Are You One Bad Decision Away

This past weekend was the finals of one of my favorite tennis tournaments of the year. It’s the grand slam. The French opened the Roland Garros. And my favorite tennis player of the current generation was playing in the finals, Carlos Alcaraz playing against Alexander Zverev. And it was an amazing match. It was an incredible five set match, went the distance, had all the drama, all the intrigue that you could possibly hope for. But something happened in the fifth set, something that a lot of people are looking at, and they say, oh, that influenced the entire game. It ruined the entire match because it was a bad call.

It was a bad call by the, the referee, the umpire. So what happened is, in the fifth set, I believe the game is two one in favor of Alcaraz. And Alcaraz is serving. He had just broken Zverev. And Zverev, in the very next game, has an opportunity to break right back. And this is very important because tennis has a very convoluted scoring system. It’s the first to six games, and typically, the person who’s serving has an extreme advantage because they get to fire this ball at 120 miles an hour at the other guy. So typically, the person who’s serving wins.

And the whole thesis of tennis is to hold your serve. So that is that, you know, win the games where you’re serving and then try to break your opponent’s serve. And if you can do that, if you can do that in one set, then you will have a very good chance of winning, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to be able to break. So Alcarazz comes out in the fifth set. This is the dramatic. This is the final set. Whoever wins this will win the tournament, win the championship, and he gets the break on Alexander Zverev. And so it’s two one in favor of Alcaraz.

All he has to do from this point on is just hold the next series of serves, and he will be the champion. Well, Zverev comes right back out after getting broken, and he has a great game, and he puts a lot of pressure on Alcaraz, and he has a breakpoint opportunity. And this is where the drama occurs. Alcaraz double faults. So what this means is when you’re serving, you get two serves. The first one you go, you try to serve it really, really hard, but you, you tend to miss that pretty frequently. So I think they only make their first serves anywhere between 60 and 70% of the time. And so they’re going for the big winner on that one.

When they miss that they get a second serve, the second serve, if they miss this one, then they have conceded. They’ve lost a point. The other person wins the point. So you only get two serves. You get your big serve, and then you get a backup serve. And so typically, people don’t miss their second serve very frequently. Well, Alcaraz serves, and it is very close. It’s very close to the line, and the umpire calls it in.

Zverev disagrees with this very vehemently. He goes and he points at the line. He says, no, that’s very clearly out. And if it is called out, he would have broken back. The game would be tied two two. But because it was called in, Alcaraz wins that game. He goes up three. One very big mental shift.

Suddenly, right now, the drama is, well, it turns out the serve was out. Zverev is right. It was a doubles. It was a double fault. He should have broken back. The game should have been. The match should have been two two tied in the fifth, instead of having been broken and down a game. And this is.

This is very important. Now, after the tournament, Alcaraz goes on. He goes on to win, and he breaks again. Azarev. And you can make an argument that maybe Zverev is, like, mentally off of his game. Now, he’s thrown because of this, but at the end of the game, or at the end of the match, after Zverev is lost, he’s in the press room, and he’s talking to the, you know, the people, and, of course, everybody wants to know, like, his thoughts on that one point in particular. How do you feel about that? You were robbed. Like, does that change anything? What do you think should happen as a result of this stuff? And, you know, he handles it very graciously.
But that conversation, that reminded me of something that happened many years ago, because this is. This is a frequent occurrence in tennis, like, these bad calls happen, and I can’t remember who it was. I was hearing them talk about this, but they said, listen, no match, no one point wins or loses a match, because you have to win 100 points or, you know, 100. I don’t know how many points it is to win an entire tennis match. That’s gonna vary, right? But there’s hundreds of points being played. One point isn’t going to decide the fate of it. And that person I remember, I think it was a woman, she said, I had the opportunity to win any number of points before that one, and I could have won any of those points, and I didn’t. So we look at that one, that was a bad call.

And we say, that’s the one that cost me the match. The reality is I had countless opportunities before that that I could have won and I didn’t take those. And I was thinking about this because it just happened this weekend. And then I watched this commencement speech that Roger Federer gave last weekend, and it was amazing. I highly recommend that you go look this up. Roger Federer commenced a speech and he talks about how in the game of tennis, you have to play every single point as though it’s the most important point in the world. Because it is. But as soon as that point is done, as soon as it’s behind you, you have to put it behind you and move on to the next point.

And this got me thinking about the plus one framework of decision making, which is all about recognizing every decision in our life is equally important. It can either move you forward towards your greatness, or it can move you backwards towards your greatness. And I love this framework. I think one of the reasons I’m so drawn to tennis as a sport is that every point is simultaneously the most important point in the game and the least important point. And it’s the same with our decisions. We look at our lives often and we think that we. Because we aren’t where we want to be, it’s the result of making bad big decisions, when in reality, it’s the sequence of small decisions, the small points that we let slip when our focus wasn’t quite there. It wasn’t necessarily the big, pressure filled points that we played poorly or we played well.

It was all the other points on the mundanity of day to day activities, those decisions that didn’t really seem like they mattered. Those were the ones that were stacking up. And at any given point, we could have reapplied ourselves and treated those decisions as they were more important than they were, instead of just coasting through. And because we were coasting on those decisions, that’s what’s ultimately led us to the place that we are in our lives. Typically, our lives are not the results of the really big decisions that we got wrong. It’s the result of the small decisions that we didn’t make as well as we could, we didn’t treat with the proper importance. And I just love this framework so much because seeing that happen in the French Open and then hearing Roger talk about it, I’ve been thinking a lot about the decisions that we make on our day to day basis to hit our goals, to achieve our big, ambitious, entrepreneurial goals. It’s not necessarily about making the right big decisions.

Those we tend to not screw up like we recognize those are important. So we apply ourselves to them more fervently. We apply more diligence. We’re more careful and more thoughtful with how we engage with those decisions. So typically, you’re not making just horrible decisions on the big ones. It’s the horrible decisions on the small and consequential ones that float by us every single day that we take for granted. Those are the ones that stack up because our lives are seriously nothing more than the sequence of small decisions stacked atop one another to create a life. It’s all the little points that stack up to influence whether or not we win this game or whether or not we lose it.

So I wanted to share this with you because I think it’s just a really powerful framework. Again, go look up that commencement speech that Roger Federer gave. It was fantastic. And let me know what struggle, what decisions are you working through right now? Do you recognize in your life? What are those small decisions that you have been to happy, haphazard with, that you’ve been too lenient with, that you haven’t been applying the full weight of your focus to what are those areas of your life that are just kind of sliding by? And as a consequence, you look back at the end of your day, your week, your month, and you realize, I have been leaking my power. I’ve been making good big decisions, but it’s the small decisions that are ultimately holding you back. As they say, little vices kill big dreams. So that’s going to do it for me, guys and gals, I’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.