Why You Should Fail College
Hi, I am Simon and this is failure 101. First of all I am posting this to reach as many people as I can so that they wouldn’t suffer from a condition which made a very bad reputation and yet can be very beneficial, known as failure.
To make this article to more sense I should shortly give some information about myself. I am currently a third year college student in Bilkent University, Turkey (one of the best in my country). I was a great student on my whole education life till the University. I was always one of the best student regardless of which school I studied and which grade I was in. In our university exam (equivalent of SAT in US), I got into the top 1,25% in Turkey and found myself in Computer Science in Bilkent University. I did not know what a computer scientist do. I was guessing long days on school yard lying down with my computer. How hard can it get? I only need to play around with my computer right? I was always one of the best so if others can do it it would be easier for me.
My English was good, but not so good that I had to take the prep school at first. I took my half year to complete it while many of my friends spent their entire year or two years on prep school. So I was off to a great start. It all begin after that as you can see on the picture on the left :D
My first mistake was my overconfidence. I took extra classes in my first semester despite what my professors and older friends said. I couldn’t understand the topic like others. I couldn’t program like others. It was too much… First time in my life I was the bad student. The student who fails from his classes and the student no one would consider to talk about school related work. I got a GPA as 1,7. I was the golden boy and my GPA was lower than my height. Despite the huge failure (for me and everyone who knows me before the college), I was okay with that, because I knew I could turn it around. There is a lot time we got in college, don’t we?
My second mistake was to postpone my duties.
By postponing my homework, labs, projects, etc. I become the master of nothing. I did nothing. Even though I was standing on my table with my books in front of me, I was doing nothing because I was so used to do everything on the last minute that I started to give better result than LeBron James under pressure. A while later I gave up trying. I was waiting the day before the due date, regardless of how big the task was.
I was constantly failing and I had no motivation. That wasn’t me. So, I started to think the result behind my constant failure in college. And then I made my first useful deduction.
I wasn’t good at what I don’t like. One of our professor has said that “Your GPA shows how much work you can do unwillingly.” I did not like computer science department. I liked to code, I liked to create something, I liked to find solutions to problems but I did not like the heavy math, physics, hardware lessons, basically the lessons which I thought that I would not be using in the future caused me a major motivation loss. So at the end, I did not like to be an engineer. I liked some parts but they do not make me an engineer. They make me an entrepreneur. So, like any other CS major student, I decided to make the next big thing.
Part 2. College failure becomes the new Steve Jobs. Spoiler alert ! I did not. I failed big time. I had ideas and I knew that they were great. I was talking this about these to my family, to my friends, to some businesses to support me. Nobody did and I could not find the power in me to pursue this on my own. Only with one of my idea, I could gather a small group of engineers. I was leading them arranging roles, looking for money and ways to advertise our product. To make a name, to success, my country was one of the worst choice with the current government. So, I created my team with student from Albania and Turkey. There are a lot of Albanian engineering students in my college. Since we could not use Turkey and countries like US, Germany, etc. was to big for us to make a name we decided to go with the countries like Albania, Serbia, Czech Republic, etc. Meaning smaller countries in Europe. The idea was success in these countries and then spread. One of my friend who was in the group with us, was an Albanian singer. Not like the most popular but popular enough that we could benefit. So, I went to Albania. Met some people. I was actually doing something. I hated my school work and no motivation to do anything about college but now I was traveling between countries for my app. I arranged us a place in a live show in Albania. It was huge for me. I was so excited. This time I would do it. I could not. When the college work kicked in, everyone in the project just left it. I was alone with myself again. My life-changing app ended before 1 line of code has written. Then I came back to college where I was doing worse than my entrepreneurship. Two of my other ideas are million dollar apps now. One of them succeed as Betterhelp and the other one just came out named flamingo and doing very well. (I even sketched the mock-ups for that app…) Even though I failed with my first app and learned something from it. I was going to do something that I actually want to do in my life not an obligatory work that is given to me. Because even though I failed again with my app, I was happy when I was trying to make it happen. College teaches what we do with our lives and I learned that I did not want to be the richest or the most powerful person, I want to be happy, be excited about what I do.
For a year I just focused on my school and hoped for the best. My GPA has seen 2.45(it is really said that that is the highest it got). Then the inevitable happened and it got lower and lower again. This college, this major was killing me. I was melting. I believed I have a potential but that was not it. I focused on where I did wrong with the first app that I tried. I noted those. I worked on those. I did not rush into anything this time. I was just trying not to fail my classes since I need to graduate at some point. But it was not my main focus. Engineering was just not so interesting. People are doing what every other people can. There is no uniqueness. Everyone can built a database if they learn how to do it. But everyone cannot paint a picture. Event though they do, they are not the same. I was looking for something that is unique, so I started making web sites. This is not something as unique as painting pictures maybe but it was enough for me. I was making what is on my mind. It was like painting a picture with code. And what you build is used by lots of people. You make something useful and totally your own creation. It worked for me. Then I started to think it about my life path. Because the job was fulfilling for me and I was looking for a job where I can work and travel at the same time. That I have no boss and the hours are mine. Maybe start my blog on the side. This is what I want. I have no doubt about it.
I met a man in one of Google Dev Group conferences here. He graduated as a mechanical engineer. But he work as a IT guy as his whole life. He was around 40 years old. He said to me that he really wants to quit his job and make his on business. He wants to see places that he did not see. He wants to create something his own. He just wanted the things that I have been talking about. At the end he said he is too old now for these. He has a wife and two kids in preliminary school and he cannot risk their future. He just wanted to realize this earlier. Now it is too late for him. He also told me that he is a person just make things done. Does not matter whether if he likes it or not. He said he was like that in the college in his first job (which is his current). He never liked it but he is a person that can do it anyway. Now he got enough of it. His own words “Im am not happy and that is not my families fault. So I am trying not to show how I feel so I smile at home to them and I smile at work to my coworkers. I never smile when I am alone.”
In a test, if you make a question right it does not give you anything. You already knew that. But if you make a mistake and you learn what was the right answer, that will stay with you. You enhanced your knowledge, you learned something new. To learn something new you can read, you can watch, you can listen, you can see. But we are all unique in our own ways and our paths in life are all different and that is okay. There is no truth that applies for everyone. That is why we cannot depend on what we learned from others mistake, what we learned from books, what we learned from conferences, classes, etc. We cannot depend on the things that we learned from sources that involves other, others writing, others story. If we want to make our own we only can depend on our experiences. And as the test example to learn something and depend on the knowledge that is earned we need to fail. It teaches what should not we do. Even we find what should we do and how should we do, to understand the method we are using is right we need to try some other wrong method to see that the first method was actually right. One of the wold’s most rich and popular man Bill Gates was another failure before he succeeded with Microsoft. His first business was indeed a failure. Traf-O-Data was a partnership between Gates, Paul Gilbert, and Paul Allen. The goal of the business was to create reports for roadway engineers from raw traffic data.
The company did achieve a little bit of success by processing the raw traffic data to generate some income. But the machine that they had built to process the data flopped when they tried to present it to a Seattle County traffic employee. Yet, this business helped to set Gates and his partner Paul Allen up for major success with Microsoft.(Check this site to see more examples like Bill Gates).
The system is fundamentally wrong. From early ages they teach us not to make mistake, not to fail. People who ended up very successful and important generally says that do not make the same mistakes I did. The problem is these people are who they are because of the mistakes they did. Because they failed and learned not to fail. I am not saying we should intentionally fail of course, but we should not afraid of failing. We will shape our own lives, choose our own ways, do which we think is right by eliminating the ones that are not suitable for us.
What happened my web-site business? I actually started to making websites for customers and currently building a community for creating web sites with me and feels the same way as I do. Looking people from my university, my neighbors, my friends, from abroad. And got two more people to the group. What if it fails? Then I will not make the same mistakes I did in this project on my next one.
