Kuala Lampur, Dec. 4 -- It came suddenly. The way lightning arrives a split second before the thunder, during one of those familiar afternoon storms in KL. I was walking back to my Ibnu Sina Residential College office after a meeting at the Faculty of Engineering when the sky grumbled, the wind shifted, and a thought appeared as quickly as the bolt that cracked somewhere behind Bukit Cinta:

What if you are already the person you have been trying so hard to become?

It was such a simple question, yet it stopped me for a moment. You see, we spent so much of our lives chasing improvement, trying to fix something inside ourselves, trying to grow in ways that look impressive. We read, we plan, we measure. We tell ourselves we are not quite th...