Recently I came across a video of Harsha Bhogle on You Tube delivering a lecture in IIM A, not the more famous 2005 video but a recent one of 2024. He narrated an anecdote where he described a situation where his brother SMSed him telling that "a single is also a good shot, don't try to hit fours". There is a big life lesson in that statement.
I often love to draw analogy between cricket and life. Cricket is a sport I am passionate about. There are multiple life lessons from sports in general. Every sport you play, or watch have learning which you can apply on real life. But since I have grown up watching and analyzing cricket, I can connect more to this sport than any other.
Life is like a long Test match of Cricket, not limited to 5 days. In a Test match a player get multiple chance to prove their mettle. Sometimes the pitch is batting friendly and after few sessions of play it suddenly help the spinners to do nasty things with the ball. In other cases, a seam friendly pitch turns into a batsman friendly once the sun comes out and takes the moisture out of the pitch. The accomplished batsman and bowlers understand this, and they use their skills to play according to the conditions. A batsman who understands that in a seam friendly pitch the bowler will have upper hand, and he will always play cautiously. Because he knows that after few hours of play there is a high probability that the ball will lose its shine, and pitch will no longer help the bowler. Then he will have a higher chance of scoring runs against the same bowler. But if, in an effort to show how aggressive a batsman he is, he tries to play flamboyantly, he increases his chance of getting out.
Similarly, life put us in situations where we are ill prepared to face. We try to wriggle out of the situations by taking actions we should not have. At that time the biggest weapon we have is patience. Instead of trying too many things, we just need to take it one day at a time, or in cricketing parlance we should just focus on scoring one run at a time instead of scoring 4s and 6s. Sometimes in life you will go through a nasty situation, and it is likely that you will fail the test. But remember that unlike test cricket where you only get two chances to bat, life gives you multiple chances to bat, you just need to show up the next day.
Whenever you get a bouncer in life, just try to duck and if that doesn't help & you get out, just come to bat again next morning. But next morning just try to take singles instead of searching for the 4s.
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