What I’ve learned from Tennis
June 8, 2010 | 6 Comments
I’ve finally released the very first private Lapsus Beta. After having chained myself to my desk for the last few months, I’ve been experiencing more than a little cabin fever. So a few weeks ago, I started playing Tennis. And I’m loving it.
I quickly realised there was a very strong correlation between positive thoughts and great shots. Whenever I focussed hard and really tried to hit the ball, to my surprise, it went into the net or over the fence. The same thing happened (less surprisingly) when I cursed myself about how badly I was doing. So what thoughts resulted in a great shot?
“I don’t care”.
Huh?
“That doesn’t make any sense!” I hear you cry. Yeah, I know. I had difficulty believing it too. But time after time the thoughts “It doesn’t matter” or “I don’t care where this goes” coincided with the ball hitting the sweet spot of the racket, sailing low over the net and landing within the white lines. After a few such shots in my first session, the guy who was running the show was prompted to ask “Are you sure you’ve not played Tennis before?” The proof was irrefutable.
This strategy has been so successful that my slightly bizarre mantra has become “Just don’t tell me the score”. The moment I know if I’m winning or losing, I start caring. And that means, ironically, that I play really badly.
The Explanation
This seems so unbelievably counter intuitive. How on earth can anyone perform when they don’t care? I’ve thought about the irrationality of this a lot and I think I’ve found a way of explaining the phenomena. It’s three words. Are you ready?
I. Already. Care.
In fact, if I’m honest, I’ve known for a few years now that I care too much. That’s an oxymoron, I know. Maybe it’s more that I handle failure very badly and the more I care, the worse I feel when I fail. Tennis has helped me to realise that the answer, for me at least, is to decrease the amount of pressure I’m putting on myself to perform.
C’mon, get to the point.
If this works for Tennis, there’s a way of applying it to my practices of software development and running a business too.
Right now I’m feeling very, very anxious about Lapsus. Every time I encounter a bug I feel terrible about myself – the same feeling I get when the ball hits the net. I’ve realised that I work best when I just relax and let myself do what I want to do already. I’ve learnt that for me, piling on the pressure is never a good thing.
And in summary…
Maybe thinking “it doesn’t matter” will make me a better developer. Maybe I’ll be less distracted by negative thoughts and more focussed on making a great product. The next few weeks and months will be really challenging – I’ve got to build a store, design a sales site, write marketing copy and press releases, squash the millions of bugs ready for version 1 and get my head around charging real money for my software. It’ll be interesting to see how this new way of looking at things plays out.
I’d be interested to hear other’s experiences of how changing your thoughts can change your life.
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6 Responses to “What I’ve learned from Tennis”
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Really nice YouTube video picks up on a similar theme, in terms of motivation. Worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rsa+motivation&aq=f
To my shame I thought Tennis was going to be a time management app.
Thanks for your comment, David. Yeah, I’ve heard Daniel Pink speak a lot about this stuff but haven’t got around to reading Drive yet. The theories he puts forwards are really interesting and surprising for those of us who haven’t seen the science behind them before. One thing I really took away from this is when I’m building Lapsus and I’m feeling low on motivation, I should remember why I want it to exist, rather than trying to imagine how much money it might make – therefore appealing to my intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.
That’s funny!
This post makes perfect sense, too, from a Zen perspective, or more western theories of what it means to be in the “zone”, or even the modern GTD movement. The paradox is that by concentrating on the end result (usually by worrying about it, since if you’re still working on it, it is not ready) you get tangled in the process, and your performance towards that end result suffers. Sure, you have to set goals for the process, but once you’ve set them (wrote them down, defined them, put them in a way outside of the process of getting there) you are free to just do it, just hit the ball, from moment to moment. In a development process there’s of course re-iterations etc. but those too should be a part of the structure, instead of a part of the process.
Congrats on Lapsus. You’re definitely on the right path.
Thanks. I haven’t thought of it in quite the way you do actually. What you say provides an interesting new perspective on the problem – the idea of getting goals etc out of the way and just focussing on “hitting the ball” i.e. writing code is a good analogy.