Attitude to Prepare to Win is more important than Attitude to Win

In the year 1998 Australian team was visiting India after having won in every place around the world. They had coined the word saying India is their Final Frontier. By the end of 1997 the champion leg spinner Shane Warne started to play his mental disintegration game against Sachin Tendulkar. Warne was quoted as saying that, “Sachin is not a great sweeper of the ball and that is going to make him struggle against his leg spin.” This is a usual tactic adopted by the Aussies to mentally disturb the opposition.

It was true that Sachin was not great at playing the sweep shot till that point in time. Hence, Sachin went to the MRF Pace foundation at Chennai and asked the former Indian leg spinner L. Sivaramakrishnan to keep bowling balls outside his leg stump so that he could practice a wide range of shots from there including sweep, paddle sweep and slog sweep. Siva told him that in the actual match situation Warne would bowl onto the footmarks and there would be variable bounce and immediately Sachin using his bat created foot holes outside his batting crease so that he could practice against variable bounce. He started doing hours of practice to perfect the sweep shot.

Result Sachin scored his first double ton in his first-class career when Mumbai the then Ranji Champion that year played a practice match against Australia and he followed up with a match winning century at Chennai in the 1st test. Eventually Australia lost the test series against India and then Sachin played a couple of spectacular knocks against them at Sharjah famously called as the desert storm in the April of 1998 and he singlehandedly won the tri series.

Warne jokingly told the media that he was getting nightmares about Tendulkar even in his sleep for the way he played against him both dancing down the wicket and also sweeping him to perfection.

Everyone has the “Attitude to Win” but passionate people have the “Attitude to Prepare to win as much as they have the Attitude to win.” It was his love for the game that made him to subordinate his likes and dislikes to prepare and practice hard to reach the Himalayan heights in his career.

In my formative years as a Public Speaker I used to practice for 500 times to deliver 2 minutes speech in national conventions. Those hours of practice eventually made me a Public Speaker par excellence and win awards too.

A wise man said, “The solider who sweats the maximum in the training is the one who bleeds the minimum in the war.”

Either you want to become a great speaker or a champion athlete or a great singer or achieve academic excellence or become a best-selling author or achieve professional excellence the key to success is to have the attitude to prepare to win.

Wishing you an awesome week.

Loving you.

JVC Sreeram