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KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 1

I 'm 17. Full of hopes, dreams, plans and hormones. Coming so far, it hasn't been as hard as what Netflix and the Internet says it should have been. Till 15, I was not doing much in school, always flunked in maths, chemistry was clearly not my thing, and, to make things worse, my brother aced his A Levels.

But I had a backup. I have a deep affection for books (not textbooks, obviously). I completed my first book "Think and Grow Rich", written by Napoleon Hill, when I was 14. Baba always spread his essence of reading in-house, which inspired me to keep going. Books gave me the company, entertainment, knowledge and insights.

Apart from books, cycling is my salvation from the mundane schedule.

The teenage years, for me, are a phase where you have to believe in the power of the dawn.

Quitting social media in my mid-teens has helped me develop a principle of my own.

Nothing is more tranquil than being solitary. Not using the social media, being a bibliophile and cheerfully accepting the cycle as my best friend, is making my teenage years peculiar compared to that of my peers.

Putting yourself in this kind of loop makes you so delicate, being highly influenced by the circumstances you come across.

Class 10 had just ended (thanks to COVID-19, I didn't have to give the board exams).

Textbooks were still something which I wanted to be good at but had no idea how. I was on the cricket ground during my holidays, where I happened to meet a friend of my brother, who had ranked 25th in the national MBBS exam.

As a person who loathed textbooks, I asked him how I could improve on my studies. In a low voice, he replied, "From now on stop loafing around."I have no idea what synapses got formed in my mind when he said so, but surely some neurons did connect. Slowly I began enjoying maths, physics followed, and chemistry, which doesn't really make sense to me, accompanied, too.

In the internal test taken by the school, I ranked 2nd, and it was the first time in three years that I had cleared all the subjects.

The guy who always use to flunk in maths, aced this time, scoring 28/30. The setup I had created for myself is what I think gave the space to flourish.

As a high schooler and a guy with vague huge life goals, I highly suggest you read a couple of books - "The Secret" and "A Mind for Numbers", written by Rhonda Byrne and Barbara Oakley respectively.

Baba, who has always been my vertebral column through thick and thin, is my inspiration and the kind of person I look forward to becoming.

"If you want to make a difference in this world," Baba says, "You have to be different from the world."

A version of this article appears in the print on February 2, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.