Practice, discipline, focus: his advice to students

After long study and reflection he names four things: practice, self-discipline, a clear goal, and concentration. A seed lies in the dark a long time before it becomes a tree; Roger Federer and Sachin Tendulkar were not made in two days of practice. People go to the gym for four days and expect a new body. Most start, then turn back.

The commonest mistake, he says, is to start and then stop. People begin a course of study, a habit or a book, and when it gets hard they turn back. Practice, discipline, a goal and concentration only work together and only over time. If you have stepped forward, don’t retreat.

Decide your priority and work on it first thing in the morning, the best time of day. Multitasking, he says, is fine for average results; to excel, focus on one point. He recalls a school lesson: hold a lens in the sun and the light gathered on one spot sets the paper alight.

Time moves at its own pace, and everyone, king or clerk, has 24 hours. What we manage is ourselves. Make a plan, set priorities so the important work is not lost among small tasks, and fit the work to the time: if polishing shoes should take ten minutes, give it ten minutes.

In the second part of his series on happiness he names the trap students fall into: thinking only of marks, salary and selection. Will I pass the IAS, the RAS, the bank exam? Because we fix on the result, he says, we neither enjoy the work nor get the result. Absorb yourself in the work itself and the results will come.

Students often look down on their own work and up at someone else’s, he says: the RAS officer envies the IAS officer, the small man the big one. But standing is something you build yourself; no one else can build it for you. A writer makes his own reputation, and so can anyone, in any work. Respect what you are doing now, and do it well.

Not everyone can read a whole library, he says. Choose your subject and focus on it, two or three aims at most. Sachin Tendulkar focused, and became a legend of cricket. Focus is what slowly turns effort into mastery.

Even if you do not write, read, he tells young people. Many people who achieved great things read before they sleep, and he mentions one who reads about a book a week, fifty a year, hoping that one in ten will give him a new idea. He knows people who still read and write at two in the morning.

Discipline, for him, has always meant showing up. Soon after his own marriage, he recalls, a friend had an interview the next day and needed help, and he was about eighty kilometres away. It was the middle of a winter night and raining. His family asked where he was going at two in the morning; he said that if he did not go, his friend might not be selected. He caught a truck, then a train, met the people he had to meet, and came back. His friend was selected. Life has difficulties, he says; what you do about them is your choice.

His own life is the example. In his 2025 interview he says the habit that matters most is consistency, even one page a day, and that big things begin with something small.