The Most Beautiful Game
The Amplified Impact Podcast
July 28th, 2023
Back in 2020, when the world was going through COVID lockdown, we were all looking for safe and responsible ways to socialize and have some fun.
That’s when I stumbled upon tennis…the perfect COVID activity.
It was such a refreshing change as it coincided with a significant shift in my life, where I had to redefine my identity and find new passions.
Tennis gave me the chance to start fresh, free from any expectations.
And while I was just a beginner…the feeling was so liberating.
Tennis has this fascinating scoring system, where the game isn’t over until the final point is played.
It taught me a powerful lesson about focusing on the present moment.
No matter what happened before or how much work was still ahead…the only thing that truly mattered was winning the next point.
That’s life right there.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The moment that we’re in, in this instance, is truly the only thing that matters.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
So I started playing tennis a couple of years ago in 2020, specifically. It was like the perfect COVID activity. I had a buddy who’d been playing for many, many years, and when COVID hit, there really wasn’t a lot of ways to go out and socialize, hang out with people. We’re in lockdown and we had to socially distance. And so I was getting antsy and I was like, I want to hang out with my friends, but I want to be able to do this in a responsible way. And my Budy’s like, hey, come play tennis with me. And I was like, this is the perfect COVID activity, where we stand on opposite sides of this court and we just hit balls at each other. And I’d never done anything like that.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:34]:
I hadn’t grown up playing really sticking ball type games like baseball or hockey or anything like that, and it was incredibly enjoyable. I fell in love with tennis pretty quickly right after that. And it was at a time in my life when I was starting to have to shift my identity around who I was and what I was going to be known for in that next phase of my athletic career. Up to that point, I had been a rock climber for the better part of a decade. And I’ve talked about this in other podcasts, but I really struggled as I started to reach the as soon as I went over the hill in climbing, it wasn’t even when I reached the zenith, it was like years later, I really started to struggle because I was getting older. I had other things that were vying for my time and my attention. I wasn’t able to dedicate my life to climbing anymore. And the way I used to talk about it is there are two types of people.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:27]:
Well, I guess there’s three. There are people who climb and then there are climbers. I guess the third group are people that don’t climb. But for my purposes, there were people who climb and there are rock climbers. People who are climbers, they identify, it’s who they are. It’s part of their soul, it’s part of their being. They hang out with climbers, they live and breathe climbing, whereas people who climb are just people who go to the gym. They go climbing and they enjoy the activity, they partake in it, but it doesn’t consume them.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:56]:
It doesn’t become a meaningful part of their identity. And I had been a climber. I lived and I breathed that world for so long, but I was past that point in my career where it held the same obsession for me. It no longer had the same importance that it had for so long. I was getting into business, I was getting to other interests in my life. My hyper focus, my ADHD was taking me in other directions. And I tried to hold on to my climbing career for as long as I could. Because I still identified so deeply as a climber, despite the fact that I wasn’t really climbing anymore and I wasn’t getting the enjoyment that I had previously gotten out of it for a couple of reasons.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:34]:
One was my social network were all rock climbers. It was people who lived and breathed rock climbing, and I could no longer relate to them in the same way that I could before, where now my fashions were around business or content creation and other aspects of my personality. And I was struggling to fit in with my social groups. And then when I would go to the gym, I was falling behind where I had previously been. And I wasn’t living up to the expectations that I knew that I had for myself. Like, I knew I could climb at a certain level, but because I wasn’t dedicating my life and my energies to it, of course I’m going to slip, right? And that was one thing I was okay with that reality, like getting old and getting past over the hill and just not performing as you once did. What I struggled more deeply with was the fact that I never felt like I could go into the gym and just have fun and be a beginner. Like I could just go in there and learn.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:25]:
I was always expected to be the expert. I was the guy that the young guys looked up to and kind of used as the benchmark. And the young lions are always looking for how to take out the old line, right? And so I always felt like I had to prove something. And I couldn’t go in there with just the pure joy of learning and exploring. And it really started to taint my relationship with rock climbing. And so in 2020, I was really looking for a new activity, a new thing to get into, so I could have no expectations of myself, nobody else would have expectations of me, and I could go back to being a beginner, to being a learner, and not have to worry about the ego that I was struggling with. Like, this wasn’t anybody else’s pressure that they were putting on me. This was all internally derived ego.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:11]:
That’s all it was. And I just wasn’t in a place where I could conquer my ego. And so I needed to leave it where it was and I needed to walk away and go do something new, which tennis became what was one of the things that started that. I also got into Brazilian jiu jitsu. And those two activities combined kind of became my new thing. And tennis in particular is an incredible activity for a lot of reasons, but primarily the scoring. The way you score a game is very convoluted, but it’s also kind of beautiful because the way a game of tennis works or a match of tennis works is that you have to win a certain number of sets, right? So let’s say we play a best out of three. That means you have to win two sets before the other person wins two sets.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:58]:
And to win a set, you have to win six games. And each game is comprised of whoever can get to five points while winning by two. Okay, so that’s convoluted. But all you got to really know is that a match is broken into sets, which is broken into sub games, and those games are broken into individual points. And what’s so interesting about tennis is that you can get slaughtered in the first set, you can lose the first set, and you can be getting slaughtered in the second game or in the second set, and yet the game isn’t over. There is no timer. And so the game only ever ends when the other person succeeds in achieving the necessary score. And what’s beautiful about the game is that you can stage some incredible comebacks as a result because it’s not over until it’s literally over.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:53]:
And it’s so fascinating to me because there is this mental side to the game that even when you’re winning, if you lose focus and you lose confidence and you start playing or stop losing, or stop playing with rhythm, then you can quickly find yourself on the other side of this momentum shift. That can be pretty drastic. And I was playing a game the other night, or match rather. I keep getting them all confused. Match, set, game. I was playing a match the other day and I got crushed. I was getting crushed in the first set. And then I managed to stage a little mini comeback, but he ended up taking the first set and then the second set, he got out to a huge lead and all he needed to do was win one more game.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:36]:
He was up five one and he just needed to win one more game and put it away and he couldn’t do it for whatever reason. Whether he choked or I just started playing better, I don’t know. But I was able to come back and take the second set, which felt great, it was awesome. But I was thinking about this, how the thing that I enjoy so much about tennis is that when you’re in the game and you’re losing by that much, I think the key to being successful is to not worry about what came before, not worry that you lost the first set, that it was a landslide. Not that you don’t worry about the fact that you lost a previous five game. It doesn’t matter. Those do not affect what has to happen next. What has to happen next is you have to win the next game.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:26]:
And to do that, you have to win the next point. And so this game distills beautifully down to a singular point in time where whoever can focus the most energy on that moment, on winning that next point, that is the only thing that truly matters. They will be able to win that point and the point after and the point after that, which then becomes the game, which then becomes the set. And it’s way easier said than done, obviously, because in your back of your mind, when you’re up five one, you’re always thinking, oh, I just got to win a couple more points and I win. Whereas when you’re losing, it’s very easy to give up and say, well, they just need to win four more, or I have to win 100 points, or whatever to get back into this game. It’s very easy to get fixated on what came before or how much work still has to come to get to the destination. But if you can just live in the moment and focus all of your energies on that very next point, because that’s really all that matters, and that’s the only thing that you can control. And I find that to be a beautiful metaphor for life, for business, for every interaction that you have, which is the past does not matter.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:32]:
You’re still in the game of life. The game is only over once it’s over. And up to that moment, you just need to keep playing each instant as well as you possibly can. So I wanted to share that with you guys because I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last day, and how we so easily get anxiety about the future or this regret about the past or this pressure from the past, when the moment that we’re in, in this instance is truly the only thing that matters. And so focus all of your energy there and just kind of watch. Sit back and watch magically as everything kind of pans out in the end. There’s a great book called called I think it’s called The Power of now by Eckhart Tolle. Highly recommend it.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:14]:
Go read that book. That’s your homework. But until tomorrow, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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