Everything Is Out of Syllabus by Varun Duggirala

Author:Varun Duggirala [Duggirala, Varun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789354924507
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2022-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

This simple aspect applies to everything we fail at in life—we never sit down and address what actually makes us fail. We never honestly tell ourselves that we’re often doing the most obvious thing wrongly. The reasons why we fail can be both minuscule and glaringly obvious, but in either case, if we don’t look in the mirror, we can’t see what’s wrong. Only when we are absolutely honest with ourselves can we learn from our failures. And if we don’t introspect and address them head-on, these failures can very easily become a crutch on which our future failures can be blamed.

I’ve sucked at being organized and focused all my life, and I’ve admitted this publicly. I blamed it on a self-diagnosis of ADHD or attention deficiency hyperactivity disorder, and used this as an excuse for many a failure, both professional and personal, resulting in failed relationships and professional crises. It’s an easy crutch to fall back on.

Only when I finally went to meet a certified therapist to understand how my mind worked did I come to the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I lacked the ability to be structured. I just suffer from a personality that strives for autonomy. I have an innate need to chart my own path. If I’m given a goal and asked to get to it my way, I will succeed, but tell me the exact steps to get there and ask me to follow them to the T and I will fail. This realization has fundamentally changed how I operate in life. It’s made me build systems from scratch (mixing multiple references most of the time) in most things I do, and I can say that I’m ten per cent more organized than I was last year (which is nothing but iterative improvement).

It’s like Al Pacino said in his fabulous half-time speech in one of my favourite sports movies of all time Any Given Sunday, ‘You only learn when you start losin’ stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game—life or football—the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second.’

So, if you fail, don’t just try again without adding that small piece of learning into the mix, that small step of improving or that extra moment of reflection. Otherwise, you’ll just end up with a teacher in failure whom you never seem to learn from.

If at first you don’t succeed, learn and evolve from it, and then try again!

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