His weekly paper Young India, 9 March 1922

Full Effort

In February 1922, a crowd burned a police post at Chauri Chaura and killed twenty-two policemen. Mahatma Gandhi stopped the nationwide protests at once. Other leaders were furious with him because the campaign was gaining ground. At Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, he sat down to explain his choice. He wrote an article called "Non-violence" for his weekly paper, Young India. He insisted on ahimsa, which means doing no harm. He wrote that human beings do not achieve complete perfection. He added: "Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment."

People usually judge an act by whether it brought an immediate prize. A job application gets rejected, or an email goes unanswered, and the day feels wasted. But Gandhiji argued that the end result is outside personal control. When you aim at a difficult standard, the target seems to move further away the closer you get. What you actually own is the care you put into the work in front of you. That work changes your habits even when the result falls short.

Therefore

Judge your day by whether you did the work properly, not by the replies in your inbox. When the standard is high, the work itself is where your control begins and ends.

A small reminder, on the desk or the notebook, that the care you put into the work is the only thing you actually control.

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