Freedom to Fail by Shabnam Aggarwal

Author:Shabnam Aggarwal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

For the first time in my life, at the age of nineteen, I had failed big. Sure, it was a relatively small failure in the larger scheme of things – I had simply tried to sell a discount card to college students, but could not due to legal issues – but I was nineteen and self-absorbed and I had followed the rules and stayed on the straight and narrow path until then. Surprisingly, my failure had a massive butterfly effect on the people around me that I could not have predicted, which then led to multiplying my own self-doubt and shame.

My father told me to take the failure off my resume and never talk about it in interviews. My mother was worried about my dwindling GPA. My friends stopped going out with me out of fear of another blubbering drunk tirade about how spineless our university was. Holed up in my dorm room on the far side of campus like a lost sock tumbling around in the back of the drying machine, staring at the last remaining mustard-and-black coloured Bargain Steeler Card on my desk, I wondered why this hurt so much.

I started to interrogate my alter ego with questions. How could I have failed? What does it mean that I failed? How do other people deal with their failures? Has anyone I know ever failed as badly as I just did? Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about their failures? What will everyone think when they find out I’ve failed? I spent weeks trying to figure out what went wrong, and how I could have avoided failing.

When I came close to graduating college, I started searching for a job in the ‘real world’. In one job interview, a tired man with a shiny head sat behind a long mahogany desk and stared down at my resume as I entered the room. He motioned for me to sit across from him.

‘So, you’re an engineer?’ he said.

‘Yes…well, no, not yet…but, yes, I’m going to be,’ I stammered.

‘How many airplanes do you think are flying in the sky right now?’ he said.

‘Um…well…let’s see…hmm…maybe a million?’

‘Can you tell me how you got that answer?’

‘I honestly just guessed…am I in the right interview? My name is Shabnam Aggarwal. Two Gs.’

‘Yes, we like to see how you think.’

‘Oh, okay. But what does this role entail?’

‘You would be building chips for microprocessors that go inside our phones.’

‘I see. So…no planes?’

‘No, no planes.’

I quickly realized I had very little interest in building nano-sized computer chips for expensive computing devices, as my undergraduate program and my father would have hoped. I was more interested in figuring out how I could use my technology skills to help kids learn to take big risks and build resilience to overcome difficult situations like the failure I had gone through. It seemed inevitable that every kid would face failure at some point in his or her life, and the most courageous innovators in the world seemed to have the support and tools to

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