getting bad grades

how getting bad grades made my life better in the long run

i wanted so badly to graduate with latin honors. the dream was cut short in sophomore year when i got a C for discrete math. it was the first of two Cs that would inevitably strike my gpa off the cum laude cut-off for good.

all throughout college, i attended every possible office hour and stayed on campus until i finished all my assignments. my friends can attest to how relentless i was. yet despite my best effort, some classes like discrete math simply eluded me.

after every exam period, i would mentally beat myself up for not getting straight As. perhaps i didn’t try hard enough, or maybe i wasn’t just good enough. though rationally i knew i tried my best and my performance in a few classes did not define who i was as a person. i couldn’t really shake that bout of self-doubt.

after a while, i got tired of feeling shitty about myself. i wanted to stop feeling so miserably about school. i realized i was feeling shitty largely due to my ego. i was praised a lot growing up, for being smart or for having potential. somewhere along the way, the praises transformed into a skewed internal narrative: if i am smart, then it means i can’t fail. if i am smart then i have to be perfect. i cannot afford to fail!

one of the biggest flaws of higher education is that it falls short in its attempt to depict life. in school, the best students are those who do all the assignments and do them well. if you perform badly on a test, it will usually affect your final grade. but in real life, the most successful individuals aren’t necessarily the smartest or most perfect. it is those who try again and again. because real life doesn’t penalize you for failing, no one is keeping score. all you have to do is try again.

i didn’t know all this then but i wish i did. i would have moved on a lot sooner. instead, i made peace with my far-from-perfect gpa by learning to take pride in my effort and progress. this was hard to do, but it was necessary to finally be free of the voice inside my head that tells me you have to be perfect.

it is impossible to say what my life would be like now had i gotten all the grades i wanted. would it be better? would i be more successful? perhaps in the near short term. there is no way of knowing for sure. but i would probably still be paralyzed by the fear of failure and appearing imperfect.

i would be so caught up in perfection, at least the idea of it, and i would consequently not do anything significant. there would be no rough drafts, no youtube channel, no substack newsletter. i wouldn’t try unless i knew i would succeed.

when i moved to new york after graduating in 2019, i had no job lined up. i was the only person in my extended friend group who graduated without a job waiting for me. i applied to at least a hundred open roles, i did about 10 final round interviews. it was exhausting, and emotionally draining. i thought my career had ended before it even began. but in the end, i got one job, the job i never thought i could get even in my wildest dreams.

as a former type-a perfectionist, i know how good it feels to bask in the idea that you are perfect and immune from failing. but as someone who has failed dramatically, i will say that it is much more delicious to finally succeed after having failed many many times.