Failing to succeed

     Today, it is 12.39 am, just past the dead of night, and I am trying very hard to fail my first class.


     I am not a person who is not sincere with his studies. I even have spectacles, as a constant reminder of the bookworm that I have grown into. I have tried every academic year of my life. to pass each exam with great enthusiasm and extreme dread. I have  always tried my best to get what I want. And today, I am trying my best to not succeed. 

     To put things into perspective, I am a twenty five year old boy, studying for his PhD in US, half a world away from the world he has grown up in. His parents, his friends and his fiance are electronically connected very well, but he knows that they are just pushes of buttons and throbs of electricity. He is studying for a subject he has never studied before, because he really wanted to take up the challenge. 
     A fish out of water, struggles, but eventually evolves into everything it needs to be. The question is, does every fish want to evolve?


     People told me that succeeding in life was the most difficult part. However though times thick and thin, 
I have come to believe that giving something up requires much more courage and succeeding. Should it be so difficult for a boy to give up when he is man enough to understand he is not good enough? Should we keep trudging and crawling down roads not meant for us, keeping in our minds small and subtle thoughts of succeeding if we want to. Success is not the end goal of life. Life is the end goal of life. But the problem happens when you want to quit something you are good at. How often do people question the fact that not every one wants to do something they are good at? However, in this world of maladjusted priorities that is exactly what we all have been tuned to think. Convincing people who have hopes and dreams about what you will do. Something I was really hoping would be taught to me once I was done learning the alphabet. 


     I am good with what I do. My results, my outcomes are a testament to that. I have always been great with grades. I have always had that piece of paper that says I am really good with what I do. But, sadly, that does not always correlate with what I want to do. And here is the tricky part of this quagmire, how do you convince people that you are not interested in doing something you are really good at?

     I have been blessed with a publication very recently, and it is a striking example of what I am trying to convey here. 
     I have worked in a lab for a year, in a wet lab setting- where I wear a white coat at the beginning of the experiment and walk out with medals of stains. I rarely got to sit down and my whole life depended on assumptions and hypotheses. Proving tests and results became my life. I forgot to eat. I forgot to sleep. I forgot to remember how it was feeling good about doing something. Every day I entered the lab, I would imagine the day passing by quickly, and I leave the lab and go home. And do nothing. Just sit by the window and do nothing. But be away from the lab.
     I wanted to cry out to people I knew how miserable I was. How I wanted to be home. How I yearned to be closer to my own country. How I wanted to do something else. If a year of research made me so miserable, was there any evolutionary advantage in going ahead with that? Logically and theoretically it made perfect sense. But then something happened.
     I graduated with a good GPA of 3.8/4.0. And a year after that, my research ended in a publication. 

     People started believing that my efforts had paid off. People started believing I was really good at what I did. People came to a conclusion that I was good at what I did because I really liked what I did. 
     And the problem was, how do I ever prove to them that was not the case? How do I ever prove to people that being good at something and being interested in doing something were two quite different things. 

     Convincing a people you don't want to do something is easy if you are not very good at it. But, if you excel in something, you can never convince a people that your heart is somewhere else. 

     It is a sad thought that today people call me crazy when I tell them I want to leave a country where I can earn in dollars and go to a country where I might earn the equivalent of a pizza delivery guy. But, that is a the topic of a completely different blog entry. 

     Today, I sit in my empty apartment, and my empty life, with good grades, and good results, trying fail because sometimes you need to fail to succeed.

Ed Lithium