A job is first about your purpose and then about the money. Great facilities are one factor that contribute to your happiness and purpose, but if there are not enough challenges to push you beyond your comfort zone, you will soon find yourself in a rut of mediocrity. If you are the smartest, fastest and best performing guy in your department or company, you are setting your progress up for an abrupt decline. You have to be challenged, you have to be stretched, you have to be beaten so you can learn to be smarter, faster and better than you were before. That is the only real journey to success.
Hang out with your seniors. Find ways to tag along with your bosses. Make friends with people who are older, smarter, richer and more talented than you. Let their presence not make you feel small, let their company serve to inspire you to your true greatness. Use their company well. Don’t just come back and end your day in the satisfaction that you spent your time in great company. Reflect. Introspect. Strategise. Use that inspiration to propel you further. Don’t be a parasite, hanging around, absorbing their energy and feeling good about the powerful association. Be someone who aspires to be an equal and then try being better. In doing so, take others along, so they may be enriched in your company as you were in those who led you out of your mediocre mindset.
GOPI
When I won the state championship at the age of 15, my brother was No. 1 and I was No. 2. But, unlike me, he was an equally brilliant student. He ranked 101 in the IIT examination and went off to study in IIT Rourkee. I continued with badminton. Training and playing alone was tougher, not having my brother as company.
I worked very hard, alone. I won the under-18 state championship in the first year. That was a big boost for me because you normally win it in the last year. Being the youngest, I was beating the older players and they began to pay attention to me. The coaches and authorities began to believe I had potential to become a national champion.
That year, when I appeared for my engineering exam, I failed. I had had no time to study and had no clue what was being asked in the examination. Most of the questions had multiple options as their answers. I did pure guess work and randomly tick marked the answers. Obviously, that strategy did not work. I failed.
My parents saw no hope for me in engineering and so badminton became my only option as a career. I was elated. There was no looking back from there.
But, life had other challenges planned. After my graduation, I got a job with TISCO in Jamshedpur. It was necessary for me to add to the family income. Since I was hired under the sports category and the facilities were great, I was happy. But very quickly I realised that facilities don’t make champions, challenges do. I was miserable there. My whole life had gone for a toss. And then, destiny intervened. I was diagnosed with chicken pox. I was alone and I was sick. As soon as my father heard the news, he left home in that instant, took the next train without any reservation, stood the entire journey from Hyderabad to Jamshedpur to reach where I was. He was appalled to see my condition. He looked after me until I recovered. I told him I wanted to come back home.
Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster India, from the chapter titled "The Competitive Gene" in Shuttler's Flick: Making Every Match Count by Pullela Gopichand with Priya Kumar.
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