Edit: you can disregard this comment now as the article and title are updated to the (much better) originals.
It's a good story, but the title is fairly misleading. It sounds like he did "mess up" a few times. But ultimately he persevered thanks to a tenacious teacher. It seems the real message is to keep pushing forward, even if you stumble.
Clicking through to the original Medium article suggests that Vox is responsible for the title since the original is much better.
I think that this depends on the definition of "messing up" - he missed a financial aid window in 6th grade, and something as trivial as filing a form late had a tangible impact on a year of his life. I think that his point is that this experience conditioned him to view risk quite differently from wealthier peers. I would disagree that "pushing forward" is a valid prescription - the counterfactual "without Mrs. Harris and Head-Royce" leaves him on a different trajectory.
Headlines are usually picked by an editor not the author. In this case the author had even already published another version of the piece with a different headline "Lost Diamonds, How a financial aid form almost convinced me I wasn’t good enough and how our current system is failing underprivileged talent".
... no, I think it's more important to take away that our system is keeping a lot of people at 0.1x when they could be 10x, not that a few 1.2xers could become 3xers if they really pushed it.
It's a good story, but the title is fairly misleading. It sounds like he did "mess up" a few times. But ultimately he persevered thanks to a tenacious teacher. It seems the real message is to keep pushing forward, even if you stumble.
Clicking through to the original Medium article suggests that Vox is responsible for the title since the original is much better.