Drive for Excellence

A gentleman was once visiting a temple under construction.
In the temple premises, he saw a sculptor making an idol of God.
Suddenly he saw, just a few meters away, another identical idol was lying.
Surprised he asked the sculptor, do you need two statutes of the same idol. No said the sculptor.
We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.
The gentleman examined the statue.
No apparent damage was visible.
Where the damage is asked the gentleman.
There is a scratch on the nose of the idol.
Where are you going to keep the idol after it is done?
The sculptor replied that it will be installed on a pillar 20 feet high.
When the idol will be 20 feet away from the eyes of the beholder, who is going to know that there is scratch on the nose? The gentleman asked.

The sculptor looked at the gentleman, smiled and said, “The God knows it and I know it “.
The desire to excel should be exclusive of the fact whether someone appreciates it or not.
Excellence is a drive from Inside not Outside.

—

I believe you must have well agreed with it. Is nt it?

I would like to thank my friend Varadharajan R for sharing this through an email.

everything happens for good

nowadays i have been ‘realizing’ many proverbs i would say. well, i may post those experiences in a separate blog!

this is an infamous proverb we might have been coming across since our childhood during several occasions and we happened to hear from many people around as well. ‘everything happens for good‘ – this might make us feel irritated and like adding fuel to fire when we are ‘in’ the circle! yes, i mean it.

when we say it to others, it may not matter but only when we ‘experience’, it will give a totally different shape.

Today i got a call from office saying that the filesystem reached its 100% in Production. Despite being a holiday, it does not matter when you are on a production support :). You have to be available on 24*7 basis as per norms. Well, i just told the network admin (aka system admin) to move the heapdumps, javacore files (they are the files which the Java process writes into the filesystem when the running java process reaches out of memory) to the external hard drive so that we can get some space. but even after that, there was no luck :(.

I came to office and i did the usual work around. I stopped the application server and cleaned up the temporary files as well by archiving the log files. And moved those archived files to the external hard drive. still no luck :(. It was stubborn and showing 99% :).

Had been thinking what would be the cause and somehow started into the tuning, troubleshooting documents. In the middle, thought of bringing the server up. But to my surprise, the server was not getting started and it was showing some errors in the linux console. After some attempts, thought of killing the process as usual and while doing so, by mistake i killed a different process named ‘EmailService‘ which was on top when i searched for the ‘java’ processes running at present in the system. Usually there won’t be any other services than our regular application server process and the corresponding node agent. Till now i have not seen this EmailService and it was not attracting me too. So i went ahead in killing the process and then i found out the mistake when verifying after deletion.

In the middle, i just checked for the memory usage, it went again upto 100%. Wondering what might be happening!

Thought i have done a mistake and have to get it corrected, searched for the process or its corresponding scheduler (cronjob in linux which is similar to the batch file in windows to automate tasks) for starting the EmailService. There we found so many core dumps generated in the EmailScheduler :). Lucky are we! After taking backup of those core dumps and deleting them, we got 24% free space and the disk usage was 76% !!

When asked the colleague about the issue during the startup of EmailService, he told one more infomation that this email service would be generating some pdfs as well. After some usual searches, we found out in a subdirectory there were some 7600+ pdfs silently sitting and occupying minimum of 1.1 MB each. Few of them had around 2MB size and very few had 20 MBs.. 🙂 So altogether we got some 700 MB+ space in disk.

Had the ‘EmailService’ not been deleted accidentally, we would have ended up somewhere else. Atleast we would have wasted some more time when dealing with the ‘Production issue’.

Overall, we should not panic about the issues rather we should welcome! 🙂 — is that what i feel now! wat say?

Talk Less.. Do More

Well, there is no need to explain the 4 words series.. any1 wud easily get it.

Its the recent blog entry of ‘Robin Sharma‘, a great author of so many excellent books like ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari‘, ‘The Greatness Guide‘ etc., Though i have been getting the updates from his blogs, this one triggered me to blog it immediately.

Just with Robin Sharma’s permission (:)), copy-pasting the content here. Anyways, the original URL is here -> http://www.robinsharma.com/life_coach_ic_blog_416.htm

Here You go..

The smallest of actions is so much better/braver/smarter than the biggest of intentions. Leadership is all about making good things happen. About getting great things done. About the translation of beautiful ideas into brilliant results.

We live in an interesting world. Too much overpromise and underdelivery. But world-class leaders/businesspeople/ human beings are different. Remarkably so.

They talk less. And do more. They are masterful at execution. They are acutely focused. On creating value. On what’s most important. On birthing their best into the world.

Have any of you seen or experienced a little controversy in this regard? If so, let me know! I am curious to know the facts falling on the other branch of the tree!