The Art of Not Throwing Your Laptop Out the Window After Day 49 of a Failed Project
The afternoon rain has finally stopped hammering the zinc roof of the Akka Kadai Coffee Shop, leaving behind that heavy, steam-bath humidity that makes you wonder why humans ever decided to settle in the Klang Valley. Ah Meng sits across from me, methodically wiping down his wooden table for the fourth time, his face carved with the quiet exhaustion of a man who has opened this same metal grille at 5:00 AM every single day for the past thirty years. Across the alley, a group of young contractors are chipping away at a stubborn slab of old concrete outside a shophouse, striking it rhythmically, clack, clack, clack, under the glaring sun. We Malaysians love the grand finale the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Datukship announcement, the viral TikTok video of someone finally making it big. But nobody ever stops to clap for the hundred boring, sweat-soaked blows that happened before anyone was watching.
We are a society obsessed with instant noodles, instant upgrades, and overnight success stories. We scroll through Instagram watching twenty-somethings buy condominiums and Teslas, and suddenly we feel like absolute failures because our own stone hasn't cracked yet after a mere week of trying. We throw down our tools in disgust, convinced that because the first stroke, the tenth stroke, and the nine-hundredth stroke didn't shatter the rock, the whole exercise was a waste of time. It’s like blaming the last drop of rain for causing the flash flood on the Duke Highway ignoring the hours of heavy downpour that quietly prepared the ground.
Success doesn't magically appear because you happened to be holding the hammer at the exact second the stone finally gives way. The last stroke only breaks the stone because of every single useless-looking, arm-aching, frustrating blow that came before it. Every late-night revision, every rejected job application, every quiet failure that made you want to pack up and go back to your village none of it was wasted. It was just compounding.
Annan Vaithegi - Personal Thought
"We spend our lives waiting for the lightning strike of luck, forgetting that the grandest monuments are built by ordinary hands swinging a heavy hammer into the dirt, one stubborn day at a time."
Annan Vaithegi (annanvaithegi@icloud.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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