It doesn't matter which year a player is born in, whether you are 19 or 20 - you have to be agile. You have to accept your shortcomings.
I love to be in the moment. I love to analyse things a bit.
One-day cricket is about aggression and flair, but Test cricket is a different ball game. One has to struggle through the hard periods initially and then look on to get a respectable score on the board.
Self-confidence has always been one of my good qualities. I am always very confident. It is in my nature to be confident, to be aggressive. And it applies in my batting as well as wicketkeeping.
Maybe because I bat aggressively and go for big hits at times, people tend to remember my batting. But I have always done well as a stumper, too.
The biggest problem is when a player asks a captain why he is not playing but does not want an honest answer.
Getting up quite late in the morning, going and trying to clean my bikes - I have quite a few of them in Ranchi - spending some time with my family, my parents and friends. Going out for rides with my friends and having lunch or dinner at a roadside hotel - that's my favourite time-pass. These are the sort of things that really excite me.
You can't make three or four spinners bowl the exact number of overs. You don't see the number of overs bowled by them before you make a bowling change; you see who looks effective and make a bowling change.
You may earn whatever money you earn as a cricketer, but you want to play for your country. At the end of the day, you want to do something special. There are plenty of people who earn 50 crores or 100 crores as businessmen or big professionals or who are really doing well in business. But what gives pleasure to your mom and dad is the fame.
I have formed the Mahendra Singh Dhoni Charitable Trust which organises cricket tournaments in Jharkhand to identify promising cricketers so that we can help groom them, either in India or abroad.
I don't believe in calling someone and having a big chat, because that puts a lot of added pressure on them. If somebody is doing something or involved in fielding practice, then a little chit-chat at that time helps because it's informal and doesn't add any pressure.
Nobody really wants to bowl a bad over, but if it happens, the individual is more disappointed than anyone else in the stadium or the team. Ideally, it is best to leave him to this thoughts and then have a chat with him after the team is back at the hotel when he will be less frustrated and more accepting.
A lot of things have changed since I made my debut in 2004. The way cricket is played has changed. The kind of players that are coming in the Indian team are drastically different than what we were used to. My role is quite the same. You only evolve with time, and that's what I am trying to do.
If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.
Finishing is one of the most difficult things to do in cricket. A player can't be a finisher in just 6 months or one year. You have to be used to that responsibility, keeping on doing what is required from you over a period of time.
One of my theories is to be captain on the field and off the field, you need to totally enjoy each other's company. I don't like discussing cricket off the field.
I don't like discussing cricket off the field.
I'm quite used to playing with few injuries, whether it is back, fingers, elbow, or something else. You have to be tough and get on with the game.
When people talk about South Africa, it's all about lions and elephants. But when we talk about India, we talk about tigers.
Let me tell you, it is an absolute lie that I told a probe panel that Meiyappan was only a cricket enthusiast. All I said is he had nothing to do with the team's on-field cricketing decisions. I can't even pronounce the word 'enthusiast.'
