It was seventh and eighth grade. I don't know about you all, but that's what we had back then. And at Fairview, there was a fellow student of mine named Steve Rau. I don't know if he's still on the planet or not, but I remember when Steve Rau decided that he was going to get straight A's, he was going to be the valedictorian, and he was also going to be the top athlete in school. I remember he made that decision, and Steve Rau did no-nonsense. Steve Rau would run to school and back just to get in his miles, and he would not go out and carouse as he was home studying to get straight A's and so forth. I saw that by his determination, Steve Rau achieved all those things because he decided he was going to do it. This is called dṛḍha-vratāḥ.

And don't get me started with Dave Dibbern. I've mentioned him before: he was a flutist, and he wasn't making as much progress on his flute playing as he wanted to. And one fine summer night circa 1969, he lived nearby. He was a fellow student in high school. He came running to our house and burst through the front door with his flute, and he had his head shaved, which was taboo in 1969. Nobody but the Hare Kṛṣṇas shaved their heads back then. He said, "That's it. No more fooling around. I'm going to get good on the flute." Then he slammed the door and ran home, and he became an excellent flute player. This is called dridha vrata. Remember the Dave Dibbern or Steve Rau principle.

And so in the Bhagavad Gita, Kṛṣṇa says that if you're careful about the way you organize your life and you don't intermingle with people who are not serious—not serious means they think it's okay to be stupid, making themselves unnecessarily stupid through some of the activities that I mentioned earlier. It's one of the tenets of spiritual practice: don't dabble in things that will make you stupid or lose your reason, or become so attached unnecessarily that you'll lose your reason. At the same time, if one practices the tenets of bhakti, it's compared to lighting dry firewood.

If one tries to practice spiritual life while at the same time contaminating one's consciousness by the lower modes of material nature through ill-advised activities, it's compared to trying to light a fire that has become moistened by the fog, or, even worse, by a heavy rainstorm. It may take a lot more fire to start the kindling in that case. So two things go together. Therefore, the sages gave this advice: lead a clean life and, at the same time, practice bhakti and then this verse comes to life (BG 7.28) :
 yeṣāṁ tv anta-gataṁ pāpaṁ
janānāṁ puṇya-karmaṇām
te dvandva-moha-nirmuktā
bhajante māṁ dṛḍha-vratāḥ

https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/7/28/
(excerpt from the talk)
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