Most brilliant students are the most brittle

We don’t talk about it much, but you see it in every middle-class home. Behind every fridge stuffed with tiffins & tuition receipts, there’s a child who’s been told they’re exceptional. They never asked for it. The system needed them to be.

I was that child.

I topped in school, ranked in college, cleared every exam with mechanical precision. I was the kind of student relatives quoted and cousins quietly resented. I had been called scholar, genius, topper. These labels felt warm for years, then slowly turned into cages.

And then I wrote the UPSC.
I failed.

Who would have thought that the same mind that had carried me for two decades now became the site of collapse. I couldn’t process how something I had given my full being to could still result in emptiness.

But here's what I understood with time.

It wasn’t the failure that broke me but the model.

From childhood, we are trained to calculate our worth like a report card. 100 percent equals pride. Anything less introduces doubt. We absorb this through medals, through applause, through that one sentence every Indian father says eventually:

“Acha karoge toh duniya yaad rakhegi.”

So we build our identity on a simple equation.

Effort → Result → Value.

It works. Until the equation stops solving.

The brittleness begins when effort no longer guarantees reward. When you see others make it into IAS through chance or category you never belonged to. When your percentile is 99 but an interview panel decides you’re not enough that year. When the world no longer runs on the equations you mastered.

That’s when the high performers begin to collapse.

When I read Sneha Debnath’s story, it haunted me.

Because I’ve stood on the edge she crossed.

That quiet moment when you stare at your life, & none of it answers the one question that won’t go away:

“Am I enough?”

We describe these as mental health cases. But at the root, these are flawed models.

We need to offer new frameworks.

Tell them success is a probability, not prophecy. That value isn’t derived from utility. That failure signals turbulence, not finality. That being misunderstood simply means your frequency is rare.

Nobody gave me that vocabulary when I needed it. I discovered it inside the rubble.

Now I live differently. I rise. I fall. I write. I’m no longer a topper. I am anti-fragile. And that gives me more than medals ever did.

Anti-fragile doesn’t mean unbreakable.
It means responsive. Expansive. Alive.

There are thousands like Sneha who still operate in systems designed for performance but blind to complexity. Some will clear their exams. Some will win gold medals. Some will spiral. All of them are brilliant.

But brilliance with brittle logic leads to quiet ruin.

We need to rewire brilliance.

Because the cost isn’t only opportunity. It’s people. And when the brilliant collapse, they don’t leave cracks.

They leave silence.