Most of us can name a film whose story we have long forgotten but whose songs we still hum. In Tamil Nadu, those songs very often carry one name: Ilaiyaraaja. The film may have sunk at the box office, and the director may have faded from memory. The music stayed.
Why do some people shine for a few years and then fade, while others keep shining for decades? Talent is part of the answer, but talent is not rare. Every school, every office and every film unit has gifted people in it. What is rare is the mind behind the talent: a particular way of thinking about work, about rivals and about success.
Watching the artists and sportspeople I have admired over the years, I have come to call it the mind of a champion. The good news is that this mind is not reserved for geniuses. It is made of choices, and anyone willing to practise those choices can make them their own.
Champions give more than they get.
A champion wants to give the client more than the client gives back. It sounds like a small thing, but it is one of the most powerful attitudes anyone can bring to their work. Most of us quietly match our effort to the reward: the big assignment gets our best, the small one gets whatever is left. Champions keep no such accounts. Every piece of work carries their name, so every piece gets their best.
Ilaiyaraaja delivered hit after hit, whatever the film and whoever the director. Vadivelu brought the same spirit to comedy. His scenes worked whether the film around them was a blockbuster or a flop, and his lines have taken on a life of their own. Years later, his dialogues still fill social media memes, and Tamil Nadu still reaches for one of his lines to sum up a situation.
There is a quiet secret behind this habit: generosity compounds. The person who gives more than expected is remembered, recommended and called back, and over a lifetime that becomes a reputation no one can take away. So the next time you are tempted to do just enough, pause and ask yourself one question. Would a champion hand this in?
Their only rival is the person they were yesterday.
Champions do not like failure, and they never quite make peace with it. Yet dislike of failure is not what moves them most. What moves them is the urge to grow and evolve, to be better this year than they were the last.
Notice whom they measure themselves against. Not the achievements of their family or the reputation of their lineage. Not the famous names from their hometown. Not even the leaders of their own field. Their only real rival is the person they were a year ago.
This is wiser than it looks. When we compare ourselves with others, we end up either proud or discouraged, and neither feeling makes us better. When we compare ourselves with our own yesterday, there is only one direction to look, and that is forward. Yesterday's success never becomes a cushion to rest on; it becomes the bar to clear next. You do not have to be better than everyone else. You only have to be better than you were.
For them, work is rest.
Perhaps the most striking thing about champions is how they rest. For them, work itself is relaxation. They do not need a holiday to recover from their work, because the work is what restores them. I honestly doubt that Ilaiyaraaja has ever taken a vacation, at least not in the way the rest of us understand the word.
His record suggests as much. He has scored music for nearly 1,500 films in nine languages. In March 2025, at the age of 81, when most people would long since have settled into retirement, he premiered his first Western classical symphony, Valiant, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London's Eventim Apollo. That is not a man counting the days until his work is done. That is a man still raising his own bar.
As a meditator, I recognise something familiar in this. When the mind is completely absorbed in a task, there is no room left for regret about the past or worry about the future. Time seems to disappear, and the work refreshes rather than drains. In that state, work becomes a kind of meditation. Most of us taste it for a few hours at a time. Champions have learnt to live there.
The work itself becomes the reward.
This mindset usually arrives in stages. Early in their careers, most champions probably worked for the usual reasons: money, fame and perhaps a measure of power. There is no shame in that; everyone has bills to pay and a name to make. Later, the reason becomes contribution, the wish to give something of value to others.
Then, somewhere along the way, they discover something simpler still. The work itself is the joy. Once that happens, the rewards slip into the background, and what remains is the desire to make the next piece better than the last.
If you are working for money and recognition today, do not be discouraged. That is where almost everyone begins. Just do not stop there. Money and fame may open the door, but it is the joy of the work that keeps a champion in the room for a lifetime.
They learn from legends, then go past them.
Champions are not immune to awe. They look up to the legends of their field like anyone else. The difference lies in what they do with that admiration. Some people meet greatness and shrink, telling themselves they could never be like that. Champions meet greatness and grow. They learn everything they can, and then set out to go further.
Novak Djokovic arrived in tennis when Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal seemed to own the sport. When he won his first major in 2008, he broke a run of 11 consecutive majors shared between the two of them. He did not stop there. He measured himself against them, match after match, year after year, and in 2011 he won three of the four Grand Slam titles. He has since won 24 in all, to Federer's 20, and spent a record 428 weeks as world No. 1.
Tamil film music has its own version of this story. As a young man, A.R. Rahman worked as a pianist in Ilaiyaraaja's troupe, playing on hundreds of films and watching a legend at work from close quarters. When his own moment came with Roja in 1992, he did not imitate the master. He brought a sound that was entirely his own, and Time magazine later counted the Roja soundtrack among its 10 best soundtracks. Within a few years, the young musician from the maestro's troupe had become one of his strongest competitors.
Working beside a legend did not turn Rahman into a copy. It gave him a standard to rise above. So find your legends. Study them, work near them if you can, and let their excellence stretch you. Admire them, but never let them become your ceiling.
They let their work do the talking.
Finally, champions are strangely quiet about their own success. They do not rush to write autobiographies, and they rarely talk about their achievements. For most of their careers, Ilaiyaraaja and Rahman have said little about their own triumphs. When champions do look back on their glory, it tends to be near the end of the journey, not in the middle of it.
The most telling moment came in 2009. Rahman had just won two Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire, with the whole world watching. Before his speech, he said in Tamil, "Ella pugazhum iraivanukke": all praise to God. At the peak of his career, his first instinct was to give the credit away.
Rajinikanth is cut from the same cloth. With a following like his, he could remind the world of his records every week. He chooses not to. He does not talk up his past successes or use the media to celebrate them. He simply lets the next film speak.
There is wisdom in this silence. Talking about yesterday's victories keeps the mind facing backward, while a champion's mind is always turned towards the next piece of work. Humility also keeps the door to learning open. The moment we believe we have arrived, we stop growing.
Put these lives side by side and the same mind shows through. Champions give more than they take. They compete with no one but themselves. They find their rest in the work and let the rewards fade into the joy of doing it. They learn from legends until they can go past them. And when success comes, they stay quiet and go back to work.
None of this needs a stadium or a recording studio. Whether you teach, heal, build, sell or cook, the same mind is open to you. You may never compose a symphony or lift a Grand Slam trophy, but you can begin tomorrow morning. Give a little more than you are paid for. Measure yourself only against yesterday. Find the joy hidden inside the task in front of you. Learn from the best, and aim higher. And let your work, rather than your words, speak for you.
Champions are not made on the day of the final or the night of the award. They are made in ordinary hours, when no one is watching, by people who choose to give their best anyway. That choice is open to you every single day. Why not make it today?
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