Coming here has been an incredible, eye-opening experience, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the nightmares that I’ve had to overcome. Throughout the past four years, I’ve gone through what I thought were devastating moments, but each and every one of them have ended up being a blessing in disguise. Instead of hoping that problems would work themselves out, I managed to turn-around my life with much less effort than most would think.

When life couldn’t get worse, it did.

Now for some secrets that even my close friends don’t know about… Going back to my freshman year of high school, I was super unpopular, I had a C+ average in my classes, and a business with terrible cash-flow problems. What more in life was there to hate? I had dreams of studying computer science at M.I.T, (I didn’t know about U.C. Berkeley at the time) but with my crappy grades and failing business, my guidance counselor expected no more than a high school diploma from me. After I was forced into selling my assets and client base to a friend’s business, I fell into deep despair.

However, as my dad and entrepreneur friends would say, something good often comes of having to deal with hurdles. At the time, I couldn’t think of a single positive thing that would come from failing a business AND getting crappy grades in only my first year of school. But things started to work themselves out…

Within the next year, I managed to get straight As AND get into college two years early. Now how the hell did that happen? These past few weeks, I’ve been talking to my friend Cal Newport about my high school turn-around, and came to realize that my life-changes came down to working efficiently. Instead of just hoping that life would miraculously get better, I looked back at what I screwed up on and made minor changes to the way that I ran my life.

I realized that I was getting less than 5 hours of sleep, I wasn’t paying attention in class, and most importantly, I realized that I didn’t have a “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.” In other words, I had no motivation for school and life. I didn’t know what I was living life for, and why people cared so much about getting good grades. But then the idea of going to college hit me… it hit me so hard that I was set on getting into an early college program by the end of my sophomore year of high school.

In tenth grade, I didn’t work that hard at all. I spent some time on Google, learning how to best write college essays, how to best study for exams, how to ace the SATs/ACTs, and I came to realize that doing well in school, business, and life didn’t have to be as complicated as everyone made it seem. If you know how to do well in the system, you’ll find yourself wasting less time and performing much better than everyone else, regardless as to how much smarter you think your peers are.

In hindsight, my crappy high school business was my most gutsy entrepreneurial experience, and my worst failure to date. However, it led to my getting straight Cs in high school, which led me to applying to college early, where I met friends who convinced me to apply to Berkeley, where I heard about this cool “Silicon Valley Tech Scene”, which got me to start a blog, thus allowing me to have the honor of writing to all of you. :) PHEW! See? Good things can come from life failures.

When sh*t hits the fan, just think about how you could turn things around. Why did you screw things up so bad, and how can you prevent yourself from doing that again? One of my biggest takeaways from that terrible year was that I needed a life goal, or what I like to call, a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.” Write yours down! This seemingly small thing will lead you to being a more productive member of society, working towards achieving that big goal. When things go wrong, it’s these minor changes that have lasting impacts.

Final Thoughts

Before coming to California in May of this year, I went back to visit my guidance counselor in high school, and told him that I’d be going to school on the west coast. To my surprise, I didn’t have to overrun my life with drastic changes in order to fix my life. And to my guidance counselor’s surprise, I managed to get into a half decent college. Stories have their happy endings!

And fortunately for me, this is only the beginning of what’s yet to come. :)

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