Daily Practice, Leela, and the Secret Every Elite Athlete Knows

There is no magic formula.

Every elite athlete knows this, even if the rest of the world keeps looking for one. The path to mastery is not mysterious. It is repetitive, unglamorous, and deeply consistent. It is doing the same thing in training, day after day, having faith that the body is adapting incrementally, invisibly until one day something that once seemed impossible simply... happens. And then, over time, that impossible thing becomes the norm.

The examples are everywhere once you start looking.

In football, your first touch is chaotic when you start out. But do wall passes every single day and something shifts. Your body begins to automate the movement. One day you receive a ball under pressure, in full stride, and control it without thinking, something your past self would have found hard to believe. In basketball, every early shot feels like a guess. Then comes the hundreds of repetitions, the same form, the same rhythm, day after day, until your muscle memory locks in. You go from hoping the ball goes in to expecting it to. In running, a single kilometre can feel brutal at the start. Show up daily, increase the load gradually, let the body adapt and before long, ten kilometres is your warm-up.

Same principle. Every time.

I've been watching this principle at work over the last few days, but in the most unexpected place.

We are currently on a family holiday in Kashmir, staying in a home tucked in a valley, a river rushing past outside, trees everywhere, snow-capped mountains on the horizon. The bustling streets and tall buildings of Mumbai feel like another galaxy. And it is in this stillness, this rare and beautiful quiet, that I have been able to sit with my four-and-a-half-month-old daughter Leela and truly observe her.

I say truly observe because, for a stretch recently, I was travelling constantly. A trip to Hyderabad for the Rugby Premier League auction. Then Goa for the Dream Sports Championship football tournament. Then Bhopal to spend time with the ownership group of an education institute. In and out, in and out, the fun uncle making periodic appearances rather than the present father I want to be. It wasn't the norm, just an unusually packed stretch of professional commitments. But it created something unintentional: the experience of returning home each time to witness Leela in phases rather than in a continuous flow.

And what I kept seeing, each time I walked back through the door, looked like transformation. 

I came back from Hyderabad to find Leela happily spending time on her own, playing with her stuffed animals. Before I left, I genuinely couldn't imagine this; she needed to be fed, burped, put to sleep, or engaged by an adult at almost all times. Independent play wasn't part of her world. Now here she was, completely at peace in her own company, in her own little universe.

But this didn't happen by magic. My wife had been giving Leela increasing stretches of alone time each day, especially during the windows when she seemed most settled and content. Micro-actions, repeated daily, with intention. What looked to me like a sudden transformation was, to my wife, just Tuesday.

I came back from Goa to find Leela tracking movement. If you walked past her, she would follow you with her eyes  and keep following, even as you moved out of her direct line of sight. Before I left, she could see you when you were right in front of her, but the moment you stepped away, you were gone. Not anymore. And again — not by accident. My wife and in-laws had been holding up black and white cards each day, moving them slowly from side to side, letting Leela's eyes chase them a little further each time. Daily repetition. Incremental adaptation.

Then I returned from Bhopal to find our girl doing the happy baby pose.

Now, I have done this pose in yoga for years and genuinely love it. But seeing my own daughter, just a few months old, lying there, legs outstretched, both hands grasping her feet, grinning — that one stopped me in my tracks. What moved me most, though, was the story behind it. My wife described watching Leela discover her own body in stages: first noticing her knees, then finding one foot, then the other, then beginning to stretch, then reaching, then learning to grasp, and finally, with a wide smile, catching both feet at once. No external instruction. No coaching. Just daily curiosity, compounding quietly, until it became the happy baby pose. 

It's really quite simple, when you strip it back.

Daily practice leads to incremental progress, which eventually unlocks new ways of performing in the world. To the outside observer, in this case, a father returning from a work trip, it looks like transformation. And it is, in every meaningful sense. But the transformation was not the result of a single moment. It was the accumulation of countless small, consistent actions that nobody else was watching.

This is how a footballer goes from scrambling for the ball to gliding past defenders at full pace. This is how a basketball player gets to the point where a contested three-pointer from well beyond the arc, a six-foot-five defender in their face, still goes in. This is how a marathoner crosses the finish line looking like they're sprinting, after 42 kilometres, in under two hours. Natural talent matters, genetics can accelerate the process, but it cannot replace the daily work that makes mastery possible. It never has, and it never will.

I have always known this to be true for athletes. But somewhere between Hyderabad and Goa and Bhopal and Kashmir, watching my daughter discover her feet, I was reminded of something I think we all quietly know but rarely stop to feel:

This principle doesn't belong only to sport. It belongs to all of us. To every human being who shows up, does the work, and trusts that something, even something invisible, is changing.

Leela is four and a half months old and she already knows this.

Maybe she's the one teaching me.