How Google Sheets Changed My Life

I sat with my head in my hands. Tears welled up in my eyes. My laptop was on the coffee table in front of me. I grabbed a couch pillow, buried my face in it, and screamed. 

This moment happened when I was 21 years old. I had just failed another online college algebra test. It was an online test. I had the cheat sheet in front of me. I copied the sample formulas into the test, and still couldn’t get the answers right. I was completely and utterly stumped. I was exasperated. 

A few weeks before this, my math major friend Isaac told me about a student he was tutoring. He said, “I feel like my student memorizes the equations, but he still doesn’t understand the concepts.” I had never been able to describe how math felt for me until that moment. My mind simply couldn’t grasp the concepts. To me, understanding math felt like trying to hang a coat on a wall with no coat hook. Every time I let go, the coat would fall to the floor in front of me. I could hang the coat on the back of a chair, or the arm of a couch for a moment, only to find it slowly slipping off minutes later.

Flash forward.

When I was 27, I gave my client an in depth analysis of the profitability of all his video productions for the year. I presented a 100-line Google Sheet, breaking down the budgets, expenses, gross and net profit, and profitability of each. I mapped the data to graphs and charts so my client could see where the money went visually. 

This wasn’t complex algebra by any means. But it was a big moment for me. I no longer felt completely conquered by math. I had used it to my advantage. I understood it. I leveraged it. 

Modern education is an endlessly flawed system that measures every complex person on the same binary scale. And maybe it labeled you as “bad” at something. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. 

The moral of the story is that the things you’ve been bad at in the past don’t need to conquer you still. Technology is changing. There are open-source, free tools to help you. And there are very few tests in the real world. If you’ve been bad at writing, or math, or athletics, or speaking, or science–there are tools to help you with those. When I discovered the built-in equations inside of Google Sheets, I realized I didn’t need to be good at math anymore. The sheet was good for me. 

Now, I just memorize the equations. I don’t need to understand the concepts.