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Please rate : Analysis of an Issue
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27 Aug 2011, 14:23
Question :
“Too many people think only about getting results. The key to success, however, is to focus on the specific task at hand and not to worry about results.”
What do you think this piece of advice means, and do you think that it is, on the whole, worth following? Support your views with reasons and/or examples drawn from your own experience, observations, or reading.
Answer :
Whenever we begin working on a specific task , many people will think about the end result and get distracted by the results the task may be able to produce, but the key to success is to focus on the work at hand. We don't need to get distracted or commit ourselves to the end results only.
Firstly to support this line of support, we can easily look at the scientific advancements that have taken place. If Einstein would have concentrated on the results of his experiments or if Newton had only looked at the end results of laws of gravity , we would not have been in the same world as we are today. These great scientists concentrated on getting on finding the utter details of how the world around them was working irrespective of the end result which could be easily be to get their ideas accepted by the society. They defined laws which still hold true.
Secondly, sometimes the work that is assigned to us or that we are working on may challenge us. It may be too difficult to reach the end points and also it may not be as usefull as it was perviously thought to be. But we need to continue concentration on it as there may be scenarios where we could use the work done for someother task. If we look into the world of science we will find that so many great discoveries were not the end result of great research but sheer luck where the researcher was only following a certain process and end up getting results which were totally unimagined.
However we can counter this argument by saying that if we don't know the end results or if we don't know how the end results would help us improve our work or world, we might not even think of spending our energies and money on a task such as this. But in this scenario , we need to understand that there are some tasks which have a limited scope and we can easliy estimate the end results. But in others, we require a lot of prework to even determine the problem we are looking at.So if the task is to reach destination X by Sunday, we can easily guess the implications of it. But if the work is to say produce a vaccine for a disease like AIDS or Cancer, we need to concentrate on the work at hand and not think about how the drug if found could change the world.
So we can conclude that the key to success is to concentrate and assign all our energies to the task that is currently assigned to us and not to ponder over the possibilites the end product may have.