The day was August 22, 2025, and the next day I had my last exam as an undergraduate. I was really happy that my undergraduate days were finally about to be over that I forgot my primary duty — the duty to read for the exam. For this exam, I shouldn’t have been in this situation. It was the hardest course of the semester and was taken by the Head of the Department, but 12 hours to the exam, I didn’t even know the PDF I was supposed to read.

So I had two choices at that point: study past questions and hope the questions were repeated, or spend the next 10 hours studying. Well, I chose the latter. For 10 straight hours, with intense focus and extreme resilience to finish the syllabus, I kept studying.

After 6 hours of reading, I realized that there was still a lot to read, and I paused and started crying. I cried and wept so badly that my eyes were swollen. But I realized that I brought this upon myself, so I cleaned up and continued reading.

The exam was the hardest of the semester, and when the result came out, I got an A (a well-fought one). That result completed my goal of graduating with a first class and getting a 5.0 GPA for the second time.

Thinking about this experience, I have come to the realization that the major thing a first-class degree gives us is a chance to experience our own greatness — a chance to discover that you are resilient enough to acquire knowledge. This resilience is what makes ordinary people achieve extraordinary results, and the beauty of it is that resilience in one field is replicable in another.

It would be foolish to graduate with the highest level of academic excellence and assume the world should automatically reward you for that. The world might appreciate you for it, but it will not reward you for it, because reward comes with value offering and problem-solving, and the mere existence of your degree doesn’t provide that.

The hard work and rigor you put into finishing with a second class upper or a first class should be isolated as a unit and applied in other areas of your life your skill acquisition life, your value proposition life, and your career life in general. Only then can you achieve success.

Success is closely related to the concept of following your passion, but passion comes from the Latin word Passio, which means “to suffer.” So passion is not doing what you love; it’s finding something you are willing to suffer for. And suffering can only be bearable when you are resilient.

Forget your degree. Find something you are willing to suffer for, apply the resilience that gave you the degree, and then the world will experience how great you have always been.

God is helping us ❤️