How to boost your income despite poor grades

The Numbers Don’t Add Up

Let me show you my transcript of failures:

High school GPA: Mediocre. No AP classes. Never made honor roll.
College: Failed Calculus II. Failed Physics I. Barely passed Differential Equations.
Graduate school: Attended a program ranked outside the top 50. Took 5.5 years to finish a PhD I’ve literally never used.
Side hustles: Failed at t-shirt designs (1 sale), online courses (handful of students), music production (no subscribers), resume writing services (2 clients), a deer-aging website (traffic, but no conversions), tutoring (couldn’t find students), and even invented a completely new type of eyewear that nobody bought.

By every conventional metric, I should be struggling. The formula we’re all taught (good grades lead to good schools lead to good jobs) should have filtered me out somewhere around my failed calculus exams.

Instead, I’m sitting here at 39 with a stable six-figure income across multiple roles, a home I own, published patents and peer-reviewed papers, and companies reaching out to me about consulting opportunities. I travel internationally at least once a year, and I’ve left footprints in scientific communities spanning optics, biology, and ecology.

Something in the standard formula is broken (or at least incomplete).

This blog exists because I spent 20 years figuring out what that something is, and I think it can help you too.

What This Blog Is (And Isn’t)

This isn’t a “mindset” blog where I tell you to believe in yourself harder. It’s not about morning routines or productivity hacks or manifesting success.

This is a blog about specific, tactical decisions that let people like me—people who don’t fit the mold—build careers and lives that work anyway.

I’m going to tell you exactly what I did, including the parts that sound embarrassing or lucky or unconventional. I’ll share the frameworks I developed, the mistakes I made, and what I’d do differently with hindsight.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

I used to suck at planning my education. The “study hard → college → degree → job” pipeline is missing critical steps. I’ll show you what they are and how to actually use them.

I used to suck at side hustles. Every side hustle I tried failed because I was building products I wasn’t qualified to sell. Within a month of changing my approach, I had two paying consulting gigs.

I used to suck at landing job interviews. I went from mass-applying to hundreds of jobs with no responses to having recruiters reach out to me daily. The difference was a $12/year domain name and a few weekends of work.

The Three Shifts That Changed Everything

Looking back at my journey from failing student to where I am now, I have identified three fundamental shifts in how I approached my career. These aren’t motivational platitudes, they’re operational changes that produced measurable results.

Shift #1: Stop Optimizing for Grades, Start Optimizing for Leverage

School taught me to optimize my effort for higher test scores. The real world rewards something completely different: the ability to do things other people can’t or won’t do.

When I was failing Calculus II, I was simultaneously teaching myself to splice specialty optical fiber in a research lab — a skill maybe a few hundred people in the world had at the time. Guess which one mattered more for my career?

This doesn’t mean grades are worthless. It means they’re one input among many, and often not the most important one. The question I started asking wasn’t “how do I get an A?” but “what can I learn to do that’s genuinely valuable and relatively rare?”

Shift #2: Stop Hiding Failures, Start Converting Them

Every failure I listed above taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way:

Failing my core classes taught me I needed to find alternative paths through academic gatekeeping
Failed side hustles taught me the difference between “products I want to build” and “services people will pay for”
My PhD taught me that credentials matter less than capabilities once you’re in the door

The trick isn’t to avoid failure, it’s to extract maximum information from each one and redirect faster. I spent way too long on some of my failed ventures (looking at you, eyewear startup). The people who succeed aren’t the ones who fail less; they’re the ones who learn faster and pivot sooner.

Shift #3: Stop Waiting for Permission, Start Building Proof

Nobody was going to hand me opportunities based on my transcript. So I started creating evidence that was harder to ignore than my GPA.

I built a personal website showcasing actual work I’d done, with images and explanations a non-expert could understand
I published papers and filed patents, creating a paper trail of accomplishment that existed outside any institution’s control
I took on projects that let me point to concrete outcomes rather than credentials

The shift from “please give me a chance” to “here’s proof I can do the work” changed everything about how I approached job searching, networking, and career development.

Who This Blog Is For

You might benefit from Conquering Failure if:

You’re smart but don’t do well on tests, and the traditional academic path feels like it’s working against you
You’re mid-career and realize your credentials aren’t opening the doors you expected
You’ve tried multiple side hustles and none of them stuck
You’re applying to dozens of jobs and hearing nothing back
You suspect there’s a “game” being played that nobody explained the rules to

I can’t promise my specific path will work for you—our circumstances are different. But I can promise to be specific enough that you can adapt what I’ve learned to your situation.

What’s Coming Next

I’m building this blog in public, one failure at a time. Here’s what I’m working on:

How I actually got consulting clients: The exact platforms, messages, and positioning that worked
The portfolio page template: What to include, what to skip, and how to make technical work accessible to non-technical readers
Why my deer-aging website gets traffic but no sales: And what I’m doing about it
The “overnight success” that took 10 years: A detailed timeline of how my career actually unfolded
Other things I sucked at: paying attention, relationships, keeping deadlines, asking for feedback, being a manly man, and keeping plants alive — each one teaching me a valuable life lesson

If you want to follow along, subscribe below. I’ll email you when new posts go up—no spam, no sales pitches, just the tactics and stories I wish someone had shared with me earlier.

Let’s Get Started

If you’re reading this and your internal monologue is some version of “this won’t work for me because I’m not as smart/lucky/privileged as this guy”—I get it. I had that voice too.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the voice is usually wrong about why things won’t work. It’s not that you’re not smart enough. It’s that you’re optimizing for the wrong things, or you haven’t found the right leverage point yet, or you’re comparing your chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 20.

The whole point of this blog is to make the path more visible. Not easier—I can’t do that. But more visible, so you can at least see where the handholds are.

Let’s get started.

Next up: How to land your dream job, despite improper planning