My cousin's friend works at a startup in Bengaluru. At a family function he asked what I was into, and I said I'd got 94% and was hoping for a good college. He nodded, waited a second, and then asked: "Cool — but what have you made?"

I had nothing. Not "nothing impressive." Literally nothing. Fifteen years of school and I could not point at one single thing I had built, written, drawn, organised or shipped that existed outside an answer sheet.

That question rearranged something in my head, and I've been annoying about it ever since. So here's the argument, as honestly as I can make it.

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The maths problem nobody says out loud

Marks are a ranking system. Ranking systems only work when they can tell people apart.

Look at what actually happens at scale in India. Roughly 12 to 14 lakh students write JEE Main every year. The IITs have about 17,000 seats. NEET pulls over 20 lakh candidates. Boards results come out and lakhs of students are sitting above 90%.

When everyone has the same number, the number stops being information.

So when you and forty thousand other people all have a 94, that number has done its job — it got you into the pile. It cannot do the second job, which is telling anyone which of you they should be interested in. It's not that your marks are worthless. It's that they're identical, and identical is invisible.

Here's the harder part. A percentage says you were good at answering questions someone else set, in a room, under time pressure, on a syllabus you didn't choose. That's a genuine skill. But almost nothing you'll be asked to do after school looks like that.

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What "proof of work" actually means

Boring name, simple idea: something you made that exists, that someone other than your school has seen.

Those last two conditions do all the work.

Exists means it's a link, a file, a photo, a repo, a recording — not a claim. "I'm good at design" is a claim. A folder of 12 posters is proof.

Someone other than your school means it faced the outside world, even a tiny bit. Marked by a teacher who has to be encouraging is a different signal from posted publicly, entered into a competition, or actually used by somebody.

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What counts (and it's more than you think)

Most people hear "portfolio" and think you need to be an artist or a coder. You don't. You need evidence.

*Organising and teaching count. People underrate them constantly because they don't produce a file — take photos, write it down, and they do.

Eight okay things beat one imaginary perfect thing.

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How to have proof by next month

You don't need a plan for the next five years. You need one thing finished.

1. Pick the smallest real thing. Not "learn video editing" — one 60-second edit of your school sports day. Scope it so small that finishing is boring.
2. Give yourself two weeks. Longer and it becomes a someday project. Someday projects are just ideas wearing a costume.
3. Put it somewhere public. Post it, enter it, submit it, send it to one person who isn't obliged to be nice to you.
4. Write down what happened. Two lines. What you made, what broke, what you'd change. This is the bit that turns a file into a story you can tell in an interview.
5. Do it again. Five okay things beat one imaginary perfect one, every single time.

Two weeks, one finished thing. That's the whole method.

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Now the uncomfortable bit

I'm not going to tell you marks don't matter. In India that would be a lie, and you'd know it.

Marks are the gate. Cut-offs are real, CUET is real, your parents' worry is real and mostly justified. Nobody is going to look at your portfolio instead of your Class 12 result when you apply to a Delhi University college. Do not read this and stop studying. That's not the argument.

The argument is that marks are the floor, not the ceiling. They get you through the gate, alongside everyone else who also got through. What happens after the gate — internships, scholarships, teams, opportunities that come to you instead of you chasing them — that runs almost entirely on evidence.

And the honest kicker: the people who build things usually understand the subject better anyway. Making a physics simulation teaches you more physics than another set of solved papers. These aren't opposing hobbies. Bas, one of them counts twice.