Everyone loves a survivor story. The grind. The sleepless nights. The “I did it alone” narrative. Single parent. Adopted kid. Broke college student who made it big.
But here’s what nobody tells you: those aren’t the reasons you succeeded. Those are just the decorations you hang on the outcome.
Being a single mother didn’t make you successful. Making a decision and executing it did. Working 80 hours didn’t build your empire. Learning which 20 hours actually mattered after burning out three times did.
Your circumstances are noise. Your response to failure is the signal.
And I’m not writing this from the winner’s circle. I’m writing this from the middle of the process, still building, still adjusting, still breaking down and rebuilding systems that didn’t hold.
Because the truth is: I’m not successful yet. But I’m still moving. And that’s only possible because I stopped treating failure like a character flaw.
The Success Story Industrial Complex
We’ve built an entire ecosystem around origin stories. TEDx stages. LinkedIn posts. Podcast intros. Everyone needs a dramatic backdrop to make their win sound earned.
The formula is always the same:
- Start with hardship (bonus points if it’s generational trauma)
- Add a turning point (usually vague, always inspirational)
- End with success (metrics optional, feelings mandatory)
But here’s the problem: none of those stories teach you how to win. They teach you how to perform struggle.
The single parent angle? That’s not strategy. That’s context. The “I barely slept” flex? That’s not discipline. That’s poor resource management dressed up as hustle.
What actually created the outcome? The fifty failures nobody mentions. The three business models that collapsed. The partnerships that imploded. The launches that flopped.
Success stories skip the database. And that’s why they’re useless.
They don’t tell you about the nights you couldn’t breathe before sprint planning. They don’t mention the three times you got scammed before you learned to spot red flags. They don’t talk about the drunken night you got beaten because you made the wrong call about who to trust.
They just give you the highlight reel and tell you to “work hard.”
My Failures Didn’t Make Me. They Taught Me How to Test.
I grew up on hard mode. My father’s boundaries weren’t suggestions. My mother’s lessons came with consequences. I felt anger. I felt hate. But after years of getting hammered by life, I realized something: I didn’t break easily. That wasn’t luck. That was conditioning.
College? I was the strategist. First job? Tech support, then SME, then trainer. Career shift? I failed the dev interview, so I went to QA instead.
But here’s what the LinkedIn version doesn’t include:
I’ve broken down. Multiple times. Some of those moments aren’t even documented because they were too raw to process immediately. I’ve had heartaches that rewired how I trust. I’ve been scammed. I’ve been beaten during one drunken night where I made the wrong call about who I was standing next to.
And none of that made me successful. It made me careful.
Not paranoid. Not pessimistic. Just… systematic.
QA Isn’t Just My Job. It’s How I Process Everything Now.
I didn’t realize it at first, but my QA mind isn’t something I turn on at work. It’s how I look at everything now.
In QA, the purpose is to ship at 100%.
You test rigorously. You find the bugs. You verify fixes. You regression test. The goal is zero defects in production. You aim for perfection because you can control the product.
But here’s the shift:
In life, you can’t control the outcome. You can only test your options and prepare for failure.
In QA:
- You can test every scenario
- You can block a release if it’s not ready
- You can demand fixes before it ships
- You control the variables
In life:
- You can’t test every scenario (relationships, opportunities, timing)
- You can’t block life from happening
- You can’t demand perfect conditions
- You can only control your preparation and response
So the real skill isn’t perfection. It’s operational awareness.
You test your options. You run scenarios. You ask: “What breaks if I do this? What’s the worst case? What’s the recovery path?”
That’s not overthinking. That’s risk assessment.
And the more I applied that lens to life, the less I chased perfect outcomes. Because perfect doesn’t exist. What exists is:
- Acceptable risk
- Known failure points
- Recovery systems
That’s what QA taught me. And it’s the same framework that kept me moving when everything else collapsed.
When I Tried to Be a PM, I Failed. And It Taught Me Where I Actually Belonged.
Failing as a PM showed me something critical: I’m not cut out to manage dev teams the way a PM does.
Not because I couldn’t do the work. But because the mental load of being a PM wasn’t just heavy, it was a different shape entirely.
As a QA lead, I had a clear lane. I reviewed. I broke things. I asked hard questions. I pointed out issues, but I didn’t define the direction.
Then I stepped into a PM role.
And suddenly, I’m not just part of the workflow, I’m defining the map. The pressure didn’t just increase. It changed shape.
Sprint planning became a nightmare. Not because of the meeting itself, but because it exposed whether or not I did the work no one sees. The logic breakdowns. The decision trees in my head that I meant to write down… but couldn’t. Or didn’t. Or froze before doing.
I don’t mind getting called out in sprint. That’s easy.
What’s harder is knowing that my brain has been shutting down the day before, not from laziness, but from anxiety.
There were days I wrote half the sprint hours before the meeting. Not because I didn’t care. But because the night before, I couldn’t breathe.
That failure taught me something: I’m not broken. I’m just in the wrong role.
And instead of grinding through it until I collapsed, I adjusted. I went back to QA. Not as a demotion. As a recalibration.
Because knowing where you don’t fit is just as valuable as knowing where you do.
The Cost of Hustle Culture: When Your Body Sends the Invoice
For years, I bought into the lie of hustle culture.
The idea that if I just optimized better, squeezed more into my day, or worked smarter, I’d break through.
Spoiler: I didn’t.
Because the real enemy wasn’t my routine. It was the lie that told me my value came from output.
Hustle culture doesn’t just drain your time. It overdrafts your:
- Sleep
- Patience
- Focus
- Joy
It convinces you to ignore your body’s signals. It makes you think breakdowns are just “mindset issues.”
It tells you to wake up earlier, push harder, and outwork the pain.
But what if the real flex is knowing when to stop?
This year, I hit a wall I didn’t see coming:
- Migraines so brutal I couldn’t open my eyes
- Stage 2 hypertension that appeared out of nowhere
- A body that finally made me pay attention
I didn’t collapse because of weakness. I collapsed because I’d carried everything too long without maintenance.
And here’s the kicker: when failure is seen in a bad light, it leads to stress. And when stress compounds, it becomes hypertension. Then migraines. Then collapse.
Men try their best to survive. We carry the dad bod like a badge—until it becomes a warning system we ignored too long.
This wasn’t just a physical crash. It was systemic.
The collapse started upstream, in my head when the mental overload from work started stacking up. Now the consequences were showing up in my body.
That’s what happens when you treat failure as something to hide instead of something to log.
Loneliness, Heartbreak, and the Failures You Can’t Test For
One of the hardest parts about failure? Some of it happens in isolation.
Remote work amplified that. Your home becomes your office. Your sanctuary becomes your prison. Memories linger in the spaces you spend the most time in. And isolation magnifies every emotion.
Heartbreak. Loneliness. The weight of being the one who’s expected to “figure it out” while quietly spiraling inside.
You can’t QA-test emotional struggles. You can’t write a test case for grief. You can’t regression test loneliness.
But you can still apply the same framework:
- What broke?
- What’s the recovery path?
- What do I need to adjust to move forward?
It’s not about fixing it perfectly. It’s about acknowledging the failure, processing it, and moving anyway.
Because standing still isn’t strategy, it’s just slow failure with better branding.
Fear of Failure Is Strategic Suicide
If you’re afraid to fail, you’re not protecting your future. You’re protecting your self-image.
And that’s the trap most people never escape.
Because failure isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s humiliating. It’s public. It contradicts the narrative you’ve been building about yourself. It makes you look incompetent. Unprepared. Amateur.
So instead of shipping, you optimize. You research. You plan. You consume more content about success until you’ve convinced yourself you’re ready, when really, you’re just stalling.
You’re more worried about looking like you know what you’re doing than actually learning what works.
And that fear compounds. The longer you wait to fail, the higher the stakes feel. The more you’ve invested in your self-image, the more painful it becomes to test it against reality.
So you stay in safe mode. You make incremental moves. You celebrate small wins that don’t actually move the needle. And you wonder why everyone else seems to be accelerating while you’re stuck in first gear.
Here’s why: they’re collecting data. You’re protecting ego.
Failure Isn’t Romantic. It’s a Feedback Loop.
Every person you see winning has a graveyard of attempts nobody talks about. Failed products. Dead-end partnerships. Strategies that looked perfect on paper and collapsed on contact.
The difference isn’t that they worked harder. It’s not that they had it worse. It’s not even that they’re smarter.
The difference is they moved through failure faster than you’re willing to.
They didn’t romanticize the struggle. They didn’t post about it for sympathy. They didn’t wait until they “felt ready.” They just cataloged what didn’t work, adjusted the system, and tried again.
Because failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s the only reliable path to it.
You don’t learn what works by reading case studies. You learn by breaking your own assumptions and building something better from the wreckage.
That’s not inspiring. It’s not poetic. It’s just mechanical. You run the test. You collect the data. You adjust. You run it again.
And you keep doing that until the pattern breaks.
I’m Not Successful Yet. But I’m Still Moving.
I haven’t “made it.” I’m not writing this from a yacht or a stage. I’m writing this from the middle of the process—still building, still adjusting, still testing what works.
But here’s what I figured out: not killing yourself for an outcome is also a win.
I’ve stopped chasing 100% success rates in life. I’ve stopped treating every failure like a personal indictment. I’ve stopped performing struggle for people who only care about the highlight reel.
What I do now is simpler:
- I test my options
- I document what breaks
- I adjust the system
- I move forward
That’s it. No drama. No grand narrative. Just incremental progress built on a foundation of failures I actually learned from.
And if that sounds boring compared to the “I risked everything and won” stories, good. Because those stories are designed to sell you something—usually a course, a framework, or a reason to stay stuck.
Your Obstacles Aren’t Your Identity. They’re Just Variables.
The problem with survival narratives is that they turn your circumstances into your personality. You start identifying with the struggle instead of the system you built to survive it.
Being broke in college doesn’t make you resourceful. Learning to stretch $50 for two weeks and still eat properly does.
Being a single parent doesn’t make you disciplined. Building a schedule that accounts for chaos and still ships results does.
Getting scammed doesn’t make you wise. Building a framework to spot red flags before you commit does.
Working through burnout doesn’t make you resilient. Learning which tasks drain you for no return and cutting them does.
Your obstacles are just the environment. Your adjustments are the skill.
And if you’re still talking about your obstacles more than your adjustments, you’re not sharing wisdom you’re performing victimhood.
Stop Performing Struggle. Start Testing Systems.
You want momentum? Stop waiting for perfect conditions. Stop using your backstory as justification for hesitation. Stop treating your hardships like credentials.
Your job isn’t to suffer beautifully. It’s to test faster than everyone else.
Failure shapes success not because it’s poetic, but because it’s the only feedback loop that tells you what’s real. And if you’re too afraid to fail, you’re not protecting your future. You’re just refusing to collect data.
In QA, we don’t ship perfect products. We ship tested ones. We know where the weak points are. We have rollback plans. We monitor production.
Life doesn’t need to be different.
You don’t need to be flawless. You just need to be operational. And that means accepting that some things will break, some tests will fail, and some risks won’t pay off.
But you run them anyway. Because standing still isn’t strategy—it’s just slow failure with better branding.
The Real Question
Success stories are entertainment. Failure logs are education.
Most people will never build the second one because they’re too busy performing the first.
The question is: which one are you actually building?
Are you cataloging your adjustments, or are you just romanticizing your obstacles?
Are you testing systems, or are you protecting your self-image?
Are you moving through failure, or are you stalling until it feels safe?
Because the people who move forward aren’t the ones who never fail.
They’re the ones who fail faster, log the lesson, and keep moving.
And if you’re not willing to do that, then no amount of motivation, no course, no framework, no guru will save you.
You’ll just keep performing struggle until your body sends the invoice.
And by then, it’s not just your career that collapses. It’s everything.
Director of Systemic Disruption & Cognitive Sarcasm
I’m not successful yet. But I’m still moving. This post is part of my failure log—documenting what breaks, what adjusts, and what keeps me operational when everything else tries to collapse. Read more at MomentumPath.net and QAJourney.net.
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