APRIL 27

Super Performers

A book published in America in 1986, entitled Peak Performers, makes a study of the lives of a number of individuals in modern America who have played a heroic role in life. One point which the writer specially emphasizes is that a great mission can trigger in a man the powerful urge to superior effort which ultimately leads him to exceptional achievement.

America sent its first manned spacecraft to land on the moon in 1967. The launching of the rocket had been the result of the combined effort of a large number of experts who had been engaged to work for this mission. One of this team, a computer programmer, said that something extraordinary began to happen as the work got under way. The thousands of ordinary men and women, who were working to make the space programme materialize, had all of a sudden been transformed into super-achievers. They had started performing with an efficiency that they had never in their whole lives been able to muster.

Within the short period of 18 months, all of the work had been accomplished with exceptional rapidity.

“Want to know why we’re doing so well?” our manager asked me. He pointed to the pale moon barely visible in the eastern sky. “People have been dreaming about going there for thousands of years. And we’re going to do it.

It is an undeniable truth that what inspires a man more than anything is to have a great mission before him. That is what arouses a man’s hidden potential and makes him capable of all manners of sacrifices. It makes him, in short, a peak performer.

A man who is satisfied no longer strives, doesn’t dream, doesn’t create. If we are possessed by fear we will achieve nothing.