At the start of 2014, the biggest thing on my mind and the thing where most of my attention was focused towards was work. I’m sure this is the case with most people around the world, and mine was no different. Being someone from the Silicon city of Bangalore, it should come as no surprise that my job was in the tech industry, and my employer was an American company. Although it may seem like it was meant to be, I was really fortunate to find myself there when 2014 began. To explain what I mean by that, we have to go back to August of 2012.

I quit my previous job at the end of August 2012 and I decided to take a 6 month sabbatical. I wanted to take this time off to relax and take a long vacation after working for 5 straight years. I also wanted to use this time to figure out who I was, what I liked, what I didn’t and then decide what I wanted to do for the foreseeable future. Although this didn’t pan out exactly as I had hoped, at the end of those 6 months, I found myself with dwindling savings and the obvious need to find a job and start working again. The following 4-5 months of job searching yielded no fruit whatsoever, and I was beginning to wonder if I’ll ever find one. But thanks to a fortunate turn of events and the kindness of a few friends I had met over the course of my sabbatical, I ended up with a new job. Even to this day, I am grateful to her for this reason.

More than a year after quitting my job, I found myself with a new one. I started it with great optimism and a small sense of pride, especially considering that the company and the job itself were revered, and the interview process was long and challenging. But little did I know of what was to come. Little did I know that the interview was a piece of cake compared to the real deal. A couple of months into training, I realized just how big of a challenge this job was really going to be. The job was demanding, the stuff I had to learn and understand was quite technical, my teammates all seemed intelligent beyond my capabilities and the training that I was going through made it very hard for me to cope with the demands. Everyday was an uphill struggle, and it felt like slipping down was far more likely than climbing up.

It didn’t take long for this to show. After a couple of  my training “checkpoints”, which I made through in not the most stellar fashion, I was told by my boss that my efforts were insufficient and that I had to step my game up in order to keep my job. Now there were times in my career where I was critical of myself and felt I was under-performing. I had felt the same about myself this time too, and I had brushed it off, saying that I was being too hard on myself. But this talk with my boss was for real, and it meant that I *really* had to give a lot more than I already was. The pressure only increased.

From that point on, and going into 2014, my focus was on giving 150% to my job. I realized that I had to make improvements in all aspects of my working style. This included changes to the ways I learned, processed, understood and retained new information, preparing better for presentations, overcoming my fears of speaking in front of an audience and last but not the least, asking my peers for help. As someone who was generally shy and feared being judged by others, the last two were tough. I had to find a way to overcome that fear and do what was necessary to save my job. “Feel The Fear… and Do It Anyway” was something I had come across before and I had decided to keep at the back of my head for another time. But now felt like the right time to apply it into my life and, boy did it help! After only a few weeks of apply this, the results were showing. And this gave me new hope. Hope that I can step up under pressure.

Then came February, and with it came my final “checkpoint” in this phase of training. If I cleared this step, my initial training would be complete and I would begin doing “real” work. The checkpoint involved treating my peers as my customers and walking them through a company website that they would need to use in order make use of our products and services. Not only did this require me to know a lot of details about the website itself, but it essentially served as a way for my peers to evaluate just how well I understood the work that I’d be doing going forward. I was told that almost everyone in the team needed about 2, maybe 3 attempts to actually clear this checkpoint, and so I braced myself for the same. I prepared for it as best as I can and with as much info as I could. I felt ready to finally put this to rest.

The 1st attempt went as I expected: I had come up short, and my peers were unsatisfied with my showing. They asked me to prepare better and give another attempt a few days later. I corrected my mistakes and filled in any gaps in knowledge that were exposed in that first attempt. The 2nd attempt was better, and I had progressed further than I had before. More gaps were exposed, but it wasn’t as bad as before. As my 2-hour time-slot had run out for that day, I was asked to give another attempt and continue from where I left off. The 3rd, and the ill-perceived final attempt came. I had expected to complete the walk-through this time, but it fell flat as I was surprisingly under-prepared. My peers gave me one more chance to crack this once and for all, and that seemed insufficient either. It took me 6 attempts to FINALLY finish the walk-through, but even those didn’t go all too smoothly. Riddled with mistakes, I barely crawled over the finish line.

The time had come for my boss to take the call about whether I’d continue or not. It took him a few days to decide, and I used these days to complete whatever was left unfinished from my training. In the lead-up to the day the told me about this decision, I prepared myself mentally for what was about to come. I knew that I had “completed” my last “checkpoint”, and decided to stay optimistic about progressing through. I even thought about the immense work that was gonna come my way, and managed to motivate myself for a tough, hellish time. This long and hard training period had at times drained me mentally, and I found myself down, discouraged, dejected and even depressed at times. But for once, I felt like I had put all that behind me and come out stronger. I felt good about myself.

I still remember that day and how it started. I got in to work at 6 pm and immediately started working on a coding assignment that was leftover from training. For 3 hours, I was immersed in writing code, executing it and making sure it was behaving as I expected it. When it turned out it didn’t, I walked up to my peers without haste and got the help I needed to get it corrected. I felt even more fired up after getting this right, but decided to reward myself by grabbing dinner. I managed to upset a co-worker and friend while I was at the cafeteria by saying something I thought was funny but turned out to be quite silly. But I didn’t let it diminish my fire one bit, and got back to my desk to continue my assignment. And then came the call.

My boss walked up to me and called me into a meeting room. I was hoping to hear some good news. Something along the lines of “you did good” “you’ve completed training” “you’ll get your set of accounts in a few days” “good luck for all that’s coming your way soon” “you deserve it for all the hard work you put in”. But what I heard from him was shocking and unexpected. “We’ve been patient and given you many chances” “your performances haven’t been good enough” “it’s not happening” “we’re gonna have to let you go” “we’ll talk more in a few days” “meanwhile, start looking out elsewhere for a job” “you got a month’s time left here”. All I remember now are just snippets from our conversation, but those snippets hurt the most. All of a sudden, my fire was extinguished, my positiveness beheaded, my optimism destroyed and my confidence crushed. This was a blow like none other. I returned to my seat, unlocked my computer, and all I saw was incoherent words that didn’t make any sense anymore. Never in my life had a few lines of code meant SO MUCH and SO LITTLE, all in a matter of a few minutes.

For the first time in my life, I had failed at my job. For the first time, all my hard work had failed to pay off. So much effort, and I had nothing to show for. It was a type of rejection that I had never faced, and now that I had, it left me in a terrible state. The first week that followed was the hardest. I would come in to work, and have no motivation to do anything. I could sit in front of my computer and pretend to be working, but even the thought of faking it was hard to digest. As an adult, I’ve always been honest with others, and more importantly honest to myself. So to pretend to be sitting in front of my laptop and working was just excruciating. It wasn’t long before I isolated myself from the team and started spending my days in a closed room where no one would bother me. And it was here that the negativity kicked in.

“You’re not as smart as you thought you were!”

“You’re a failure!”

“Your best wasn’t enough!”

“You’re a loser!”

“You’ll never find a job again!”

“You’re an embarrassment to your company and your peers!”

“You don’t even deserve the money these guys paid you. You gave them nothing in return!”

Sometimes, even being in that room didn’t help escape these thoughts. I would just go home early on such nights and distract myself with music, movies or an intoxicant of choice. Few at work would notice I even left early. Few seemed to even care. I wasn’t going to be there any longer anyway, right? Well, so I thought.

After the first week, I began to calm down a little and started feeling more level-headed. I felt it was about time to share this news with others and not keep it all to myself. As shy and socially inept I felt back then, I had managed to build friendships with a few of the people I worked with, and they were the first ones I reach out to. Telling them about it wasn’t difficult, as I never had a problem coming to terms with what had happened, or to even accept it. My friends were surprisingly sympathetic towards me, even expressing how I was hard done by the way things worked around there. They felt that though the company may seem revered, it had its own share of problems, and I was merely a victim of those same problems. They talked about the issues that they faced themselves, and how they don’t like the place all too much; and that helped comfort and console me to some extent. I don’t think I realized the impact of their words until I actually began writing about it here, but their words and feelings really helped me get away from the ordeal for better rather than worse.

By now, I was beginning to rationalize what had happened and tried to find a proper explanation of what had happened. I knew that I had to be objective about it all, or else I would just be blaming the whole thing on someone other than me, thereby washing my hands clean of any responsibility. That wasn’t very honourable in my eyes, and I didn’t want to go down that path. So I started reflecting on all that had transpired in the last 5 months, and tried to recognize areas where I did good, where I could’ve done better and areas that were simply beyond my control. Hoping that this was as objective as I could get, I started to construct my story based on these reference points.

For days, this was the story that I wanted to tell everyone who asked about it. This was the tale that would go down in my history books. It seemed objective, it seemed fair, and it helped me make sense of what had happened. Like someone who had lost a son or daughter unexpectedly and was seeking answers, this seemed to suffice. It felt good to have constructed this objective story and not end up either being too hard on myself or escaping from the failure completely. But then came the bigger question: what happens now?

Moving on from something like this was new to me. It was something I hadn’t done before, and it was all up to me to decide how I go forward from here. Many ideas flashed through my head. From Thomas asking a little Bruce Wayne “Why do we fall?“, Monty Python singing “Always look on the bright side of life” to  James LaBrie saying “It’s time to pick up the pieces, go back to square one“, it was clear that staying positive was paramount.

I began to work with the story I had concocted, and try to take away the positives from it all. Letting go of the things I couldn’t change was the easiest. There were always going to be things that I couldn’t change in any situation, so not fretting about them seemed logical. I had to keep in mind the parts where I could’ve done better, and use it as something to work towards, something to get better at. And this attempt at self-improvement had to be fuelled by all the good that I had done in these months. All the progress I had made, all the fears I had overcome, and all the little achievements that were easy to overlook were the pieces I decided to pick up and motivate me to come out of this for the better.

I think for the first time in a long time, I really began to understand what the words “optimism” and “positivity” meant. It gave me a glimpse into how the minds of other people probably worked. This is probably how all these people could dive into so many new endeavours and come out for the better regardless of how it all went down. Maybe this is the difference between happiness and sorrow. Maybe this was the secret to “living”.

The reason why 2014 was such an important year for me, and why this event was so important in that year is precisely because of the lessons I learnt above. Adopting this mindset, albeit although imperfectly and incompletely, was what set the scene for the rest of the year to come. I chose to not just let this influence my work life, but also the personal aspects of my life. I slowly began to shake off my fears and insecurities, gather the courage to try new things and take more steps towards leading the life that I’ve always wanted for myself. I now knew that I had the capacity to face certain challenges and step up to overcome them. I also knew that if I failed in these challenges, it’s not the end of the world and all I need to do it pick up the good pieces and start over again. Life goes on, and I had to move on too with a positive outlook. And that is precisely what I did for the rest of the year.

Remember how I thought that I wouldn’t be at this company any longer? Well, it turned out that right after my birthday in March, I was given another chance. My employer thought that though I didn’t do so well in this role that I had, it was still worth it to give me another chance in a role a little different from the last. Not having much of a choice anyway, I decided to go through with it and ended up clearing the interview, surviving the probation period and securing this new job at the same company. I’ve managed to be better at this one, as I still continue to work there as we speak. It seems like things actually did turn out for the best, and unlike what Eric Idle said, I didn’t even have to whistle!