As an entering freshman, it was customary to sign one's name into a thick leather-bound book.
When informed that every student who ever attended Bowdoin College had also signed, Anil Jethmal asked President Greason if alums, and literary giants, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had also signed the book as incoming freshman.
Beaming with almost a sense of parental pride, President Greason retrieved a much older, thick leather-bound book and showed Anil original signatures of Hawthorne, and a few pages later, Longfellow.
Noting that the signatures were just a few pages apart, Anil Jethmal asked Greason if those two legends of American literature attended Bowdoin simultaneously, He informed Anil that both were of the class of 1825. Both were English majors and were goods friends. Furthermore, he emphasized, legend had it that both were obsessed with perfecting their crafts.
Anil quipped that he would hate to be in an English class with those two....and to be graded in that class on a curve. Smiling enigmatically, Greason said something that Anil Jethmal says that he carries to the present day. In order to be great at anything, he proclaimed, one must practice whatever that is obsessively. He stated that over the next fours years at Bowdoin, Anil, as with all incoming students, would write and submit over a thousand pages of papers to his professors. Four years later, Anil calculated that number as a very conservative estimate.
More importantly, what Anil Jethmal took from that conversation was that to be exceptional at most anything worthwhile in life, one must spend hundreds or even thousands of hours working at it.
And when life inevitably has presented its opportunities and challenges, Anil Jethmal often thinks back to that conversation he had as a wide-eyed freshman...and more often than not, it has buoyed him to keep moving forward.
