Work Lessons from Tennis

I’ve been playing tennis regularly for a few years, and to my surprise, there are many parallels from tennis that can be applied to improve our work:

Introspect

I took my tripod to the tennis court, and recorded a video of myself playing. I could immediately see all the mistakes I was making.

At work, we should periodically self-reflect. For example, I took on a gig to transform a company. It failed. I introspected to understand what expectations I need to set next time before taking on such a project, in order to succeed.

Fail your way to success

When learning tennis, you hit the net or hit the ball out too often. You should not attach undue weight to this or become embarrassed. It’s part of the game. Even the best players hit the net. If you’re not, you’re being too conservative.

At work, I see people who don’t want to fail, and so shy away from work they haven’t done before. This leads to stagnation. Others do the important work, learn more, get credit and important projects in the future, thus moving forward in their career.

If it hurts, do it more often

Neither my opponent nor I can serve well. When the first serve goes awry, he skips the proper technique for the second serve, just to get the ball in somehow. I don’t, even if I lose multiple games as a result. Unless you practice what you’re weak at, you won’t improve. I take on short-term pain for long-term gain.

At work, I see companies that launch once a month or less often because things have gone wrong before when launching. But that’s the wrong solution, since it compounds the problem — infrequent launches become more risky, not less. Frequent launches do have a risk problems occuring more often, but typically problems that are smaller in severity and therefore easier to debug and fix. If it hurts, do it more often, rather than running away from the problem.

If you’re skeptical, validate it

My coach told me that if I go to one side of the court to receive a ball, I need to immediately run back to the center before the opponent hits the ball. I didn’t do this, hoping that if the ball comes again to the same side, I can save the effort of running back and forth😛 My opponent took advantage of my laziness to easily win points. So now I understood the why of the guideline, and I follow it.

At work, we’re sometimes given guidelines we aren’t convinced about. For example, I told a founder to follow the sprint system. He grudgingly agreed but would assign work mid-sprint saying “It’s just an hour”. This caused the sprint system to break down, as you’d expect. When we’re not fully bought in, we ending up doing things half-heartedly, which doesn’t help. Instead, if you’re skeptical about something and feel that you can do it differently, do it your way. Whether or not it works out, you’ll learn something. If it works out, you’ll have validated your decision. And you’ll have the confidence to follow it in the future, say if you’re challenged about it. People without this internal confidence backing their decisions are never sure about what they’re doing, keep flip-flopping, and don’t come across as skilled to others. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve understood the problem at a deeper level, which will help you in solving a similar but not the same problem.

Eustress and distress

When I started playing tennis, I was going through a period of intense stress in my life, and I didn’t want more stress. So I took a relaxed approach to tennis. I did not put any pressure on myself. I did not plan anything. I did not observe my game and identify what I can improve. After a few months of encouraging me to do better, my partner stopped playing with me.

Looking back, I thought that all stress is bad. But that’s not true — I had mixed up the concepts of eustress (good stress) and distress (bad stress). I now apply eustress to myself. Before the match starts, I tell myself I have to win every game. When a ball is being served, I tell myself I have to win this point. Eustress is improving my game.

At work, say no to distress, like toxic people. Say yes to eustress, like managing people for the first time.

Upstream Decisions

Many of my shots go awry, with the ball going in a random direction. When I asked myself why, I noticed that my footwork (position of feet and legs) was bad. I was facing forward when I needed to face sideways. As my coach says, if your feet are not in place, nothing will work. So then the question became why my footwork was bad. That was because I was not preparing after the previous shot, by returning to the center and getting ready to receive the shot. I was instead staying put till the opponent played the shot, and then running in the last minute, which didn’t leave enough time for footwork. So it’s a chain of events: preparation => footwork => shot. If you’ve missed the first step, the rest will fail. So I decided to focus on the first step.

At work, companies have problems like the app not working properly. This is merely a consequence of upstream decisions like not having enough engineers on the team. You have to swim upstream and tackle the problem at its source to fix the downstream.

Pick a couple of things to work on

There are many things I can improve at tennis. My coach told me that the reason I become tired so quickly is that I hold my breath. So I’ve decided to pick this and serves as the two things to focus on. I can’t improve everything at once, so I’ll pick these. Breathing properly ensures that I can play longer, which gives me more opportunities to improve at everything else.

At work, companies sometimes attempt too many things at once: improving the desktop app, improving the mobile app, building more features, improving UX, improving reliability, improving scalability, building APIs and so on. This spreads the team too thin, so nothing gets done. Instead, they should select a few priorities to work on, get that sorted, and only then attempt the others.