A general thought of an IAS aspirant – “I will change the world, but not today, tomorrow”!
If there was ever a UPSC CSE Starter kit, it would include a couple of thousand advices for IAS aspirant, a list of books out of which only some are going to be touched and few cliche questions and their equally cliched answer. Among these entire questions, one holds the most weight. That question is, “Why do you want to be an IAS?”
Everyone who is an experienced aspirant will always ask a new IAS aspirant to do two main things, First is read, understand and if required, mug up the syllabus and the second is, knowing why do we want to be an IAS or a civil servant rather. The answers received are varied responses, which range from “I want the respect which comes with it” to “I want to serve the nation from grassroots.”
It is now a widely accepted fact that a little more that 99% of the IAS aspirant taking UPSC CSE exams are going to fail. Of course, the level of preparation of every candidate is going to be different. The other factor which keeps us from getting there is procrastination.
This is an interesting dichotomy here. On one hand we want to serve the nation, change the world and what not. But while striving to reach there, we are procrastinating?
I started thinking over this conflict in one of my procrastination spree. While introspecting myself I arrived to one great conclusion. The reason of procrastination is my Misplaced Motivation. While we ask ourselves that why are we aiming to be a top bureaucrat, we should also ask ourselves, is my motivation misplaced? Why do I REALLY want to be an IAS? Also, for once please be honest to yourself. Don’t sugar coat your own answer to yourself. Be brutally honest and tell yourself the truth. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this exercise.
Mother Nature through the process of evolution gave us many tools in our survival instincts database, one of the most dangerous and self-destructive among them is lying. It can be argued that lying can be good, when lied to others. The destruction quotient of lying goes up much higher when we lie to one of the most important person in our universe, ourselves. Now couple this with Procrastination and voila, we have got ourselves a nuclear bomb of our own.
While deciding to prepare for UPSC CSE, we have shown that we can be brave. We are not afraid of starting with a clean slate again. It is really hurting to see one of us fail just because our motivation was misplaced and we procrastinated. Brave people like us, deserve to achieve great heights, but that doesn’t mean we are entitled to be there just because we were brave. We will have to fight for it. It is a brutal world out there and only the fittest will survive. All we have to do is sit up and start doing what is right.
PS: Before everyone starts bashing me, I would like to inform that I am your fellow aspirant and procrastinator. Let me know if you want me to write on how I am battling procrastination.