When Suria first walked into the towering gates of a palm oil refinery in Lahad Datu, Sabah, the sun was just rising over the rows of oil palm trees. She had graduated from Universiti Malaysia Sabah with a degree in chemical engineering, carrying the pride of her kampung and the quiet determination of someone who knew the journey would be long.
She expected tough assignments. She expected long hours. She expected to compete with colleagues for promotions. What she didn’t expect was that her greatest competitor would not be another engineer — but herself.
The refinery was unforgiving. Steam hissed from the boilers, the control room buzzed with alarms, and tank farms stood like silent sentinels under the heat. As the only young female engineer in her department, Suria felt the weight of every mistake, real or imagined. Every time a senior questioned her decision, the voice in her head whispered, “Maybe they’re right… maybe you’re not ready.”
Her first real test came during a shutdown inspection. A minor leak in the crude palm oil pipeline threatened to delay production. The maintenance team looked to her for a solution. She hesitated — afraid to be wrong — until she remembered what her mentor once told her:
“The refinery doesn’t wait for perfect answers. It waits for courage.”
Suria took a deep breath, assessed the line, and proposed a quick isolation plan to allow partial operation while repairs continued. It wasn’t flawless, but it worked. The plant kept running, losses were minimized, and more importantly — she proved to herself that decisive action mattered more than silent doubt.
From then on, she stopped treating her career as a race against others. She began treating it as a daily challenge against yesterday’s Suria. Each day, she pushed herself to learn one new process, ask one smarter question, and take one step outside her comfort zone.
Competition with others revealed her weaknesses. Competition with herself revealed her potential.
Years later, when she was promoted to Senior Process Engineer, she stood on the refinery’s loading jetty, watching tankers carry refined palm oil to markets far beyond Sabah. She smiled, not because she had “beaten” anyone, but because she had beaten the one voice that mattered — the one that once said “good enough”.
For Suria, the refinery had always been more than steel, valves, and steam.
It was the arena where she learned the greatest truth:
The fight isn’t to prove others wrong.
It’s to prove yourself right.
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