“Labour, however vast, ought not to have any terrors for a scholar, still less for a Hindu scholar; yet before one engages in it, one requires to be assured that the game is worth the candle.”
— Sri Aurobindo
A group of scholars intended to study an epic of the Bhāratas written by Krishna of the Island of Vyāsa. This epic has between twenty-four to twenty-seven thousand couplets. But the scholars planned to rake out just 8,000 lines from the War Purvas and declare the result the Mahabharata of Vyasa.
When Sri Aurobindo read this, he wasn’t pleased. Clearly, how can one assume that 30 percent of a poem comprises the whole? “It is only by the patient scrutiny and weighing of the whole poem, disinterestedly, candidly, and without preconceived notions, a consideration Canto by Canto, paragraph by paragraph, couplet by couplet that we can arrive at something solid or permanent,” Sri Aurobindo noted.
In effect, he was saying: If you look for shortcuts that offer a quick and easy way out, the results will be shallow and unreliable.
Shortcuts often make things worse. The shabby report has to be redone, the lose-weight-quickly diet leads to long-term health issues, the stock purchased on a tip crashes, and the hastily implemented policy turns into a disaster.
Speed and effortlessness are coveted—the way Pandit Birju Maharaj moved his body and Sachin Tendulkar smashed good balls for boundaries were remarkable. But that required mastery, which didn’t come overnight—it was a result of decades of hard work.
Work hard on things that give you control over your mind, body and time, that make you feel competent. Be consistent even when the results are not visible. The stronger the challenge, the sweeter the victory tastes.