How many of us have heard the expression, “Take yoga off of your mat and into your life.” What is implied by this expression and how do you apply age-old principles from the Yoga Sutras to the modern-day world? Let’s take a look at Yoga Sutra 1.14,
“Sa Tu Dirgha Kala Nairantarya Satkarasevito Drdhabhumih”
Sa = this, tu = and, dirgha = long, kala = time, nairantarya = without break, satkara = earnestness, asevitah = well attended to, dridhabhumih = firm ground
“It is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time; without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness that it can succeed.”
The first requirement for success is that the practice should be done for a long time. The second requirement is that it must be done continuously. Once a student asked Swami Satchidananda, “I’ve been practicing yoga for the past ten years, but I’m still the same. “How often?” asked the Swami. “Oh, off and on” replied the student. So, continuity is the next step towards success. Finally, the last requirement is “with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness”. This means with full attention, with the entire application of your mind and with full faith in your achievement.
Now let’s take a look at these principles and apply them to Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand hour rule from his book, “Outliers : The Story of Success”. First of all, what is an outlier? An outlier is something/someone that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body. It is also a statistical observation that is marked different in value from the others of the sample. For example, Mozart, The Beatles and Bill Gates are outliers. What do these three have in common? Upon close investigation it is discovered that it is not talent alone that made them successful, but the opportunity to practice – hours and hours of practice. How much practice did they need before they became successful? Ten-thousand hours. Ten-thousand hours is a lot of time, it most certainly cannot be done overnight – usually it is the equivalent of ten-twenty years of practice. According to Malcolm Gladwell, this is the golden rule for success.
Mozart’s early works were not outstanding, according to psychologist Michael Howe in his book, “Genius Explained”. Even though he started composing at the age of six, many of his earlier compositions were probably written by his father and perhaps improved in the process. It wasn’t until he was twenty-one that his earliest masterwork (no. 9, K271) was composed. The music critic Harold Schonberg said that Mozart did not produce his greatest work until he had been composing for twenty years.
In 1960, the Beatles were a struggling high school band, which were invited to play at Hamburg and this was their golden opportunity. In an interview with John Lennon he stated, “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
They started playing seven nights a week once they became popular, five-eight hours a night. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964 they had performed for an estimated twelve-hundred times. Philip Norman who wrote the Beatles biography, “Shout” stated, “They were no good on stage when they went there (Hamburg) and they were very good when they came back (Liverpool). They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers. They weren’t disciplined on stage before that, but when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them”.
Now let’s turn to Bill Gates. Bill Gates was placed in a private school named Lakeside at the beginning of the seventh grade. Midway through Gates’ second year at Lakeside, the school started a computer club funded by a rummage sale by the school’s Mothers’ Club. In 1968, most colleges did not have computer clubs. Furthermore, Lakeside installed what was called an ASR-33 Teletype, which was a time sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. From that moment on, Gates lived in the computer room. However, buying computer time was expensive, so one of the mothers of Lakeside, who was also one of the founders of Computer-Center-Corporation (C-Cubed), proposed that the computer club at Lakeside could test the company’s software over the weekends in exchange for free computer time. In this manner, Gates found one opportunity after another, anything for free time on the computer. Those five years, from the eighth grade through the end of high school were Bill Gates’ Hamburg. In the words of Bill Gates, “It was my obsession. I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week, that we wouldn’t get twenty-thirty hours in.”
These examples fulfill the first two requirements of the Yoga Sutra 1.14. The practice must take place for a long time and must be continuous. What about the third requirement – “a quality of positive attitude and eagerness” – where does this come from?
Malcolm Gladwell has divided his book into two sections: Opportunity and Legacy. Opportunity is what Mozart had at the age of six, he had his father, the Beatles had Hamburg and Bill Gates had Lakeside. The other requirement is legacy.
The best example of cultural legacies is described in the chapter, “Rice Paddies and Math Tests”. What is a cultural legacy? Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
From a yogic perspective, a cultural legacy is “Sanskara”. These are ingrained deep into our psyche. Sometimes, they help us and sometimes they do not. For example, in the chapter, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” it is clear how cultural legacies create communication problems between pilots, co-pilots and traffic control between different countries, which can result in plane crashes. At the same time there are certain cultural legacies, which can help foster a positive attitude, perseverance and success. There is a Chinese proverb, “No one who can rise before dawn three-hundred and sixty-five days a year fails to make his family rich.” This is the slogan of every rice farmer. They do not blame the land, they do not blame the weather, instead they know that their harvest is directly proportional to the amount of work that they put into their rice paddy. Rice agriculture is skill oriented. If you are willing to weed a bit more diligently, become more adept at fertilizing, spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, do a better job at keeping the clay pans level, and make every use of each and every square inch of the rice paddy, you’ll harvest a bigger crop.
Students from the same culture approach Mathematics in the very same way. According to Allan Schoenfeld, a Math professor at Berkeley, ”We sometimes think about being good at Math as an innate ability. You either have it or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master Math if you are willing to try. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard. For example, spending twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
What we learn from cultural legacies is that success is a function of attitude – the desire to achieve. This is good news for those who have always believed that they either “have it” or “don’t have it”, because now we know that everyone has it – everyone is deserving and capable of success. All that is required is the correct mindset.
In the words of Swami Vivekananda, “Think of one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on that one idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.”
~Kirti Saran
December the 9th, 2015