A bad grade prompts a change in direction.

• Author: Hitz, Dave
• Position: LEADERSHIP - Brief article

From How to Castrate a Bull by Dave Hitz with Pat Walsh. Copyright 2009 by Dave Hitz. Published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint (www.josseybass.com).

ARISTOTLE SAID that the secret to happiness is to find what you do well and do it. Getting a C- on a required physics course finally convinced me that I was in the wrong place. I changed my major to computer science. Thank goodness for that bad grade. Had I been a tiny bit better at physics, I might be a second-rate physics teacher at a secondrate school today. My brain was not wired well for physics, but it worked great for computer science. This was before people saw computers as the path to riches. I didn't switch to computer science for money; I switched because I loved the work.

After Princeton, in 1986, I moved to Silicon Valley. Resumes are generally boring, so I decided to include "herded, branded and castrated cattle" on mine, if...