The failure that changed the course of my life

I've failed at almost every interview I've ever done, but there's one that hurt more than any of the others. I've failed the interviews for most part time jobs when I was in school, most of the accounting firms that I applied to, and most of the companies that I applied to after Big 4 too. And I'd usually get pretty far, just not all the way. Like before I started the company that I have today, I actually got pretty far with some really cool companies like Shopify, Google, and I almost made it to the end with OpenAI, and that's way before they were known for ChatGPT like today. But the one that devastated me was when I got waitlisted after my interview for med school. Because like most of my life, I was on a very smooth path to becoming a doctor. I had really good grades in my science degree, I had a solid resume with a bunch of volunteer work at the hospital and some other nonprofits. I even did a really cool project at the Neurological Research Institute where I was tracking the migration of neurons in chicken embryos, and I crushed the MCAT which is like the medical school entrance exam. I scored in the 96th percentile and like that was with barely studying. I did my exam prep with Kaplan. I remember when I was throwing out my books, there was a bunch of them that were still wrapped in plastic, I didn't even bother reading them. So after all of that, when I finally got my interview, I was euphoric. I was like, okay cool, I made it, this last step is just a formality. But that year, the main school that I was applying to had implemented a new interview methodology. There's no more of that standard interview where you just go into a room and talk to people. Now you'd go and rotate through these 10 different rooms with made up scenarios and actors that you'd be dealing with, and there'd be a grader behind a one way mirror. At first I was actually thinking, okay great, this would work in my favor because I'm actually a pretty good actor. But what I didn't realize is that that fact would actually be my downfall. Basically when the result of the process came out, I got waitlisted and I was completely devastated. I thought my entire life was ruined. But what really pissed me off was when I went to go talk to the admissions officer and asked what happened and kind of look at the scores for my interview. They confidentialized the score card so you don't know who the graders are and they share them with me. I had pretty good scores on most of the rooms, but there was one grader who completely destroyed me. And I don't know who it was because the name was blacked out, but he gave me a 0 on every single category and he wrote this comment at the bottom that said something like, I would never trust this person, I would flag them but I'm sure the system will weed them out. Like this person viscerally hated me. And the weird thing is I remember that room, it was so innocuous. Like I can't imagine how the interactions with between me and the actor could have possibly given that sort of a reaction to the grader. I remember arguing with the admissions officer and being like, look maybe this person knows me outside of this interview process and I don't know who it is, but like clearly they have a gripe with me. Like this one guy graded me so harshly that it brought down my average and caused me to get waitlisted instead of getting in. But the admissions officer was like super arrogant. He was like, no we've designed this process and we know that it finds the best people, so maybe you're just not it. Even though it was the first year that they'd done that process. And sure, let's say their process was so good that they somehow knew I'd be a horrible doctor. What's funny to me is that there's another person, he's a friend of mine and he went to med school there, and that guy is now one of the school's pride and joys. Like he's a school celebrity, like they keep inviting him back to go give speeches, he's on all their marketing materials, like he's a big deal, not because of med school, because of other stuff. But that same guy also got rejected by that process the same year that I did. So a little bit questionable how perfected it is anyway. Anyway, while it's been a long time since that actually happened, I'm still very bitter about it and I hold that spite very close and it fuels a lot of my motivation to succeed today. So I suppose there was a silver lining to it.