“The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. - Confucius
I always hated such motivational quotes, these were just lies that the adults told us just so that we get inspired. But for me a 17-year-old adult, it was just a thin cloud veiled over the realities of life. The world for me was just a huge barrel roll where we just had to go through the motions and everything would anyways roll back to normal.
But all of this changed for me at a fateful Friday morning, looking forward to the weekend and was just waiting for my school bell to ring. That morning, our chemistry teacher distributed our mid term paper, a class 12 student who was scoring well and geared up for his board exams in 3 months, I was not worried I knew I would have scored well. But my marksheet read 13/50, it was like someone had taken out my intestines and was now chocking me with them. I had never failed in an exam, and to fail in one so close to the board examinations was not something I was prepared for. I scoured through my paper, hoping there must have been a mistake, the teacher must have forgot to check an answer, but as I flipped through the pages reality dawned on me.
I HAD FAILED
The teacher called me to her desk and said that I had to take remedial classes after school due to the poor results. I was aghast, I never thought I would be asked to take remedial classes after all I was one the highest scoring students in class. That day I went home and showed the marksheet to my father, he too was shocked but then a smile appeared on his face and he said the above quote to me. From then on, every day I took one step, each day taking upon a new task thereby working on cutting down the mountain of a syllabus into small peaks.
Fast forward to 23rd May when I received my board results – 95/100, that day I realised that maybe Confucius knew what he was talking about.
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