It is an absolute necessity. Sense of urgency says, “I do not have time”. Let me burn the candles at both ends. The sense of urgency is felt precisely like cutting off your air supply.

If someone comes up behind you right now and grabs your nose and shuts your mouth. First minute you will say someone is playing a game with me, who is this person…trying to figure it out etc. You hit your next 30 seconds and start wanting to breathe, the person grips harder. Now you start pushing harder, because you want to breathe, and if it continues for 30 more seconds, you are into desperation. You scratch, you bite, you claw, you don’t care who the hell it is holding you. At that moment in time, you will kill to breathe. And that is burning desire. It is a lot more than just survival. It is basically recognizing that nothing can hold you back. Nothing should get in your way. Survival would have been there in the first 10 seconds. But at the last 10 seconds, it was not even the issue of survival. It came down to the simple fact: “I WANT to breathe”. Total focus becomes tinier and tinier until it reaches the point that “I want to breathe”.

Look at Thomas Alva Edison. He is there, working away, continuously for 96 hours in his lab, not having gone home or out at all. He is so focused on his work. Literally, his housekeeper has to force-feed him. Nothing can irritate him, nothing can take him out of the lab if he is burning after an idea.

Tagore would look himself up in the middle of the night, when he was writing his masterpiece Gitanjali. Nothing could touch him. Until it came out of him (Gitanjali), nothing could get in the way. What drives these people like that?

Picasso locked himself in the attic until he finished his painting. They all have that, where their focus boils down to that particular thing being achieved and nothing else. But you do have it too. Every single one of us does. Almost invariably, usually, when we fall in love. Be it puppy love at the childhood phase or more serious mature things in adulthood, it comes at a point where those that you love deeply, your parents, your best friends, who before this thing happened had the greatest influence over you, the people for whom you had great respect and admiration, all of them flushed down the toilet because of someone you don’t know, have not really understood, not got to know very well yet, and yet who took over your entire existence. So the capacity is there.

The sense of urgency is not something that one can seek, it cannot be contrived, it has to be derived. It comes from within us.