Action and its Purpose

There must be a purpose behind any action. Its the law of causality. Every action has some cause behind it...or in other words, it has some purpose..For many of our actions, this very purpose is not aligned with our ultimate goal. This is when we lose our effectiveness.
Take your day to day work...If the plan is crystal clear , one tends to be more efficient in his work..This is because he/she always performs any action whose purpose is aligned with the ultimate goal.
Think of the time when you do not work efficently..you will realise that at all those times, the ultimate goal is unclear..and hence you face a question- why am I doing this?
In longer projects, when the final deliverable is to be submitted in 4-5 years, the planning part is most crucial...In a plan, only actions which are contributing to the larger goal shoud be included.
Many times, even after planning well, the implementation becomes difficult. To implement the plan continuosly for this long , one needs to be intellegent and mature enough to be able to see the bigger picture.
This problem is faced by many students doing PhD..First 1-1.5 years of PhD are meant for learning the 'state-of-art' in your research area (popularly called 'Lit. Review')..and no one is expected to come up with some extra-ordinary results during this time...If you invest this time well, the remaining years of your PhD will be smooth walk for you..But with every passing second in this intial period, student becomes more impatient as there is no tangible output.
The thing needs to be well understood here that you are building the foundation for ur PhD in early stages...and as the foundation is below the ground, it is not visible...but it is most important for the stable structure that you are going to bulid afterwords.
With some impatient students it happens that they start with a narrow vision in their area and finally land up in a null solution...This is the most difficult situation to handle, when there is no way to go..