I remember

I remember when i was a kid we used to play this game, in the college pool.
Who would dive, touch the bottom and get up the fastest to the surface.
I remember I used to cheat. I never would touch the bottom, go only half the way and then tried to come back to the surface fast !
I always lost.

I was surprised. Though a hopeless swimmer, I used to be good at this games , find the coin, catch the pebble etc. Or maybe I used the play these games all the time,thats why I was hopeless swimmer. But I couldn't learn one important thing from his little game.

I remember in my first year I saw my friend Ashutosh go through a real bad time. He had a fight with his friends, his love life went awry, his grades were down in the dumps.
And then, I saw his meteoritic rise. He consistently scored more than 70 % , lost oodles of weight, went from a meager 60 percentile in mock cats to a dizzying 97 percentile in CAT 2006. He maybe never had it so good. But I couldn't pick a simple clue from his life.

And the that one small thing was -

You can't rise up until you've hit the bottom