Perseverance

The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Toiled ever upward through the night.-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A farmer prepares the ground, plant a bamboo seed, water it & fertilize it for whole year and except for tiny sprout nothing happens. He continues to water it and fertilize it for second year and to his amazement, nothing happens. He tries to peer through soil to find something grown inside but did not find anything. In third year, he took care of small sprout, lovingly clearing weed away, but dint see any result. He felt very discouraging. He planted seed with love & hope in best soil & he was not getting any reward from it. Year fourth also passed away with futile effort & no result at all. He saw other plants in garden have grown up in leaps & bounds, pleasing eyes with their vibrant growth and life. For four years he saw a tiny shoot sprouting from a bulb, no bigger than first year. He sang to it, encouraged, challenged and finally got angry & threw up his hands in irritation. He wanted to stomp it out of life & when he was about to quit during fifth year, for six weeks the Bamboo tree grows as much as three feet per day, until it grows Ninety Feet Tall!

Greatness is not handed to anyone neither it reserved for few people. It is available for you & for everyone. The best performers practice long-long hours every day including weekends. Tiger Woods is a prime motivational example of someone who BELIEVED in the beauty of his dreams, followed his passion, worked hard to pursue them and ACHIEVED unbelievable success. He has been introduced to Golf at an extremely early age of 18 months by his father and has been encouraged to practice intensively. Woods had pulled ahead at least 15 year of practice by the time he became youngest winner of Us-Amateur Championship, at age of 18.  Even after winning many championships, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours of day practicing and conditioning. He's up at dawn and can stay out on the course for as long as 14 hours hitting balls again and again and again off the tee, out of the sand, or on the green.

 Life is like Bamboo tree. It seems discouraging. We seemingly doing things right by nourishing plant with utmost care and still we see no results. But during long years when there are no visible results, the bamboo tree was developing a mature root system that would sustain & nurture its explosive growth.