Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Necessity v/s Passion

I am waiting for my train to start from my work place back home. I do this every day from work but today I am late. It is almost 8:45 p.m. It has been a very tiring day. Tired by complaining of work, thinking why things couldn’t have been better, what if I was doing things differently, why don’t I change few things, blah, blah, complain, criticize, condemn.

Train master announces – “Obviously, Train is going to be delayed 7 minutes”. 7 minutes? Are you kidding me? I am already 3 hours late to reach home! And now they make me wait 7 more minutes? And who can believe how long the 7 minutes will be. I heard the ‘Obvious’ announcement 15 minutes back already.

There I go again… complaining, grumbling. Well, today’s day will go by and I will not even remember I spent significant part of my day grumbling. So who cares?

Do successful people have such frustrations? I am sure they do. All humans do because no place is perfect even if you are perfect, or you want to believe that you are. Either people around are idiots or the whole situation is just not right. Then what do these successful people do? Don’t they complain? Needless to say they don’t waste their time crying like someone like me would.

They are too focused on important things in their lives than to even think about other things that can cause a bother. Their complaints would be – How can I better things? What do I do to make things better? How can I do things differently? How can I change few things? My work suck but how can I enjoy what I do?

And that’s the difference between me and them. Both me and they work hard, both think hard. But the difference between what drives me and what drives them is ‘Necessity’ v/s ‘Passion’.

Btw, 7 minutes is almost 30 minutes long now. Grrr!

Thinking about focus, one thing comes to my mind. I have been struggling with weight problem ever since I was in college. I tried different diets, joined gym. I would carry on with a plan for may be max 10 days (recalling optimistically). And then back to square one. In fact at times 2-3 squares behind square one.

Lady behind just cried out, “This is bull$h&*’. (Train journeys are fun, get to see so many expressions, so many people!) Btw, the lights in the train are now turned on.

So, what was driving my focus to become thin? Necessity! I wanted to loose weight. I wanted quick results. I tried for 10 days but at the end of it I was too tired and frustrated. I did not see any benefits and I gave up too soon. I was too lazy to keep going.
But have you not heard of stories of people who went from size 10 to size 4? What did they have that I lacked? I know the answer. Passion! They had the passion and worked towards their passion.

The train has started moving. So, not everything is dark and bad today. I finally will get to go home tonight (before mid-night).

So where do I get the passion from? I was talking to one of my friends one day. I started complaining about work and he told how he did not like his job either. Then for a moment we started talking about what we could do for living if we had an option not to do things that bother us. Though we knew that some things may not be practical in near future, I could feel a new energy in me. We were so engrossed and came up with so many innovative ideas. Just thinking about the new ideas, my work did not feel so bad it did before the chat. I had a great day at work after that.

Abhinav Bindra won a Gold at Olympics for India couple of days back. During the award ceremony, he was so calm and confident. He had an ‘I know I deserved to win, I am good at what I do, I knew I could win Olympics gold one day. I worked hard for this’ look on his face all the time. I looked up his profile on Wikipedia and was surprised to know he is 25 yrs of age and CEO of a company. After Olympics he is going to get monetary benefit of 2 crore rupees. Boy! What an achievement. And how was he handling sport and business? I know it is his passion for both that drives him every day and there was this golden day where we reached the peak of success and got rewarded for his passion.

At work, I have got a chance to interact and work with many people who are passionate about their work. And how do I know they are passionate? Well, they deal with similar people I do, they work around similar things that I do. And they are successful. That’s because they want it so bad, it’s their passion. They know what they want and work towards it no matter with whom they have to deal with or what they need to do to reach there.

I believe that one who is passionate, crazy about anything will achieve it, will get it against all odds. There are NO EXCEPTIONS.
And those who do things just because they need to it will never get what they want. However hard they work or whatever they do. They will never be happy because necessities will change with time and finally they will give up. There are NO EXCEPTIONS.