These last few weeks, I have learnt so much working with my dad, to help him give shape to a long held dream of his – publishing a book that my grandfather wrote!

I was born three years after my grandfather passed away. So I have only heard about him from my grandmother, parents, uncles, and aunts. Some of them say I resemble him and that’s one of the reasons that I have been slightly intrigued by who he was, what he did, etc.

Over so many years, I have heard interesting anecdotes multiple times, tried to peep into his personality based on old reminiscing by different elders, and hoped to emulate him in terms of what he achieved in life. Yet, I never quite grasped the enormity of what he did around his literary aspirations.

He was a writer and a poet and quite well known in the central Indian region in his days, with regular articles published in various magazines. He was also very well known locally around my home town and hence I have heard bits and pieces of the kind of work he did in those heydays.

However, what turned out to be the most astonishing fact to me, which I discovered recently, was that he worked for over 14 years to give shape to his magnum opus. Something that he started working on when he had just crossed 40 years of age, and was almost due to complete before his untimely demise. And it wasn’t that he took time off or kept going in loops on some parts of the book.

I was in awe when I understood the enormity of this effort. For someone to dedicate 14 years of one’s life to a single pursuit is not a common occurrence. It takes a huge amount of patience and just continuous persistence to be able to do something like this. And then to not be able to publish it must have pinched him a lot in those last days.

He certainly isn’t the only one in this category. There are so many other examples of people continuing to pursue a single minded goal for years altogether, undeterred by difficulties in their path. Sometimes they don’t achieve what they had set out for but enrich themselves so much in the process. Most of them are champions in the literal sense!

As I thought more about this and how we live our lives, I couldn’t even think of comparing it with how we view a lot of things these days. How for a lot of us, it is about instant gratification and the need for external validation for everything we do. How we want to win everything even before we have understood the real meaning of winning. And how if we don’t get something, we move to the next best thing, forgetting about our original pursuit.

We don’t give enough due to those who continue to persevere and keep going at something specific. We view them as incapable or a failure, when they could very well be on the verge of success. What we miss out is, while they may take time to get to their destination, that duration of effort does not take away anything from their success. For they are the ones moving the needle on difficult things, or things which they probably weren’t good enough at, or just needed that time to find their rhythm and achieve success.

Perhaps we will do well to keep this in mind as we get on to that next project, that next job, that next relationship, or just that next personal goal. The enormity of our effort is not determined by the outcome that it garnered but by the enrichment that it leads us to and the fun had while at it…

PS: Salute to my father and uncles for taking it upon themselves to get this unfinished work published now!