By Sagar – CEO, ApniPathshala

I was an average student in 11th grade. Good enough to pass. Good enough to learn. But never in the top 1%.

I was okay with that until one afternoon in physics class changed something inside me that I didn’t fully understand for years.

Our professor was teaching something about motion. Mid-lecture, he turned around and asked six students to stand up. I was one of them. My friends were too.

And then he said something I will never forget.

“Look at these students. They are amazing. They are good from their heart. May God bless them with everything. But they will never be good students in physics. They will always fail. There is no way they ever succeed and score good marks.”

I didn’t understand it then. I still don’t understand what he was trying to do. But what I know is what it did to us it left a vacuum. A quiet, hollow space where confidence used to be.

After that, I tried harder than I ever had. I studied physics every single day. I practiced. I pushed myself.

And still I kept failing.

Badly.

I couldn’t understand why. The effort was there. The willingness was there. But the results never came.

A Second Chance at Learning

Many years later, I found myself as a student again this time at ApniPathshala, in our very first POD in Narayan Chandra Trust.

The person appointed to run the centre had left midway. Dr. Malpani reached out to Pankaj Sir in Delhi and asked him to come to Mumbai to help stabilise the situation.

He came. He stayed for around 20 days.

And before leaving, he and Simran Ma’am asked me to run the POD.

I honestly thought they were joking.

I had zero experience in computers, IT, or WordPress which is exactly what we were supposed to teach.

But somehow, a few of us figured out a rhythm: learn from Pankaj Sir over a call in the evening, teach the same topic to our batches the next morning.

We called it Learn from Peers.

And honestly?

We did a decent job. A really decent job.

The Power of Three Words

About three years later, Simran Ma’am told me something that stopped me in my tracks.

When they left Mumbai and chose me to lead the POD, they themselves weren’t entirely sure it was the right decision.

But they never told me that.

They never said:

“We’re not sure you can do this.”

Instead, they simply said:

“We trust you.”

They never said I wasn’t good enough.

They just said I could do it.

And somehow, that was everything.

“It’s Your Baby Now”

When I went to Dr. Malpani and told him I wanted to run ApniPathshala not just help, not just contribute, but actually own it I was nervous.

I had no business plan.

No proven track record.

No guarantee I wouldn’t fail.

I expected difficult questions.

Instead, he looked at me and said:

“Do it. It’s your baby now.”

Those six words landed somewhere deep.

Not because they were grand or dramatic.

But because they were unconditional.

And in that moment, something shifted.

Not just in how I saw the work but in how I saw myself.

Trust Creates Responsibility

Every time I made a mistake after that and I made many, some of them costly Dr. Malpani never made me feel like a failure.

He would listen.

Sometimes he would correct.

But always, underneath it all, was the same quiet message:

“I trust you. Keep going.”

Being trusted doesn’t make a person reckless.

It makes them responsible.

It makes them want to become worthy of the trust placed in them.

It becomes its own kind of discipline.

What I Learned About Trust

I think about all the years I spent failing physics, wondering what was wrong with me.

Now I know:

Nothing was wrong with me.

A word had been planted, and I had grown it faithfully, exam after exam.

Dr. Malpani planted a different word.

And I have been growing that one ever since.

Carrying It Forward

When I built my team, I made sure to carry this forward.

I tell every team member the same thing:

“I trust you.”

And to every student who walks into an ApniPathshala POD, we say the same:

“We trust you.”

I now understand why I failed physics all those years ago.

It wasn’t because I lacked ability.

It was because someone had planted the idea that failure was inevitable and I watered it with every exam I took.

I understand why Learn from Peers worked.

And I understand why ApniPathshala runs today.

Because the people who believed in me never once let me doubt myself in the way that mattered most.

Final Thought

Trust is not a soft skill. It is the infrastructure on which human potential is built or broken.

A single sentence from a teacher took something away from six students on a random afternoon in an 11th-grade classroom.

And a single sentence “I trust you” gave something back years later to one of them.

Words matter.

Trust matters.

And the absence of trust?

That matters most of all.

Author: Sagar – CEO, ApniPathshala
Written from experience, not theory.