What has cricket got to do with off-field antics?

Many commentators look at the example of Ravinda Jadeja's high living and scoff at it as a distraction from the serious business of scoring runs and taking wickets for India.

How can you succeed if spend your time riding motorbikes, driving fast cars and buying restaurants?

Yet Jajeda has gone from a useful ODI bowler who fired a few darts at leg stump, to a Test quality spinner who put one of the best players of spin in the world in his pocket.

A true cricketing rock star; living the high life yet putting in the performances on stage. But it's not the expensive living that makes the man take wickets.

For Jaddu is not driven by trinkets. Yes, he enjoys the rewards that success brings, but he also knows that those rewards only come if you are a master of your art.

So he plays and practices with a passion that is rare.

It's very difficult developing as a spinner - even more so when you have talents with the bat and in the field - yet recently Jadeja has learned the mysterious skills of flight and dip. That is no accident because he was never a big ripper of the ball, relying on the batsman to make mistakes with flat, straight darts.

Let's not underestimate that transformation. Michael Clarke was in the form of his life going into the Border-Gavaskar series in 2013. He made the Australian captain his bunny by taking his wicket a frankly silly number of times; including a brilliant ball to gain a rare stumping.

That change was born in a passion to learn his game and develop a style that was congruous with his personality. You can see how his personal trait of focused passion fed into his efforts to learn and grown.

It was that very trait that also lead him to be a mischievous youngster and a petrol-head in later years.

You may not be the same type of person as Jadeja, but you can use the same method of understanding yourself to grow your skills.

In learning the methods that work for you individually, you grow in confidence. The more confidence you have, the more able you are to put doubt into the batsman's mind. You go from useful middle overs slow bowler to wicket taking hero.

Jadeja's secret is that his motivation to develop comes from within. The psychologists call it intrinsic motivation and it's far more powerful a way to develop than any reward from IPL money to Indian Test caps.

He got there because he wanted to understand himself and his game. When he did that he transformed himself, slowly but surely, into a bowler who could succeed at Test level, then go away and enjoy the rewards separately.

You can get there too if you see the challenge of bowling spin as a way to develop and understand yourself, not as a way to reach your dreams. If you do the former, the latter follows on magically.