Life teaches. We get some things quickly, some take time. Some take a very long time. After a long long time I have realized the value of perseverance. I am trying to put together a history of how life taught me this lesson.
As a kid, and like most of the kids, I wanted to enjoy myself fully. I wanted to play most of the time and homework was a drag. I liked tasks that could be done fast like math and hated things that needed continuous hard work like drawing and writing. I believe I had concentration problems, and I still do, but they, I guess, were much worse then. If I needed anything I needed it now or never. As a result my hand writing remained very poor and I can't draw a straight line without a ruler to date.
My first experience of the power of perseverance was in college. My friend Satashu is the epitome of perseverance. He never loses hope and keeps working in things he likes, diligently until he is very good at it. Me, I want quick results. Every other day in my life I ask myself this question: Why am I not great yet?
Being a fun loving guy I didn't find perseverance exciting, after all I was fed on and greatly influenced by AB's movies in which the AB god could do anything. You see AB and you know how he is going to turn the hopelessness around and you want to be like him. The problem with this thinking is that you don't look at the perseverance that took AB to become what he is.
From my experience it seems to me that there is nothing like raw talent. There is your desire to do something, your strategy of doing it and your execution. I see it everywhere especially in sports. While playing we are learning all the time. We develop insights and we practice known as well as self developed techniques. The people who play better do mostly because of the following reasons:
1. Some time in their past life they have spent more time on a sport than others.
2. They have had some coaching. This may be as simple as certain suggestions given to you by your father or brother.
3. They have a physical advantage like height or health.
Of these the first point is the most potent one. The more you practice a thing the better you become. Coaching can be very effective, it can accelerate your development speed many fold. But if coaching is out of the picture, which is the case with most of the activities in India, then the one who has spent more time on a particular activity the better he/she will be at it.
A case in point is GRE. You will occasionally come across a guy who didn't prepare much for GRE and still cracked it. In all such cases that I have seen so far I have found a strong English background. Even though a lot of us are from English medium we didn't have the same kind of environment for learning English. At one point in my life I wanted to improve my English and wanted to find someone I could talk to in English and I found absolutely no one. To people living in Metros this will sound unbelievable and you would think "he didn't try hard enough" but believe me I tried and found no one. Plus everyone, including me, found someone speaking in English very awkward and snobbish. With this background it is really difficult for someone to crack GRE. What one didn't get in the whole life one has to master in a matter of days. So what do you do? You put in more hours and try to compensate. If you have someone from the English camp around you and try to match his amount of time spent on preparation then you are a fool. You will end up screwing up your score and even worse come to think that the other guy is a stud. (Thankfully in my case I stumbled upon a simple strategy that gave me a score of 1530/1600 in a matter of 3 weeks preparation, more on that later.)
success === time spent on preparing for success
I have recently being able to put perseverance in practice. I wanted to touch type and now I can. I had wanted to do it for a long time but what my fickle nature didn't allow me to do in six years I have been able to do in 1 month. I can now type without looking at the keyboard and at 43 words per minute. One month seems like a lot of time to spend on an activity at first but it is way shorter than six years. In the long run perseverance is a much more efficient strategy.
Another case in point for me is Volley Ball. I had almost no experience with volley ball until last year. Last year some of my friends in office decided to participate in the office volley ball tournament and I agreed to join. Since then we have been playing volley ball very regularly. I now play well and any team is happy to have me when I go to play volley ball. This is a feat compared to football that I have been playing like once every year for the whole of my life and still can't kick the ball right; difference being patience and perseverance.
Important to notice is that patience without perseverance is totally useless. If you wait for things to happen and are patient about it then it's such a waste of time unless you really can't do anything. Things don't usually happen unless you make them happen. If you don't immediately know what you can do then spend time thinking what you can do. I have almost always found something useful that I can do in such situations.
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