The Beginners Mindset

And why not being an expert is a good thing.

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I should be a women’s cricket expert. I am a women’s cricket expert. I feel like a women’s cricket expert. 

None of those statements are true. 

The first, then. I should be a women’s cricket expert (talking about this in the Indian context), because I’ve played internationally and professionally for 15 years and built a media career in the last six years writing about and commentating on the game. But the fact is, that this current assignment has shown me that I can’t call myself that.

I’m commentating on the Women’s domestic One Day competition. It’s been six years since I retired, and there are more new faces than old on the domestic circuit, and this week has had me doing a LOT of research into each of these players. 

On one level, this is to be expected. Besides women’s cricket, I work on other sports too, mostly men’s cricket. And there is so much cricket to watch, and so little domestic women’s cricket on TV, that it’s not possible for me to follow each scorecard on the domestic circuit. And I’m not a cricket tragic. Cricket is my work, but I like to get away from it every now and then. I’m not one of those people who will trawl through the BCCI website on their days off. (I need to remind myself of it from time to time, but..) I do have a life. 

I am a women’s cricket expert. That feels wrong too.

Yes, my experience as a player and a media person, especially a journalist, is fairly unique. Yes, my body of work is significant, having written hundreds of articles on women’s cricket (280+ at last count) over the last six years for major publications. And yes, I co-authored the first ever research paper on women’s cricket in India, the Equal Hue Report, where we surveyed over 350 domestic cricketers to document the state of the dometic circuit. But like the previous para has shown, I don’t know it all. That’s something this last week has brought me face to face with, and I’ve accepted it. I’ve had to lean into the gaps in my knowledge, put the expert hat aside, and return to the beginners mindset. So I’ve done the hard googling, stared at scorecards, and interviewed people who have their ear to the ground. Good, old fashioned, research. 

And I realised, if I feel like a women’s cricket expert, it could mean I’ve gotten complacent. It’s a delicate balance between self belief and overconfidence. I’m reminded that there are always people who know more about something than me. But at the same time, I need to remember that I know some things that so many others don’t, and so are worth sharing.

This is a concept -and a process- I talk about in my Multimedia Sports Journalism course, in the Proactive Sports Content section. When writing about a topic that we don’t know much about, we might assume a couple of things: 1. No one would be interested in this, so why make content around it. And 2. I don’t know enough about this, so how can I make content about it? Both those aspects are mindset blocks which I teach my students how to overcome using a lesson called the Knowledge Pyramid. And these last 10 days have reminded me how to research, and conduct interviews with experts, which is also a topic I talk about in the course. 

Basically, I’m taking my own advice. And surprise surprise, it’s working. Most of the time. (I might have called S Meghana,Meghana Singh once. Or twice.) 

I’m sharing this with you to remind everyone who’s starting out that you have an advantage over me. People at my level are more likely to get complacent, and might not ask the kind of curious questions that we used to, because we assume everyone knows the things we know. Beginners, on the other hand, question everything, and therefore can open yourself up to insights that I might be blind to.

If you want to dive deeper into the concepts I’ve talked about here, consider signing up for my next batch of Multimedia Sports Journalism, by Snehal Pradhan. We start the next batch on Monday, and have only a few slots left. If you are reading this email as soon as you get it, and register immediately, you might be able to sign up to the QnA I’m doing at 8:30 PM tonight (Wednesday, 17th November), for those who have questions about the course. 

A reminder: This is the last cohort for this year. 

See you next week!

-Snehal

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Song of the week: Previous batches of my course will know that I talk about creating a writing environment. One part of that environment for me is music. I like curating instrumental music tracks that work for me into a writing playlist.

Latest addition to that playlist is this album from Star Wars Visions, a reimagining of Star Wars by anime studios in Japan. Yes, that’s as cool as it sounds. These tracks are from the Episode named The Village Bride.

Would you want to see my full playlist? Let me know.