Thursday, February 14, 2008

Two Decades of Life

It is wonderful to learn how far the great men from past as well as present generations have gone after only two decades into their lives.

Two years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the 20-year-old Augustus, his grandnephew, was intensely in a long and bitter struggle for power in the Roman world. Alexander the Great was only 20 years old when his father died, and he succeeded to the throne without difficulty.

George Washington was a district adjutant at the age of 20, charged with training the militia in the quarter assigned to him.

At barely 20 years old, Thomas Alva Edison was already on his way to coming up with his first invention, an electric vote-recorder. Guglielmo Marconi started working on the idea of the existence of electromagnetic waves when he was only 20, after reading the experiments on a similar subject by a fellow scientist a few years earlier. That eventually led to the invention of radio. The 20-year-old Michael Faraday attended lectures by a famous British scientist and became fascinated, got hired as his assistant and within a few years came up with some important discoveries of his own.

Ibn Sina was already two years into regaining full status as physician when he was 20. Ibn Khaldun, at the age of 20, began his political career at the Chancellery of the Tunisian ruler Ibn Tafrakin.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer started writing short stories and books, as well as propaganda for the Indonesian Nationalist cause at the age of 20 while serving in a paramilitary group at the height of his nation’s war against the British and Dutch.

Bill Gates laid the foundation for Microsoft when he started working at Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems with Paul Allen when he was only 20, after a successful demonstration of their Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter.

Garry Kasparov is already a second-ranked chess master in the world when he turned 20.

Lennard Lee, a 20-year-old Cambridge medical student easily surpassed Datuk Malik Mydin’s timing en route to becoming only the second Malaysian to swim across the English Channel.

In the sporting field, Ryan Babel and Lucas Leiva, both being 20, are already first team regulars with Liverpool. Andrew Bynum is fast developing to become one of the premier centers in the NBA at the tender age of 20. The 20-year-old Rafael Nadal meanwhile broke a 29-year record of 53 consecutive clay court match victories.

Adlan Benan Omar, Imran Idris, Yazid Jay Jalani all entered Cambridge when they were 20.

Of course I am only focusing on a tiny number in a huge pool of many other great men that had lived and left substantial remarks in the long history of our world. But it is more than suffice to highlight the heights of which attained by the great figures in the first two decades of lives.

As for me, well, I turn 20 today. To date, I attended a pretty decent school, got involved in a basketball team, scored a fairly good result in the SPM and secured a scholarship to study overseas. That pretty much makes my resume. Clearly far off the ranks of the aforementioned greats.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

happy birthday bro..
the 41st member of the Motherrussians.
at 20 you are already making history..
i've known you as the greatest person i've met..and i'm proud to call you my friend...
goodluck in everything that you do..

Noni Kapet said...

it's not what greatness is achieved at a specific point in life - it's whether the life as a whole, in entirety; is an extra-ordinary life.

there are people who created history at 15 only to disappear and die frustrated at 40.

life is a journey, it's never about "points" - it's about the war so to speak, not about the battle.

and we should never measure ourselves against others but only to what God has given us. Each of us has our purpose and for that is given certain things from God - it's whether we make full use of what has been given, to serve the purpose that is righteous and noble.

It's a journey that matters, not the stops we take.

happy birthday, you ought to talk a lot more when i c u this weekend.

Danial Jaafar 🇲🇾 said...

selamat hari lahir

gue tak reti sangat bermadah bahasa ni.

moga hidup dalam rahmatNya
Amin

caliphkaai said...

"To date, I attended a pretty decent school, got involved in a basketball team, scored a fairly good result in the SPM and secured a scholarship to study overseas. That pretty much makes my resume. Clearly far off the ranks of the aforementioned greats."

mencungkil gigi buluh diparang,
disiat-siat senipis lidi,
merendah diri bukan kepalang,
terlupa budi usaha sendiri.

disiat-siat senipis lidi,
panjang terlalu hujung dikerat,
terlupa budi usaha sendiri,
eloklah begitu darjat terangkat.

udah 20 tahun?
selamat hari lahir...
maaf, lewat mengetahuinya.

mostlyepiphanies said...

salam hari lahir cepe!Aww this post makes me feel tiny,and i'm not even 20 yet!(that's not saying much,since I might as well be 20).

Anyways skang ko dalam flight balik aussie kot!Cepat2!