Today I have to discuss about hard work, focus, involved approach, practice and research? Why? Because I have been inspired to do so, by a prompt under #IndiSpire!

Yes, what I want to submit is that Inspiration is the driving force. I remember a story here. According to it there was a drunkard person, he kept consuming a lot of wine regularly, while his financial condition was not good, he could not support his family well, often he had quarrels with his wife, he often abused and beat his wife and sons and ultimately he died of excessive drinking.

That person had two sons, on growing up, one of them became a drunkard like his father but the other one never touched wine. On being asked, the first one said- what could I do? My father was a drunkard, I also became, I had to be like that!

The other one, who closely watched and felt, what a nuisance drinking had created in their family and because of drinking, his mother and both the brothers suffered a lot! So he had taken a pledge that come what may, he would not become like his father!

So here the background was the same for both of them, but both the brothers got different inspiration from that! Inspiration could to some extent come from verbal teachings but most of it comes from behavior of your peers, elders and social circle. Yes our parents, teachers etc. become our role-models, so we knowingly or unknowingly draw inspiration from them. But what inspiration we take depends to great extent on our values and attitude.

Now what an inspired person does after that, depends on his or her- hard-work, focus, involved approach and no doubt also on practice and research. There is an example of Guru Dronacharya Ji, he taught all his disciples the same art of Archery but it was Arjun who said that he is only looking at the bird’s eye, where he had to hit, nothing around that. So this is called ‘focus’, no doubt it requires a lot of practice and hard work to achieve that.

Another example is of Eklavya, whom Guru Dronacharya could not accept as a disciple, as he taught only the princes and he was from a downtrodden class. But Eklavya had great faith and he made a Bust of Guru Dronacharya and practiced before that. And what Eklavya achieved in archery was not possible for the princes, who were learning archery directly under the supervision of Guru Dronacharya. Only faith, hard work, practice and continuous research could make him achieve this highest standard in archery.

So I would like to repeat that Inspiration is the driving force, it is not simply reaction. Like in table-tennis, hitting the ball back, reaction is just acting outwardly, as we say ‘for every action, there is equal and opposite reaction!’. So for reacting, we do not have to internalise, we just react. Also like we follow somebody’s instructions. We are asked to do something and we do that as asked for or our reaction might also be different, we may do the opposite or refuse to follow the instructions. But all that is not inspiration.

In the case of inspiration, we internalise the teachings, the virtues or values and follow them by heart. Further we might get the inspiration from verbal teachings also but most effective inspiration we get from the behaviour of our peers, elders and society.

There are so many factors in our getting inspired and then performing to perfection. Hope is also a major factor in it. I remember a famous story by Munshi Prem Chand Ji titled ‘Poos Ki Raat’ (A night in the cold month of ‘Poos’). The story is about a farmer and his son, who work in their farm for saving the crops during the very cold night of Poos. They continue to do that hard work during the chlling cold of ‘Poos’ month, as long as they feel that they can save it from the stray animals, but when they find that nothing can be achieved by this hard work, they leave everything at the disposal of the stray animals and go to sleep. There Prem Chand Ji says-‘Hope is the mother of zest.’

Yes we can keep on performing based on the inspiration that is our driving force, as long as we believe that we can achieve the result for which we are making all efforts.

So I would like to sum up as- Inspiration is the force that makes us perform, but we must have hope also that we can achieve the result for which we are working. And then for achieving the desired result the attributes needed are- hard work, focus, involved approach, practice and in some cases research also.

This blog post has been written on the # IndiSpire prompt, What is inspiration? How different is it from hard-work, focus, involved approach, practice, and research?

Kindly give your valuable comments on this.

This post is also under #MyFriendAlexa campaign. I am participating in this campaign to take my blog to next higher level.

#MyFriendAlexa, #samaysakshi-writing, #IndiSpire # Inspiration

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