For most of my childhood, I was a straight-A student.

Then life changed.

An unforeseen event in my family affected me deeply during my 11th and 12th grades. Within less than a year, I went from being one of the toppers in my class to landing on what my school called the “highly challengers” list, students considered at serious risk of failing their board examinations.

My school has maintained a 100% pass rate for years. Students on the “highly challengers” list were watched closely, and if sufficient improvement wasn’t visible, they would be asked to transfer before the board exams.

I managed to somehow make the cut, wrote my exams, and graduated with 74%.

It wasn’t the academic finish I had originally imagined for myself. But it was a finish.
And I moved on.

When Plan A Stopped Making Sense

Like many Indian students, I initially explored the conventional routes. Engineering. IIT. Medicine.

The problem was simple: my foundation in the 11th and 12th-grade syllabus wasn’t strong enough to compete seriously in those entrance examinations. I flunked them. 

So I looked at what did come naturally to me.

Storytelling.

Design is fundamentally storytelling. You are selling a brand, a product, an idea, a vision, or a lifestyle. The medium happens to be visual.

That made sense to me.

I applied to some of India's leading design institutes, including NID, MIT Institute of Design, Symbiosis, UID, and NIFT. Without formal coaching or extensive preparation, I cleared the entrances and received offers.

Then came the next problem.

I couldn’t afford them.

A design degree at the time could cost roughly ₹5 lakh a year. I tried everything I reasonably could. I approached relatives and well-wishers, tracked every payment deadline, and kept trying to put the money together.

One by one, the deadlines passed.

One by one, I crossed the colleges off my list.

Eventually, there were none left.

I gave myself about a week to be disappointed.

Then I looked for the next door.

Start With What You Have

I enrolled in a private design institute in Chennai.

At the same time, I was teaching myself constantly. YouTube, online resources, Photoshop tutorials, design references, anything I could get access to. All of it happened on a laptop I had borrowed from a friend.

Within the first few days of joining the institute, I realised the course wasn't going to give me what I was looking for.

So despite having already paid the fee, I stopped valuing the money I had spent over the time I was about to lose.

I started applying for internships instead.

My first opportunity wasn't even in design. It was content writing.

I took it.

Soon, the company needed visuals for those articles. I could design them, so I took that responsibility too. My pay increased, my role expanded, and one opportunity started leading into another.

That became a pattern.

Over the next six years, I worked across telesales, customer support, website inventory, warehouse management, HR, operations, content writing, and multiple levels of design.

It looked like job-hopping from the outside.

For me, it became an accidental education in business.

I learned how customers think. How teams function. How sales funnels work. How operations break. How money moves. How people are hired. How products are sold. And how different departments affect each other.

I was consistently contributing well beyond the title I had been hired for.

I wanted an environment where my ability to learn, contribute, and grow was not limited by my designation.

So I created one.

From $10 Projects to Maayasthra

My first year of freelancing was ruthless.

I would take complete branding projects for $10 or less. Sometimes five or six days of work would go into a project at that price.

And low-budget projects were rarely simple.

Clients were often early in their own journey and still figuring out what they wanted. Revisions could continue for weeks while the original budget remained exactly the same.

I still treated every client seriously.

I worked long hours, stayed responsive, and made sure the quality of my effort wasn't determined by how much someone was paying me.

That decision paid off.

Clients began referring me.

Then their referrals referred me.

Eventually, I had more work than I could personally fulfil.

So I raised my prices.

$10 became $20.

$20 became $30.

Then considerably more.

Eventually, I was charging above-market rates and was still receiving more work than I could take on myself.

I began putting together a small group of talented freelancers, people who, like me, were slightly unconventional, deeply interested in their craft, and looking for an opportunity to do something meaningful with it.

The group of freelancers became a startup.

The startup became a company.

Today, that company is Maayasthra, a multidisciplinary design company with a team of 50+ creatives working with global enterprises.

Optimism Was the Constant

That compresses almost a decade of my professional life into a few paragraphs.

There were many more setbacks than the ones I've mentioned here.

But one thing remained remarkably consistent through all of them:

I expected things to get better. Not passively.

I refused to treat a setback as evidence that the future would also go badly.

When something failed, I looked for the next move.

When a door closed, I looked for another one.

When I was rejected, I treated that opportunity as something that was not meant for me and kept moving until I found what was.

That mindset protected something extremely valuable: momentum.

Had I allowed every setback to break my spirit, I would have stopped dozens of times along the way.

Instead, I guarded that spirit aggressively.

I always looked for the silver lining. I treated setbacks as blessings in disguise. I maintained an unreasonable certainty that something better was ahead.

Eventually, that belief became evidence.

I attribute a great deal of that spirit to God. Even when circumstances gave me no obvious reason to stay hopeful, that optimism stayed intact.

Be Ridiculously Optimistic

If you're starting your career, confused about what comes next, building something difficult, or simply going through a rough phase, this is one competitive advantage anyone can develop.

Be ridiculously optimistic.

Not naive.

Not passive.

Optimistic.

Believe there is a better outcome available, then keep moving until you find it.

Combine that optimism with smart work, strong ethics, and a clear purpose, and setbacks stop looking like endings.

They become redirects.

Hard work alone does not make someone unstoppable.
But optimism, smart work, and purpose will get you there.