The Gambler In Me

 

I have been reading the Enron book over the last few weeks as part of my currently active 10-15 book rotation. Those who know the Enron story know that Jeff Skilling was an incorrigible gambler starting at a very young age. As I read about Jeff Skilling's gamble to apply for business school only to Harvard and nowhere else, I was suddenly reminded of an event from my own life history that I had stored somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain and nearly forgotten about.

I vehemently don't think of myself as a gambler. Whenever I've found myself in front of a slot machine at an arcade or in Vegas or any game of mere chance, I've had zero urge to take part. I have not once in my life played the lottery. I don't believe in astrology, tarot cards, luck, and other similar phenomena that reward something other than one's own effort. So, it came as bit of a shock to be reminded, as I was reading about Skilling, of my own very bold gamble in grade 12 (senior year of high school). 

Having put all my eggs in one basket, I had completely ignored the Board-administered standardized final exams for grade 12. Most universities use the results of these exams to determine whom to offer admission. (India does not use results from the SAT exams.) 

There's a small elite set of engineering universities, however, that completely ignore the Board exam results and rely exclusively on the results of a highly competitive and challenging nationally administered entrance exam. Whereas the Board exams tend to reward memorization and recall, the IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) exams reward a deep understanding of difficult concepts in math, physics, and chemistry and the ability to apply these concepts to new problem scenarios (often involving some level of creative thinking).

The IITs have only a 2% admission rate and are therefore significantly tougher to get into than Harvard. It wasn't just that I had the self-confidence in my abilities, which I supposed I did. But it was also an exercise in choosing my battles. I figured that if I tried to do well in the Board exams as well as the IIT exams, that would reduce my chances of doing well in either one. Getting into anything less than the IITs was not worth the effort. (My plan B was always to move to Canada, my country of birth, and find a good university in Canada. So, that made my risk even more calculated. Although at the time I had no concrete plan in place to move to Canada and no money to fund the idea.)

As it turned out, I was only interested in proving that I could get in. I wasn't so much interested in putting in the four years of grueling work to learn about electrical engineering topics like transformers and metallurgy that I felt were not going to be relevant to my planned career in software engineering. 

Therefore, I proceeded to have a lot of extra-curricular fun on campus at IIT Roorkee for a year and then skipped town and left for Canada. Once in Canada, I enrolled in a computer science program, which I considered to be much more worth the effort since I would be learning something I would actually use during my career. And, gladly, I've been proven right about this one decision (but have been wrong about many others).

Remembering this story made me realize that we all take calculated risks at many stages in life. It's just that we don't see them as risks because each of us has a certain appetite and justification for the risk and as long as we're operating within that justified framework we don't perceive it as a risk (except, perhaps, in hindsight).



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