Punctuality

Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you all to this august house on this auspicious day to listen to my speech. Today I shall be talking to about a valuable trait that should be acquired by every human being. This is a trait that if acquired well can help you achieve tremendous success in life. A trait that can help you meet your goals, that can earn you respect, that can make you more productive, prosperous and affluent. That trait, ladies and gentlemen, is punctuality.

Punctuality is possibly the most important character trait that a human being should have. There are a lot of virtues associated with being punctual. Irrespective of whatever you do in life, punctuality is as much important in carrying out your diurnal chores as much is eating food, drinking water, working, and even breathing. Irrespective of whatever you do in life, punctuality is an extremely important requirement on your part to do it all well. Whether you are a doctor, a teacher, an officer, or even a house wife, the sheer amount of expectations that your profession or the society has with you places onerous requirements upon you to be punctual. With punctuality you can meet the severe challenges of life. Without punctuality you fall in the abysmal depths of oblivion and become irrelevant.

So what is punctuality? We should proceed further with our today’s discourse by initially defining and describing punctuality. A very simple definition of punctuality could be to meet all of your duties and obligations, perform the tasks that are expected of you, in due course of time. To spend due amount of time on each and every prescribed activity and to complete it accordingly. Ladies and gentlemen, stated simply, punctuality is all about meeting your deadlines on time.

Ladies and gentlemen, life presents each one of us with a limited amount of time to live on this planet. Of course, some of us live longer than the others. However, the time to live each one of us has is limited. Each day of our lives can be looked at as a slice of time that we have on on our disposal to utilize fully. We could have a fuller experience of that day, or we could simply waste the whole day sitting idle. As the day passes, that slice of time is taken away from us. Most of us do not realize this. However, the truth is that with the passing of a day, our life simply shortens by a slice of time that day is equivalent to.

Let us try to understand this with a simple analogy. A very natural and direct analogy is to look at a sliced loaf of bread. Imagine that you have a loaf of bread that is well sliced. Now imagine that you take a slice of bread away from it every day. The truth is that as you take one slice of bread away from the loaf every day, you do not even notice that something has been taken away from the loaf. However, the reality is that the loaf has diminished in size. You only notice that the loaf was diminishing when you have eaten all the slices and the loaf does not exist any longer.

Our lives are absolutely like that. With each day passing, we do not realize what we have lost. After all, like most other days, we wake up well on the next morning, and hopefully we are healthy as well. However, the truth is that with a day’s passing and with the dawn of a new day, our life has been shortened exactly by one day.

Now I would want you to do a small thought experiment. I would want each one of you to close your eyes for a few seconds. Slide back in your seats. And take a deep breath. Rest your head on the back of the chair you are sitting on so that your face is facing up towards the ceiling. Close you eyes. Take a deep breath and relax. Now as you have closed your eyes, and you are breathing deeply. I would want you to contemplate on an idea. I would want you to remember all the days of your life you have past behind. Just relax and try to think. Don’t worry, you have plenty of time. Actually you may spend as much time as you wish contemplating on this idea. Just simply think of all the previous days of your life. Or just think about yesterday. Just try to remember yesterday. Now open your eyes.

I wonder how many of you have been able to think about the previous day of your life. I’d rather claim that you couldn’t remember anything at all. The truth should be that your minds were totally empty. Such are the ruses of life. As you sit here listening to my speech, you couldn’t recall the previous day of your life in a simple thought experiment.

You can do one more thing instead. Try taking notes on your diary about your diurnal activities. Do it everyday. And then juxtapose all of your daily activities for a month to get a better idea about how you spend your time. This can be a valuable exercise by which you could know that how much time you waste or utilize in your life.

Ladies and gentlemen, life is short. And you have to make the most out of it. You have the most out of it to make it an enjoyable and a valuable experiment. You simply cannot allow yourselves to waste your time by malingering here and there. If you are student, think about it that what would you have earned by the end of your tenure as a student. If you are a professional, think about what sort of memories you would have as you retire. You should have valuable experiences to share with your friends and colleagues at the end of the day. And in order to do so you would have to nourish the habit of punctuality in yourself.

Punctuality does not mean to be studying or doing boring things that you do not like to do all the time. Punctuality means to allow a work and life balance in your living experience. You simply have to spare time for each one of your activities. You should adopt appropriate time management schemes to carry out all the things you want to do or should do. You should spare time for work and entertainment. And you should do it all effectively.

So, I congratulate those of you who have been valuing punctuality in their lives. And for those of you who have not been valuing punctuality, I would like to congratulate them as well. After all, you spared time to arrive to this august hall to listen to my speech. After all, you made a nice decision to utilize your time for a meaningful purpose. I would only tell you to value punctuality and practice it. Do things on time. Spare time for most types of activities. This will expand your comfort zone and enhance your experience of life. And the next time your niece asks you to write a speech for her, write it for her on time. Otherwise she might get annoyed and angry and this may have dire repercussions for you after all.

Thank you very much and I wish you all a prosperous life.

Photo by Horia Varlan

If you found an error, highlight it and press Shift + Enter or click here to inform us.

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Punctuality by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

3 comments

  1. Pingback: google

Leave a Reply to adminCancel reply