An Asian F is Still an A (or, The Failed Tiger Mom’s Portfolio Theory)

First published on Medium on 11/2/2021

Remember that episode of Glee where Mike Chang’s dad wants him to give up dancing and his girlfriend because he received an A- in AP Chem? His life is basically over, according to his Tiger Dad. The episode is called “Asian F”.

Which is an A-.

It’s a thing. A real thing. There are tons of stories of students throwing themselves out of high rises or in front of trains because they received something, anything less than an A. The toll on mental health is real. But what if you “really” failed. Like received an actual “F” on your transcript? Would you die? Not necessarily.

THE CONFESSION:

I know what happens when something bad happens. I feel it in my body: first my face begins to tingle, then it crawls down to my shoulders. Sometimes my hands shake and everything feels hot. I get sort of prickly all over my body. Then I am numb. It is what I imagine happens if I were to get caught in a lie or some sort of crime. It’s imposter syndrome embodied. Then it sort of passes and I pretend it didn’t happen or it wasn’t important. But it lives on in many unintended ways…like writing about it 30 years later.

I’ve taken Corporate Finance three times. Failed it twice. I could make up all sorts of explanations about the first time. Didn’t go to class, didn’t do the homework. I could even blame it on an ill timed break-up with a boyfriend but really for the most part, I would just look at the pages in my textbook for hours and it just looked like gibberish. I just couldn’t process it — I’d stare at the page and…nothing.

The first time was as an insane decision to take one of the hardest classes as a second semester senior. So clearly, rational judgement was not a strong suit at age 22.

The second time I failed, the stakes were much higher. In business school, corporate finance is a core class which means if you fail it, you can’t graduate. I struggled through the whole semester. It wasn’t my professor’s fault. Chi-fu Huang was visiting from MIT’s Sloan School. He was a gifted teacher — and I beat myself up incessantly in the aftermath because I squandered the opportunity to learn from a renowned academic who actually knew how to teach.

I don’t remember exactly how and when I found out. I knew the outcome wasn’t going to be good because staring at a piece of paper for two hours for the final was not going to get me much. Nor was the approved “cheat sheet” written on an 8”x11” piece of paper going to help (though it was a piece of art to see an entire finance textbook crammed onto two sides of a piece of printer paper). I learned almost too late that the only way to learn it is to simply push a pencil across the paper and do the math. Reading about finance theory was not going to help me calculate NPV.

Early in the following year, the dean of admissions, my economics professor and my advisor took me to lunch to strategize how they would support me through this situation. I made up all sorts of excuses. I was never going to be in finance, and it was irrelevant to my plan so why did it matter anyway. I was embarrassed, humiliated and kept telling myself, “I am smarter than this” as I felt my self-esteem eroding by the minute. And really, there was no getting out of retaking the class. There was one other method of mitigation and I failed at that too. It was a difficult hour — made all the worse because they were SO. NICE.TO.ME!

In my panic and defensiveness, I completely lost the point of being at this storied university and the privilege and luxury of stretching my brain in new and fascinating ways just because. The worst part of it all was there was help all along the way. It never needed to get to that point. But I never sought it. That’s probably a whole other conversation with a therapist someday.

THE LESSON:

In every failure, there is a gift. It is so hard to remember that in that moment or any of the ensuing 14 weeks. I learned friends would support me. I learned that my professors WANTED me to learn and succeed…even when I felt it was impossible. I was reminded that learning was the point. For a while, I thought I didn’t deserve to be there. But I did.

I guess corporate finance wasn’t a complete loss because I also learned how to apply portfolio theory and beta — it just wouldn’t be on Wall Street. I learned that the returns on my finance experience would depress my ROI so I needed a hedge, which meant adding other things in my resume. Which is how I realized that while I might always suck at finance and accounting, I am REALLY REALLY REALLY good at marketing to people who were great at it. So much so, that I became a product manager for Microsoft Excel. A few short years later, just about all finance and accounting professionals did their work on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, not a spreadsheet from a company called Lotus. And that was, in part, because of me.

I also found work that satisfied to my need to incessantly ask why and challenge the status quo. I found a love of creating communities during my summer at Apple Computer and their User Group Connection. I found quant jocks who provided me with the data to support my creativity but didn’t dominate it. I even found a friend who taught me how to create giant PivotTables that hit a SQL database and do some crazy analysis of my business all by myself.

My risk tolerance for game changing ideas in fast moving industries was higher than for others. I found my actual risk tolerance was for industries that had a beta closer to 2.0 than 1.0. Technology was one place where that was true. What surprised me more later was that I wanted a direct relationship between the work I did and my compensation. That manifested itself 10 years later as I founded my own company. I’ve worked for myself ever since and never looked back.

In the throes of achievement, it can be difficult to remember that an Asian F is still an A. Somehow, our ability to withstand failure as a society has evolved into grade deflation where an A-minus feels like an F, only made worse by making an “A” in an AP class worth 5 points instead of 4. Talk about moving the goal posts.

I once told my daughter about a college interview when I asked an applicant about their greatest failure. They told me it was when they didn’t made the fourth grade travel basketball team and their journey back from that. My daughter looked at me with incredulity, “Fourth grade? no big failures since she was 10? That’s crazy. I fail every day!” I beamed inside as I thought, “she gets it.” Because in every failure there is a gift. And who doesn’t want to get presents all the time?