Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

For people from India, I wish you all a very Happy Pongal:Makara Sankranti: Baisakhi Greetings.

These festivals symbolize the destruction of evil (in the form of burning of junk). From time to time, we also need to slow down to reflect what we have learned from the past experiences and take some time to clearly identify where we are going and identify and burn the activities which might slow us in our mission.

Last weekend, Shobana and I took sometime to do that and it really clarified few of our focal points. These focal points really helped in changing the priorities and also gave a sense of urgency to the goals we both set for this year. All achievers take some time to do this "action orientation."

It really helps to take the time to think, plan and set priorities. Once we do that, we can launch quickly and strongly toward the goals and objectives. It is not a one-day show but achievers work on the priorities steadily, smoothly and continuously and seem to go through enormous amounts of work in the same time period that the average person spends socializing, frittering time and working on low value things.  Once we work on high value tasks at a high and continuous level of activity, we can actually enter into state of flow. We feel elated and clear.  Once we get into that flow we also feel happy and energized. We also experience a tremendous sense of calm and personal effectiveness.  I am sure everyone has experienced this feeling at some point of time.

The best way we can trigger this state is by developing a "sense of urgency". This is the inner drive and desire to get on with the job quickly and get it done fast. This inner drive is an impatience that motivates us to get going and to keep going. A sense of urgency feels very much like racing against ourself. If I feel like I have all day to do something, I’ll take all day to do it – it’s Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion”)

With the sense of urgency, we become action oriented rather than talking continually about what we are going to do. We focus on specific steps we can take immediately. We concentrate on the things we can do right now to get the results you want and achieve the goals you desire.