3 Mental Models from Tennis You Can Use To Build a Business

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod. So, back in 2020, I started playing tennis. My buddy Brandon, he calls me up, and he’s like, you want to go hit some tennis balls? And this is in the midst of lockdowns and quarantine. We’re not allowed to hang out with other humans. But I figured, hey, he’s gonna be standing on the other side of a net on this other side of the court, and we’ll hit some balls at each other. This seems like a safe enough way to sort socialize. And so we started playing tennis, and he was so much better than me. He’d been playing for years, and he was just crushing me.

But it was fun. It was really fun. We came up with these crazy rules to try and even out the game, where I get to hit the ball pretty much anywhere as long as it doesn’t hit the fence. It doesn’t have to be on the actual court. As long as it doesn’t hit the fence, it’s still in play. And we played this really bastardized version of tennis for a long time, but we kept showing up every single week and playing together, and it started improving, and I got really passionate about it over the last couple of years, and I’ve been playing a lot, and now we’re very equal in terms of abilities, and we have fantastic matches. And it’s one of the things I look most forward to each week is going and playing early morning tennis with him on the weekends. It’s a lot of fun.

But over the years, as we’ve been playing tennis, I’ve been learning more about the game. And there’s so many interesting lessons and analogies from tennis that you can overlay into other areas of life. In fact, I think all games, I think pretty much all of life, is just pattern recognition. And things that work in one domain tend to work well in other domains. And this is part of the mental models framework, where we collect information from one domain, and then we think, maybe this will fit over here. We try and plug and play, and a lot of times it does. And it kind of fast tracks our capacities in that new area or gives us new insights, new perspectives. And so whenever I’m doing things like playing tennis or doing jiu jitsu or playing chess, I’m thinking, how does the lessons that I’m taking here, how do they serve me in other areas? How can I use what I’m learning here elsewhere? And I think that’s a really great way to start creating your own internal mental models.
And I’ve shared my mental models around chess in a video, the art of strategic thinking on YouTube. It’s one of my favorite videos that I’ve ever done, and it is by far our worst performing video by far. It’s abysmal. And yet I don’t care because it’s my favorite one. It is the most original content because, well, you have to go watch it. The art of strategic thinking on Anthony Vicino’s YouTube channel. So go check that out. But anyways, this morning I was thinking, what are the lessons, the frameworks, the mental models that I’ve taken from tennis that I can adapt to my business, to my personal life, and I wanted to share three of them with you.
Number one is the idea of high percentage tennis. Tennis is interesting because at the lowest levels, it’s a game of errors. Most points are won because somebody makes an error. We’re not good enough to play at a high, consistent level. And that flies contrary to what a lot of amateur players will want to do. That their instinct to do is to go and hit winners. Their goal is to hit the ball really hard in a way that the opponent can’t get to it. Right.
That’s called a winner. But the truth is, most point. While those feel good, while it feels good to hit a winner, the truth is majority of points at the amateur level are won through errors. And so really, your goal shouldn’t be to hit winners, it should just not to be making errors. That’s it. It’s not sexy, but that’s the effective play. And this flips on its head as you get to the more professional level. Suddenly there they are, winning more points through winners and there’s fewer errors because their abilities are so much higher up there.
They start to play. Now they have not just what are called unforced errors, but forced errors. Forced errors are when you are playing the point well and you’re putting your opponent in a compromised position and they are having to make harder shots than normal, and then they make an error. So, God, this concept is just so interesting. I see so many permutations of it being applicable within business. Right, or investing in general. Where Warren Buffett says the number one rule of investing is don’t lose money, rule number two is don’t lose money. Or number two is don’t forget to rule number one.
Right. But it all revolves around this idea of playing high percentage tennis. Play the games or play the points in a safe way, consistent way that you know will have measurable, moderate returns. And that’s not going to set anybody’s hair on fire. And it’s not going to hit any winners that blow people off the court. But your goal is not to lose the point. Your goal is to stay in the point long enough that your opponent loses the point. And I think there’s something about that mindset which is not sexy, but is very effective.
So play high percentage points when it comes to your investing and when it comes to your business, pick those things that have a very high probability of working as long as you keep showing up and doing the unsexy things that your competitors are unlikely to want to do. And truthfully, that is the secret that I found to succeeding in the window washing game is just showing up and knocking on more doors than my opponents were willing to knock on. That’s it. It was the high percentage game. I just had to go knock on enough doors that they finally gave up and then I was the only one out there knocking on doors. Right. So that’s a really cool concept, the high percentage points. Okay, next one is that improvement doesn’t happen in the game.
Improvement happens in practice. And it’s important to distinguish when you’re playing the points for real and when you’re playing points to practice. These are different things. Practice and performance do not go hand in hand. Performance does not lead to improvement. You might elevate your level and play at your best during that time, but that is not a sustainable level. That’s going to transfer the next time you play. And so separating these mindsets of am I practicing right now or am I performing right now? And that’s a concept that’s served me very well in all physical domains, is just recognizing what am I here to do today? What is the actual goal? And this was very hard when I was in college running cross country and track, because a lot of times you’d show up to practice and you’re like, we’re here to practice.
This is a warm up. This is a cool down. This is a relaxing long run. But because you’re hanging out with other 20 year old high testosterone dudes, it’s very hard for that to not turn into performance and into some kind of competition. Even inside of practice. Right now that I’m older, I’m like, I don’t care so much about that. But it’s still very easy to get fooled into thinking, oh, I should perform now, when really what you need to be doing is practicing. And you should have an equal time, amount of time designated each week for both of those because they’re both very important.
Right? Like you’re only as good as you can perform with pressure, right? But you can only elevate that level and improve over time through practice. So if you want to get better at something, make time to both practice and perform. The equivalent here, if say, you’re a writer would be sit down every single day and work on your writing and trying to hone it and improve it. But then the performance is actually writing and publishing it, putting it out there and seeing does it work. Do people like it right, getting that feedback so improvement doesn’t happen in the game. Third thing that I’ve learned about tennis set I think is very applicable in all areas of life is that you need to be able to manage your emotions. The person who tends to win in tennis isn’t necessarily the better player, especially when skills is effectively equal. It’s the person who’s better able to manage their emotions in the moment.
One of the really interesting things about the games when Brandon and I play is that he’s technically just a little bit better than me. But if he’s not in the right mind space and I am in the zone, I can WHOOP his ass right now. If it’s flipped and I’m not in the right mind space and he is locked in, he’s going to crush me. So what’s the difference here? Well, a lot of times it’s just managing your physical state and managing your emotions. That’s really easy to say, but really hard in practice, especially in a game like tennis, where really minute shifts of energy and of momentum and of rhythm can throw off an entire game. Truly, you can go from 1 minute striking the ball very clean and well, and you’re like, I have full control. I’m in the zone right now. And then the next second, you’re just a fraction of a second off and each stroke is suboptimal.
And now your opponent is pouncing and they’re crushing you. And now your emotions are getting involved and that can lead to more tightness. And now you’re hitting the ball even worse than before. And now just in the span of seconds, that’s how quickly it can happen. And if you don’t have a way of managing the emotions, you’re going to continue in that downward spiral. And we can easily see how this is a lesson that applies in all domains of life, right? If you do not control your emotions. I wrote about this a while ago. What did I say? Those who cannot master their emotions are doomed to serve them.
Simple as that. And this is true in business. This is true in your personal life and your relationships is if you cannot manage your emotions, then you are a slave to them. That is just how it is, not saying that you need to master them and squelch them and push them down. Because a really interesting thing that Novak Djokovic, who’s like the best tennis player of all time, he talks about the fact that it’s not that you don’t feel the frustration and the annoyance. Like for him, he’s known for his mental willpower and his ability to summon this incredible mental fortitude in these highly shustled moments. He says, it’s not that I don’t feel those things, it’s that I acknowledge them and then I let them go. And that I think is beautiful.

So those are three lessons that I’ve learned from tennis set and three little mental models that have helped me now as I start thinking about how do I apply this to my business, how do I apply this to my life? And hopefully you can take these and run with them and include them in your own life and they can bring you some value. So hopefully if they do, you let me know. Shoot me a review, guys. Reviews and ratings. I love them. They’re delicious. They help the podcast grow and reach more entrepreneur manures so that hopefully we can make a positive impact on the world. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to do that.

And I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye.