Effort

How would you define effort?

Is it how you try and please your boss? Is it how you make your girl friend happy? Or is it how you maintain a good relation with your boy friend’s mother? You put in a lot of effort to buy them gifts, make them feel special or just keep them from firing you. That is usually how we see effort. Everything that we do to keep our world in place and may be add a few more lights to it.

These however are not really efforts. Sorry but these are your needs. You need them and thus you are putting in a little bit extra work to make things right for your own self and keep them that way. When you work an extra hour at office you are not making an effort. You are just making sure that you boss stays happy with you. You pay that extra buck for the perfect gift for your girl friend and you make sure that she loves you for that. You are again not making an effort.

Effort happens when you go out of your way to do something for somebody whom you don’t want anything from. Effort is that desire you have to see somebody not even remotely related to you in anyway having a good life. The kind of life you would want to have. Sadly it is a desire many of us have but very... very few of us actually manage to act upon.  However the ones who do are the real people making an effort.

These are the people who after working the whole day, fight their way through the worst traffic jams to go and teach a few kids so that they have a bit of what they actually deserve. These people also spend nights staying up till late after slogging off at office, working on magazines that do not fetch them money or even recognition. They do it just to help a cause. They go off to the remotest parts of the country for months to work. They find out more about such other people who are out there making an effort to change what is given. To do something about the wrongs those are there in the society, in us.  The things that are talked about but not worked upon. They do all this even when the NEED not have done it. Because the rest of them don’t. People talk about illiteracy but they do not do anything to make the children understand the importance of education or make it interesting to them or to empower them in any way so that they can grow up to become earning individuals. They talk about health conditions in rural areas but they do not actually do anything about it. Read the newspaper, draw a frown on the face, blame it on the government and then say ‘the NGOs are just making money for themselves’ but never go out and actually find out about the real scenario.

Good news is that we have a few exceptions who know that efforts are made when you don’t gain anything out of your work. You just grow by it.