Success is sweat plus

At the recent release of his biography, music maestro A R Rahman spoke about how to stop procrastinating. "Get a deadline," he said, echoing what Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote in the very first sentence of his humorous essay, The Pursuit of Prog...

Success is sweat plus
At the recent release of his biography, music maestro A R Rahman spoke about how to stop procrastinating. "Get a deadline," he said, echoing what Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote in the very first sentence of his humorous essay, The Pursuit of Progress: work expands so as to fill time available for its completion. A shorter deadline supposedly starves such expansion of 'non-work'.

Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless resorts to a fictional, albeit chemical, cop-out: The catch-line, which could well have been scripted by Big Pharma, says it all: "A tablet a day and what I could do was limitless." The protagonist-writer confesses slyly that he does not have delusions of grandeur; only "a recipe for grandeur"!

Needless to add, what was initially just a writer's dream-run to El Dorado soon turns into a nightmare of side-effects, withdrawal and worse. Limitless thus comes off as more of a cautionary tale than an easy endorsement for chemical enhancement.

A similar denouement comes from Goethe's Dr Faustus, which chronicles the rise and fall of the power-hungry alchemist who dares to sup with the Devil himself with a short spoon!

The moral of both stories is simple: read the fine print before signing away your soul! Alternatively, deadline or not, there is no short-cut to success, except through lots of hard-work, some talent and a bit of luck all in that order.

For as the Wizard of Menlo Park famously said, genius is 99% perspiration. That is not to discount the role played by the remaining 1%; which also separates men from chimps!
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