In the early 1980s, Bjorn Borg dominated the international tennis scene. After winning the Wimbledon Cup and completing a grand slam, he graced the cover of Time magazine.

The accompanying article traced his remarkable career, starting as a young, talented but unknown Swedish player who had to travel every day by train to and from his town to the city. He mused on his journey and shared the secret of his success: “I got on the train every day.”

Borg’s story is an inspiring example of the lesson in this Sunday’s Gospel, the Parable of the Talents. We associate this parable with the saying, “To whom much is given much is required,” or as the master in the parable who says, “To everyone who has, more will be given… the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

We often hear and say that at the end of it all, what the Lord will ask us is not how much we have achieved and accumulated, but rather how much we have loved. It is not the success and accolades, but what we have done in love and service.

Let me invite you to reflect on this last point—doing all things in love and service. Let us go back to Borg and other brilliant persons like him.

10-year rule

There is a widely held theory, particularly in sports but also the arts, called the 10-year rule. It shows that those who have attained greatness and brilliance in a particular field have gone through 10,000 hours of deliberate or deep practice.

It means 1,000 hours a year and if you compute that on a six-day week and factor in just 10 percent of the time for competitions, it’s equal to four hours of daily practice. The key here, though, is not just practice, but deliberate or deep practice.

Deliberate practice goes through a process. One focuses on a skill at a time, beginning with the basics for each skill. Practice makes perfect, yes, but practice with reflection and feedback. One gains knowledge of one’s strengths and gifts and builds on these.
Realizing one’s mistakes
Equally important is realizing one’s mistakes and improving on these. Interestingly, it is this latter point where much learning takes place. Some say that one who does not become aware of his/her mistakes gets lulled into a false sense of mastery, going into automatic mode with the inclusion of the mistakes.

In his prime as a basketball player, Michael Jordan was asked what accounted for his brilliance. He answered, “I made many mistakes.”

The goal of deliberate practice is to reach a level of efficiency and proficiency in a skill that one does excellently, automatically. After this comes brilliance when one journeys beyond one’s comfort zone, way beyond, as one colleague in a sports program for public schools would emphasize.

Beyond our comfort zone

This is what I propose as the central point of our reflection: going way beyond our comfort zone.

One of the books I often referred to when I talked to the teachers and parents of students in Ateneo de Manila High School is “Greater Expectations” by William Damon. The author says that for a young person to grow and mature morally, we need to set high standards, greater expectations, encourage and provide them with the environment to flourish. Challenge and attract them to go beyond their comfort zones.

This is what I believe the Lord asks of us when he says, “To everyone who has, more will be given… the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” We “have” or gain “possession” or ownership of something—a talent, gift, virtue, blessing—when we act on and with it, especially when we act in love for and in service of others.
Genuine, conscious choices
Acting in love and service is always an invitation to go beyond one’s comfort zone if we choose to live out—to borrow the term, deliberate love and service. Deliberate love and service is first and foremost a conscious choice; some call it mindfulness.

Yes, to love is a choice and the deeper and more life-giving love is a choice consciously made. Genuine and conscious choices always lead to action and the action here is always one that breaks new ground, breaches the status quo, moves way beyond one’s comfort zone.

I think the master in the parable commended the good servants because they chose to try and act in faith, knowing the risk of failure and yet not being gripped by fear. Note that the useless servant’s inaction was born out of fear.

Consciously choosing to love and serve overcomes fear. It overcomes sloth—knowing that choice leads to action, which requires us to roll up our sleeves and work, do our homework and all the tedious things that go into a job well done.

Our reward is not just the outcome or the success, but the choice and the process that went with the action.

This is the invitation and challenge in this Sunday’s Gospel of the Parable of the Talents—to live our life making use of our blessings to love more and to serve more. Greater love, greater service.

Greater love and greater service both elicit great fear, and the default reaction is that of the useless servant—to hide and not risk, to stay in our comfort zone.

Authentic service

In the book “Hinds’ Feet on High Places,” author Hannah Hurnard writes that to love someone is to give the person to power to hurt you in a way no one else can, to be vulnerable to pain. To love someone is to respect the freedom of the beloved and this adds to the vulnerability.

Greater love means greater vulnerability to pain and this elicits great fear.

Authentic service requires an emptying of self in the spirit of Christ’s “kenosis” in the Letter of Paul to the Philippians: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God; rather he emptied himself and took on the form of a slave.”

Authentic service asks us, as Ignatius of Loyola prescribes, to enter the world of those we serve and to accompany them in their journey with humility and respect.

All these, greater love and greater service, ask us to make deliberate choices, from which come deeds of love and service in the day to day.

It becomes a way of living and every day we get on the train to make our brilliance shine and give glory to God.