I Almost Failed…

I ALMOST failed… 

I joined the United States Navy before I even finished High School? Why? Because I knew my grades weren't good enough to qualify me for anything more than the job, I had at the time working at Burger King. I spent the better part of High School with my friends, playing sports, and working. As an average low C student at best, I saw the opportunity to join the military as my best chance to potentially have a real career. However, a funny thing happened when I took the pre-assessment test for the military, I aced it. Anyone who joins the military is subjected to the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB for short. This test is designed to help determine what you will do while you are in-service and is scored on a scale from 1-99. So, when I received a 99 on my pre-assessment, you could say that both my self-image and my hopes for my future rose quite a bit. I didn’t receive a perfect score on the actual assessment however, I instead only managed a 94, which was still more than enough to secure optional career paths in cryptography or nuclear energy systems. Being 19 I can tell you it sounded way cooler to be a "spy" than a "nuke", and so I chose my rate, and there for my fate.

Boy was I in for a rude awakening when I arrived in Pensacola, FL for "A" School. In a theme that's continued to this day, I had a really hard time learning the wrote content, as a matter of fact, I almost failed out of my specialty school. So, what happened? With effectively a failing grade our class moved into the application phase of our training where we could put the tools and principles we'd been studying to use. From that moment on, I was virtually unstoppable and quickly recovered percentage points as I applied the information that I'd been unable to fully grasp prior to that point. It's one thing to talk about how to fine tune the frequency of a signal on an oscilloscope and another entirely to do it. Being able to simulate, model, and quickly identify my mistakes in real time allowed me to quickly catch up and even pass some of my colleagues. The next time I returned to the training center in Florida for my advanced "C" school many years later, I continued my path to success by graduating with honors.

I say all of this because to me it highlights the need to hold ourselves to our own expectations and standards. Had I listened to the people who in High School told me I'd be working at Burger King the rest of my life; or, listened to the instructors in Pensacola who told me I should be looking to change Rates when I was so close to failing. I would have allowed other people to convince me that I was the problem. When the problem was that others expected me to be a sponge, capable of sucking up information and spitting back out that exact same information on command. But I’m a data processor. Capable of accepting information and then transforming it into actionable results and intelligence. I've been awarded for my intelligence reporting, I've been promoted when everyone said promotions rarely happen, and I've managed projects at Microsoft that enable them to accurately monitor their own data centers critical systems.

I almost failed. But I didn’t. You see I'm older now and have not only much more experience but also a great deal more knowledge about the world than I did at 19. Ultimately, there's only one person who can determine whether I'm a failure or not, and it's me. Over the course of my career, I've managed to ALMOST fail at many things when judged by others. In each case I chose to continue to try and that alone is what has allowed me to succeed. History is littered with the stories of people who almost failed and in doing so became household names. I'm not looking to be the next Bill Gates or Henry Ford, but I am hoping to be a reminder that failure only happens when you stop trying.

“If you fail, never give up because F.A.I.L. means ‘first attempt in learning"

~Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam