Cricket: The game is about dealing with failure

MS Dhoni wasn't cocky but there wasn't any false modesty either: Greg Chappell

Jonathan Selvaraj Posted online: Sun Oct 06 2013, 01:51 hrs

In Visakhapatnam with the under-19 team, Greg Chappell talks about Australia's changing cricketing mindset and his eventful coaching stint in India. He opens up to Jonathan Selvaraj as he revisits the dressing room that had ageing seniors, an out-of-form captain and a rookie wicket-keeper who was a natural leader.

In what capacity are you connected with the Australia under-19 team?
I’ve come in as National Talent Manager. I’m chairman of our youth selection panel. I’ve been in charge for three years now and I normally travel with the U-19s as a youth selector and manager. But when Stuart Law took up the Queensland job, then we had to do some reshuffling. And that’s why I came back as the coach.


Of late a number of Australia U-19 players have been blooded into first class cricket and the senior team ...
Five years ago we came to the conclusion that it was taking on average four years for the U-19 players to get on state contracts. That was too long. So the Second XI competition was changed to a U-23 competition (Futures League). I think it has been quite successful. Twelve of the players who played the 2010 Junior World Cup went on to get state contracts as did 13 from last year’s World Cup. That’s considering three of our best bowlers — Pat Cummins, Ashton Agar and the wrist spinner James Muirhead — were injured. Those three boys also went on to state contracts and of course Cummins and Agar have played international cricket.


Why do you have to give them a push?
The international programme has become busier and T20 cricket has made it busier still. International players don’t play domestic cricket. And after professionalisation at our domestic level, those players don’t play club cricket. That’s had an impact on the younger players. We have come to the understanding that our club cricket and our domestic cricket can’t do the job that it once did. So we have to identify the ones we think have potential and invest in them.


So doesn’t domestic cricket and the experience that comes with it count?
Playing for ten years doesn’t necessarily give you 10 years’ experience. It could just be that you had one year’s experience ten times. If you are not getting better, then your experience is useless. Performance in domestic cricket up to a point is important but once somebody with the skills that you require shows the ability to score runs or take wickets at that level, the sooner you get them to the next level, the better.


How different is it to coach a U-19 team from a senior team. Are the players scared of you?
No, they are not scared. They are respectful but they are not in awe of me. I am a resource like the rest of our support staff. My role at this level is different from the role at state level and the role at international level.


What is it that you look for in a young cricketer?
It is about assessing their potential. Have they got the skills that historically do well in Test cricket. Can they bowl fast? Are they someone who gets bounce? Can they swing the ball? Do they put some revs on the ball? The first thing I’m interested in, in a batsman is can they read lengths well because that means they are watching the ball. If they are going forward to balls they should be back to then there is a problem. How do they read the game on the field? I am looking for things that the scorecard can’t tell me.




Could you give an example of someone you noticed who read length well during your stint as India coach. What about MS Dhoni?
MS Dhoni came into the one-day team just before I joined as coach. Most people saw him just as a front-foot hitter. One day I saw him batting against Ajit Agarkar on a very slow wicket at the Chinnaswamy Stadium and he was very comfortable on the front foot. Ajit has a very good bouncer and I thought I would like to see how he responds to that. So Ajit bowled him the perfect bouncer and the next thing you know he had hit the ball to the top of the roof. So I said 'Ok he reads length well'. It wasn’t as if he was constantly looking to get to the front foot and that was his only skill.


Was that the only thing that set him out?
His reading of the game was incredible. He had a calmness and an inner strength which wasn’t something I had seen a lot of in other cricketers. He was very confident. He wasn’t cocky but there wasn’t any false modesty either. If he thought he could do something, he would go ahead and say he could do it. Both in India and Australia you have a lot of players who are afraid to stand up because they feel they might be thought of as being ahead of themselves or setting themselves up for failure. He had no concerns about that. He was supremely confident in his own ability. He had some work to do with his wicketkeeping but you could see he had the basics. I saw him as far more than a one-day cricketer. I could see him as a Test cricketer. And I could certainly see him as a captain.


Why do you say that?
His ability in the Indian dressing room to move between the seniors and the juniors was unique. There was nobody else I saw that could compare. Even some of the seniors struggled with other seniors. Not just physical strength but also an emotional strength … a spiritual strength. He knew who he was. He didn’t have any doubts about his ability to play at that level.


It wouldn’t have been easy for him. He comes from a state not really known for its cricket.
That’s interesting. We had a camp in Bangalore early on. I wanted the guys to talk about themselves. I had come in knowing some of the senior players because I had seen them play and I had met many of them before. But I wanted to know about their life and cricket. And it was an amazing story of where he had come from and how he had learned his cricket playing on the streets with his friends and at each level how he had to prove himself again because each time he came in he was the new boy. He talked very well about how each of those steps had given him something. Some confidence, some experience, some knowledge.


What were you looking for in these sessions?
I was looking not just for cricketing talent but also something extra which would help them succeed. Not everyone was cut out for a life as a professional cricketer. These guys are on the road for ten months of the year. You are separated from your friends, family and support structures. Not everyone can cope with it. I was looking for that inner strength. That ability to be able to be self-contained. Also you have to have a sense of humor.


Why sense of humour?
This game is about dealing with failure. Bradman batted 80 times in Test cricket and he only got 29 hundreds. So he failed 51 times. The rest of us have had a huge struggle. It’s only those who accept that they are going to fail a lot and have a belief that their method will work will be able to keep at it. Dhoni’s method was and is unique. Not many people play like him, but he has immense confidence in it. And that’s all that really matters.


What did you see in Suresh Raina?
There was an X factor there. He had the ability to score runs quickly. He read length well and he had shots all around the wicket. He was a brilliant fielder, a more-than-useful all-rounder. I saw him first at a camp in Bangalore. This was simply a way for me to see some talent. We had a camp for the bowlers and for the batsmen. There were a lot of good players but only a few had that X factor.



Anyone else with X factor?
Another one was Sreesanth. I was standing on the far side of the ground and I moved to second slip where I had fielded my whole career and that’s a good place for me to get my look at him. And I kept seeing the ball coming through to the keeper. He had a very easy action and there was some pace there. And as I said before, genuine pace excites me. So I spoke to others and they said 'oh no he is from Kerala and he doesn’t get wickets'. So I talked to other people and they said he doesn’t get a lot of wickets but he gets a lot of nicks. He just never had players who could catch the ball. So as I have said before, it isn’t about wickets, it’s about how many times you beat the bat. How often do you get the outside edge, how many times do you hit them on the pads. It could be how many times you can draw a false stroke.



How do you remember your time in India?
Far from regretting the experience, I look back at my time in India with great fondness. Most of my experiences here were very good. There were parts that I could have done without. But that happens. When I look back it was overwhelmingly positive. It was a wonderful opportunity and a great honour to be asked to coach someone else’s country. I couldn’t coach Australia. Coaching India wasn’t the next best thing, it was the best thing. India is the hub of cricket in the world these days and to work in that environment and try and understand it a bit better… I consider myself very fortunate.


How did you try to understand the culture? You read a lot. Did you go through books?
I have a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. I read it, I still read it. I have a copy of the Koran. I read that as well. I’m interested in all of that. (Ramesh) Mane the team physio was a Brahmakumari (follower). We went with him to the temple in Bandra. My wife went to the Hare Krishna temple in Bangalore where they serve meals to thousands of kids. When we went to Pakistan, Saeed Anwar took me to a teaching mosque outside Lahore. I wanted to understand that a bit more because we had Muslim players in our team — Wasim Jaffer, Mohammad Kaif, Irfan Pathan and Zaheer Khan. I felt I needed to understand something. I mean I couldn’t speak the language, and I just wanted to understand their world a little bit better, in the hope that that would help me, help them.



Did the players appreciate that you were trying to understand their world?
They might not have been aware of some of it. I went to Irfan’s home in Baroda and of course they couldn’t speak much English and of course I couldn’t speak any Urdu. But you look into someone’s eyes and you can understand. Irfan’s mother spoke to my wife and she said “thank you for looking after my son". And we got a thrill from the fact that they appreciated that we were looking after their kids. And they were like our kids. Because they were young, they were vulnerable and they needed someone to look out for them.



So what were the high points of your stay?
My only interest in the time that I was in India was what was best for the Indian cricket team. The whole thing was a spiritual experience. The education point of view was one thing that we really focused on. India was struggling in one-day cricket, particularly chasing. And we made a process of getting the team to understand how to chase. And when we had seventeen wins in a row that was an enormous achievement. And it wasn’t an achievement for me, it was an achievement for that group. They had to buy into it. Rahul Dravid as captain had to buy into it. There were a lot of risks. There were criticisms we were changing the team, we were changing the batting order.. And the fact that we got the guys buying in was tremendous.


What went wrong when you were coach of India?
AS you know in that role, the spotlight is such that nobody wants to understand what is going on underneath. All they saw was what they wanted to. If it had worked, you would be a hero and if it hadn’t, you would have been a zero. Generally what I have found in life is what you see isn’t necessarily the whole story. But no one was really looking at what Greg Chappell the coach was saying, and try and understand Greg Chappell the person. I tried to explain what we were trying to do, but in fact, it was counterproductive. People just used it against me.


Have you made your peace with not just what happened but some of the people involved?
I haven’t spoken to some of them, but you move on. I was in Kolkata earlier in the year and I learned that Sourav’s father had passed away and I rang him and spoke to him at that time and passed on condolences.


Was he surprised?
I’m sure he was a little surprised but he said he appreciated it very much. As I explained to him at the time it wasn’t anything personal (about the decisions I made). I rather liked Sourav and I admired him as a cricketer but at that point he probably wasn’t the best person to be in that position.




Could you have avoided some of the decisions?
When you take a decision, you go with it all the way regardless of what happens. I believed and it was agreed that this was the best team for Indian cricket and the team at that stage. Sections of the media wanted to portray that it was me against Sourav. But it was nothing to do with that. It was purely to do with the cricket. In fact I quite liked Sourav and I have had some great experiences with him. He had been with me in Sydney before the tour of Australia in 2003, and it was a wonderful experience. And I said it before and even subsequent to the issues that we have had that Sourav considers me the best batting coach he ever had. So we had a mutual respect but I hardly expected him to agree with some of the decisions I made. But our relationship was separate from our job. If he had been my brother I would have done the same thing.

What kind of a recovery is this when so many people are crippled by debt?

Financial despair, often fuelled by payday lending, poisons the present and undermines hope and opportunity

• 
• • Stella Creasy
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 October 2013

Anti-payday loans campaigners at Brighton for the Labour conference. Photograph: David Levene for the Observer

Britain is once again being talked about as a place of prosperity. We are told to be relieved that the worst of the financial crisis has passed; the nation is becoming, according to David Cameron, a land of opportunity. Yet the same government that talks tough on national debt turns a blind eye to the personal debt the public have racked up on their watch. So while confidence may return to Britain's elite, millions of others endure sleepless nights about their future.

These are the people drowning in debts built up coping with the consequences of a recession in which wages froze but prices continued to rise. With little help from the government or banks, payday lending filled the gap. That leaves many people trapped, balancing multiple loans with multiple companies. They are trying to put food on their tables and heat their homes while paying off high-cost debts. One constituent was juggling eight different payday loans, to try and cover lost hours at work. She eventually lost her flat and only cleared her debt with her redundancy payoff; she is now back in rental property.

Last week, a Sure Start in Walthamstow, north-east London, told me of 30 clients served with eviction notices the day the benefit cap was introduced. Parents not even given a chance by landlords now face an overcrowded private rental sector that shuns housing benefit claimants. Several have been referred to social services as fears about debt and homelessness create unbearable stress.

Benefit cuts are the tip of the iceberg of pressures pushing the public into the red. As working hours have been slashed, so a wave of part-time jobs has led to underemployment and wasted productivity. Rail and energy prices have rocketed without competition from government to drive down the costs of getting to work or keeping warm. Asking those with thousands in unsecured personal debt – our current national average is £8,000 and growing – to take on risks and responsibilities is a non-starter. What hope saving for old age or social care costs, sending children to university or a housing deposit when the end of the month, let alone the end of the year, appears so distant for so many?

Which is why the toxicity of payday lending doesn't just feed today's cost of living crisis, but affects tomorrow's country of opportunity too. Cameron talks about prospects, but by his inaction we know his vision is one for the privileged few.

The failure of Project Merlin to lend to businesses shows coalition incompetence; the failure to provide affordable credit to our communities in such circumstances is inexcusable. Little wonder payday lenders now make £1m each week bleeding cash from consumers desperate to bridge the gap between a rocky jobs market and rising everyday expenses.

Such borrowing only compounds budgeting problems. Debt charity StepChange report 22% of payday loan clients have council tax arrears compared with 13% of all other clients, and 14% of them are behind on rent compared to 9% of all other clients. Such difficulties are music to the ears of companies for whom the more in debt a customer is the more profit they make.

Not every customer gets into financial difficulty, but enough find the price they pay for credit means they have to borrow again; 50% of profits in this industry come from refinancing, with those who take loans out repeatedly creating the largest return. One company makes 23% of its total profit from just 34,000 people who borrow every month, not able to cover their outgoings without such expensive finance. In turn, such loans devastate credit ratings, leaving users few other options to make ends meet.

Plans from the Financial Conduct Authority to limit rolling over of loans and lender access to bank accounts offer some progress. Yet until we deal with the cost of credit itself, there is little prospect of real change or protection for British consumers. Capping the total cost of credit, as they have in Japan and Canada, sets a ceiling on the amount charged, including interest rates, admin fees and late repayments. This allows borrowers to have certainty about debts they incur and firms have little incentive to keep pushing loans as they hit a limit on what they can squeeze out of a customer.

Lenders aggressively campaign against such measures knowing their profits, not customers, would take a hit. They threaten that caps would drive them out of business and push borrowers to illegal lenders – when evidence from other countries shows the reverse is true. Labour's commitment to capping in the face of such industry and government opposition reflects not just different priorities but different perspectives about in whose interests to act.

Only this government would make a virtue of defending companies that most now agree are out of control. The Office of Fair Trading is so concerned it has referred the entire industry to the Competition Commission. Its report into payday lending details how consumers are repeatedly sold loans they cannot hope to clear. The Citizens Advice Bureau found 76% of payday loan customers would have a misconduct case to take to the Financial Ombudsman. Despite overwhelming evidence of the toxic nature of their business model, these companies are being allowed to continue trading as if the consumer detriment it causes is a matter for the borrower to navigate rather than of public interest to address. Wanting to get regulation right should not prevent us from acting to avoid what, if left unchecked, will no doubt become the next mis-selling debacle akin to PPI.

In its willingness to front out concern about the fate of its 5 million customers, the danger is that this industry – and this government – wins the argument. They portray financial regulation as anti-competitive, anti-personal responsibility and anti-British, conveniently overlooking the market failure their behaviour represents.

This fosters a pessimism that the best we can do is pick up the pieces of the lives ruined, homes lost and credit ratings destroyed by companies exploiting the desperation of a country living on tick. Supporting alternative credit is vital, but so, too, is securing an alternative credit market and collective consumer action.

The longer we wait to learn the lessons of other countries on the use of caps, real-time credit checking and credit unions, the more people these legal loan sharks will snare into a cycle of inescapable debt – and a future where that land of opportunity is all too far away.

Stella Creasy is Labour MP for Walthamstow

Rise and shine: the daily routines of history's most creative minds

Benjamin Franklin spent his mornings naked. Patricia Highsmith ate only bacon and eggs. Marcel Proust breakfasted on opium and croissants. The path to greatness is paved with a thousand tiny rituals (and a fair bit of substance abuse) – but six key rules emerge

• 
• • Oliver Burkeman
  • The Guardian, Saturday 5 October 2013

 

Click on image for full illustration. Illustration: Jean Julien for the Guardian

One morning this summer, I got up at first light – I'd left the blinds open the night before – then drank a strong cup of coffee, sat near-naked by an open window for an hour, worked all morning, then had a martini with lunch. I took a long afternoon walk, and for the rest of the week experimented with never working for more than three hours at a stretch.

1.  

This was all in an effort to adopt the rituals of some great artists and thinkers: the rising-at-dawn bit came from Ernest Hemingway, who was up at around 5.30am, even if he'd been drinking the night before; the strong coffee was borrowed from Beethoven, who personally counted out the 60 beans his morning cup required.Benjamin Franklin swore by "air baths", which was his term for sitting around naked in the morning, whatever the weather. And the midday cocktail was a favourite of VS Pritchett (among many others). I couldn't try every trick I discovered in a new book, Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work; oddly, my girlfriend was unwilling to play the role of Freud's wife, who put toothpaste on his toothbrush each day to save him time. Still, I learned a lot. For example: did you know that lunchtime martinis aren't conducive to productivity?

As a writer working from home, of course, I have an unusual degree of control over my schedule – not everyone could run such an experiment. But for anyone who thinks of their work as creative, or who pursues creative projects in their spare time, reading about the habits of the successful, can be addictive. Partly, that's because it's comforting to learn that even Franz Kafkastruggled with the demands of his day job, or that Franklin was chronically disorganised. But it's also because of a covert thought that sounds delusionally arrogant if expressed out loud: just maybe, if I took very hot baths like Flaubert, or amphetamines like Auden, I might inch closer to their genius.

Several weeks later, I'm no longer taking "air baths", while the lunchtime martini didn't last more than a day (I mean, come on). But I'm still rising early and, when time allows, taking long walks. Two big insights have emerged. One is how ill-suited the nine-to-five routine is to most desk-based jobs involving mental focus; it turns out I get far more done when I start earlier, end a little later, and don't even pretend to do brain work for several hours in the middle. The other is the importance of momentum. When I get straight down to something really important early in the morning, before checking email, before interruptions from others, it beneficially alters the feel of the whole day: once interruptions do arise, they're never quite so problematic. Another technique I couldn't manage without comes from the writer and consultant Tony Schwartz: use a timer to work in 90-minute "sprints", interspersed with signficant breaks. (Thanks to this, I'm far better than I used to be at separating work from faffing around, rather than spending half the day flailing around in a mixture of the two.)

The one true lesson of the book, says its author, Mason Currey, is that "there's no one way to get things done". For every Joyce Carol Oates, industriously plugging away from 8am to 1pm and again from 4pm to 7pm, or Anthony Trollope, timing himself typing 250 words per quarter-hour, there's a Sylvia Plath, unable to stick to a schedule. (Or a Friedrich Schiller, who could only write in the presence of the smell of rotting apples.) Still, some patterns do emerge. Here, then, are six lessons from history's most creative minds.

1. Be a morning person

 Georgia O'Keeffe: one of a majority of very early morning risers. Photograph: AP

It's not that there aren't successful night owls: Marcel Proust, for one, rose sometime between 3pm and 6pm, immediately smoked opium powders to relieve his asthma, then rang for his coffee and croissant. But very early risers form a clear majority, including everyone from Mozart to Georgia O'Keeffe to Frank Lloyd Wright. (The 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards, Currey tells us, went so far as to argue that Jesus had endorsed early rising "by his rising from the grave very early".) For some, waking at 5am or 6am is a necessity, the only way to combine their writing or painting with the demands of a job, raising children, or both. For others, it's a way to avoid interruption: at that hour, as Hemingway wrote, "There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write." There's another, surprising argument in favour of rising early, which might persuade sceptics: that early-morning drowsiness might actually be helpful. At one point in his career, the novelist Nicholson Baker took to getting up at 4.30am, and he liked what it did to his brain: "The mind is newly cleansed, but it's also befuddled… I found that I wrote differently then."

Psychologists categorise people by what they call, rather charmingly, "morningness" and "eveningness", but it's not clear that either is objectively superior. There is evidence that morning people are happier and more conscientious, but also that night owls might be more intelligent. If you're determined to join the ranks of the early risers, the crucial trick is to start getting up at the same time daily, but to go to bed only when you're truly tired. You might sacrifice a day or two to exhaustion, but you'll adjust to your new schedule more rapidly.

2. Don't give up the day job

 TS Eliot’s day job at Lloyds bank gave him crucial financial security. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy," Franz Kafka complained to his fiancee, "and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres." He crammed in his writing between 10.30pm and the small hours of the morning. But in truth, a "pleasant, straightforward life" might not have been preferable, artistically speaking: Kafka, who worked in an insurance office, was one of many artists who have thrived on fitting creative activities around the edges of a busy life. William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in the afternoons, before commencing his night shift at a power plant; TS Eliot's day job at Lloyds bank gave him crucial financial security; William Carlos Williams, a paediatrician, scribbled poetry on the backs of his prescription pads. Limited time focuses the mind, and the self-discipline required to show up for a job seeps back into the processes of art. "I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me," wroteWallace Stevens, an insurance executive and poet. "It introduces discipline and regularity into one's life." Indeed, one obvious explanation for the alcoholism that pervades the lives of full-time authors is that it's impossible to focus on writing for more than a few hours a day, and, well, you've got to make those other hours pass somehow.

3. Take lots of walks

 Tchaikovsky 'believed he had to take a walk of exactly two hours a day and that if he returned even a few minutes early, great misfortunes would befall him.' Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

There's no shortage of evidence to suggest that walking – especially walking in natural settings, or just lingering amid greenery, even if you don't actually walk much – is associated with increased productivity and proficiency at creative tasks. But Currey was surprised, in researching his book, by the sheer ubiquity of walking, especially in the daily routines of composers, including Beethoven, Mahler, Erik Satie and Tchaikovksy, "who believed he had to take a walk of exactly two hours a day and that if he returned even a few minutes early, great misfortunes would befall him". It's long been observed that doing almost anything other than sitting at a desk can be the best route to novel insights. These days, there's surely an additional factor at play: when you're on a walk, you're physically removed from many of the sources of distraction – televisions, computer screens – that might otherwise interfere with deep thought.

4. Stick to a schedule

 Patricia Highsmith, among others, ate virtually the same thing for every meal, in her case bacon and fried eggs. Photograph: Corbis Sygma

There's not much in common, ritual-wise, between Gustave Flaubert – who woke at 10am daily and then hammered on his ceiling to summon his mother to come and sit on his bed for a chat – and Le Corbusier, up at 6am for his 45 minutes of daily calisthenics. But they each did what they did with iron regularity. "Decide what you want or ought to do with the day," Auden advised, "then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble." (According to legend, Immanuel Kant's neighbours in Königsberg could set their clocks by his 3.30pm walk.) This kind of existence sounds as if it might require intimidating levels of self-discipline, but on closer inspection it often seems to be a kind of safety net: the alternative to a rigid structure is either no artistic creations, for those with day jobs, or the existential terror of no structure at all.

It was William James, the progenitor of modern psychology, who best articulated the mechanism by which a strict routine might help unleash the imagination. Only by rendering many aspects of daily life automatic and habitual, he argued, could we "free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action". (James fought a lifelong struggle to inculcate such habits in himself.) Subsequent findings about "cognitive bandwidth" and the limitations of willpower have largely substantiated James's hunch: if you waste resources trying to decide when or where to work, you'll impede your capacity to do the work. Don't consider afresh each morning whether to work on your novel for 45 minutes before the day begins; once you've resolved that that's just what you do, it'll be far more likely to happen. It might have been a similar desire to pare down unnecessary decisions that led Patricia Highsmith, among others, to eat virtually the same thing for every meal, in her case bacon and fried eggs. Although Highsmith also collected live snails and, in later life, promulgated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, so who knows?

5. Practise strategic substance abuse

 Ayn Rand took Benzedrine. Photograph: New York Times Co/Getty Images

Almost every potential chemical aid to creativity has been tried at some time or another: Auden, Ayn Rand and Graham Greene had their Benzedrine, the mathematician Paul Erdös had his Ritalin (and his Benzedrine); countless others tried vodka, whisky or gin. But there's only one that has been championed near-universally down the centuries: coffee. Beethoven measured out his beans, Kierkegaard poured black coffee over a cup full of sugar, then gulped down the resulting concoction, which had the consistency of mud; Balzac drank 50 cups a day. It's been suggested that the benefits of caffeine, in terms of heightened focus, might be offset by a decrease in proficiency at more imaginative tasks. But if that's true, it's a lesson creative types have been ignoring for ever. Consume in moderation, though: Balzac died of heart failure at 51.

6. Learn to work anywhere

 Agatha Christie didn’t have a desk. Any stable tabletop for her typewriter would do. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

One of the most dangerous procrastination-enabling beliefs is the idea that you must find exactly the right environment before you can get down to work. "For years, I said if only I could find a comfortable chair, I would rival Mozart," the American composer Morton Feldman recalled. Somerset Maugham had to face a blank wall before the words would come (any other view, he felt, was too distracting). But the stern message that emerges from many other artists' and authors' experiences is: get over yourself. During Jane Austen's most productive years, at Chawton in Hampshire in the 1810s, she wrote mainly in the family sitting-room, often with her mother sewing nearby. Continually interrupted by visitors, she wrote on scraps of paper that could easily be hidden away. Agatha Christie, Currey writes, had "endless trouble with journalists, who inevitably wanted to photograph the author at her desk": a problematic request, because she didn't have one. Any stable tabletop for her typewriter would do.

In any case, absolute freedom from distraction may not be as advantageous as it sounds. One study recently suggested that some noise, such as the background buzz of a coffee shop, may be preferable to silence, in terms of creativity; moreover, physical mess may be as beneficial for some people as an impeccably tidy workspace is for others. The journalistRon Rosenbaum cherishes a personal theory of "competing concentration": working with the television on, he says, gives him a background distraction to focus against, keeping his attentional muscles flexed and strong.

But there is a broader lesson here. The perfect workspace isn't what leads to brilliant work, just as no other "perfect" routine or ritual will turn you into an artistic genius. Flaubert didn't achieve what he did because of hot baths, but through immeasurable talent and extremely hard work. Which is unfortunate, because I'm really good at running baths.

Benzedrine, naps, an early night: an extract from Daily Rituals

Gertrude Stein

In Everybody's Autobiography, Stein confirmed that she had never been able to write for much more than half an hour a day, but added, "If you write a half-hour a day, it makes a lot of writing year by year." Stein and her lifelong partner, Alice B Toklas, had lunch at about noon and ate an early, light supper. Toklas went to bed early, but Stein liked to stay up arguing and gossiping with visiting friends. After her guests finally left, Stein would wake Toklas, and they would talk over the day before both going to sleep.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven rose at dawn and wasted little time getting down to work. His breakfast was coffee, which he prepared himself with great care: 60 beans per cup. After his midday meal, he embarked on a long walk, which would occupy much of the rest of the afternoon. As the day wound down, he might stop at a tavern to read the newspapers. Evenings were often spent with company or at the theatre, although in winter he preferred to stay at home and read. He retired early, going to bed at 10pm at the latest.

WH Auden

"Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition," Auden wrote in 1958. If that's true, the poet was one of the most ambitious men of his generation. He rose shortly after 6am, made coffee and settled down to work quickly, perhaps after taking a first pass at the crossword. He usually resumed after lunch and continued into the late afternoon. Cocktail hour began at 6.30pm sharp, featuring several strong vodka martinis. Then dinner was served, with copious amounts of wine. To maintain his energy and concentration, he relied on amphetamines, taking Benzedrine each morning. At night, he used Seconal or another sedative to get to sleep.

Sylvia Plath

Plath's journal, which she kept from age 11 until her suicide at 30, records a near-constant struggle to find and stick to a productive writing schedule. Only near the end of her life, separated from her husband, Ted Hughes, and taking care of their two small children alone, did she find a routine that worked for her. She was using sedatives to get to sleep, and when they wore off at about 5am, she would get up and write until the children awoke. Working like this for two months in 1962, she produced nearly all the poems of Ariel.

Alice Munro

In the 1950s, as a young mother taking care of two small children, Munro wrote in the slivers of time between housekeeping and child-rearing. When neighbours dropped in, Munro didn't feel comfortable telling them she was trying to work. She tried renting an office, but the garrulous landlord interrupted her and she hardly got any writing done. It ultimately took her almost two decades to put together the material for her first collection, Dance Of The Happy Shades.

David Foster Wallace

"I usually go in shifts of three or four hours with either naps or fairly diverting do-something-with-other-people things in the middle," Wallace said in 1996, shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest. "So I'll get up at 11 or noon, work till two or three." Later, however, he said he followed a regular writing routine only when the work was going badly. "Once it starts to go, it requires no effort. And then actually the discipline's required in terms of being willing to be away from it and to remember, 'Oh, I have a relationship that I have to nurture, or I have to grocery-shop or pay these bills.'  "

Ingmar Bergman

"Do you know what moviemaking is?" Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film." But it was also writing scripts, which he did on the remote island of Fårö, Sweden. He followed the same schedule for decades: up at 8am, writing from 9am until noon, then an austere meal. "He eats the same lunch," actorBibi Andersson remembered. "It's some kind of whipped sour milk and strawberry jam – a strange kind of baby food he eats with corn flakes." After lunch, Bergman worked from 1pm to 3pm, then slept for an hour. In the late afternoon he went for a walk or took the ferry to a neighbouring island to pick up the newspapers and the mail. In the evening he read, saw friends, screened a movie, or watched TV (he was particularly fond of Dallas). "I never use drugs or alcohol," Bergman said. "The most I drink is a glass of wine and that makes me incredibly happy."

How I bought drugs from 'dark net' – it's just like Amazon run by cartels

Last week the FBI arrested Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of Silk Road, a site on the 'dark net' where visitors could buy drugs at the click of a mouse. Though Dread – aka Ross Ulbricht – earned millions, was he really driven by America's anti-state libertarian philosophy?

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 October 2013

The FBI alleges Ross Ulbricht ran the vast underground drug marketplace Silk Road for more than two years. Photograph: theguardian.com

Dear FBI agents, my name is Carole Cadwalladr and in February this year I was asked to investigate the so-called "dark net" for a feature in this newspaper. I downloaded Tor on to my computer, the anonymous browser developed by the US navy, Googled "Silk Roaddrugs" and then cut and pasted this link http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/ into the address field.

And bingo! There it was: Silk Road, the site, which until the FBI closed it down on Thursday and arrested a 29-year-old American in San Francisco, was the web's most notorious marketplace.

The "dark net" or the "deep web", the hidden part of the internet invisible to Google, might sound like a murky, inaccessible underworld but the reality is that it's right there, a click away, at the end of your mouse. It took me about 10 minutes of Googling and downloading to find and access the site on that February morning, and yet arriving at the home page of Silk Road was like stumbling into a parallel universe, a universe where eBay had been taken over by international drug cartels and Amazon offers a choice of books, DVDS and hallucinogens.

Drugs are just another market, and on Silk Road it was a market laid bare, differentiated by price, quality, point of origin, supposed effects and lavish user reviews. There were categories for "cannabis", "dissociatives", "ecstasy", "opioids", "prescription", "psychedelics", "stimulants" and, my favourite, "precursors". (If you've watched Breaking Bad, you'll know that's the stuff you need to make certain drugs and which Walt has to hold up trains and rob factories to find. Or, had he known about Silk Road, clicked a link on his browser.)

And, just like eBay, there were star ratings for sellers, detailed feedback, customer service assurances, an escrow system and a busy forum in which users posted helpful tips. I looked on the UK cannabis forum, which had 30,000 postings, and a vendor called JesusOfRave was recommended. He had 100% feedback, promised "stealth" packaging and boasted excellent customer reviews: "The level of customer care you go to often makes me forget that this is an illegal drug market," said one.

JesusOfRave boasted on his profile: "Working with UK distributors, importers and producers to source quality, we run a tight ship and aim to get your order out same or next day. This tight ship also refers to our attitude to your and our privacy. We have been doing this for a long time … been playing with encryption since 0BC and rebelling against the State for just as long."

And so, federal agents, though I'm sure you know this already, not least because the Guardian revealed on Friday that the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ have successfully cracked Tor on occasion, I ordered "1g of Manali Charras [cannabis] (free UK delivery)", costing 1.16 bitcoins (the cryptocurrency then worth around £15). I used a false name with my own address, and two days later an envelope arrived at my door with an address in Bethnal Green Road, east London, on the return label and a small vacuum-packed package inside: a small lump of dope.

It's still sitting in its original envelope in the drawer of my desk. I got a bit stumped with my dark net story, put it on hold and became more interested in the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies as the value of bitcoins soared over the next few months (the 1.5 bitcoins I'd bought for £20 were worth £300 at one point this spring).

Just under a month ago I was intrigued to see that Forbes magazine had managed to get an interview with "Dread Pirate Roberts", the site's administrator. And then, last week, came the news that Dread Pirate Roberts was 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, a University of Texas physics graduate who, according to the FBI's documents, had not just run the site – which it alleges earned him $80m in commission – but had hired a contract killer for $80,000 to rub out an employee who had tried to blackmail him.

If that sounds far-fetched, papers filed last Thursday show that he tried to take a contract on a second person. The documents showed that the FBI had access to Silk Road's servers from July, and that the contract killer Ulbricht had thought he'd hired was a federal agent. It's an astonishing, preposterous end to what was an astonishing, preposterous site, though the papers show that while the crime might have been hi-tech, cracking it was a matter of old-fashioned, painstaking detective work.

Except, of course, that it's not the end of it. There are two other similar websites already up and running – Sheep and Black Market Reloaded – which have both seen a dramatic uplift in users in the last few days, and others will surely follow. Because what Silk Road did for drugs was what eBay did for secondhand goods, and Airbnb has done for accommodation: it created a viable trust system that benefited both buyers and sellers.

Nicholas Christin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who conducted six months of research into the site, said that what surprised him most was how "normal" it was. "To me, the most surprising thing was how normal, when you set aside the goods being sold, the whole market appears to be," he said. And, while many people would be alarmed at the prospect of their teenagers buying drugs online, Silk Road was a whole lot more professional, regulated and controlled than buying drugs offline.

What's apparent from Dread Pirate Roberts's interview with Forbes and comments he made on the site's forum is that the motivation behind the site does not seem to have been making money (though clearly it did: an estimated $1.2bn), or a belief that drugs hold the key to some sort of mystical self-fulfillment, but that the state has no right to interfere in the lives of individuals. One of the details that enabled the FBI to track Ulbricht was the fact that he "favourited" several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian Alabama-based thinktank devoted to furthering what is known as the Austrian school of economics. Years later, Dread Pirate Roberts would cite the same theory on Silk Road's forum.

"What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or 'sticking it to the man'," said Dread Pirate Roberts in the Forbes interview. "It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong."

And it's this that is possibly the most interesting aspect of the story. Because, while Edward Snowden's and the Guardian's revelations about the NSA have shown how all-encompassing the state's surveillance has become, a counterculture movement of digital activists espousing the importance of freedom, individualism and the right to a private life beyond the state's control is also rapidly gaining traction.

It's the philosophy behind innovations as diverse as the 3D printed gun and sites as mainstream as PayPal, and its proponents are young, computer-savvy idealists with the digital skills to invent new ways of circumventing the encroaching power of the state.

Ulbricht certainly doesn't seem to have been living the life you imagine of a criminal overlord. He lived in a shared apartment. If he had millions stashed away somewhere, he certainly doesn't seem to have been spending it on high-performance cars and penthouses.

His LinkedIn page, while possibly not the best arena for self-expression for a man being hunted by the FBI, demonstrates that his beliefs are grounded in libertarian ideology: "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind," he wrote. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments … the best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed … to that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a firsthand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Silk Road, it turns out, might have been that world. Anybody who has seen All the President's Men knows that, when it comes to criminality, the answer has always been to "follow the money". But in the age of bitcoin, that's of a different order of difficulty. Silk Road is just one website; bitcoin is potentially the foundation for a whole new economic order.

The Daily Mail may not realise, but Marxists are patriots

The traducing of Ralph Miliband is a reminder of how far we now are from understanding socialism

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 20.15 BST

‘The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years indicates that people are turning again to an analysis of the exploitative logic of capitalism that remains singularly accurate and powerful.' Photograph: PA

Whatever their views of him, most decent people backed Ed Miliband this week as he defended his father against jingoist attacks on him by the Daily Mail. The Labour leader angrily described Ralph Miliband as a British patriot, and correctly noted that he does not share his father's principled commitment to socialism. Labour is right to demand an apology from the Mail, not only for a frankly bigoted attack on a respected Jewish intellectual, but also for claiming that the party's politics bear any resemblance to the socialism it formally abandoned nearly two decades ago.

The defence of Ralph Miliband runs along wearyingly familiar lines – that he unambiguously proved his patriotism by fighting in the anti-Nazi war, which along with "no apology for the empire" has become the principal litmus test for love of Britain. His lifelong commitment to a supple Marxism is noted but quietly skimmed over as an embarrassingly anachronistic aspect of an otherwise decent and loyal man. Yet a defence of Miliband senior which does not also challenge the red-bashing that often goes hand in hand with antisemitism is, at best, equivocal. More perniciously, it accepts the distorted terms set by the rightwing press which defines patriotism narrowly through obedient adulation of monarchy, militarism and elitism.

Ralph Miliband was not a patriot because he served in the navy. He was a lover of this country and its people precisely because he understood that institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords symbolise and perpetuate inequality, and that militarism usually encourages the poor to die defending the interests of the privileged. Hispatriotism has more in common with long progressive patriotic traditions in Britain, from the Diggers and Levellers to the Chartists and anti-privatisation campaigners. It was about claiming land and country for the majority of its labouring denizens rather than the plutocrats and the powerful who live off the fat of the land while spouting an insincere "nationalism" which serves less to create collective wellbeing than to prevent their privileges being questioned.

Even while noting that Ralph criticised Eric Hobsbawm for not repudiating Stalinism, the Daily Mail recyles the false charge that adherence to Marxism is indistinguishable from commitment to a poisonous Sovietism. This is no different from claiming that Christianity is indistinguishable from the bloody crusades and inquisitions conducted by some of its adherents. However, Ralph Miliband would also have found his son's claim that capitalism can be "made to work for working people" incoherent, and wilfully ignorant of how capitalism actually works, constitutively reliant as it is on concentrating wealth among relatively few while extracting the labour of the many.

For years, captains of corporations in the affluent west have been able to peddle the myth that capitalism can be made to work for everyone by outsourcing its most exploitative aspects to other parts of the world, extracting both resources and labour ruthlessly. Now, however – as the centre of capitalist gravity shifts southwards, the western social democratic compact unravels, and the foundations of the welfare state are disastrously undermined – it will be less easy to keep up this pretence of affluence for all.

The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years alone indicate that people are turning once again to an analysis of the fundamentally exploitative logic of capitalism that, for all its relentless bad press, remains singularly accurate and powerful.

It is time to junk the cheap and facile propaganda that socialism is reducible to Stalinist depredations. In Ralph Miliband's own anti-Stalinist understanding, socialism was about "the wholesale transformation of the social order" by giving ordinary people control over the economic system, fully democratising a political system in which ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and helpless, and ensuring "a drastic levelling out of social inequality". It is the abandonment of these democratic aspirations for the craven pieties of the Daily Mail that must really "disturb everyone who loves this country".