The circles shrank once more, and my fingers tensed on the keyboard as I struggled to keep pace with the 220 BPM tempo of Tengaku on “osu!”. Osu! is a rhythm game that challenges players in hand-eye coordination, focus, and stamina. I had played this song countless times; it got to a point where the sliders and circles were etched into my muscle memory. Yet, here I was, stuck, failing repeatedly. I clicked ‘retry’ again, determined to push through.

The only sound that night was the upbeat tempo of Yuku Suzuhana's voice across my headphones. My room, lit only by the soft glow of my monitor, was a cocoon–isolated from the world outside. Yet despite this tranquil atmosphere, every time I retried the map, I managed to miss a new section. Was it my mentality? A skill issue? It was not supposed to be this difficult anymore. After all this time, I should have been better. I needed to be better.

As the night progressed and my score had not, it finally clicked. Frustration blurred the circles on the screen, and I leaned back in my chair, my hand hovering over the mouse for a moment before letting it rest. In that moment of quiet pause, I realized this was not about the game anymore. My fingers were present as they moved with mechanical precision, but my mind wandered elsewhere. The pursuit of perfection in osu!—the endless retries, the frustration—was no different from how I approached everything in life: coding and biology, all an interminable pursuit of achievement and flawless execution.

But why? I looked into the game, and the dim light of my room muted the color. My desire to click "retry" was still there, but this time I resisted. For the first time, my eyes focused beyond the glowing circles and sliders. Suddenly, I did not have to get a perfect score to prove anything. What mattered was that I kept going even when events did not go as planned.

As I emerged from that dim room, illuminated only by a screen, I took this realization. In collaborative coding projects, I used to push my team relentlessly, focusing only on efficient algorithms and minimal execution time. But during one late-night debugging session, a teammate was clearly overwhelmed by a complex bug. Instead of just pointing out the error or optimizing their code myself, I sat down with them. "Let's walk through this logic step-by-step," I suggested, patiently explaining the concepts. "It's not about who writes the fastest code, but about understanding the process and building something solid together."

Similarly, in biology, my focus shifted from merely memorizing pathways for high test scores to appreciating the intricate beauty of biological systems. Lab experiments, once stressful hurdles demanding perfect results, became explorations. When an experiment didn't yield the expected outcome, instead of frustration, I felt curiosity. What went wrong? What could this unexpected result teach me? The challenges – like the complex interactions in an ecosystem – were still there, but my approach changed. I wasn't just chasing grades; I was engaging with the fascinating process of discovery. Each unexpected finding or flawed hypothesis became a stepping stone, deepening my understanding more than rote memorization ever could.

Perfection has never been a part of human nature, nor is it a part of osu! It lies in finding pleasure in the rhythm, even when the beat is hard to follow. It’s about recognizing that some things are worth the effort—not because they guarantee success, but because of the growth and satisfaction that come from the struggle. Whether it was mastering that rapid BPM, even when I didn’t hit every note perfectly, or debugging complex code, even when the logic felt tangled and obscure, I learned to love the messiness of it all.
After all, life is not about achieving a high rank or being first with the highest results but simply staying in the game, finding a rhythm between wins and losses, and remembering each missed note played within the music.