Hello

My story is not your typical success story – it starts with me messing up pretty badly.

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Back in 2001, I was this kid who came second in his 10th boards.

Pretty good, right?

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Well, things went downhill fast after I changed schools. I bombed my 12th boards, ending up in the bottom five of my class.

 

The worst part?

Seeing the disappointment in my dad's eyes.

That hurt. A lot.

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I tried for IIT, spent a whole year in Lucknow for coaching, but that didn't work out either. Ended up in a not-so-great engineering college.

 

My dad barely talked to me then, but when he dropped me off at college, he just said one thing: "At least get 75%."

 

Those words stuck with me, and guess what?

I graduated with 75.54%. Small win, but I needed it.

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Then 2008 happened. Global recession. Everything was a mess. TCS was hiring from our college, but out of everyone, they didn't pick just two people. Yeah, I was one of them. Talk about bad luck! So I packed my bags and headed to Bangalore to look for jobs.

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Here's where it gets interesting. With no job and a lot of anger, I started writing my first book. Got rejected 49 times (yes, I counted!), but the 50th publisher said yes. That book ended up selling 50,000 copies! Pretty cool for a guy who couldn't get a job, right?

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I wrote more books after that. Some worked, some didn't.

 

My third book flopped, and my fourth one? Sold exactly 17 copies.

Made a whopping $11!

 

But hey, I learned from it. Studied the whole self-publishing thing, figured out what readers wanted, and created the Sam Wick series under a different name.

 

Those books?

They hit bestseller lists in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada!

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But life threw another curveball in 2021. My dad got diagnosed with rare cancer. I wrote my tenth book sitting in hospital corridors, between rushing to blood banks and ICU visits. Lost him on April 1st, 2022. That broke me. Couldn't write a word for 8 months.

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Then something unexpected happened. I started writing on LinkedIn, and in January 2023, one of my posts about Shark Tank went crazy viral – 8 million views! Got featured in all these big newspapers. My followers jumped from 5,000 to over 24,000. Wild, right?

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It's been years since Dad left. Sometimes I think about that disappointed look from years ago, and now I wish I could show him everything. I think he'd be proud. Maybe he always was, in his own quiet way.

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You know what's funny?

 

All those failures, those rejections, those tough times – they taught me more than any success could. They showed me that it's okay to mess up, to take detours, to start over.

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So that's me – the guy who went from failing his exams to writing bestsellers, from getting rejected by publishers to going viral on LinkedIn. But more than all that, I'm just someone who learned that every setback has a comeback hidden in it. You just have to keep showing up.

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And hey, I'm still writing, still learning, still messing up sometimes, but now I get to help others do the same. Pretty cool how life works out, isn't it?

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