The greatest challenge I’ve had to face in life was overcoming the overwhelming need to be perfect in absolutely everything I said or did. This thirst for excellence ensured that I missed out on many great opportunities simply because of the fact that I feared my handiwork would be anything less than perfect.
I loved to read and even as a child I devoured every book I could lay my hands on. From this love for books came my desire to be writer. I had a dream and I was ready to toil as well. So, I wrote and wrote and wrote at every opportunity I got, on the covers of text books, on the margins of registers, sometimes even on newspapers. All these ruminations however were far from perfect for me. They were for my eyes alone. Eventually what happened was that my art began to stagnate for lack of feedback. That is when I realized that in this search for perfection, I had almost destroyed whatever craftmanship I had.
I decided to fix the problem. I started off slowly, by letting people read what I wrote, then by participating in inter school competitions, writing for college magazines and finally by featuring a few of my writings in The New Indian Express, an English daily. What I learnt from my experience with writing, I started applying to other areas as well. I started accepting more and more challenges and looked at each of them just as an opportunity to learn and not as a platform to prove my mettle. The hunger for success was replaced by a thirst for learning and experiencing and excellence I realized just happened to follow…