3 Life Lessons We Can Learn From Tennis

The tennis court is 78 feet long with a width of 27 feet (for singles matches). The service net is 21 feet from the net while the net is 3 feet 6 inches high at the posts and 3 feet high in the center. Recreationally, there are no fans for support. It’s just you, a racquet, a tennis ball, and an opponent on the other side. It’s the definition of what it means to be alone; yet, there is something lively about the sport.

I spent last Saturday playing tennis (my favorite hobby) with a friend in Akron, Ohio and couldn’t resist reminiscing the summers of non-stop tennis and what the sport means to me.

As a brief background, my journey with the sport started in 2005 after I stumbled upon the US Open Quarterfinals as a 13 year old kid channel surfing. I immediately fell in love with the sport after watching the James Blake vs. Andre Agassi match and bought a racquet the next day:

It’s crazy to think about how different things were back in 2005 when I first started playing tennis. I was literally “just a kid from Akron” listening to rappers like 50 Cent. ??

Today I look back on 16 years of wins, losses and how the game of tennis positively impacted my life. Here are?3 life lessons?I learned from tennis:

1. Be Resilient and Embrace Failure

• Do I fail? The short answer: too many to list. The long one: Failing is never a full-stop. Rather, a semi-colon that motivates you to learn. Everyone faces failure and rejection and I am no exception. In tennis, the sport is built on a million opportunities for failure… You can lose simple points, games, sets, matches and/or tournaments. Getting used to failure and learning how to handle it well is what success is built upon- loads and loads of failure.?Embrace it. No other sport teaches this lesson better than tennis.

1. Accept Responsibility

• When you play tennis, you're truly competing against yourself. You're perpetually trying to improve: to hit serves faster, find ways to move your opponent around more, and/or find ways to surprise your opponent. That's your job on the tennis court. There is nobody to blame but yourself. Life is not about winning against other people; it’s about winning against yourself. It requires a dedication and the ability to accept responsibility for your performance.

1. Ideas Don’t Matter — Execution is Everything

• Stop thinking and start doing.?The best way to live life is to take more action in the direction you want to go. Want a better tennis serve? Then get to the court and practice. If your dream is to become a software engineer at Google, then take action towards achieving this goal by learning how to code. Or if your dream is to become a world traveller, then book that trip you’ve been thinking about for years. The world is counting on you to do something. Stop thinking and just do it.

Overall, tennis has taught me so much about life and there is so much more I could write about; however, at the end of the day it all boils down to how hard you are willing to work to better yourself. Enjoy some funny tennis pictures/videos from my past decade below ?? … FYI: I’m a lot better at tennis now (always improving!)… I just don’t have any recent videos lol