The board of Oak a Motivational Story

Here is another edition of the motivational story to charge you up. This story is narrated to me by a motivational speaker in Lucknow.  A man, an inspiration and leadership consultant has values and great business mind. 

Once there lived an old man in a village. He was blessed with the happy family of a son and a wife. The son was talented and studious. But the son was suffering from bad temper. In his anger he could say such words that could hurt people many a time. The father was worried about his son’s behaviour and he came up with a decent plan to make his son to lose this bad habit. One day he called his son and assigned a task to him. He said, “I am assigning you a task to get rid-off your temper”. “You need to put a nail in the oak board every time you lose your temper”, he added. The son agreed to do so. At the end of the day, he nailed around 40 nails in the oak board.

The son felt his anger as a burden to him as every time he had to nail. He decided to control his temper. Soon the day arrived in which there was no nail is embedded in the oak board. He was very happy to see this and he couldn’t believe too. He ran to his father and said, “Oh father! I did it. There is no nail today”. The father hugged him in joy and cried. “That was the only thing bad about you my son and now it is also gone”, he said. “You are the best son I could wish for”, he cried with joy. Now, the task was not yet over. He assigned another task to make sure completely removal of bad temper. He assigned to remove each nail in a day when he didn’t counter bad temper. Later in the year, he removed every nail on the oak board. He was completely away from the bad temper. He went to his father and told about this day which his father was waiting for so long. 

Father told his son to bring back the oak board and showed the holes inside it. Father said, “You may have removed all the nails here but the scars remain”. The words you said might hurt people and left scars on their heart no matter how many times you said sorry and felt guilty about it.  “Choose your words wisely my son”, he said. He was now proud of his son success in beating anger and bad temper. He could now relax and live his life peacefully. The son was also thankful to his father for the best lesson of his life to remove bad temper from his life. He was amazed by the trick used by his father. He knew he would regret the words that he uttered to people as the scars were always there no matter what he would do.