Episode 184 — The Champion Builder ft. Sanjeeva Singh

He learned archery by watching. As a schoolboy volunteering at the 1982 Asian Games, Sanjeeva Singh had never held a bow — he spent his days fetching targets and water for the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese archers training on the field he was assigned to. He watched. He applied his Class 11 physics to what he saw. Within two years he was a national junior champion.

That same instinct — watch closely, apply what you know, teach yourself if nobody will teach you — took him to the 1988 Olympics as an archer, and later built the Tata Archery Academy from nothing in a Jharkhand tribal belt nobody expected to produce a world champion. It’s the same instinct now building India’s first rural integrated archery academy, from the ground up, in a village in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh.

In this conversation: the myth that you can’t be a serious athlete and a serious student at the same time (he was both, at once); the “ruthless” standard he holds his trainees to and where the line sits before it tips into harm; his own framework for what it takes to build a champion mindset — four Ps, four Ds, and willpower; and why, at nearly 60, he chose to build his most ambitious project yet in a place with no sporting infrastructure at all.

Listener Action

Visit notestothem.live before you go back to your day. Leave one note — it doesn’t have to be for someone who has died. It could be for a job you left, a friendship that faded, a version of yourself you’ve outgrown, or a dream that didn’t become what you hoped. Just notice what it feels like to give it somewhere to go, outside your own head.