By Douglas Kruger
LAST week, my wife had her photo taken with several members of the Springboks rugby team. She says she can now die happy. I’m still trying to arrange that thing with Nigella Lawson before I can say the same, but what a week it’s been for Jersey. And what great sports the Springboks were.
It’s a singular honour to have a squad of such calibre on our shores.
It’s also a special treat for South African expats, who clambered to get everything signed, from caps and rugby balls, to babies, kitchen sinks, and even the odd anatomical unmentionable. I may never wash there again.
South Africans see rugby as far more than a sport. It’s encoded in a double-helix down to the level of our DNA, something like the koeksisters at our annual bazaar. Take it out of our make-up, and we collapse into jelly.
One snide Englishman mentioned that we might be a “one-trick pony”. Well, sure. But what a trick it is. We take all the energy that should go into… I don’t know… governing a nation, law and order, a functioning economy… and we pour it into that one game. And we’re not sorry.
Watching the Springboks train was instructive. As with any high-performing athletes, each movement was so decisive. So clean. Conducted at such speed, yet made to look so easy. There were none of the fumbles you might see when us mere mortals have a go. That perceived ease is ever the mark of true mastery.
The hours of practice per individual must certainly run into the thousands, and even the hundreds of thousands. Yet the essential formula is simple, and it was on full display up at the training grounds.
To attain mastery, in sport, or in anything, the essential formula is: yearning + input + deliberate practice, sustained over time.
It’s a complex topic, and you can go into a great deal of depth and nuance on each of these elements. But that’s the essential framework. Let’s unpack it.
“Yearning” is the deep desire to master. Childlike obsession. It’s sometimes called “the rage to master”.
Without that burning passion, instruction is ineffective, because the will of the trainer is working against the will of the student. But when the heart is in it, everything changes. Still, a burning passion alone will only take one so far. It’s all heart but no technique. Next, you require “input”.
Input comes in different forms. Self-study is good, but personalised coaching by someone who knows what to look for is significantly better. The best coaching incorporates immediate, actionable feedback: “No, like this.”
Then come the hours of practice.
For true mastery, practice must follow a specific structure. Merely playing a game of rugby every Saturday isn’t enough. Ask the guy who plays golf each weekend, yet grows steadily worse year on year. Instead, mastery requires what the experts call “deliberate practice”, and it’s a different animal.
Deliberate practice is what we saw up at the St Peter training grounds. Break a pursuit down to its constituent parts, then run drills, mastering each in turn, before building it all up again into a cohesive whole. Witness the Boks doing a single movement over and over, starting slow, then speeding up.
The final part of the equation is “sustained over time”.
Eventually, anything can stop being fun. That’s when discipline becomes the order of the day. Do you continue, even when you don’t want to? Real discipline is what you do when you don’t feel like it.
There is a useful hack for solving this problem. It’s called “preloading the decision”.
Think of a gym trip. If you wait until you’re in the mood, you’ll never go. So don’t leave it to chance. Instead, pack your bag the night before. You have effectively “preloaded the decision”. Now, it’s no longer a matter of motivation. The decision is already made. When the time comes, you simply go, no thought process required. Most times, you will enjoy it once you’re there. The brain is the enemy, and the preloaded decision is the bypass.
Now that the Springboks have left the Island, my wife worries that it’s all downhill from here. The highlight of her existence grows dimmer in the rear-view mirror. I’m informed that I shouldn’t worry – our wedding day did come in a close second. Still, it leaves her with a crisis: what to do with the rest of her days?
As an attempt at an answer, she has now joined the women’s rugby team. I’m not going to list the places where she now sports scrum-bruises, but suffice to say one doesn’t show them on one’s LinkedIn profile.
-
Douglas Kruger is a global speaker, and the author of 12 books published by Penguin. A transplant from Johannesburg, he lives in St Helier with his wife and son. His son also shows early signs of rugby-obsession.
