Mirza Yawar Baig – Thoughtful practice
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
My brothers and sisters, I'm going to
send
you with this the link to
a wonderful
speech
on,
by Jeff,
Jeff Colvin,
the author of
talent is overrated.
And the speech is about
his concept that talent
is overrated.
And what he
talks about, which is
what we see as outsiders
as
a gift,
magic, as, you know, all kinds of things.
When you see an expert
operating in his or her expert area,
and we say, well, this is a god
given gift to that person. This person has
superb talent, and,
nobody can equal it.
What we don't see is
the
hours
and hours
and weeks months years
of practice.
And not just a practice, but of what
he calls deliberate practice, and which I call
thoughtful practice, which is the same thing with
a little bit of value addition which I'll
explain to you in a minute,
that goes behind us.
So, this talent, which we see as
only talent, is not only talent, it is
something which
comes as a result of
hard work.
So this
is JF Colvin talking about his own theory,
it's fantastic.
It's a set of 3 videos about 11
minutes each.
Listen to the first one and the second
one pops up and listen to that and
the third one.
And as in his book, he gives
many
case studies, actual
statistical data,
in proof and in defense of his theory.
The most empowering and wonderful thing about this
is that
this means that we are not restricted
by any,
gift
obtained.
Anyone can aspire to greatness.
All it requires is seriousness
with the approach.
If you are serious enough to work for
it, you will get it.
And I think that's a very
inspiring and,
empowering
thought.
I wanna talk to you about how important
this is,
the issue of thoughtful
practice from the from the
from a different
context, which is not just in becoming good
at a particular physical ability,
but becoming good in terms of
overall
our character.
Now
the
thing that Jeff Colvin,
talks about is
in terms of thoughtful practice, he talks about
3.
He didn't actually name those
spheres or circles,
but
I'm naming them.
3 circles that we operate in. 1 is
the circle of comfort. So comfort zone or
3 zones.
Right?
The names are not important. It's to understand
the concept. So
the comfort zone. Comfort zone is the zone
in which,
whatever you do,
you know how to do it.
You do it well. You're happy with it.
You're within coach customers,
meaning those who see you, meaning those who
benefit from your actions and so on.
They feel
that they have got,
you know, value for money so to speak.
And so this is your comfort zone.
The second one is
your stretch zone
or your growth zone.
And this growth zone or stress zone is
something where you are being
compelled.
Again, not by force, but by an example.
To do more
than what you normally do.
And how much more is a little bit
more,
not too much more.
If you do too much more, if you
attempt to attempt to do attempt to do
too much more or you are inspired
to do too much or forced,
then you enter what is called the panic
zone in which you really
learn nothing. You just you just go completely,
you know, panic. You get paralyzed, you don't
do anything or,
yeah, you know, you go nuts. But
before that,
the growth zone or the stress zone,
this is the most beautiful thing. This is
the most
valuable
thing because in this zone, you
are learning.
Now one of the
one of the most wonderful
quotes
that I
remember
of all time is that no one knows
the best that he or she can do.
No one knows knows the best that they
can do.
The best is only what you did last.
So you say, well, you know, can I,
can I jump 6 feet?
Long jump, not high jump.
You might say, yes. I can jump 6
feet.
Now how huge is somebody says, can you
jump 7 feet?
Our usual act reaction to any statement
where we are invited to do more than
what we normally do
is a negative. We say, oh, no. No.
I can't do that.
Can you lead this team? No. No. I
can't do that.
Now if you break that down
and you should,
and you say, well, why do you say
you cannot lead this team?
Oh, I never did it before.
So if you never did something before,
what is the data you have?
The data you have is precisely that, that
I have never
done this before.
Now if I never do something before,
does it prove I can't do it? No.
All it shows is that I did not
do it before,
which is fine.
So now can I do it or not?
What is my data? My data is I
don't know if I can do it. So
this is the most important,
you know, learning to say that
it is not to say that I cannot
do something,
but to understand
that I don't know if I can do
it or not.
So take that data.
Stay with the facts. What are the facts?
I don't know if I can do it.
Fantastic. So now where do you go? Where
do you go from here? I'm gonna try.
I'm going to try and see if I
can do this.
Do what? Do more
than what I have done until now.
And lo and behold, I find I can
do it. So now what happened to
the bar of my best?
What is my best?
My best has just now gone up.
My to the extent that I
exceeded my previous best.
Now this is something that you can do
lifelong.
Lifelong.
And barring,
and may Allah give all of you,
and all of us perfect health and and
all our faculties intact, but
barring physical
and mental,
illness and incapacity,
we
never know the best
that we can do because
it's not fixed.
Every time we try,
you learn that,
I can actually do more than that.
Now that is the the most important thing.
So
comfort zone
and then we have the,
growth zone
and then we have the panic zone. There's
no there's no benefit
in getting into the panic zone.
Stay within the growth zone. So there's no
benefit in staying in the comfort zone because
you never learn anything.
You're doing the same old thing over and
over again.
There is
no benefit in getting into the panic zone
because again you learn nothing.
You just get panicked
and, you know,
you're too busy,
running away,
in fear.
The benefit is in is in staying in
the growth zone.
Because they are not panicked,
and you're being stressed.
You're not being left alone to do
whatever you thought you could do,
and be happy with that. No. You're being
pushed.
And you're being pushed out to do a
little bit more, a little bit more, a
little bit more. Now this is the beauty.
This is the beauty
of this wonderful approach.
Now that pushing
is the is the first part of it.
2nd part of it, which is equally if
not more important, is
now that I've decided to do
a bit more,
how must I approach that?
How must I approach that?
And you approach that
thoughtfully.
You approach that,
deliberately.
It's not accidental.
It's not, sort of, you know,
my mind is somewhere, my thoughts are somewhere,
and I'm just, sort of,
pushing around, you know,
just mechanically doing something. No.
I'm deliberately doing. I am aware of myself.
I'm aware of what all my faculties, my
strengths, my weaknesses
as I stand here. And then I am
aware of the challenge
that I'm faced with
and how will I approach that challenge in
a way that
is beneficial
for me.
Right? Now in Aikido,
which I learned,
in the nineties, early nineties
in Bangalore from my great
friend and teacher,
Julius Abe,
There is a concept called centering.
Now centering, Julius always to center yourself center
yourself.
So before you go into
a fight, before you start
a series of
moves and exercises to center yourself.
Now centering consists of exactly this. Centering consists
of
becoming
fully aware
of yourself
as you stand there.
Now you've damaged how
unaware we are,
how much of a,
fog we live in
with respect to ourselves,
with respect to our
surroundings, with respect to
our own faculties,
our own strengths.
We live by default. We just, you know,
we breathe and we work and so on.
But when you center yourself,
you have to first take
a few seconds off
and focus on yourself
and bring all your being, all your power,
all your
physical, mental, and spiritual strength
into yourself, into that moment.
And then from that centered position,
you move.
And that move will be the most powerful
move to make
because it's coming out from that whole,
focus
and reservoir of
energy.
But that will not happen if you don't
center yourself.
Right? It won't happen if you
are walking around in this fog
of
whatever's happening in life. You have to center
yourself.
So this concept of centering
from aikido.
Center yourself,
and then you move out of there into
your activity that you're doing. So when you're
practicing,
it is this deliberate practice
with every move that begins
with centering yourself.
I was learning golf in the late eighties.
I I
I wanted to play golf, and someone
gifted me with a golf
set. And so now I had the golf
golf set. I had my
so called desire to learn golf,
and, I didn't know how to play it.
At that time, I lived in
the Mango range
in the Nilgiris, and the nearest golf course
was the golf course of the Ooty golf
course, the Ooty golf club, the Ooty golf
club.
Now the Ooty golf club with golf club
is very interesting. It's there,
obviously, because of the location,
of Ooty. It's
mountainous, hilly.
The, fairways are very narrow.
They are
mostly
on both sides. They are bordered
by gorse,
which, for
those of you who don't know what gorse
is, gorse is a extremely
thorny,
very, very thorny,
kind of bushy,
animal. It's not an animal, it's a it's
a plant, very thorny bush,
extremely thorns, full of thorns.
Now, that the reason why that's important is
because if you hit your ball
into the into the course,
you're done. You either get a mulligan if
you're playing on your own or a friendly
match,
so you're allowed another shot
without penalties,
or you lose,
you you you will get a penalty. So
you, you know, you get a stroke.
So the,
this was a problem with with gorse.
Ball gone. It's gone.
Now,
narrow long freeway. So you had to learn
how to hit straight.
The other problem I had with,
my learning of golf at that time
was that I had, first of all, a
full time job.
I was,
in the tea plantations.
And,
secondly, that I
lived my main road where I where I
was living. I was living in North Carolina
state.
My range is
about 3 and a half hours away,
from the woodland.
So there's no way on earth
that I could practice every day.
Even getting there every week was sometimes a
challenge because of work commitments and so on.
And if I was going to play golf
once in a week or less,
there was no way that I was going
to even learn golf. So, what I did
was
I
persuaded one of the caddies from Woodleigh Goughto
to go and stay with me, to live
with me.
His name was Frank Augustine and I owe
him a lot.
I used to go to Frankenstein.
Frank Augustine. Now, Frank Augustine
or Augustine
was a wonderful human being.
He was like
maybe
5 foot
nothing. He was 5 foot 1 or something.
He was scrawny. He was like a dried
prawn,
and the shot that he hit
every single time,
for the golfers who would understand this very
well, it gave you that very fantastic,
very satisfactory
sound
that you get
when your club
hits the ball
absolutely square
without any
chipping,
without topping,
without going too much under or over.
Absolutely exactly in the center.
You get this very satisfying
foot.
Now that's what Frank Allistines
every single stroke of his did that.
So here was this man who,
was physically,
you know, much less
strong than I was. Physically, he was he
was weaker than me than I was.
I'm talking about late eighties, so, you know,
that's a long time ago.
He was shorter than I was and everything
else, weight and whatnot.
Yet
my shots
would struggle
sometimes to go to 10 feet from where
I was standing.
And Frank, obviously, shot
on the Ouchi golf club would
not always because the the the fairways were
also long, but
almost always
he would tee off
from 1 green
and the shot would land, the ball would
land on the other green.
And then he had to go and put
it into the hole,
where I would take maybe 2, maybe 3
strokes to get there. So almost never on
par.
Now, what I did was I got him
to come and stay with me.
He set up a practice net,
and then he came to me with
a bag of
I think he had a 100 golf balls.
These were balls that he had
salvaged
out of the gorse
in
in.
So, anyway,
they were he had spent his
time and energy and
some blood, I guess, because, you know, get
them out of the garage, you had to
get scratched and bleeding.
So he came with this 100,
balls.
And my routine was, in the morning
or in the evening,
sometimes balls.
I had to hit a 100 ball balls
into that net.
There's a big mango tree next to the
net, and,
old Frankenstein would sit under would sit under
the tree, and he would do what I
call it is by his chicken
act. He would go cluck cluck cluck.
Every time I hit
the ball, not to his satisfaction and believe
me, he was doing that chicken act almost
constantly.
Even sometimes when
I hit the ball fairly well,
the most I would get out of him
was a about a grunt. I said, and,
then the next ball is it.
So what he was doing was he was
forcing he would say concentrate.
Concentrate. Concentrate.
And I would concentrate, and I would hit.
And I would hit it wrong, and it
comes again, and it's wrong.
And what he was doing was exactly this.
He was teaching me,
first,
making me aware of
what I could
what could go wrong, and then pushing me
to do better.
And we did this
for 3 weeks
every single day.
And after that, we went to the golf
club,
and we played
a full 19 hole.
You know,
of course, we played the whole course.
And, I mean, I never became a champion
golfer, but, you know, I could see
the huge impact
of this training.
So I have, Julius Abe
to thank for my his training
in Aikido,
and I have Frank Augustin
to thank for my
training in golf.
Both of which at that time,
unknown to me were
really training
in leadership,
in
excellence,
and in learning about myself,
my limits, and the ability to
push myself
out of those limits.
This is the benefit
of thoughtful
practice,
and that is what I want
to leave you with for today.
Thoughtful
practice.
See the,
the videos of,
geofcovid.
Thoughtful practice
is what
distinguishes
the expert
from those who are not.
And
it's not a matter of talent, it's a
matter of
thoughtful practice.