Struggle is essence of life

Santosh Rangarajan
2 min readSep 11, 2021

I came across this wonderful passage in Book, Art Of Science and Engineering

Richard Hamming — Art of Science and Engineering

Indeed deep/insightful and motivational passage

Now let’s look at iconic tweet from iconic Amitabh Bachan.

Essence of both passages are same

Problems/challenges give purpose to life. It gives reason to move along day in and day out.It makes the Journey meaningful. They are necessary.

Consider a scenario where there is no struggle . Below is example below from Book Age of Spiritual Machines

As passage says , We like to solve problems but we don’t want all of them to be solved too quickly

Problems give purpose and motivation. Struggle should be embraced as part of journey

There are other areas where each of us would have similar experience

  • Working hard for sales deal vs closing deal without any struggle
  • Preparing and cracking an interview vs interview where there is no technical challenge
  • Cracking a entrance example
  • Solving that difficult scalability problem

Examples are numerous and we can all relate to it.

Lets consider this screenshot from Andrew wiles who took 7 years to solve Fermat’s last theorem

Fermat’s Last Theorem

Requires amazing grit/will power/determination and motivation

Take Away/Conclusion

Struggle/Challenges/Problems are part of life/business. One cannot run away from it. Participation with intent is key. Any achievement/results without struggle doesn't give inner satisfaction which one seeks. There is no learning/growth without struggle.

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Santosh Rangarajan

Software Engineer. Interests include — Distributed Systems, Data Storage , Programming languages