I have a Computer Science degree from Carnegie Mellon, which spent four years contending for the best CS program on the planet. I also have, somewhere in my transcript, a course I passed with a strongly-curved D and to this day cannot tell you a single thing about. Both of those facts are true at once, and the second one is the more honest summary of my education than the first.
This isn't an anti-school essay. I'm not going to tell you college is a scam or that grades are fake. The schools I went to were genuinely some of the best in the world, taught by people who were genuinely brilliant. The problem wasn't them. The problem was that I'm very good at games, and school is a game, and I played the game so well that I optimized the actual learning right out of it. The best schools didn't fail to teach me. They taught me, very efficiently, how to forget.
The smart kid who couldn't afford to study
I grew up in Bangalore as "the smart kid." Every high-schooler in the city seemed to know who I was — I'd published a fantasy novel at fourteen, done the book-signings and the newspaper articles, the whole thing. And being the smart kid felt great, right up until you notice what it quietly forbids you from doing.
It forbids you from trying.
Because here's the trap, and I've never found a cleaner way to say it than the way I wrote it down years ago:
“Being called smart all my childhood had made it part of my identity and I was afraid to lose that title more than I was afraid to fail a class.”— About Me
If I studied hard and still didn't ace something, the explanation would be obvious and humiliating: maybe he's not that smart after all. But if I didn't study and scored well anyway, I was a genius. And if I didn't study and scored badly — well, of course I did, I didn't even try. Not-trying was a perfect hedge. It protected the title no matter what happened.
So I stopped studying. By eleventh and twelfth grade I'd basically quit — I barely passed my finals, walked away with effectively a tenth-grade education, and skipped the whole JEE rat race that every ambitious Indian kid grinds through. On a whim, I took the SAT instead, scored well without prep, and ended up with offers from both Carnegie Mellon and the University of Toronto. I picked CMU. It felt like the smart-kid story holding up: no effort, top result.
It was the worst possible lesson to have reinforced right before the hardest four years of my life.
At Carnegie Mellon I became the dumb kid — and optimized just as hard
I showed up in Pittsburgh in 2017 having never lived outside India, knowing not one person in the entire city — and carrying, by my own honest accounting, roughly a tenth-grade subject knowledge and a published teen fantasy novel into a room full of people who'd been the best wherever they came from.
The label flipped overnight. I went from the smart kid to, in my own head, the dumb one. And here's the part that should have scared me more than it did at the time: I responded by optimizing just as hard — only now the target was different. I wasn't protecting a reputation for brilliance anymore. I was terrified of failing out. So I did what I do best. I treated the degree as an optimization problem and solved it.
I figured out, with genuinely impressive precision, the exact minimum effort that would still pass every class. I did every homework and every project to the partial completion I needed and not a percentage point more. And it worked, eerily well:
“I got countless 81.5 percentages, proof of my optimization for minimal effort in every class… Unfortunately, this strategy also optimized for minimal learning.”— About Me
I used to be proud of those 81.5s. They were a flex — proof I could hit a B with surgical economy, getting exactly the grade I wanted while everyone around me burned themselves out for an A. It took me years to see what that number actually was. It was a receipt. Every one of those barely-Bs was a small, perfectly-executed transaction in which I traded the thing I was paying tens of thousands of dollars for — the learning — to protect myself from the discomfort of maybe looking dumb.
Two opposite labels, smart kid and dumb kid. Identical result. As I eventually put it to myself:
“Whether I was seen as exceptionally smart or below average, both of these labels had only served to limit my growth.”— About Me
That's the part most people miss about the "smart kid" thing. We talk about it like it's an arrogance problem. It isn't. It's a fear problem, and the fear is symmetrical — it makes the praised kid coast and the overwhelmed kid coast, for the exact same reason. Both are guarding an identity instead of growing one.
Where the learning actually was — and how I stepped around it
Here's the genuinely strange thing. Carnegie Mellon did know how learning works. The structure was right. The lectures were never really the point:
“The actual solution isn't important — what matters is developing problem-solving skills… This is how we learned EVERYTHING at Carnegie Mellon — the lectures are basically just mildly interesting youtube videos… the actual learning happened when we spent days solving a single homework sometimes a single problem, even if we didn't even solve it.”— How to become a cracked software engineer
The problem sets were the gym. The hours stuck on one problem — that was the education; the struggle itself was the rep. And I knew it, abstractly. But the grade only measured the output, not the wrestling. So my optimization quietly routed around the one part that mattered. Hit the threshold for the B, skip the struggle that didn't show up on the rubric. I was technically present for the most expensive education in the world and absent for the part that was actually worth anything.
This is the specific way the best schools teach you to forget. Not by teaching badly — by measuring something adjacent to learning, well enough that you can chase the measurement instead. Grades are a proxy. They were always a proxy. And the smarter you are, the faster you discover you can satisfy the proxy without satisfying the thing it was standing in for. The reward isn't a lie; it's worse than a lie. It's real, it just isn't pointed at the right target.
The semester I accidentally found out I was capable
I'd love to tell you I had an epiphany and reformed. What actually happened is I bottomed out.
A bad spiral of sleep and health caught up with me, and my fourth semester landed around a 2.5 GPA — close enough to an expulsion warning that the optimization was no longer working even on its own terms. So the next semester, lining up with the hardest classes I'd taken yet, I tried something almost embarrassingly basic. I slept properly. And I decided, more or less for the first time, to try to actually understand the material instead of gaming the grade.
That semester turned out to be the most relaxing, rewarding, and growth-filled stretch of my entire college experience — and I came out of it with a perfect 4.0, named to the Dean's List. In my hardest term. The honest emotional truth of it is that I didn't believe it was possible. I had spent years quietly assuming the ceiling was the ceiling, that "smart but lazy" was just who I was. It wasn't a ceiling. It was a mindset, and the mindset had a door in it the whole time.
That's the experience that made Carol Dweck's Mindset land for me later, not as a self-help cliché but as a literal description of something I'd lived:
“Wherever you believe in growth, you improve. Wherever you don't, you stay stuck.”— Day 9: Fixed vs Growth Mindset
I'd been stuck for years in the exact places I refused to believe I could grow. The semester I believed otherwise, I grew. It really was that direct.
The relapse I'd rather you hear from me
If I stopped the story there it would be a clean little redemption arc, and I don't trust clean arcs — least of all about myself. So here's the counterweight, and I'd rather hand it to you than have you assume I'm hiding it.
I relapsed. My last semester I took exactly one course, did the bare minimum, and walked out with a 52.5% — a strongly-curved D. Passed. And the line I keep about it is the most damning thing I can say about my own education:
“I didn't even know the contents of the course even after having completed it.”— About Me
Impressively optimal, one last time, for learning as little as humanly possible while still getting the credit. The fixed mindset isn't a level you clear once and you're done. It's a default I slide back into the moment I stop choosing against it. I'd had the 4.0. I'd felt what real learning felt like. And I still chose the curved D, because the old reflex — protect yourself, minimize exposure, don't risk looking dumb — was right there waiting, and it's comfortable.
I tell you this for a reason that's bigger than honesty for its own sake. If the growth mindset were a personality you simply have, none of this would be teachable. The fact that I keep losing it and finding it again is exactly what makes it a skill — something with a method, something you can coach. The relapse isn't the exception to my story about learning. It's the proof that the thing I'm building is real.
So I'm building the school I wish I'd been forced into
After CMU I spent two and a half years as an engineer at AI startups — watched one grow from two people to fifty — and then I walked away from it at twenty-four to learn on my own terms. In the months since, I've learned more than I did in those years at the leading companies, and I learned a lot at those companies. The difference wasn't the material. It was that nobody was grading me, so for the first time the only reason to learn something was to actually know it.
That's what reignited an old love of teaching, and it's why I'm building courses now — Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Thinking — for people who've already graduated and want to revisit the fundamentals and genuinely understand them this time. The whole design is a reaction to the trap I just described. My critique of school isn't that it's hard or useless; it's specific and autobiographical: it rewards the grade over the learning, treats the lecture as the product when the problem set is where learning actually lives, and force-marches everyone at one pace. My fix is a different shape entirely:
“It's like going to a gym, where each individual gets the most out of it from doing weights suited to them rather than the average weight in a class by giving everyone the same problems and pace.”— Is Japan Overrated? My experience
A class gives everyone the same problem and the same pace, which means it's too easy for some and crushing for others and right for almost no one. A gym lets each person load the bar to their own edge. That's the whole idea. No grade to optimize against — because the moment there's a grade, someone like me will find the 81.5% path through it and call it winning.
I won't pretend the launch went smoothly, because it didn't, and the way it failed is the most on-brand thing about it. The very day my first paid class was supposed to begin, a visa miscommunication forced me out of the United States. I left in about a week with two suitcases, leaving most of what I owned behind. The course evaporated on day one. And the way I handled it is the same growth-mindset move, just pointed at my own life instead of a grade:
“I focused on what I could control… I was never truly upset for even a day… In the process, my passion for teaching has only grown stronger.”— the cancelled-launch message, Core Life Courses
The setback didn't kill the project. It became the curriculum — the course is now as much about embracing challenge and learning in the open as it is about math. Which is fitting, because the real subject I'm trying to teach was never the math. It's the thing the best schools accidentally trained out of me: that the point is to grow, not to look like you already have.
I'm not selling a cure. I relapse; I told you. I'm closer to a fellow patient who finally read the chart than a doctor. But I know the disease intimately, in both its forms — the praised version that's too scared to try, and the overwhelmed version that optimizes for the floor — because I've had both, at the best schools in the world, and walked out having forgotten most of what I paid for. If any of that sounds like a thing you'd want to un-learn alongside me, the longer version of how I actually learn things now lives over in Learning & Teaching. The honest invitation is the same one underneath everything I make: I'd rather grow at this with company. Say hi.