Learning How to Learn from Eklavya

These days, I find myself reaching for books I've already read. Recently, from that pile, I picked Steal Like An Artist to skim.?

I love how different that book is. To me, it’s a reminder not to reinvent the wheel but to follow what successful people have already done. Not every idea needs to change the world in a never-before-seen way—sometimes, replicating someone's work with your own twist is enough.?

Call it “stealing like an artist,” or "none of us have a single original thought," or whatever else!?

You start seeing parallels in almost everything when you keep reading different genres. While skimming through my notes, I connected the book's main points to a story from the Mahabharata: Eklavya, Dronacharya, the Pandavas, and the most expensive Gurudakshina ever given.

You probably know the one. A talented tribal kid named Eklavya wants to learn warfare and goes to the best teacher in the land. However, the teacher disapproves because he promised to teach only the children of the royal clan.?

Disappointed but motivated, Eklavya, the wonder kid, learns from a distance, keeping Dronacharya, the royal teacher, as his virtual mentor.?

Long story short, he quickly becomes an excellent warrior.?

Although self-taught, he had a teacher who indirectly guided him.?

(The latter part of the story is interesting but currently irrelevant, so I'll skip it.)

For most topics, learning has never been easier than it is today. You go to the internet, search for a few things, and you can easily spend hours going into every niche rabbithole directly/indirectly related to the topic.?

Spend 12 hours, and you can learn more from the internet than from a degree course. In a few years, or perhaps even months, you won’t even need to juggle multiple tabs; just asking questions to a GPT will help you learn in minutes.

But learning is not just about reading; it’s also about executing.?

And executing in front of a mentor.

Eklavya learned everything on his own, yet he had a teacher—Dronacharya's statue—for tangible support.?

Every day, he'd practice in front of it, treating it with humility and keeping his ego in check, like he would with an actual teacher.?

Controlling your ego is crucial in learning well. Most of us fail here.?

Yes, you can steal like an artist.?

But only when you recognize that someone, somewhere, sometime, has done it before you, possibly better - and now you are trying out your version of that old trick.

Hoping to best someone is good at keeping you motivated.?

But that someone need not always be another person.?

Unfortunately, we are trained to compete with others from childhood. Ranks and grades were part of our upbringing.?

Eklavya was different. He didn't need to compete with Arjun or Duryodhan; he was learning for himself.?

(That wasn't the case with Karna, but that's another story for another day.)

?Eklavya was fighting his own battles and was satisfied with his own accomplishments.

He learned like no one else because he had the best tutor, one who didn’t even know he existed.?

That is a lesson in itself.?

We can learn from anyone in the world, even if they don’t know we exist. Even if they were alive tens and hundreds of years before us. Even more so in the digital age.?

So this is my way of learning:

• Pick a book and learn from it.?
• Pick a person from history and learn from them.?
• Pick a business, whether successful or failed, and learn from it.?
• Pick a situation and learn from it.

All you need is a curiosity for learning, a controlled ego with a mentor supporting you, and reasons to do well!

Good luck!