For five Sundays in a row in late 2007, I sat one exam paper a week. Each Sunday covered an entire semester of engineering.
I was already four months into an MBA at the time. And if those papers had run past 31 December, my MBA would have been cancelled.
That's the compressed version of how to keep learning when your plans fall apart. The longer one starts three years earlier.
Key takeaways
- When the outcome leaves your control, the only lever you've got left is what you choose to learn next. And that choice is available even on the worst day.
- Learn where the crowd isn't. I was behind my batch in computer science, so I went sideways instead of trying to catch up.
- The credential isn't the asset. I failed the certification exam and kept the knowledge, and it was the knowledge that mattered for the next twenty years.
How to keep learning when your plans fall apart: 2005
At the end of my third semester, my engineering college lost its university affiliation.
Nothing happened straight away. Classes carried on for about another year, teachers still turned up, and like most students I assumed it would sort itself out. Then it stopped. The remaining semesters had no teaching at all. There were protests, and plenty of people joined them, right across the BTech batch.
I didn't take part. And I want to be careful here, because I honestly don't know what most of my own batch chose to do with that time. The version of this story where everybody else wasted it and I didn't would be a very flattering thing to claim without any evidence.
What I do know is what I did. I had time I hadn't asked for, and one question seemed more useful than all the others. What can I learn right now that keeps me moving forward?
Why Red Hat, of all things
The reason wasn't resilience. It was competitive.
I was new to computer science in that batch. Many classmates had studied it before engineering, so I was starting behind them. And thousands of people finish a computer science degree every year, so the degree by itself differentiates nobody.
Trying to catch up on the same ground made no sense at all. Going sideways did.
So I picked RHCE, Red Hat Certified Engineer. It would teach me how Linux actually worked, how servers get built, and all of it hands on rather than theoretical. Nobody else in my batch was doing it.
The classes were in person, about an hour from where I stayed, three months long. So while my own college had stopped teaching me, I was commuting two hours a day to be taught something that nobody had asked me to learn.
One of the faculty there said something I've carried for twenty years:
You don't learn Linux. You have to live Linux.
And it generalises. You have to live a thing to get good at it, and living it means doing it every day until it stops being an activity and just becomes a habit.
The exam I failed
I sat the RHCE certification and I didn't clear it on the first attempt. There was a second attempt available. I never got to it, because by then time had simply run out.
So I have no certificate. Three months of classes, two hours of travelling a day, and nothing at all to put on a CV.
What I did get was the foundation of everything technical I've done since. If it hadn't been for that course, I'd never have understood servers, systems and architecture the way I do. And that understanding is what made the rest of my work in enterprise technology possible. It's why I ended up as CIO at IndiaMART.
Did I know any of that at the time? Not a chance. And that's the point. You can't see which learning will pay out, so the only sane strategy is to keep learning things that genuinely interest you and let the compounding sort itself out.
Starting an MBA I might not be allowed to keep
By January 2006 the classes were gone and the semesters were uncertain, so I set a different goal and started preparing for CAT. It wasn't the original dream. But it had something better. Structure, and a direction I could actually move in.
CAT happened. FORE School of Management happened.
And then came the part I've never really written about. Partway into my first year, the date arrived to submit my graduation degree, and I didn't have one. My engineering exams still hadn't been held.
Without that degree the MBA couldn't stand. An MBA can only begin after your graduation is complete, so the whole thing, the fees, the year, all of it, was hanging on a document that didn't exist.
I was extremely tense. A mentor at FORE told me to go and speak to the programme director, and gave me the advice that genuinely got me through it:
Be honest. Tell them whatever it is. Nothing else is in your hands.
So that's what I did. I explained the situation exactly as it was, and to my surprise he gave me three months, with one condition. The degree had to carry the year 2007, because that was the correct expected completion year for somebody starting an MBA in 2007. If it said 2008, my MBA would be cancelled.
Five Sundays
Midway through that first MBA year, my engineering college was affiliated to another university, specifically to protect the careers of its students.
Five semesters of exams were scheduled across five consecutive Sundays. One paper each Sunday, each one covering a full semester. By God's grace, they began in the last week of November and finished before December ended, which is the only reason my degree carries 2007 and my MBA survived.
For the months before that, nothing was in my hands. If it had gone the other way I'd have restarted, and there was no way to know until it actually happened. So I left it to time and kept doing the only things still available to me, preparing and showing up.
That's the part I'd want a nineteen year old to hear. This wasn't resilience in hindsight. For more than two years the outcome was genuinely unresolved, and the learning had to happen anyway, without any guarantee attached to it.
Years later, in 2022, I took the CliftonStrengths assessment because a friend had trained as a certified coach and suggested it. My top strength came back as Learner.
It didn't tell me anything new. It just named, seventeen years late, what a boy with no classes had already worked out. That same belief later became the title of my second book. Stop learning, stop winning.
What to do on Monday
- Separate what you control from what you don't, in writing. Two columns. Most of the anxiety lives in the first one and most of the available action lives in the second.
- Pick one thing to learn that nobody has assigned you. Not the obvious next step in your field. Something adjacent, where fewer people around you are heading.
- Choose it for interest, not for the certificate. If the credential vanished tomorrow, would you still want the knowledge? If not, pick something else.
- Live it daily rather than studying it in bursts. An hour every day beats a weekend of intensity, and it's the only way anything ever becomes habit.
- If you're stuck on something outside your control, tell the truth to whoever holds the decision. It worked for me when nothing else would have.
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth learning something with no credential at the end?
In my case it was the single most valuable thing I studied in those years, and I've got no paper to show for it. Credentials open doors. Knowledge decides what happens once you're through them, and only one of those compounds.
What if I can't see how the learning will ever be useful?
You usually can't, and that isn't a reason to wait. I picked Linux because I was behind my batch, not because I had some plan involving servers. The use showed up later. What matters is keeping the habit running while the outcome is still unclear.