The Art of Being Tough

Apologies for last week’s skip. I hosted the main stage of a business conference with illustrious guests such as Tom Brady and CEOs of brands like AG1 and Whoop and I needed to actually prepare rather than wing it on the strength of my intellect. I hope you’ll forgive me. No more skips, I promise!

This newsletter is inspired by one of Tom Brady’s anecdotes he told on the main stage. Brady was asked about Super Bowl 51 when his New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28:3 and somehow still managed to win, what it was he thought about in the moment of near defeat. He said for a sliver of a second he felt sorry for himself and his team but then he remembers thinking:

“Don’t be a little bitch.”

And that sentence right there inspired this week’s newsletter. What does it mean to be tough? Here are four points that make you tough, tougher, the toughest. Let’s start right where Tom Brady left off:

Catching your own thoughts

Many people think that thoughts happen. That ideas, images, fragments of sentences, emotional spirals just hit them out of nowhere. Like the weather, uncontrollable and fickle. The first time I knew I was doing something wrong was when I watched a Roger Federer interview where the journalist asked him about his consistency. Roger said that every time he steps on court he feels the same way. Whether that’s a Wimbledon final or a second round in Dubai, his mood is the same.

Meanwhile, I was going through three hundred different emotional states in the warm-up alone. I started to monitor where my thought process wanders to before a match, from fear to determination, from worry to asking myself what my friends were currently doing back home and whether I’d be happier doing the same, and suddenly, my thoughts became mundane. Every day the same thing. It bored me. Realising that my thoughts were not monsters that jumped out of the bushes to surprise and overwhelm me but instead daily wanderings of a restless mind numbed their effect.

Thoughts happen, yes, not everybody is a monk that can make them pass by like clouds in the sky. But it’s up to us to catch ourselves from letting them spiral out of control. Where Tom Brady showed his toughness was not by the way he called himself “a little bitch”. It was the fact that he caught the formation of self-pity before it could blossom into a full-blown pity party. Turning the game around and winning was a nice bonus on top. All of this leads me to my next point:

Stay in the moment and focus on the process

After beating a world number one for the first time in her life in Rome, Sorana Cirstea said that she was able to focus on the things she needed to do rather than on the result which helped her stay in the moment. Consequently, winning the match came almost as a surprise. It sounds so simple, don’t think about winning, think about doing, but the truth is: Humans are made to think about the future. Plan for the future, prepare for the future, protect yourself from the future. One of the reasons we have taken civilisation this far is because of our ability to think about the future. If you want to win as many matches as possible in tennis, though, you need to stop right now. Thinking about uncontrollable aspects of the game expends energy you don’t have, makes your mind weak and porous and will in most cases cost you the match. Jannik Sinner is the master of staying in the moment, of solely focusing on the process and what he can do better. The process is first, the result will follow.

Endure pain and discomfort

When you say somebody is tough, this is usually what people mean. A person willing and able to endure pain and discomfort. There’s a fine art to it, however, that people don’t talk about enough. Enduring pain just for the sake of it may be admirable but won’t get you too far. The smart person knows when they must endure and when it’s time to let go. Arnold Schwarzenegger writes in his book that in order to build muscle you need to destroy muscle. Literally, you rupture fibres for the muscle to rebuild stronger. That is a biological fact and there’s no way around it.

Humanity has come so far: We work less and produce more. And with AI on the horizon that trend may escalate to extremes. I’m saying all of this without judgement, merely stating it. In professional sports, however, some facts will remain true forever. You will always have to spend a certain amount of time on court, you will always have to have a certain amount of repetition and muscle memory in your system and you will always have to run bloody intervals on the treadmill. The pope lives in Rome and tennis players run intervals. There is no circumventing some form of pain and discomfort in order to be the best version of a tennis player you can be. While work-life-balance for a tennis player is a nice concept in theory, in reality your life and your balance might better be found in the work. That’s why Novak Djokovic has had such incredible longevity. He would probably live a similar lifestyle even if he wasn’t a tennis player. He loves to take care of his body - he eats healthy, sleeps well, meditates daily, optimises the details. These aspects of professional sport are not a chore to Novak. They are his life. And because they are his life, his work-life-balance is always perfect. The more beauty you find in the pain of routine and practice, the longer your career will be and the happier you will be.

But back to the smart person knowing when to let go. I used to play a lot of five-setters in practice because I figured if I’m strong enough to play five sets, three sets will be a walk in the park. I quickly learned that I cannot apply the same approach of a three-set-match to a five-setter. I used to bring full intensity and focus to every single point I played. In five sets, I learned to let games and sometimes even sets go. A futile fight is the worst kind of fight. It costs energy, it costs nerves and when hour four starts ticking, it often times costs you the match.

Wear an ironclad suit against criticism

In a sport where you play weekly and almost always lose weekly you need a strong sense of self to survive. There’s Chad on your Instagram account who knows that you serve badly and Claus back at home who has a tip for your forehand and all the betters in the world who want your pets to die (not the pets!). It’s not always ill-intentioned, sometimes people just get really attached to a version of yourself they see on TV and they want to help. Knowing who you are and what you are capable of is the best vaccine against these kind of comments.

Coco Gauff does it best, in my opinion, she uses “hate” - as she calls it - as fuel. It makes her run harder, compete better, win more. Counterintuitively, comments that are supposed to bring her down, make her stronger instead. They help her endure pain and discomfort (see above). It’s almost like a game for her. A challenge she accepts and delivers on. You dare to doubt me? I’ll show you. The reason she is able to do it is that she frames criticism as hate and hate is something you keep away from yourself. She keeps bad comments at a distance. They never become a part of her.

Alexander Zverev, on the other hand, did something he probably shouldn’t have done. He posted a comment on a video he was cut out off complaining in the comment about favouritism for certain players. It doesn’t matter whether he has a point or not, whether he is right or not. Letting people into his mind that is filled with random things as all of our minds are, unfortunately, in this tough sport that is tennis, shows weakness. Of course weird thoughts will cross your mind (see point one) but you have to catch yourself before they blossom into a reaction. Everything you do in public is a message to the locker room. Your opponents register lapses and they remember the next time they’re on court against you. Keep the facade up, keep the suit strong.

If you know who you are and you trust your inner core to the fullest, it won’t matter what people say or whether you were cut out of a video or not. If Tom Brady had given into a thought spiral that was beginning to form, he would have started with “what bad luck to play this badly on the most important day”, would have moved on to “we’re an embarrassment to our fans” and would have ended on “we don’t deserve to be here”. I know that because I had these thoughts many, many times over. But Tom stopped himself. He stopped his thoughts. Other people’s doubts never became his own. How did he do it?

“Don’t be a little bitch.”

Simple, biting, succinct.

Things that make me happy:

Watching Tom Brady tell anecdote after anecdote about his life as a quarterback and what it takes to lead a team made me really happy. Not because I thought I learned so much, after all, the only team I lead is me (there is a me in team) but because I could see how happy it made him to talk about it. He was right back on the field doing what he loves most. Which leads me to…

Things that make me unhappy:

Seeing Tom Brady beam while telling stories about himself as a football player made me giddy and sad at the same time. I could tell that being on the field made him extremely happy and now all of that is gone. Athletes do die twice, once when they retire and then one more time when they, well, actually die.

Greetings from Rome, friends and fellow tennis fans, my face is marked by red clay and my heart is made of cheese and my fingers have biscuit crumbs on them. I will see you all next week, I promise, no more skips…

Yours truly, Andrea