Converting a weakness into a strength is what #inspiration is all about. Other elements like hard-work, focus, involved approach, and research can play a role in strange and unexpected ways. Let me give a few examples.
There is a story about a boy who had lost his left arm in an accident. He remained shattered for a few days but realised soon enough that life must go on. For some strange reason he went to an old Japanese judo master to learn judo. The teaching began but the master taught him just one move and the focus remained there for months.
‘I am confused, teacher,’ said the boy, ‘why teach me just one move when there are plenty of other moves to be taught?’
The master said nothing and the training went on as before. It was at a tournament months later that the reasons became clear. The boy won his initial matches easily and in a later match he was able to use his move when the opponent became impatient. Surprisingly, this one-handed boy entered the finals and sure enough his opponent gave him the right moment to use the move that he knew so well. As the opponent dropped his guard, the boy used his left-arm move and won.
The boy, however, was confused. ‘I have only one arm, master,’ he asked later, ‘and yet I won the tournament. How?’
‘Simple,’ said the master, ‘the move that you have mastered is the most complex and the most effective throw in judo. Most players dilute their attention and remain in a perpetual decision-vortex when they know everything. The other advantage you have is that the only known defense the opponent could apply involves grabbing the left arm of the player who has invoked your move.’
The judo master had effectively helped the one-armed boy convert his weakness into a strength. This is what inspiration is all about. Of course, hard-work, focus, involved approach, and research are all seamless embedded into any inspired move. The judo master had his research in place when he decided to teach the one-armed boy the judo move that took him places. The young judoka obviously harnessed undiluted focus and hard-work that inspired him to reach the pinnacle.
Look at the way Arunachalam Muruganantham paid no attention to a lack of finances and other expensive resources and banked upon his own personal brand of improvised research into an advantage when he worked with his idea to give the world low-cost sanitary napkins. He stuck steadfastly to his inspiration.
Dashrath Manjhi, an illiterate labourer near Gaya in Bihar went on to cut a path that was 110 m long and 9.1 m wide deep through a mountain using only a hammer and chisel. The death of his wife was his weakness that urged him on to do the impossible and make his village more accessible. He had a long-term vision to help him keep going with all the back-breaking hard-work that he was completely dedicated to. Whatever the others in the village had to say did not matter a bit. He had his inspiration with him.
Inspiration isn’t always about writing a panegyric for your girlfriend or making cute doodles on the iPad to win attention. Inspiration isn’t at all like a fabulous excuse that an employee may make to avoid staying late in the office to complete an assignment. On the contrary, an inspiration is actually similar to a sudden brilliant and timely surge that makes that employee add ideas that transforms a mere late-evening routine assignment into a strategically vital document!
Once you read about the way others have gone and created masterpieces or done the unthinkable you will know that inspiration is quite different from a mere positive effect. When I watch a film showing Milkha Singh slogging away to transform into a world-class athlete, I may be full of positive energy but this alone does not mean that I will be inspired to go ahead and run the marathon at sixty. Even reading the examples above can fill readers with positivity but not necessarily inspire any one of them to do anything that turns them into a legend. Not that positivity doesn’t help. It does. Positivity is like a launch-pad for inspiration which, in turn, becomes the cradle for creative thoughts that make sure that a person keeps on moving forward with tasks completed that inspire others to do the same as Kenneth Branag wrote: ‘I choose to be inspired by things that have been done well in the past.’
Everything in this world is a potential source for inspiration… even excel sheets brimming with dumb figures and insensitive statistics. Numbers too have a knack to pop up and inspire when you focus on them with involvement. I have stared at sheet after sheet of impassive figures and realized soon enough that the more enterprising and energetic numbers simply start popping up and dancing after a while. They want to get noticed. Some headlines in a newspaper do the same. Interesting sentences in a story or a novel follow the same rule and so I tend to read texts slowly and deliberately. The problem with inspiration is that it goes back into its cocoon once you hurry up things. I have always felt that inspiration is a rather nervous feeling that doesn’t like to be pushed. But once one has managed to get hold of even one cursory touch of an inspired bit, one must nourish and nurture it with obstinate research and unflinching focus. This is where hard-work comes in. This is what everyone from poets to inventors do. I have always believed that inspiration loves to be unveiled slowly and surely… which is quite different from grabbing and unboxing it like it was some new gadget.
Inspiration is like the lines of a poem that must be read slowly so that each nuance penetrates your consciousness and creates its home there. No one can possibly construct large dormitories inside where they keep throwing bits and pieces of diverse inspirations to be pulled out and used for different tasks. Inspiration doesn’t work like this and this is what makes it different from mere ideas. For instance, I may stumble upon a brilliant idea but I still would need an inspirational push to convert it into a story or a poem or even an essay. The same is true for scientists, managers, researchers, and almost everyone else. Selling vadas, for instance, was a brilliant idea that Venkatesh Iyer played with until the right inspired vision revealed itself. It was only then that a merely brilliant idea transformed into a visionary concept or an inspired entrepreneurship thrust that created history.
I believe that inspiration exists in blissful isolation until it happens to ride an idea and decides to commute through bastis that have fanciful names like focus, hard-work, research, and practice.
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Inspiration is a rather fussy thing to aspire for
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Arvind Passey
24 September 2018
