. Even if I look at someone like your boss, the guy put his entire life into pursuing his dreams!

2) When I was strolling in Bombay House reading the names of the distinguished people on the nameplates, I realized the importance of hard work. To be honest with you, I never realized what hard work meant until I found something that I could put my heart into. I hated engineering to the core. I hate nagging and forcibly doing something I don't care about. I want my own space and freedom to do what I want. For a long time all this has been denied to me. I thought that maybe TAS will give me that opportunity. I have now realized that even I have the capacity for extraordinary amount of hard work. I may not be inherently brilliant like these IIT toppers, but I can work hard to be like any of them.

3) My real passion is business. You won't believe this, but I have spent my time in college doing projects in nanotechnology and high precision engineering and none of them interested me forever. I have learned more by knowing what I don't want in life than vice-versa. To prepare for my interview, I went through at least 200 magazines that I have accumulated over the years and I don't miss even a single issue of any of the top biz mags in the market. That is partly the reason why I knew what to do when I got the case study in my hands. I have read books on PE, i-banking and the works in my spare time for the past 2 years, just to understand how all of this works and I will continue to do so. I haven't slept properly for the past 3 months and all my waking hours (sometimes even in my dreams!!!), all that went through my mind was TAS. I thought that this will be my redemption and I will finally live a normal life, do what I really like and work with a bunch of smart and experienced people. None of this materialized.

4) I have leaned to accept failure. Maybe it's important for us to fail more than succeed. To tell you the truth, while I was going though the TAS process, I had this feeling in my mind that this may not materialize simply because it means unprecedented success at such an early age and what have I done all my life to deserve this??? I have never tasted failure, how can I taste so much success??? Maybe it was god's way of making sure that I become a mature individual first and a manager afterward. I have never slogged my ass off for my acads, it was more of a torture for me, I spent most of my time time in college attending international debate tournaments 'coz I love it. I realized that even hard work doesn't guarantee success. Now, I am ready to try again, more than that, I am ready to fail again. Whatever opportunity I will pursue next, I will put double the effort I put into my TAS prep. And if I fail again, I'll work thrice as hard to pursue the next opportunity. I don't mind stretching myself to the limits now 'coz I have realized that I am as capable as any other guy.

5) It's not about money. It's never ever about money. It's about passion and the willingness to go beyond the realm of the ordinary. TAS does pay 20 lacs a year, but even if it was 6 lacs, I would still work for it simply for the exposure I will get. Thanks to my Baniya genes, I always had that narrow approach to look at any career from a monetary perspective. I now realize that money is always a by-product of what you do, what matters is the work you do, that is the reason why I don't care about going to London.

6) I have always wanted to pursue brilliance. For me, it is not about money, it is not about position or power or anything. When I look back at my life, I realize that I always wanted to be counted as someone brilliant, someone who defines the field he chooses to enter. I now realize that it takes an entire lifetime of hard work and dedication to accomplish this and I am ready to do this, I just need direction.

7) I am not afraid of competition anymore, but I am trying to be realistic. Now u'll say write CAT!!!! I stay away from CAT because of 2 reasons:a) All my IIM friends have brilliant acads, mine are very average.b) What will I do at an IIM??? My friend at IIMB tells me about the level of competition inside the IIM for even the job you want! And needless to say, the top jobs are taken away by these IIT guys. You will know better as u have been there, done that.

8) In the long term, I do wish to be an entrepreneur. I guess if I had got through TAS, I would have been charmed into the comfort of the TATA group and the prestige that comes with it. This would have made it even more harder for me in the future to go and do my own thing. Maybe this is God's way of making sure I don't give in to such temptations easily by making sure that I fail innumerable times before finally succeeding.

9) The worse thing I can do to myself right now is to get dejected and give up. I know that the days ahead are not easy and my managers will make my life hell because they know I can't go anywhere now.

10) The IT industry work experience is not valued anywhere abroad, so all my dreams of INSEAD and HBS just go down the drain forever.I hope I din bore you with my mail. There is no one to guide me and hence I feel that I can share this with you. There are no mentors here in TCS. My supervisor thinks that Moscow is in New York!!! This is the level of dumbness we have here and the same supervisor threatened to screw my ratings so that I don get though TAS if I din follow her wishes. My greatest fear is that I will end up living a mediocre life, I don want this to happen.Could you please let me know if it is possible for you to speak to me to help me figure out what I should do next?

Regards,

Siddharth.