Ever realize how we always tend to plan things to live a perfect life "in the future"? Ask yourself. Is your present a plan of the past? Perhaps not. Then why do we still plan for that future, that Utopian life that both you and I somewhere know we are never going to live? Its cause we have this "hope" that "If I start doing things right from now on, I will eventually achieve it down the line". But the reality is that you or me doing things "right" depends on a lot of factors around us, which are usually never perfect.
I thought a great deal about this, and have been doing so since a long time, with absolutely no solutions to convince me. I also talked to a lot of people trying to fix this puzzle. A few gave me answers. And a few gave me solutions. And the one's who gave me solutions never ever gave me any answers. The solution was absolutely simple. There is no point running behind something that we somewhere know is almost impossible to achieve. And no, I am not talking about compromising your dreams or objectives either. I am simply talking about adaptability. Plan, but at the same time, don't live it so much in your mind that you allow reality to break the dream all together. Rather, keep it simple, keep it agile. Keep it open to change. Change the route when reality shatters one. And keep doing this till you reach your goal.
Now that I talked about one factor of flexibility, let me talk about the other factor, i.e. "perfection" or "The final point of conclusion". My professor once narrated us this joke which summed up what engineers are made of. And it made me realize how this same principle can be applied to daily life.
So it goes like this: There are 2 guys who are supposedly "horny as hell". One mathematician and one engineer. And at a considerable distance in front of them are 2 hot sorority girls. Now the rule of the game being, at any given time, a guy can only travel half the distance in between himself and the girl. And then after he reaches that half distance, cover only half the distance in between his new position and the girl. And so on and so forth. When the game starts, the engineer starts running. 1st half distance, 2nd half distance and so on. When the engineer has covered quite some distance, he looks back to see the mathematician leave the game and go back. The reason? The mathematician knows that covering half distances will never exactly get him to the exact point where the girl stands. And the engineer still continues. Why? Cause he knows that he will not reach the exact point, but will still reach close enough for "all practical purposes". After laughing over this sexually suggestive joke, It dawned upon me that the professor actually managed to quantify the spirit of us fellow engineers. The spirit of never giving up, the spirit of aiming for perfection, and continuing even when they know half way down that perfection won't be achieved.
Besides being happy for having saved the face of our profession, this simple joke gave me a whole lot of things to think about recently. What I realized is that life is never perfect. We dream, we act towards our dream and then most of us like the mathematicians, give up half way towards the dream. I understood that I need to be an engineer not just by profession but by character as well. That we may not exactly achieve what we set out for, but sometimes what we end up with when we are around the area of our interest might just be a custom fit for what we are and what we never expected would be so satisfying.
I concluded one thing and one thing alone from all this unceasing thinking: Adaptability and the drive to move forward; with curiosity to know why others stop but to still keep moving at the expense of being called a fool is what makes or breaks your dream.
