Years later, I now believe that such a pattern is true for almost any field. There are some who are actually naturally good at certain things, and then there are those who appear to be naturally talented. For the casual observer, this difference will all but go unnoticed. Yet, given a choice between talent and hard work, somehow I prefer hard work. It’s perhaps because I have seen a lot of people waste their talent, as they became carried away with what they could do, while, those who reached such a stature by hard work understood the process and what it takes to succeed at the highest level.

In the book “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell, he mentions something similar – the 10,000 hour rule: claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practising a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Now, if you practised what you want 2 hours every day, that’s going to take you just about 14 years to become an expert at it. This is why it’s so important that you don’t let anyone tell you how bad you are at something. The only thing that matters is how much you love doing it, and how badly you want to make it up there. Talent can be substituted for hard work in lots of cases – especially if the process of ageing is not a factor for what you are trying to achieve.

In a batch of some twenty students taking the exam, there would be around 20-22 question papers, lying face down and spread out on a table near the entrance of the lab. We queue up by our register number and wait patiently for our turn. Each person, when his turn arrives walks forward, looks at the pile of question sets, and chooses ONE.

The cruel thing about this process is that, in case the question happens to be the only question you had not studied for (one law states that the probability of getting a question is indirectly proportional to the amount of confidence you have with the answer for that question), you would end up feeling really mad at yourself for picking that paper!

This has led to numerous superstitions amongst the students, when it comes to picking a paper. A friend of mine once said he will always pick the right most paper. Another person said he would pick the one in the middle. Some try to keep a blank mind and pray that their fingers randomly touch a paper with an easy question. And, the last person in the batch almost always curses his fate for being the last guy in the queue, because he is left with only a few papers to choose from. Or, on an unlucky day, only one paper to pick up.

But, I ask myself, does it really matter which paper I choose? Deep down I know it doesn’t. My logical reasoning tells me that there cannot be any correlation between picking a paper from a particular position and the difficulty of the question. Yet, some things are just outside the control of your logical mind. You would rather be superstitious than “break” the habit and end up with a killer question. Especially when you are already depending on the stars to wade through an exam!