You will have to do something you have never done.
Today, I am going to talk to you about how Physics can save our lives. Well, it is actually about hard work being the key to success… but it does have Physics involved in it.
To begin with, let us answer this question to ourselves. WHAT IS SUCCESS? For some of us, it might be getting good grades. For some, it might be winning a tournament. While for the others, it might be getting into an Ivy League university.
Well, success can be considered something more than the materialistic achievements. If a person has not yet achieved a certain goal or reached a certain landmark, it does not mean that he or she is not successful. Success may be adding some value to one’s character or personality. There also is success in putting effort and trying. When asked about his attempts to make a light bulb, Thomas Edison said, and I quote, ‘I have not failed a 1000 times. I have successfully discovered 1000 ways NOT to make a light bulb’. For me, the success today is that I am giving this talk in front of the school community… in front of you.
The academic rankers among us know that good grades cannot be achieved without studying. The sportsmen among us know that first place cannot be achieved without practising.
And now, to reiterate my point, I will show you how Physics is involved in success. As we know, Sir Isaac Newton provided us with the three Laws of Motion.
The first one of them states that ‘an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.’ This can also mean that if one does not make an effort to reach his goal, he will not reach anywhere.
The second law of motion tells us that the acceleration of an object depends directly on the net force acting upon the object. We may say that with an increase in the amount of effort and hard work one puts in, there is an increase in the chances of him reaching his goals.
And finally, the third law states that ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ This law shows us that there is a consequence to each and every one of our decisions and actions.
It may temporarily look like success can be achieved without working hard. For example, there is a chance that you score good marks in an examination by cheating and not getting caught. Those few extra marks may make you feel happy for a while, but in the long run, it will do you significantly more amount of damage than you would possibly imagine. It will not only hurt your self-respect, but also your conscience- that very sense that helps you differentiate between right and wrong.
This reminds me of a story I heard when I was younger.
Once, there was a crane which used to live near a forest. Farmers used to cross the forest regularly to go to the market for trading. One day, the crane stopped the farmer and asked him where he was going. The farmer replied that he was going to the market to trade his worms for some feathers. The crane said that it would give the farmer a couple of its feathers if the farmer gave it his worms. The farmer agreed to do so. This trade between the crane and the farmer went on for days and weeks. They both were really happy because now, the farmer did not have to travel all the way to the market, and the crane did not have to hunt for its food. A day came when the crane was not left with any feathers on its body to trade for its food. By then, it had forgotten how to hunt for worms. Soon, it died of hunger… It starved to death.
From this story, it is really clear that easy todays make tough tomorrows, and tough todays make easy tomorrows. What one looks at when he takes a shortcut is a fake façade of success.
In the end, I would just say that we keep on complaining about things and procrastinating. We keep on thinking that if we just go with the flow, we will stumble upon success sooner or later. But success is not something one achieves through sheer luck or coincidence. One has to plan towards it, work towards it, sweat to achieve it.
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