In an era of instant gratification, we settle for shorter trees, but remember patience has its reward

“My wife and I have built a new home with a lovely garden which houses lovely bamboo trees. I got reading on the Chinese bamboo and learned that the tree takes 5 years, 3 months to grow to its whole height of 80 feet. Yet, for the first 5 years, you only see a tiny green shoot, but in the next 90 days, it grows into a full-fledged tree. But in those first 60 months, it is growing its strong network of roots underground, to support the tree. 

In an era of instant gratification, we settle for shorter trees, but remember patience has its reward. These are your years of growing that strong network of roots but be sure when you finally achieve your success, people will call it “overnight success”

– Rahul Dravid

Couldn’t have probably picked a better quote on perseverance and on simplicity as to how elegant a simple observation can be and that translated on this domain of motivation and inspiration takes a whole different idea altogether. I guess motivation was never something which was outside of the purview of our lives, it was right there, something very simple, something which is the true nature of our surroundings. In this case it may be the tree growing up.

I was trying to read something about delayed gratification and most times I thought I did understand that and we are making ourselves very capable and increasing our strengths to deserve the right things when the time is right. But it does become hard to maintain the same gusto throughout, there are so many things that can distract us including ourselves.

But reading something like this brings us back to the bigger question – If we ourselves are not in a position to observe our growth, who else would believe and observe the same? If we ourselves don’t acknowledge the true self, don’t appreciate and nurture it, who else would? And if we let that go for something else, something which is easier or a short term success – we end up losing everything we ever stood for.

Or perhaps if I try to extend the same metaphor, perhaps we broke open our own roots before they grew stronger. I am not recommending just a wait without doing anything, at the same time I am saying that sometimes we fail to notice how close we are to the goal and more often than not, we give up when we are almost on the very verge of achieving it!

Well perhaps one constant question can help a lot, i

Is  this making us stronger, in the direction we want to grow? 

If the answer is yes, then maybe it is best that we believe in what we truly see and perceive and go after it. After all, success aint going anywhere right?