Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am a religious person. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a low profile person, so I don’t usually talk much about my personal life. So, I’m not that religious person who is always talking to other people about religion and I’m very happy that way. I believe that faith should be something personal, a person who ends up talking a lot about it ends up becoming a boring person.
I know people of different religions. Catholics, evangelicals, spiritualists, atheists, etc. So I avoid talking too much about God to people who don’t believe in God, I usually use the word destiny. When I’m talking to an atheist, instead of saying “God has a purpose for you” I use “Destiny has a purpose for you”.
Now I’m going to tell a personal story. As soon as I entered college, I was introduced to an activity called a coding marathon, basically we train for ICPC and other algorithm competitions. I immediately related this project and noticed that they are people who solve complex problems using programming and this could be very useful in my future, since I would like to work in big techs.
At first I attended training without the aim of competing. I love sports and understand the importance of competitions. If you are competing, you must compete to win. Competitions are necessary for everyone’s growth. To compete you need responsibility, commitment, discipline, cooperation and friendship.
The problem was that I didn’t feel like I had the necessary commitment to represent my college in the biggest programming competition in the world. I participated in other projects at college and would not have the exclusive dedication to prepare in a way in which I could win the competition. So, I was happy just attending training to gain knowledge, without the obligation to compete.
One day, I ended up being invited by two people to be part of a team to compete in a programming marathon. These two people are extremely intelligent and dedicated. At that point in my life, I was already in the job market, working full time, and I still had to study for college. Despite so many responsibilities, I chose to accept the invitation and join this team.
As a competitive person, I didn’t feel very happy seeing my teammates dedicating all their time to the competition while I was working. The feeling I had was that I was being useless and people were having to study for me, since I didn’t have as much time to prepare as I was busy with other things. After some training, we did the competition. The result was not so good, but I’m happy with my individual performance, I thought it could be much worse.
The following year, an opportunity arose for someone to take my place on the team. A person who would have much more time to dedicate and with him the team would have a much greater chance of triumphing in the competition. One of the football players I admire is Diego Ribas and he is the author of a phrase that I carry with me in my life, during an interview after a football game he said “The good of Flamengo is more important than my ownership”. Therefore, I was very happy with my replacement and I really hoped that this team would be very successful in the next competition.
It worked out! The team achieved a great place in the national stage, but one of the members had to retire and again the team was missing and again I was asked to return to the team. It turns out that after a year without training, I was practically retired and flying in my career as a programmer, standing out more and more in the companies I worked for.
Furthermore, my available time was even shorter, so it would be very difficult for me to get back into the competition. At no point did I hide these problems, I was always very transparent with my friends. After a lot of sacrifice trying to convince me, they said they wouldn’t participate in the competition again if I wasn’t the third member of the team, so they managed to convince me to participate again.
We train as much as possible. Something very memorable for me was training in the middle of a shopping mall during Carnival. While many people were wearing costumes and having fun, we were focused on studying for a test. The name we chose for the team was Lebenslangschicksalsschatz.
Lebenslangschicksalsschatz is a fictional word from the series How I Met Your Mother. It means the treasure of Destiny for life. According to my friends, the idea was that the coding marathon was a gift that we had received in our lives and that would mark us forever.
The day before the competition, I spoke to one of my team members and told him that it would be incredible if we could get fourth place in the competition and he agreed and said “That would really be the best scenario”. We are competitive, but we are also realistic. We know that there are some teams that are better than us and that would probably be ahead of us. Fourth place would give us a gold medal and a place in the world final of the competition.
On the day of the competition we were focused and did much more than we expected. Everything went very well, the teamwork was incredible and so was the precision. We did 11 of the 13 problems and became national champion. For the first time in history, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro was national champion of the programming marathon.
Destiny truly gave me a treasure that will remain with me for life. Thank you Destiny.