Sports is a great teacher. In a cricket-crazy country like ours, the game offers both entertainment as well as fabulous success learnings.
Within cricket, the most fascinating format is test cricket, as it mirrors life like perhaps no other sport can. Over five days, it captures the drama of life itself with its highs, lows, wins, losses, successes, failures, with varying emotions at various stages of the match. It is called test cricket for a reason, because it really tests you. Excellence in test cricket is not just about talent, it is about skill, endurance and critically, temperament. The recently concluded India-South Africa test series saw India get whitewashed at home yet again in a span of few months. What was a fortress which touring teams scarcely breached has now been annihilated – thanks to fabulous victories by New Zealand and South Africa.
These losses have raised questions over our batters’ ability to play the turning ball, and the temperament to dig in and stay put at the crease, boiling down to the one word that defines success in Test Cricket – Application. This factor is critical for success in any walk of life. It assumes much greater significance in a world which is flooded with Apps on our smart phones, which are not really making us that smart with success play.
As a society we seem to be suffering from the ‘App-dication syndrome’, with our heads bowed down not towards applying ourselves to our tasks with greater diligence; instead, our heads lie buried for hours inside the apps that have caught our fancy and are addictive.
In a sense we have ‘app-dicated’ our dreams to the apps that control our brains, which are overfed with information and experience a kind of mentally draining engagement. Application in contrast is about avoiding distractions and staying focused – whether on the cricket field or in the field of existence, where we aspire to build careers or businesses.
No doubt, the smart phone apps are a great leverage if used in the right way and for the right reasons. They represent the new-age lifestyle, expanding our entertainment and knowledge canvas. The fundamentals of life and success achievement though are a constant.
As they say for batters in cricket, it’s time for all us to put our heads down and apply ourselves to the things that matter to us and not allow distraction to become a kind of a disease. This will ensure that just like a batter, we can play a long and fruitful innings, which will be remembered long after people have exited from the apps.
So, Apply, Don’t App-dicate.
(Hariharan Iyer is a seasoned Motivational Speaker, Corporate Trainer and Author of multiple management books. His latest release is Off Stump – Life And Management Lessons From Cricket. He is the Founder-Creator of Hariharan’s School Of Success Education (HSSE) - www.thehsse.com. He is popularly referred to as The Enter-Trainer®. He can be reached on hariharan@thehsse.com).
