What are you most passionate about? When someone asked me this question, I had my answer ready – public speaking. I was thirteen years old when I began, and I realized very quickly that I loved it. I loved the teamwork and I loved the intensity and excitement of the competition. I completed school and joined college to find my second love – robotics. Robotics started as a hobby for me, when a couple of friends and I decided to explore in our first year of engineering. It later blossomed into a passion which would keep me awake, skip my meal and push me to take an extra mile. I was a young boy who loved debates and robotics more than girls and movies.
It was the November of 2011, my first inter college debate competition. I probably gave one of the best speeches of my life only to realize that I did not win it. I participated in competitions one after the other, but the results never changed. Was I not lucky enough? The phrase the harder you work the luckier you get – became a myth.
In my pursuit of success, I focused on my second love. My team had the perfect robot - perfect wheels, balanced CG and perfect in weight – ready to conquer the terrain. But Lady luck seems to have been sleeping on that day. We repaired our robot and now we were sure that it could traverse any terrain. But I failed again and again. The two things that made my world became a distant habit. I stopped competing, I got boxed out. How do you feel when you lose? Not once, not twice but fail again and again, that too in areas which you thought were your greatest passion. Confidence shattered and self-esteem evaporated.
One day when my father saw me in this state of despair, he narrated a small story. . He told me that when I was a kid, I could not even stand at an age when most kids could walk without any aid. Doctors told that I may not be able to walk. No one even told me to stand or walk, but I kept trying and trying and this year I even completed my first marathon. My dad told me, ‘If back then, when the world was on the verge of giving up on you, you stood, you walked, and you ran, then what is stopping you… to try once again?’
With confidence reinstated by my dad, I came back to the stage and the arena. I figured out that when the going gets tough, the tough gets going, be it a robot which can conquer all terrains or the difference between a perfect speech and a winning speech. Everything was the same this time, the stage, the audience, the topics or the terrains, the competitors or the arena, the only difference was that Anik started kissing success. By the end of my 3rd year in college, there was not a single debate competition in and around the city nor a single robotics event where I had not participated… and won them all.
What happens when you fail at work? What happens when your confidence hits rock bottom? You have two options – either you accept that you cannot win and go back home, or you come back again and again and again. It is said that those who never give up are the ones who never lose. The biggest skill of a boxer is not in the strength of his punch, but in his ability to bounce pack after getting hit with a punch. In the pursuit of success failure is just a part, it will always be there. But whether you succumb to it or rise from the ashes is a choice.
T. A. Pai Management Institute