From the title, you probably think I am self-deprecating and depressed. I mean why would someone want to fail. We all want to succeed and we know that we become what we think and do. Pondering and actively wanting to fail will only make one failure in the end.

You are right in thinking them and I will be sad and will worry about if you didn’t. Our society and network imposes success or more clearly, their view of success on every one of us: Nice car, house, family, job and lavish lifestyle. They all indicate success to everyone around us. We are also wired to strive and we are never happy when we do get all of them, there is always more we can do and someone of envy we can become.

Failure, on the other hand, goes against everything our society wants us to be. I mean who wants to be broke, not have a steady relationship, not have a job and live like a recluse or whatever else society considers “a failure”. We all know “failure is the stepping stone to success” but nobody wants to step on that stone. We all just want to cruise our way to the top floor. That is a reasonable desire although not a practical one.

Let me start by saying that I won’t consider myself successful by any means. I have a few things going well in my life and I do struggle with many things but I am happy with where I am. My journey to where I am is fairly ordinary but not without many roadblocks.

Let me talk about my failures. I had 3 failure moments so far in my life and after every one of them, I felt like I was done, faced mild depression and ultimately turned things around to a state which I consider much better than what I was before it happened.

The first one, my failure to pass an exam in college. To give you some context, I grew up in India, a country, where students are pushed to their mental limits due to enormous pressure from family and society and their only measure of success in life is to get into a great school and job that pays them well. Passion is for the weak. Growing up in such a competitive environment means a lot of stress to perform well in exams, to get good grades, more specifically, better grades than everyone around me. Up until I was in college I had not failed a single exam. I had not been a rock star in studies, I did well, ranking between second and fifth in class which was hard in retrospect and I don’t give myself enough credits for that. In college, I had cruised through all the courses with great scores until my last year, where I failed an important course. The professor at the time seemed like a lunatic. When I saw the score on the board, I was surprised, not by the fact that I had failed (which did make me sad) but by a sense of calmness and way I handled it. I smiled and told myself: let me fix this. I will give it another shot and prove that I am the best in that course. I worked hard and took the test again and made it with good grades. This was my first blessing or opportunity. In a way, it gave me confidence that I can always snap out of failures. It prepared me for some of the worst times in myself which I at that time I did not know or appreciate enough.

Second on, my failure at a startup. Yes, I was ultimately fired from the job. This was my first job in the US and I had come here with a lot of excitement. I left my family (my mom and sister and her new family) at that time to travel across the world to work for an exciting new company in San Francisco. There was a lot to learn not just from the job perspective but also from a cultural perspective. The part of India I came from was a conservative nook and everything there happened because it had been the way for the last 100 years. After reaching San Francisco I saw, Segways, Mini go cars that looked like carpets on wheels, Cars with large fluffy pink mustaches. It was exciting for me. Somewhere along the road of soaking it all in and getting used to the environment, I had lost track of the real reason I was there, to help a company succeed. I had tried to focus many times, learn new things and establish myself as a long(er) term resident in a new country but it simply was too much. The company’s work stopped appealing to me and the management style from leadership wasn’t working for me anymore. Ultimately, it led to them letting go of me. I didn’t know at that time but it was one of the best things that could have happened to me. The situation was nasty: I had my H1B work permit which would self-terminate when I lose my job. They were kind enough to keep me on payroll until I found the next opportunity. Still, it was hard. That was most definitely ground zero for me. At that point, I had fallen too much in love with my new future and was very sad and upset about the reality that I might have to go back to my home country and start all over again thinking that I may not have the same opportunities and excitement again. I worked hard, attended a lot of interviews and ultimately landed a job at LinkedIn which was very transformational for my career. I met some of the smartest people I had ever worked with and they just changed me as an engineer. I remember walking along the beach on July 4th, 2013 thinking about everything I had gone through in the past month, the nightmare now behind me and feeling relieved to have found my dream job. That was most definitely the beginning of what I consider a chapter in my career and life. I swore to myself that life is too short to spend in a job that was not exciting and that I will create a real meaningful impact no matter which company I choose. In the following years, I worked hard, got promoted within six months and continued onto a very exciting journey.

Four years later, I had reached a plateau at Linkedin. I had lost the initial spark of working in a startup environment. My performance started slipping. It was clear that I had started to evolve into a misfit in my team. There was a lot I wanted to do and deliver but the more I was excited the more dragging it all became. It’s hard to explain but my job wasn’t making me happy anymore. This time, however, I had the control. I decided to move on. I learned from my previous interviewing experience and wanted to do things differently. I prioritized companies that I felt passionate about and interviewed with them. When I finally landed a job in Lyft, I was ecstatic. There were several reasons for this. The pay was good and most importantly I get to stay in San Francisco and not have a long commute time. I was slightly off there though with the commute. It still took me 45 minutes as I lived across the city. Lyft has been great to me for several reasons. I started at a time where the data org was in its infancy and I knew everyone in the org. As the company grew, data org grew as well and I feel like a veteran even though I joined almost 4 years since the company started. If I were to say one thing that I learned while at Lyft that would have to be “relationship matters”. I chose to no longer work in a silo and slave away in the depths of the codebase. As an engineer and (now) a manager I always focused on collaboration and teamwork. I consciously choose not to take credit for the work I do and see if I can highlight and echo what others did more.