Cool practice makes perfect

VITHAL C NADKARNI

Laura Vanderkam had a moment of insight some years ago: you can have a full life that few of us think possible, when you give structure and purpose to your leisure time. This is like treating one’s weekend wardrobe with the respect one assigns to one’s weekday suit and tie, she writes in 168 hours: You have more time than you think. 

But most people don’t ‘use’ their leisure time optimally. One reason is mental pre-occupation. If you love your job, are self-employed or thrive against ‘impossible’ deadlines, you tend to spend lots of time thinking about your work, even when you’re chilling out or swinging in a hammock. 

Also, most people tend to spend big chunks of their leisure in the most ‘frictionless’ ways — watching TV, for example. If you started exercising every time you wanted to turn to the tube, you’d soon be fit enough for competitive triathlons! 

So how does one cultivate such ‘virtuous’ practices? Start with this basic insight: while most of us think of our lives in grand abstractions, a life is actually lived in hours. If you want to be a writer, for example, you have to dedicate hours to putting words on the page. And if you want to do something or become something — and you want to do it well — it takes time. The noted New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell sums this up in the 10,000-hour rule in his Outliers: The story of success, which says the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practising a specific task for a total of 10,000 hours. 

This works out to 20 hours of work each week for 10 years. So, genius may not be the only or the main ingredient of a successful symphony of a person’s life, Gladwell emphasises, citing the cautionary story of Christopher Langan who ended up working on a horse farm despite having an IQ of 195 (compare this with Albert Einstein’s score of 150)! 

Gladwell blames the environment in which Langan grew up: “No one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone,” he writes. 

In contrast, Eastern traditions tend to attribute such results to innate or intrinsic causes or disciplines. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, cautions against unintelligent (tamasic) or overpassionate (rajasic) effort. 

The best results flow from satvic practice: dispassionate or detached effort, abhyasa backed with vairagya. 

Practice makes perfect; but don’t lose your cool.

Courtesy: Cosmic Uplink / ET