THE ‘Harvard Business Review’ once reprinted the letter-head of a successful large corporation which read as follows: “To look is one thing; to learn from what you understand is still something else; but to act on what you learn is all that really matters.”
William James, the Harvard Professor wrote: “No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may posses and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has taken advantages of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain unaffected for the better. Mere good intentions do not matter; action is the sky.”
Abraham Lincoln knew that slavery will never be abolished if people just talked about it; action was required.
Martin Luther King knew that people should agitate, make noise, stir things up, if blacks wanted equality. Mahatma Gandhi knew that there should be a freedom movement if India wanted freedom and he had to wake up and stir a Nation. Winston Churchill knew that there is no point in bargaining and arguing with Nazis. A bloody war was inevitable.
In a democracy, people cannot sit back and get treated as second class citizens, if they allow themselves to be persecuted and don’t resist and agitate, they will remain second class and will never achieve anything.
They will never create luck by sitting idle, making comments and never going into action. They have to tear down and rebuild. If they act; others will react.
Opportunities follow the people who are willing to go that extra mile. Luck will follow them automatically; they don’t have to go in search of it.
– T.G.L. Iyer
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