How Designing Changed My Life

Surya Anand
Nov 4 · 4 min read

Bear with me, this is my very first attempt.

Make your decisions stubborn.

At 15, I dropped out of high school because I sucked at getting good grades and had a terrible school life to be simple.

At that time, the only thing that I concentrated was on playing football. I barely even cared about other things. It was the only thing that kept me alive. I had no life outside football.

Soon enough, everything changed, it took one single match to flip my entire school life. To keep it simple, I got into a fight. For the whole year, I was so afraid to go to school. I always had a fear of getting bullied and beaten up. Besides, my grades were terrible.

A few months away, I had to take an exam that would be the deciding factor for my future education. Although, I passed my grades were nowhere near to get me the subject I wanted to study. With no choices left, I enrolled in Commerce.

I hated going to school, as always my grades were still terrible. I barely showed up in school unless there was a match.

I broke my hand right before my Half-yearly exams, so I had to skip. Unlucky me, I was still playing football with my broken hand, and one of my teachers recorded it. I got into a huge problem. I stopped playing football and this got me into depression.

My only goal was to find an alternative to football, something that’ll make me sink into it.

I somehow stumbled through Design+Code and I instantly fell in love. I asked my mom if she could buy it for me. Unfortunately, she couldn’t at that moment but sooner on my birthday she gifted it to me.

It took me 3 months to complete the course since I had no time on the day. I stayed up late every day to learn design. I started sleeping in my classes, this pissed of my teachers as I was already bad at everything. My situation got worse at school day after day.

I was constantly getting into trouble, I hated being punished. I felt I was not taught anything at school — This is my personal opinion. On the flip side, I was learning soo much from the Internet at this point I thought I should better drop out of school instead of wasting everyone’s time and effort that they took to shape me up.

At first, I thought it would be easy to drop out of school but it wasn’t easy as I thought. I saw I had no chance of dropping out of school. Being in India, it’s so difficult to convince everyone around you. There are a lot of strings attached.

My mom was so terrified to hear this because she’s a single mother who got abandoned by our family. She struggled a lot to pay for my school. The only reason she wouldn’t let me is that she was so concerned about what others’ opinion.

Luckily I was 15 at that time I was already a year ahead of everyone my age. How? because I was enrolled in school when I was 2-years old usually most would enroll around 3–4 years old.

I used this to my advantage. I convinced everyone that if I screw up, I would get back to school as I still had the age to attend high school. Few months after I dropped out of school.

My only goal was to find an internship I tried looking for opportunities around me. I was shocked because there was not even a single design studio or agency around me. I thought I screwed up, It was not even a month since I dropped out.

After two months, I saw Meng’s tweet that he was looking for designers. At first, I never wanted to apply. For me, it was way too big even to think about it. But deep inside I was soo excited that I wanted to apply. Meng is one of few designers that I look up to the most and to have an opportunity to work on his team is like going on an interstellar journey.

I sent him an email and exactly an hour after we set up a meeting. Yes, I got the job. The moment was something miraculous for me. To have someone put such great faith and trust in me for the first time.

I had and have a long way to go, still have a ton of things to learn. There’s a lot that I wanted to do in my life. I believe I have taken the very first step towards my goal.

The main reason I wanted to share this story is simply to tell how design has changed my life. Design helped me a lot to escape from reality. Helped me get over really bad memories from my childhood. Above all to be a part of an incredible team.

In the end, all I had to do was trust my gut. There’s no regret when you trust yourself. It’s almost impossible to go wrong. But there is always a way to do things differently but I had to choose the hard way.

Thanks everyone for reading. Have a nice week!

Surya Anand

Written by

16 — Designer at @designcodeio

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