I noticed a poster at the swimming pool which caught my attention yesterday. The wordings in the poster goes as follows:

Victory is when ten thousand hours of training meets one moment of opportunity

This phrase is supposed to be aimed at sports people where it is so true.

I have played badminton for many years now. We used to go to flood light badminton tournaments in and around Chennai and win every single tournament – continuously from 1989 to 1999 we won almost every single tournament went to.

People came and asked us many times, how we managed to do it. I have also had people come and challenge me saying ‘I am going to practise for the next one year, and I will come and defeat you guys consistently from next year.’ To all these people, I used to say just one thing:

‘We practise for 4 hours every morning rain or shine, and we have been doing it for over ten years now. So next year, if you have to beat us, you should have practised more than what we have done so far. If you manage to accomplish it, yes you can beat us consistently.’

Seeing this phrase at the pool, reminded me of my badminton days in India, and I thought, how true!

I started thinking of how to generalise this phrase (as this one is more relevant to sports). I ended up coming up with a variation of the phrase:

Victory is when ten thousand hours of sincere effort meets one moment of opportunity

If you think about it, you will notice that people like Bill Gates have put in hours and hours of effort into building this empire, called Microsoft today. It was not a success overnight, it was hours of dedication and hard work, which has resulted in this massive victory for him, a side effect of which has made him be in the top five richest people in the world for many years now.

I know there are many people who would question this and say ‘what about those who were smarter not to invest many hours, but to succeed in a very short period of time?’.  For those folks, I have made another interpretation of this sentence:

Even if you do not put in many hours of effort, it is possible to be victorious if you are very smart and also lucky – but, if you put in many hours of effort, there is no way you will fail.

The difference is, if you do not put in hours of effort, there is no guarantee to sure success, whereas hard work and sincere efforts will always pay off.

Having seen the fruits of investing hours of effort into something, I continue to believe that this will continue to give the right rewards over a period of time. I follow it to this day and hence I have no doubt in advocating this idea to the readers of my blog.

I am on the quest to victory. Are you? If you are, let me know how you feel as you put in hours of sincere effort along the way. Trust me, you are on your way to victory, so keep going.