I never was a good student. I liked half the subjects they taught us in school, and I was good at one or two of those.

I always had this notion of identity in the things I did and the things I consumed.

I was a geek because I liked science and math. I was a nerd because I preferred video games to sports. I believed I was a nice person because I followed the rules and didn’t swear, even though my behavior in a lot of other situations was far from “nice”.

I liked to stick to what I knew and considered stuff that was beyond my wheelhouse to be not relevant to me, or in moments of arrogance, even beneath me.

This attitude also extended to the tasks that I considered to be my responsibility.

At home, I made the bed in the morning and helped set up the plates for dinner. That was my job. I did it every day but no more than that.

So, even if my mom was tired and had to cook at the end of a rough day, I wouldn’t have the realization to lend her a hand because cooking was not supposed to be my thing (remember how I said I was far from nice).

My concept of personal responsibility was a narrow-minded one, what Satya Nadella would call the fixed mindset, devoid of any growth and incurious to learn. It was only a matter of time before someone, or something, snapped me back to reality.

It did happen, eventually, when I started my first job.

I joined an Indian IT company where we worked on outsourced projects for an American giant. I won’t be revealing any more details as they are not relevant.

Unsurprisingly, I kept the same childish approach at work.

We worked on a massive application which was divided into several logical modules. I was assigned to work on one module for over half a year. Soon, I knew everything there was to know about that module — both how the code functioned and how it contributed to the business.

The Task

One day, I was tasked with implementing a business requirement that needed me to pull data from several tables, some of which stored data for an entirely different module. I had no experience with the other module and was frustrated that I had to now learn it to complete my job.

At the core of the requirement was a complicated SQL query — the instructions that tell the database where the information is, and how it should be organized and sorted. My team lead warned me well ahead of time that the query was going to be a task unto itself, and that I shouldn’t waste time.

Dragging my feet on having to learn the ins and outs of that part of the database, I came up with the brilliant idea to ask another team member who had experience with that other module to help me write the query. She agreed. That was enough for me, and I marked that problem as solved in my head and focused on other tasks.

For the next few weeks, I followed up with her again and again asking her if she had the time to help me out. Each time, she would say she was busy, and I would postpone the meeting to another day.

Months passed by. The task was nearing the deadline. I had finished the front end while I was reliant on my coworker’s help to write the query and finish the back end. My team lead started breathing down my neck asking me for progress and every time I would say that I was waiting for my coworker’s help.

That was when he pulled me aside and gave me the talk that left an impact on me.

The Talk

He said, “It’s your name on the requirement. The task has been assigned to you. I, or anyone else for that matter, don’t care that you were not able to get someone’s help. If you don’t make the deadline, it is all going to be on you.”

His words were a massive epiphany. I was responsible for doing the work regardless of how difficult or new it was for me. It was all on me. If the feature didn’t ship on time, or worse, if it shipped with bugs, there was going to be nobody else to blame but me.

I wrongly, yet sincerely, believed that since I was assigned to maintain one module of the application, writing a complex query that needs data from other parts of the database should be somebody else’s job; that not knowing enough was reason enough to not get the work done on time; that once I had finished making the GUI, somebody else on the team would just hand me the query to populate data in it.

I thought, and I stress this again, incorrectly, that I was entitled to get the query from someone else because I didn’t have the time to work on something I wasn’t already an expert at.

Thankfully, my coworker was available to help me the very next day and we got the issue resolved, but the lesson that situation taught has stayed with me for life.

I’m sure this sounds stupid to many readers who may understand it intuitively. But I just wasn’t mature enough to understand it then.

Regrets

Having a fixed mindset has affected my life in ways I cannot undo anymore. Sure, I have a lot to live for as I’m only in my mid-30s, but some things have slipped through my fingers for good. I wish that, when I was growing up, I understood the full scope of what I’m responsible for and the repercussions of not fulfilling those responsibilities.

I know now. I just wish I had known it a little earlier.