Its all done...

After a disastrous game over the weekend, there was a lot of brainstorming done at my team's weekly practice session about what needs to be done to turn our fortunes around. For that matter, I was lectured by a good friend (who, I realized yesterday, is also a damn harsh critic) on lack of application at my batting and he urged me to practice very very hard if I wanted to make justice to my enormous talent.


How funny that I land up on this blog post in exactly 12 hours after that counselling session. It beautifully captures the message -- 

When you come across a passage that particularly appeals to you, she said, try copying it out in long hand. The point, according to her, was that writing out great passages helped you absorb a sense of the rhythms and styles of writing; over time, they’d become part of muscle memory.

I was skeptical. She was not amused. Have you, she asked me then, ever visited an art gallery? Have you seen budding artists sitting in front of great paintings, and painstakingly copying them? Why do you suppose they do that? Because the process teaches you about strokes, textures, techniques of the masters — and over time, such exercises help make these techniques an integral part of your own skills.

Natural talent alone isn’t enough to make you good. You have to work damn hard, and practice damn hard. Some researchers have even put a number to how many hours of practice you need to achieve excellence: 10,000 hours. 

So, if I have to be good at cricket, I have to practice for 10000 hours i.e. finding 10000 hours of cricket videos on youtube and the likes, play like in those videos and most importantly, finding 23 idiots (10 players in my team, 11 in the opposition and 2 umpires) who have 10000 hours to spare as well. 


Boy, excellence is hard to achieve!!!