By Gene Kwon, Salt Lake City, UT
The Match Point Feeling
I remember the exact feeling of standing at the baseline down match point. Your legs feel heavy. Your mind wants to jump ahead to the loss before it happens. Tennis taught me that feeling early, and it turns out business hands you the same feeling on a much longer timeline. A bad quarter. A deal that falls apart. A partner who walks. The physical sensation is different, but the mental one is not.
Most people think competitive sports teach you how to win. I think that undersells it. What they actually teach you is how to keep playing the point in front of you when your mind is already living in the next one.
Nobody Wins Off Talent Alone
On a junior tennis circuit, you learn fast that talent gets you on the court but it does not keep you there. I played against kids with better strokes than mine plenty of times. The ones who won consistently were not always the most gifted. They were the ones who showed up early, tracked their own patterns, and adjusted mid-match instead of waiting for the changeover to figure out what was going wrong.
Business rewards the same habit. I have watched founders and operators with real talent lose ground to competitors who were simply more disciplined about noticing what was happening in real time. Being smart is not the edge people think it is. Being nimble while the match is still live, that is the edge.
Scoreboard Watching Is a Trap
One habit tennis beats out of you, if you are lucky, is scoreboard watching. You cannot win a set by staring at the score. You win it point by point, and the score takes care of itself. I still catch myself wanting to check the scoreboard in a business sense, wanting to know exactly where I stand against a competitor before I decide my next move.
The instinct is natural but it is usually wrong. If I spend the point worrying about the score, I play worse. If I spend the day worrying about the competitor, I make worse decisions. The better move is almost always to play the point, close the sale, fix the process, and check the scoreboard later.
Losing a Set Is Not Losing the Match
Tennis is unusual among sports because you can lose entire sets and still win the match. That structure changes how you think about setbacks. A bad set does not mean the strategy is wrong. It might just mean the other side is playing well right now, or you are pressing too hard, or the conditions shifted.
I bring that same framing into business. A quarter that goes sideways is a set, not the match. The mistake I see people make is treating every bad stretch as proof the whole plan needs to change. Sometimes it does. More often, the right move is the same adjustment a good coach makes between sets: tighten one or two things, keep the rest, and go back out.
Competing Against the Court, Not the Opponent
The best advice I ever got as a junior player was to compete against the court, the conditions, and my own execution, not against the person on the other side of the net. Watching the opponent too closely gets you playing their game instead of yours.
I see the same trap in business constantly. People build their whole strategy in reaction to a competitor’s last move. That is playing someone else’s game. The operators I respect most set their own standard for execution and let the competition react to them instead.
What Actually Transfers
Not everything from sports transfers cleanly to business. Business does not have a fixed scoring system or a referee, and there is no changeover every two games to reset your head. You have to build your own rhythm for that.
But the core habits do transfer: track your own patterns, stay in the current point, treat a bad stretch as a set and not a match, and compete against your own execution rather than someone else’s scoreboard. Those are not tennis lessons or business lessons specifically. They are just lessons about how to compete well over a long period of time, and I learned them on a court before I ever learned them in an office.