My Untold Struggles

People typically recognize us for what we have achieved, but quite often, that perception is lacking in nuance and dripping with recency bias.? We don’t spend enough time talking about our failures, and the unintended consequence is a dangerously misleading air of infallibility.? The recent emergence of social media and its near perfect influencers has only compounded this issue.? My own life has had its share of ups and downs, and I am sometimes surprised by how even the people that know me well know so little of my struggles.? So today, I thought I would share examples of the untold struggles that would never be self-evident just by looking at my profile.

One my earlier struggles of note came as an 18 year old who had just left Ethiopia in pursuit of a US college education.? I was a top student most of my life, and yet, I was still unprepared for the humbling experience that met me in college.? Luckily for me, my school did not even issue real grades for the first semester and simply operated on a Pass/No Record grading scale so I couldn’t have picked a better college or a better time to stumble and fall.? My parents probably don’t know this to this day, but I flunked my first biology class and was fortunate that it never made it to my transcript thanks to the No Record policy. ? I needed some time but I was able to thankfully adjust and figure things out.? Over the next four years, I would go on to graduate from that school and even stay on for my Masters degree so anyone could be forgiven for thinking that I waltzed my way through college. ? Hell, I sometimes have to remind myself about those gloomy days when I look at my own profile.? But yes, I failed a class in college.

Another time I struggled professionally was in my early days at LinkedIn.? A confluence of factors led to this one, some clearly of my own doing. ? First of all, I was not intentional or ready to be the engineer and the leader the company hoped I would be when they first hired me.? To make matters worse, the company was going through hypergrowth so employees were usually left to their own devices to solve their own problems.? And finally, like any young company, the company was rife with new inexperienced managers, some especially ill-equipped to deal with these types of problems (Shameless plug:? LinkedIn’s incredible Apprentice Manager Program was started a couple of years later and I suspect it would have been the perfect remedy for some of the issues I was experiencing at the time).? At my lowest moment, I second-guessed my own abilities and questioned if I was good enough for the job. ? Fast forward a few years and things have been a lot steadier, probably giving many the false impression that my time at LinkedIn has always been peachy.? Well, that could not be farther from the truth and quite frankly, I would not be here today were it not for some fortuitous management changes. ? So yes, I once struggled at LinkedIn...a lot.

It is not lost on me that my struggles, as difficult as they may have been to me, still pale in comparison to what others have to overcome on a daily basis. ? But I also think it’s important to tell these stories so people don’t get infatuated with the highs and fail to account for the inevitable lows. ? Humans are inherently fallible and these lows are what make us truly human and relatable to others.? So if you have been blessed with good fortunes, there is no better way to pay it forward than to speak of your struggles so others can draw strength and inspiration from your stories when they are experiencing their own lows. ? And if you do that, people will only appreciate your success even more because like Churchill once said “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

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