Managing multi-tasking
‘Live every minute’.

A farmer on returning home rebuked his children, “Why these nests are present on the floor?”. Children replied that they would get them cleared the next day as soon as X, Y & Z come. The little sparrows went to mother sparrow and told her the farmer’s words. The mother sparrow told them to… relax and enjoy. After one week, the farmer again asked his children, “Why these nests are present on the floor?” The children gave excuses that X, Y & Z had gone for some work so these nests could not be removed. They told their father, “Don’t worry, we will do it tomorrow. Next time they will not be there when you come.” The little sparrows went to their mother and still the response was… relax and enjoy.

After two weeks, the farmer was full of anger when he found the nests at the same place. He called his children, listened to their excuses and said, “I will clean them today itself.” Terrified, the little sparrows told their mother about farmer’s attitude. The mother sparrow said. “Fly off, today the nests will be cleared. It’s time to go…”

Do it,
Do it yourself,
Do it right,
Do it right now!

Successful people do more important things and they do them more often and get better and better at them. They have the discipline to get out and get started— Bang with ‘b’ and not with ‘g’ and then stay with it until it is done.
Brian Tracy, motivational speaker has beautifully summed up: “Eat your frog early in the morning!” Frog is a metaphor for the biggest and the most difficult task. If we finish off the most challenging job (eating a live frog!) early in the morning, we will not have to be tense throughout the day. And the satisfaction would be that difficult work is already over and the other smaller jobs can be done with lot of care, ease and speed.

Denis Burkitt of Burkitt’s Lymphoma fame was not a promising student at primary and secondary school, so much so that a tutor warned Denis’s father that his son might fail to complete a University degree. One day, while on his way through town to the Protestant school, he lost his one eye in a boys’ street fight.
He changed over from engineering to study medicine and his academic performance jumped from lacklustre to near top of the class. Following graduation, he continued with surgical training and obtained fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1938. He applied for a position as physician in the colonies, but his request was turned down, as a one-eyed surgeon did not seem practical.

He proved his cyclopic abilities to Adolf Hitler. He was subsequently accepted for colonial service in Uganda. He found out that in African children, the jaw is the commonest site of the tumour and he later named it “Burkitt’s Lymphoma”.

Burkitt’s research lead to the discovery that lymphoma is linked to the presence of Epstein-Barr virus in children whose immune system is weakened by chronic malaria. Burkitt later helped to develop an effective chemotherapy—cyclophosphamide—for the disease.

Despite his great work and the many honours he received, Denis remained a modest and humble man. “I saw with one eye what others could not see with two.” When asked to autograph a book, Denis Burkitt used to write:

Attitudes are more important than abilities.
Motives are more important than methods,
Character is more important than cleverness,
And the Heart takes precedence over the head.

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