‘Missing a forest for a tree’ goes a popular idiom and it best describes my generation’s approach to many a thing. We are so consumed in our quest to achieve big time success that we often forget to savour the small successes that come our way. The result is that most of us would have even forgotten the taste of success. It therefore becomes very important for us to identify those small successes that come our way and use them as ladders to achieve more success. There is only so far that a man who hasn’t tasted success can go. I was going through a lean patch both mentally and physically and so decided that I would do something that would make me happy. I wanted to take on a small task whose accomplishment would give me a small taste of success, one that I desperately needed to fuel my inner fire.

Though the top billing was assigned to my project work, I realised that I would be able to achieve very little if I was ill-motivated. On the other hand, I could do a lot if my passion was strong. Solving programming puzzles gives me immense satisfaction, and that is exactly what I decided to do, first of all. I picked up an MGPT problem of a previous batch(Kingkong) and started solving it. I was initially rusty and my mind, inert, but as the minutes starting ticking by, my mind rose to the occasion and the dead creativity (it was not really dead, after all!) began to come alive. I managed to solve the problem in about a hour and a half, not exactly a great time, but I was satisfied with the small success. The program executed perfectly for all the inputs provided, including a special case that I had correctly anticipated and accounted for in my code. The confidence that I got from solving a single problem was immense, and I feel that the time spent was more than worth it.