Sunday Musings With Dad

My dad Kishore V Sonpal, was just short of 82, when he breathed his last on June 12, 2020, 01:24am. He built the habit of maintaining a diary right from the time after his engineering, when he took up his first job with Indian Railways, way back in 1964. His writings have stood the test of time. They are as relevant today, as they were, when he penned them down. I am sharing third of these diary entries. Just like me, hope you will also find subtle meaning in his writings.

Here is the third share. 

Transcript of the Image:

You don’t try to architect the perfect future. Whether in personal or professional life, you don’t call the shots too far. What you do is this: you go down a path every day and look around and ask yourself – How you can do bette and what twists and turns you need to take. If you need to take a turn, then take it without any hesitation and then don’t look back. Its about taking the successfully making the right decision every time, rather than some grand strategy.

End of Transcript

Pardon the brevity of the message, but hope you capture the depth of the message. Many time in life, before we start a project or even during its execution, we get over-awed by the hugeness of the ask or the bigness of the task. We get boggled by the number of variables and depth of details we need to address. We set unreasonable targets instead of taking things one step at a time, pausing and rethinking on every other step, making sure not to miss anything.

The diary entry this time is not a dated one, but I am sure Dad understood this early in life. He was an astute observer for details and would easily know if someone had done a job in a hurry or was trying to hide the minor blemishes. He would not allow people to dictate timelines to him. He would in-fact, calm his aggressive manager down and make him see his point of view instead.

When I shared this note with a friend, he immediately had a list of excuses on the impracticality of it. His argument was ‘who has the time?‘. And that, remains the biggest challenge for people nowadays, they are constantly using lack of time as an excuse and missing out on many finer aspects of life.

As they say: Some of the simplest things in life, are learnt the hard way.