The Fount Of Consistency

                                                                                                                Janki Santoke, Cosmic Uplink, Economic Times, Dec 18, 2009.

The sustainability of action is crucial to success. An individual action, even if well executed, does not achieve goals. The ability to consistently perform is vital to success. Consistency inaction derives from a person’s internal attitude. Three kinds of attitudes govern human action: selfish , unselfish and selfless.

Selfish persons act merely to fulfil their personal desires. Their interests , and may be that of their families, are all their mental horizon can encompass . At its most unsophisticated level, selfishness is merely following one’s whims and fancies. To do, at the spur of the moment, what would give one immediate gratification .

There is no thinking involved. The capers of such people fill the more popular sections of the society papers. Such people are not achievers. They do not fix goals and discipline themselves into achieving them. Further down the continuum are the selfish persons who do set goals and achieve them. However their goals pertain only to their personal well-being . Such goals cannot span decades. The pressure of desires necessitates fast results. The intellect being fuzzy, cannot project beyond a point. So consistency over long periods is not possible .

The common burn-out syndrome is a manifestation of this attitude . People push themselves to achieve their self-centred goals to the point of collapse. Not only that, they get discouraged if their goals are not achieved quickly. The unselfish people fix goals ranging a wider spectrum, both in terms of time and persons it will benefit. They can conceive a goal that may take decades to show results . Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, J R D Tata and the like demonstrated similar long-term perspectives. Today, even after many years, we are still benefiting from their vision . Also, their failures never seemed to bog them down. However , unselfish people also have a boundary. They can conceive up to a point. The identification, though great, ends somewhere, may be at my community / country / species. Though far superior than the selfish, they too are restricted in conception.

Those rare individuals who are totally selfless, who want nothing for either themselves or for the world, can transcend all barriers. They conceive, pursue and achieve the goal of self-realisation which may cut across many lifetimes . Their capacity for consistency is awe-inspiring .

Thus a person’s consistency of action is dependant on how high an ideal he is able to conceive. The higher the ideal motivating him, the greater will be the capacity for consistency.