Lessons learnt chasing a small black ball

I have recently rediscovered my enthusiasm for squash. It’s a good workout and it’s indoors - which is a plus in rainy Singapore. So, I decided to get back on the court and try to win some of the “box matches” at my club. (These are supposed to be friendly matches…only they aren’t!).

Now, squash is a young man’s game. At my age, there is very little chance of winning just by getting on the court and bashing the ball hard and fast (this was my main strategy when I started twenty years ago). So I decided to get some help by engaging G as my coach, and to use technique & cunning to make up for speed & strength.

As I improved, I came to realise that many of G’s lessons could be used off the court as well. Here are seven of them.

1. Get a Coach. Well that would be the first advice from a professional coach, won’t it?! But I soon realised that there are always things you don’t know about the game - small things that make a big impact. You can discover these things yourself, but it’s a long and hard road. There are also things you don’t know (or refuse to accept!) about how you play yourself. Having someone whose main interest is to improve your game is a phenomenal advantage.

Having a good boss, coach, mentor is probably the best advantage one can have in a career or in business. It’s said that “people join jobs, but they leave bosses”. Maybe they would stick around if they joined the right person.

2. Be honest to yourself. When G outlined a squash fitness plan for me, I told him that I was pretty fit. I was running about 40km a week and gym-ing most days. (And, honestly, I wasn’t paying for getting fit but to learn squash!). But G soon proved to me that I wasn’t fit enough for squash. I could run a half marathon in decent time because I have run all my life, but that doesn’t help in squash which needs high intensity bursts, quick side-to-side movements, sharp reflexes, and explosive power even when off-balance.

Being positive is good, but not to the point of deluding yourself. Over-confidence breeds complacency. Too often we underestimate what it will take to deal with an opponent or a situation. Only when we know and accept our strengths and weaknesses, and the true magnitude of the task facing us, can we hope to win. (But be honest about the opponent as well! Don’t make them out to be some sort of superpower, or you’ll lose before you get on the court!)

3. Have (an explicit) plan. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The plan can be simple, as it was in my case when I was struggling to beat someone in my box. (We saw that he usually messed up his volleys, so the plan was to get him to volley from the back of the court and then kill the poor return in front corners). Or the plan can be extremely elaborate with multiple alternatives as it is at higher levels. 

Whatever the level, to win we need some sort of explicit plan that uses our strengths and exploits the opponent’s weaknesses. In fact, we usually need two or three plans because sometimes things change or don’t work - maybe the opponent has a new trick, or our gammy knee is playing up more than usual. 

There’s often an urgency to bypass the planning and get straight into action. But it’s almost always a mistake. It’s being decisive at the cost of being strategic. The best players in the world spend days, if not weeks, analysing matches, working out the best combinations they would use in different situations, and then practicing & tweaking these combinations till they are fluent with them. What looks instinctive on the court (“what an unbelievable shot!”) usually has hours and hours of planning and practice behind it.

Most people will be quick to say that the game is won on the court and not in the locker room, implying that we spend too much time planning and too little executing. Is there is any truth to this? Good planning is indeed a live and iterative process, like an if-then-else tree that keeps getting deeper, as it accommodates new information. I think what happens is that we get stuck in repeatedly aligning high level objectives (“deploy our portfolio to our advantage”). It just feels like we have been talking about the plan for a long time, whereas in reality we haven’t really moved a single level deeper.

4. Prepare. Prepare. Prepare. G often tells me that in squash everything is about preparation. The actual winning shot may have some improvisation, but it is usually quite mechanical. Getting yourself to the right place, in the right stance, prepared for your swing is three-quarters of the game. Just a simple adjustment of getting my racquet in position before I moved towards the ball made a whopping 70% improvement in my shot accuracy!

There’s a fabulous quote attributed to Vince Lombardi: “Everyone has the will to win, but few have the will to prepare to win”. I see less and less of this value now-a-days, especially among the new generation in this insta-world. We appreciate flair (which is often disguised as creativity) more than meticulousness, and seek a silver bullet for all our problems.

Creativity is valuable for solving specific challenges, but it cannot replace good old-fashioned skill and muscle-memory. Good squash players are endlessly creative on the court, but they still spend hours doing drills. In a match it’s the drills that help you cover the 10+ metres under 2 seconds. You can get creative once you reach the ball, and you have the luxury of time for a creative shot. Improvisation works best when strong basics are in place. Drills and preparation are the bedrock for victory - in squash, in business, or indeed, in life (as I keep explaining to my 8 year old!)

5. Don’t make mistakes. And if you do learn from them. I told G about a big issue that I wanted to fix. When my drive from the back landed in mid-court the opponent would hit it to the opposite front corner and I couldn’t reach the ball in time. His solution - make sure that your drive doesn’t land mid-court! I must say I was a bit disappointed with this advice, but on thinking about it, it made sense. I was losing these points not because the opponent hit a great shot, but because I allowed the opponent the opportunity to hit that shot.

“Don’t be afraid to make mistakes” is almost a cliche now. It’s meant to allow people work uninhibited, be more emotionally engaged, more creative, and explore more ideas. But often it becomes an excuse for laziness. The hard fact is that the person or team or company that makes the fewest mistakes, usually wins. There are exceptions, of course, but you can only identify them with hindsight. Warren Buffet’s two rules for success are: 1. Don’t Lose Money and 2. See Rule No. 1.

So now I try not to make mistakes, and learn from the mistakes I do make so I don’t repeat them. It’s not exactly pithy advice, but it seems to be more usable.

(I also found that it was surprisingly hard to identify our mistakes. Most times when you lose a rally, the mistake doesn’t happen on the last shot. It takes a bit of discipline - and honesty! - to go over the rally in your head and identify the point where you made the mistake. In large organisations, the ability to identify the root cause is even more critical because we are usually distant from the scene and, more often than not, drowning in information.)

6. Don’t over-complicate it. Do the basics well and just get a bit better everyday. In squash owning the T (the middle of the court), hitting rails (deep long shots that stick to the side wall), and prepared combinations (drop, cross, cross-lob) are the basics of the game. G’s best advise to me was to be ruthlessly consistent on these and to keep piling on the pressure. It would just be a matter of time before you force an error from your opponent. And then you pounce.

Getting really good at the basics is probably the safest success “formula” for every sphere. Consistent and mindful practice deepens not only your skills (the outer-game), but also your understanding of the game, and of yourself (the inner-game).

Strangely, off the court, consistency is often under-rated, and getting a little better each time is often seen as incrementalism (said with a wrinkled nose). The cry is for disruption and revolution. Yet Toyota became the world’s largest automaker by - to paraphrase the 350-odd pages of the book - implementing continuous improvement.

There’s a natural temptation to do the unconventional, break the mould, forge your own path. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work often enough to win consistently. And if the basics aren’t in place it never works. Of course, you have to seize the opportunity for a creative kill shot when it arises, but you are a lot more likely to pull it off when you are prepared for it. It’s undeniable that winning with disruption produces spectacular results, but it comes after a spectacular amount of work to “rise above the rules”, and calls for more than your fair share of luck.

7. Keep it together when it matters. After about 10 lessons my shot accuracy and court movement improved dramatically, yet my winning percent hadn’t improved much. The reason? In the adrenaline rush of the match I would forget about 75% of what I had learnt. Instinct would take over and all I’d want to do is to smack the ball hard! Then as I’d start losing I would remember all the good stuff and try to put it into practice. But by then I’d already be winded, and it was so much harder to do things right. And if I happened to be winning, I’d often forget the good stuff altogether (I’m winning anyway, right?!).

Something similar often happens in organisations. There’s a huge temptation to short-cut or even abandon the good habits and success techniques, especially when the going is good. We recall them when things aren’t going well but then, of course, it takes more than just good habits to get back to winning. (Note: I am not advocating “processes” and so have chosen the term “good habits” intentionally!). For individuals I think it comes down to good old discipline, and for organisations it comes down to culture (I like the simple definition of culture as an ‘environment that is created to promote and propagate good habits through the organisation’.)

So those were my seven learnings after a few sessions with G. I reckon I learnt more in these few hours on the court than in many week-long courses. I learnt things viscerally so they will stay with me, there was enough repetition to make me feel what was right and what was not, and got I fitter running about the court instead of getting fatter binging on snacks! Most importantly, my progress was all down to me. There was no team to “let me down”, no cheat days, no “presentation" at the for an approving authority, and the measurement was always ruthlessly transparent: either I would improve my accuracy & winning % or I wouldn’t.

Maybe there really is something in that old cliche about sport being a metaphor for life!