Vijay Pendakur

Reflection: Success, Failure, and Learning

I’ve succeeded…

My parents immigrated to North America at the end of the 1960s and my sister and I grew up in the Chicago metro area. I’m a true product of 1980s television and 1990s music! From watching Growing Pains, Night Court, and Who’s the Boss with my parents on weeknights, to having my highschool audio-landscape defined by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Nas, The Pharcyde, and Rage Against the Machine, I feel like a very normal GenX, 90s kid. I skated, I wore huge pants, I dyed my hair. You know…the basics.

I also experienced intense feelings of isolation and otherness growing up as an Asian American kid in a Black:White binary that wasn’t very kind about difference. Encounters with violence, bullying, and xenophobia shaped my middle school and high school years and I wasn’t academically focused or successful. Beyond school, I didn’t choose to excel in sports or music or art…or really anything.

But, I turned it around, slowly, in college and went on to find my voice and my confidence during 5 years at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I majored in East Asian Studies and U.S. History and lived abroad in Osaka, Japan for a year along the way.

After college, I had a wonderful 18 year career arc in higher education administration. The through-line for this chapter of my career was my deep belief that environments matter. I’d lived this personally and experienced diminished outcomes (mental, emotional, spiritual) when the environment around me didn’t set me up to flourish. I wanted college to be a time when every student could do the best work of their lives. This purpose took me all over the country, working at five universities and speaking at dozens more. I published, I taught, I completed a masters and doctorate. It was good.

After nearly 2 decades of working on the student experience in higher education, I pivoted to corporate leadership. The same lens served me well in numerous C-level and VP roles in publicly held tech companies. I led DEI, L&D, Social Impact, and University Relations in these years and I saw the same thing: environments have a huge impact on whether employees do the best work of their lives (or not).

As my 45th birthday approached, I decided to go out on my own. I have 2 radically simple design principles that informed this choice. First, I want my family to get the best of me, not the last of me. And second, I want my work to center my strengths and my happiness. The best way I could find to live these 2 design principles was to become a solopreneur!

I’ve failed…

Oh boy, where do I start? HA! Rather than catalog my impressive breadth and depth of failure here, I’ll name two key failures that shaped me. First, I achieved prestige and significance in higher education, but felt burned out and unhinged in the process. In my fifth university leadership role, I was in an endowed Deanship at the largest Ivy League university, and had been named Presidential Advisor on Diversity and Equity. And…I was not happy. I didn’t fail by underperforming at the role, I failed because I put myself in a position where I couldn’t thrive at work. I had all the laurels and public praise, but I was miserable.

A second failure that’s worth naming here is in my job search processes for corporate roles. In some key moments of my corporate leadership journey, I searched for roles from a place of fear and scarcity, rather than purpose and truth. I moved very quickly and ignored numerous signals, because I was concerned about job security and wanted to deliver stability for my family. With scarcity gripping the wheel, I did not steer my career and life towards my truth or wholeness. Rather, I ended up both miserable and underperforming in executive roles that were a terrible fit for me. Yes, I had achieved financial success and economic security, but again, I was miserable.

And, I’ve learned…

My many successes and failures have been incredible teachers in my life. In addition to these lived experiences, I have had the gift of loving family, loyal friends, wise mentors, and prudent sponsors to help me take these data points and turn them into awareness and growth. I’ve used mental health counseling, coaching, and meditation extensively as self-improvement tools along the way.

The peaks and valleys of my life, combined with my formal education and practical training, show up in my work as a speaker, facilitator, and coach. These days, I work hard on listening to myself and noticing what emotions surface during different parts of my days and weeks. These are important signals in helping me put fear and scarcity in the back seat and allow abundance, truth, and joy to steer for me.

Fun facts:

• Proud husband to Katie, a psychotherapist and naturalist

• Proud papa to two girls, Mira and Savi

• Aspiring amateur guitarist

• Total whisky nerd…let’s talk bourbon, rye, and scotch!