A special thanks to my wife Danilyn, our children, and my team of Rachel, Dolores, Shelley, Alicia, and all those friends who provided valuable feedback and support to me so that I could deliver my first TEDx Talk to a global audience.
I took an Uber ride from downtown Sydney to the campus of UNSW to deliver my talk. The drive took a little less than 30 minutes. The driver was a young Indian man named Sunil from Hyderabad. We started to chat and he told me he played cricket every Sunday. I took opportunity to share the 4 pillars I was presenting at my talk, and Sunil immediately said “I never considered the fact that I could apply watching the bowlers arm and reading the Googly to life!”
The same thing happened to me the day before my talk, when I went to the same venue for my rehearsal. This time the driver was Omar from Afghanistan. He too loved cricket, and was so happy about Afghanistan’s win over Sri Lanka in the recent ODI.
It made the 30 hour & 15,000 kilometer journey worthwhile for me as I know there will be millions of fans tuning into watch the Cricket World Cup next year! It will be held in the birthplace of the game in England. Fans from all of the 5 major continents of the globe will cheer on their favorite teams across every time zone with the best connectivity right to their phones!
My role is for them to recognize that cricket transcends the game and provides lessons for the challenges we face In life. My book “The First 10 Runs in Singles” fore-worded by Sir Viv Richards and recommended by my cricket idol Bernard Julian, provides 30 short lessons for life and leadership from the game of cricket. As I write my team and I are translating the book into Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali & Urdu to reach a wider audience.
I finished my TEDx Talk with these words, quoting American Sport Writer Grantland Rice, “When the greatest scorer comes to mark against my name, he doesn’t write if I won or lost but how I played the game”
This my friends, is the life lesson that cricket teaches us. Life lessons like persistence, patience, preparedness, discernment, initiative. When we press in, we will be taught by it. Thank you.