To become Invincible at Life : Create your own T

One of the reasons we like to share what we have read with other people is that it allows us to live and learn within a community of people for whom learning is a way of life. We have known Jinay Savla for a couple of years as a bright young wealth manager helping Indian families “financialise” their savings. We are delighted to see him write about his learnings of how to build expertise on LinkedIn. Jinay begins by stating a problem many of us face “We want to do something that drives us, that makes us get up in the morning and jump out of the bed. We want to be inspired and in the process inspire others too. In a nutshell, we want to feel and live the way Steve Jobs did or MS Dhoni does or Roger Federer does or Elon Musk does…People in different streams look upto their heroes of that stream and wish to be that way.
So what stops you or me to achieving that epitome of peak performance? The invariable question of ‘How’ to reach there?”
Then he lays out the complicating factor: “To answer this query, we study the lives of these geniuses. Then somehow come to a conclusion that they were born that way. Like Sachin Tendulkar had the perfect stance when he lifted his bat or Micheal Schumacher got into a race kart even before he started running…we take a look at the journey of our heroes and our mind creates a map as to where they were exceptional and we were weak. It’s this very comparison that leads us to believe that we won’t be able to achieve that sort of success in life…”
And then he states the big question: “So how do we get out of this limited set of thinking?”
Here is Jinay’s answer – the letter “T”: “You may have more than 10 interests. So rather than waiting for some heavenly voice to tell you that this 1 out of 11is where your passion is, you should decide to pursue all of them….
These interests are a horizontal range of possibilities that you can accomplish in life. It’s the broad ‘-‘ (horizontal headline of letter of T). I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk. He practically built an internet company, then a financial services company, an electric car company and a rocket company. PayPal changed the way we exchange money over the internet, Tesla changed the way we perceive an electric car (I love that Model X) and re-usable rockets through SpaceX, completely changing the dynamics of the industry…He has tremendous work ethic and lives by it.”
“Power of Specialisation: Malcom Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours rule to become an expert has gained immense popularity through the years. In his book, he gives an amazing insight into how sports people get into intense hours of practice. Aamir Khan’s movie Dangal gives us an insight into how intense practice for years carves out it’s own niche…
Harsha Bhogle in his book The Winning Way gives us a glimpse into the journey of legendary Sachin Tendulkar…At one point in his life, he has played 55 games straight for 55 days straight. His schedule would be to practice from 7 am to 9 am then play a cricket game, again practice in the evening for 2 hours post his cricket match. …This is ‘I’ of the letter T’s vertical line.”
Jinay then explains how he applies the “T” principle in his daily life: “To follow such interests, you don’t really need to leave your current job. It can be done along with your job. There are tonnes of other opportunities waiting for you to grab …
For me personally, writing is a way of putting my thoughts together. It’s been 5 years that I write close to 1,000 words every single day…So now, I read a lot of books, write a lot (which for me is an effort at generalisation…I don’t know whether it forms a good T, it’s better left to the awesome readers who take their time out to go through. For me, it’s the journey worth taking.
The trick is not to really worry about whether it will work or not. Just start. And if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean, we give it the required effort.”