“How can a person who is desirous of ease and comfort acquire knowledge? How can a student desirous of learning be comfortable? A person who desires only comfort has to give us learning and a student desirous of learning must give up comfort.” — Vidur Niti
Whenever I notice that things are slowing down for me, I ask myself: am I putting in enough effort, or am I slacking off?
This question is a learning I took from the Mahabharata. The epic tells us that as children, the Kauravas and Pandavas would learn various skills from Dronāchārya, one of which was archery. All children would stop after the lessons ended, except Arjuna. He wanted to practice all the time.
Dronāchārya noticed this and instructed his cooks to not feed Arjuna in the dark. But one night when all children were eating, a strong wind put out all the lamps. Call it fate, call it destiny. And Arjuna thought, “It’s dark and I can’t see my hand or the morsel. But I can still eat because practice has strengthened my muscle memory. This means if I keep practicing, nothing is impossible.”
From then on, Arjuna stopped sleeping at night. He practiced and practiced until he became a shabdavedi (one who can shoot an object without seeing it because they can locate it by the sounds it makes). Dronāchārya then realized that there was no stopping Arjuna. The warrior would learn what he wanted, regardless of whether his teachers taught it or not.
Arjuna’s spirit of a champion is not confined to ancient India; it lives on in the training regimes of the greatest modern-day athletes, like Virat Kohli, Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, and Mohammad Ali. They put in extraordinary effort in training and as a result, made their opponents sweat in competition.
Such ekāgratā (one-pointedness) is what we need in order to grow our abilities. Figure out what you want and go after it by cutting off distractions. And you already know what you want. It’s the task you keep postponing or researching on but never start doing, because it appears daunting or because you are waiting for someone to do it for you. Help will come and so will success… when you prove you are worthy. That we only get what we deserve is a law of nature.
As former British long-distance runner Mo Farah said, “Don’t dream of winning it. Train for it.”Ekāgratā helps us achieve uttamatā (excellence) and leads to ātmanirbhartā (self-reliance).