I failed out of university in Poland. Not because I lacked the ability — I had been strong in mathematics all my life. I failed because I had enrolled in a shipbuilding engineering program with the primary goal of getting on a trip abroad. The real reason I was there was not engineering. It was escape.
When the trip did not materialise in my first years, the motivation evaporated. Without a strong WHY behind my effort, I stopped caring. The work collapsed. The program ended. And I found myself, at a low point, facing a system that wanted me to join the army, forget about dreams, and fall into line.
That failure taught me something I have spent the rest of my life refining: a weak WHY produces a weak HOW. Every time.
The pattern I saw in thirty years of teaching
When I eventually became a mathematics teacher in Canada — a career that spanned more than thirty years in Toronto high schools — I watched this same dynamic play out in thousands of students, year after year.
A student who knew why they were sitting in that classroom — because they wanted to become an engineer, because they wanted to understand how the world was structured, because someone at home had told them that mathematics was the language of freedom — that student figured out the HOW. They pushed through the hard units. They came back after failing a test. They asked questions. They stayed.
A student who only knew the HOW — who had memorised the steps, passed the quizzes, got the grade — forgot the HOW the moment the exam was over. The knowledge didn't stick because there was nothing to attach it to. No reason. No anchor.
"This is not a math problem. This is a human problem. And it runs in every area of life."
What a strong WHY actually looks like
A strong WHY is not motivational language. It is not a goal you write on a sticky note. It is a reason that survives contact with adversity.
My WHY, when I was trying to leave Communist Poland, was not "I want a better life." That is too vague. My WHY was specific and visceral: I had sat on a street in Vienna, sipping a beer that cost more than a week's salary back home, watching people walk freely. I had seen the other side of the wall. I could not un-see it. That image became the engine that ran on its own fuel through every setback that came after.
When I arrived in Canada and spent a full year working in a woodworking factory — seven days a week, twelve-hour shifts, two days off in three hundred and sixty-five — the WHY was still running. The factory was not the destination. It was the first chapter. I never confused the two.
Where most people's plans collapse
Most plans fail at the same place: the first real obstacle. Not the anticipated difficulty — the actual one. The one that arrives at three in the morning and feels like evidence that you were wrong to try.
This is exactly when your WHY either holds or it doesn't. If the reason is borrowed — from a book, from someone else's expectation, from a vague sense that you "should" — it will not hold. It has no roots. The first hard wind takes it.
If the reason is yours — earned through experience, tested by time, rooted in something you have actually lived — it holds. Not comfortably. It holds the way a tree holds in a storm: it bends, it creaks, but the roots keep it in the ground.
How to find yours
You do not find your WHY by thinking about it. You find it by honest excavation. Ask yourself: what is the thing I cannot stop wanting, even when it is inconvenient? What is the thing I have wanted quietly, for years, that I have never said out loud? What image, if I saw it clearly, would make the current hardship feel worth it?
Write the answer down. One sentence. Not a paragraph. A sentence. If it takes more than one sentence to explain, you haven't found it yet.
Then ask yourself: if this got hard tomorrow — if the obstacle showed up, if the momentum stopped, if the doubt arrived at full volume — would this reason still be standing? If yes, you have your engine. If no, go deeper.
The HOW is negotiable. The route changes. The strategy adapts. Plans fail and get replaced. But the engine — the WHY — that has to be non-negotiable. That is the thing that keeps you moving when everything else stops working.
I know this not because I read it somewhere. I know it because I ran that engine for a decade before I had the vocabulary to describe what I was doing. And I have watched what happens — in classrooms, in conversations, in my own life — when the engine runs out of fuel.
The plans don't collapse because people aren't capable. They collapse because people aren't connected. Connected to the reason. Connected to the thing underneath the goal.
Find your reason. Build everything else on top of it.