What your marks don't measure
Dear friend,
These next few weeks, lakhs of families across the country are waiting on a number.
A board result. A percentile. A rank.
The number arrives. And we treat it like a message from heaven.
I want to write to you about why it isn't.
Twenty years ago I walked into IIM-A expecting marks to finally mean something.
Everyone in the hall was a topper. Every single person had been the best in some classroom in some city in India.
For about a week, that felt like the answer.
Then the year started.
And I noticed something nobody had told me.
Not all toppers were the same.
There were two kinds.
One group kept their eye on marks. They learned the syllabus. They optimised for grades. They were good at the test, the way they had always been good at the test. Many of them struggled. Not academically. Quietly. The thing they had been good at their whole life suddenly didn't tell them anything new about themselves.
The other group also kept marks in mind. But marks weren't the thing. They went into the topics. They sat with ideas. They understood things at a level you could feel in five minutes of conversation.
Even at IIM-A, with everyone holding the same admission letter, marks were not the line that separated people.
Depth was.
I keep coming back to this now, twenty years later, because the rules have shifted again.
The internet and AI have done something education hasn't caught up to yet.
In any field, a small number of people who hold real excellence can now reach the whole world. From a town. From a bedroom. From a BSc in physics in Nashik.
Excellence is the currency.
Not marks. Not credentials. Not the name of the school on the certificate.
And excellence is not a number. It is a body of work. Built slowly. Out of attention, repetition, hunger, and the willingness to be terrible at something for a while before you are good at it.
A reader wrote to me this week.
He is finishing a BSc in Physics from Nashik. On paper, nothing dramatic.
Underneath the paper, a different story. Two years of building. A travel fitness platform. A foot-tapping pad that generates electricity and reduces muscle stiffness. Research into the talent gap in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. He has pitched, been rejected, watched competitors emerge, lost confidence in ideas he once believed in, and stayed in it.
And then he sent me one sentence about himself I have not been able to put down all week.
"Genuine hunger to build something real, and a willingness to start from the bottom of whatever that requires."
Read that line again.
That is the recipe for excellence in any field, in any decade.
Hunger to build something real. Willingness to start at the bottom.
I have not seen a marksheet in twenty years that captures either of those two things.
So this week, when the number arrives in your house, or your friend's house, or your child's house, please remember what the number is and what it isn't.
It is a measurement of how well someone played a particular game inside a particular system.
It is not a measurement of who they are.
It is not a measurement of what they will build.
And in the world your child is actually walking into, it is not even the right test anymore.
The right test is whether they have the hunger that the reader from Nashik has, and the willingness to start at the bottom of whatever they end up building.
That hunger doesn't always show up on a marksheet.
But that is the only thing that is rewarding, and gets rewarded in the game of life.
And no number is - not your weight, not your bank balance, not your age, not the size of your house.
In gratitude,
, Adi
Building India's 1st Working BBA
Write back. I read every reply.
PS. I wrote a longer piece on LinkedIn this week about the reader's reply. If you want to see what one young person quietly building in Nashik is up to, you can read it on my profile.
This week's recipe: Khichdi. Because nothing teaches you about excellence like the most humble dish in your kitchen.
Khichdi is what you eat when you are unwell. When you are tired. When you don't want to think. We treat it as the bottom of the food ladder.
But the difference between a forgettable khichdi and one you remember years later is exactly the difference I'm writing about in this letter. It isn't the ingredients. It's the attention.
Try this once:
- Half a cup of split moong dal, washed and soaked for 20 minutes
- Half a cup of rice (any variety you have at home)
- A generous spoon of ghee
- Half a teaspoon of jeera
- One small dried red chilli (two if you like heat)
- A small piece of ginger, crushed
- A pinch of hing
- Half a teaspoon of turmeric
- Salt to taste
- Three cups of water (more if you like it loose)
Heat the ghee in a pressure cooker. Drop the jeera, then the dried chilli, then the ginger and hing. Wait for the kitchen to smell like something is happening. Add the rice and dal, stir for a minute, then the turmeric and salt. Add water. Three whistles on medium.
Open. Add another spoon of ghee on top before serving.
Eat with curd, papad, or a slice of lime.
The recipe is almost nothing. The result depends entirely on what you did with it.
Same with the marksheet that's about to land in your house.
The result depends on what comes next.
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