February 13th, 2026
Trust the process.
As I write this, I am a tech content creator with 25k followers on Instagram, 10k followers on LinkedIn, incoming Software engineer intern at LinkedIn this summer, and a student at Purdue University with multiple hackathon wins.
But life wasn’t always this good. A life like this shouldn’t have been possible.
I used to play ice hockey at the highest level before I was cut from my professional AAA Elite team a year into the pandemic of 2019.
The years that would follow would be some of the worst years of my life,
I was spoiled, unhealthy, and stupid (slept during online class, missed assignments, played video games through each hour of the day). If there was any time in my life that I’ve been depressed, it was then. I had dug a hole so deep that I had pushed myself out of the running for nearly all T50 universities.
My freshman year of high school was a disaster. The fall from glory of what used to be a promising, upcoming, young ice hockey super star, was now reduced to a 1.7 GPA, no extracurricular, no friends, loser who played video games to numb the pain.
I regretted quitting ice hockey, the entire experience of it.
But fast forward 4-5 years, I look fondly on the kid I used to be because he did something that didn't make any sense.
When all hope was lost, when I was standing at death’s door reconsidering my reasons for living, when a decades worth of grind, work, and sacrifice amounted to nothing, I decided to believe in myself, work hard and trust the process.
At the absolute bottom of the valley, I killed whatever ego I had and looked up to my own classmates as role models. I started to listen to my parents’ words from years ago like ghosts of the past guiding me on my next move. I looked towards myself to be creative, follow my heart, be a better friend, a better brother, a better son, work hard, and trust the process.
In the remaining years of my high school career,
Until I got into a T20 university for computer science in one of the worst job markets computer science majors had ever seen,
And today I am a sophomore with
But none of this would have ever happened if I didn't trust the process.
If I had never played ice hockey, I would’ve never understood what it meant to be ambitious. If I never was ambitious, I never would have believed I could do it. If I never believed in myself, my life would have ended right there and then.
After the pain of being alone, of being judged by your peers for trying, of trying to change for the better, my life is a story of someone who fell complacent once and lost everything, but life does not end after failure.
Until death, all defeat is psychological.
So pick your head up, aim for the stars, and trust the process.
Because it will never make sense to you in the moment, why you have to go through so much pain, so much suffering. But if you trust the process, worked hard enough, dreamed big enough, if you were tough enough, sacrificed enough, learned enough and applied what you learned enough, then on one given day in the future, you could achieve what you thought to be impossible.
Believe in the process.
~ Ethan