Good at gaming the system

Dear Aditya,

Most of us have felt it at some point.

That quiet thought in the background: "Maybe I'm not good enough."

I've spent 20 years inside education. And here's the uncomfortable truth no one really says out loud.

Education has one metric: how well you score in exams. That's it. And what gets measured… gets done.

So we've built a system that rewards one thing: people who can crack the code.

Which chapters to skip. Which questions repeat. How to optimize for marks.

And the ones who figure this out? They win. They get the seats. They get the applause.

(They also develop a sixth sense for spotting "important questions." Sadly, life rarely repeats last year's paper.)

But I keep thinking about the others.

I was one of them.

I loved science. Not the syllabus, I actually loved science. I was reading Stephen Hawking, exploring quantum physics… not for marks, just because I was curious. And the system didn't know what to do with that.

I see the same thing today. There's a student I work with, Siddharth. He planned and executed an entire FIFA tournament. Raised sponsorship by pitching to founders. Sold, organized, delivered. Real work. Real skill. Real ownership. The system doesn't see him. Because he doesn't fit the metric.

There's a line by Peter Thiel that stayed with me: "Competition is for losers."

What he meant was, when everyone is competing on the same axis, no one is building anything new.

That's exactly what our exam system does. It turns every student into a competitor… in a game someone else designed.

And the ones who don't fit? The thinkers. The builders. The doers. They walk away with one belief: "I'm not good enough." But they were always good enough. The metric was just too narrow to see them.

And here's the part we need to accept: Systems move at system speed. Slow. Careful. Predictable. They won't change fast enough for your child. Or for you. But the world already has.

The tools are here. The technology is here. The market is ready. For people who can think. Build. Connect. Create.

So maybe the real question is: Were you the kid who gamed the system? Or the one the system couldn't see?

In fratitude,
adi