I Think I know the Secret Behind Ab De Villiers’ Extraordinary Batting!
If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.
Watching Ab De Villiers bat, for cricket fans, is like watching the greatest show on earth. If you don’t understand cricket, think of it this way, he is so skillful that if cricket was a 100-meter race he could easily beat Usain Bolt, running backward.
When he is playing at his best, the experience for the spectators is nothing less than watching a space shuttle take off, it is mesmerizing.
How Come He Is So Good?
He started playing international cricket in 2005, about a year before I started watching cricket seriously. It was the time when Lara, Ponting, and Tendulkar were the brightest stars. Ab De Villiers was like a baby Chimp in the ring with these Gorillas, and nobody really expected him to become this Cricket god that he has become.
The first four years of his career really don’t give one any reason to believe that he, one day, will be challenging The Don or Tendulkar for the Greatest Cricketer tag. Then came 2010 and everything changed. Lara had retired, Ponting and Tendulkar were soon to follow. Cricket pundits were betting on a few young Cricketers to lead cricket into a new era, which, without a doubt, will now be known as the ABD era. That year he scored 984 runs at an average of over 80 including 5 hundreds, more than his previous four years put together. He started playing these ridiculous shots that left people in awe, but as we know orthodoxy hates innovation, Cricket purists questioned his style of play(which they admire now). He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care and kept on inventing and adding more of these unorthodox shots to his arsenal. It seems like others were not as creative as him, or maybe they just lacked the courage to play unconventional, high-risk cricket. So how did he develop these unique and awe-inspiring shots? This is where it gets interesting and this is where Stuart Kauffman and Steven Johnson come in. Kauffman and Johnson, by the way, are not his coaches, one is a Theoretical Biologist and the other is an Author, we’ll talk about them later in the article.
(Most of the Ideas from here on are taken from Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You.)
1. DELIBERATE PRACTICE is the reason for his success, Something that an average cricketer Doesn’t do.
There is no such thing as natural talent. This myth that some people are born great, is just that, A myth. One may have some predispositions but that is a long way from crafting your skills so much that you become great. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson broke this myth about two decades ago, but for some reason, we are still holding on to it. It is Deliberate Practice that separates great cricketers from good cricketers, not their natural talents. I’ll define Deliberate Practice for you before I talk about its role in Ab De Villiers’ rise. Ericsson describes it as, “an activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance”. Simply put, It is about practicing difficult activities, carefully to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and get immediate feedback. We start to enjoy doing things that we are good at, which is exactly the opposite of deliberate practice. Deliberate Practice makes you feel uncomfortable. It stretches your brain and makes you so uneasy that you want to quit doing it, and go back to what you are already really good at. If you enjoy your practice, then it's not Deliberate Practice. For instance, Where other cricketers would practice all day to improve their already great cover-drives, he would practice his off-balance inside-out over covers. He wouldn’t like practicing it as it is mentally very uncomfortable. Human brains don’t enjoy failure and they always want to feel that dopamine rush, which is what happens during successful attempts. Ab De Villiers is also a human being, he doesn’t feel good practicing those difficult shots either, he also can’t get them right for quite some time. He also wants to play that on-drive that he is already great at, But he Doesn’t give in to the uncomfortable feeling of this brain-stretch. He keeps doing it until he gets good at it, which he will eventually, and at that time his game will go one level above his competitors. The other important aspect of deliberate practice is Immediate Feedback which his coaches provide him with, it is a harsh critique of your work( Yes, you need an expert coach to provide you immediate feedback, in order for you to improve significantly). Now the question is, How does he know what new shots to practice? how does he invent all these new, Seemingly impossible shots? This is where Dr. Kauffman & Steven Johnson come in.
2. The Adjacent Possible(The Invisible City that Only ABD Can See.)
Adjacent Possible is a term coined by Dr. Stuart Kauffman which he used to describe how simpler chemical structures, spontaneously, formed into complex chemical structures. Author Steven Johnson adopted this term to explain how innovation happens in any field. Johnson Says, “ We take the ideas that we inherited or stumbled upon and we jigger them together into some new shape”. So innovation, in any field, happens when someone is at the current Cutting Edge(One can become the cutting edge only with Deliberate Practice) of their field and tries new combinations of the existing ideas to bring some new inventions into the world. These new combinations lie in the Adjacent Possible space, and average people of any field can’t perceive these invisible possibilities. Ab De Villiers has practiced so hard that he has become the current cutting edge in cricket. Ab De Villiers can see these new combinations, which are invisible to an average cricketer. Adjacent Possible space is like the city on the other side of the hill, to get there, you have to climb the steep hill, but since you are not fit enough to reach the top you can not see the city on the other side. ABD is like that guy who has made himself capable, with deliberate practice, of going to the top and seeing the city on the other side. In that city, he finds new and more effective ways of doing things.
Others can also achieve what ABD has, they just have to become the cutting edge with the help of deliberate practice to discover the Adjacent possible.