Writing is an ideal state activity or so I used to think. You need silence, a good medium and of course, uninterrupted mindshare to focus and craft your thoughts as you translate them into words and onto the screen. Turns out, life is not fair and life is never ideal. There is no ideal state. You just have to make do with what you have in the hope that you will reach the elusive ideal state.
This epiphany has been the most illuminating one so far. Many times I have tried to pursue the ideal state before starting something. As if the ideal beginning state would lead to successful outcome of the task that I was undertaking. 4 out of the 6 attempts at UPSC led to failure in the first stage itself. But when COVID came, and workload increased I managed to crack the prelims. Then I took a 2 month leave without pay and wrote the mains unsuccessfully. If only I had continued to work and juggle prep, I would have cleared? Who knows.
The ideal state is a dreamland. A state of utopia considered an essential pitstop for getting to euphoria. There is no ideal state. You just have to work with constraints. Most strategy and operations book celebrate constraints and encourage you to embrace them.
At the intersection of opportunity and constraints lie the scope for innovation they say. That’s why doing something consistently becomes so difficult. Constraints keep cropping up and you tend to lose focus as priorities shift. But being anchored to one or two priorities is the hallmark of excellence. Doing the same thing over until the constraints don’t matter. Perhaps that is the ideal state. Not so elusive after all. Just hard to achieve. Very hard.
