Dhruva Arya wrote on LimkedIn, there are a few things in sport prepare you like this one. Anyone can lose in private. Learning to miss in front of a crowd and serve the next point is why so many former players never fear failing in public again.
By 15, I had lost more times in public than most people will in their whole lives.
That turned out to be the most useful thing tennis ever gave me.
Think about what a tennis loss actually is.
No teammate to share the blame. No coach who can sub you out. No clock to run down while you hide. Just you, alone on a court, missing shots in front of everyone who came to watch, and then being forced to walk to the other side and do it again. And again. Until it's mathematically over.
You don't get to lose quietly in tennis. You lose in full view, point by point, with your face doing its best to stay calm while everything inside you falls apart.
I did that hundreds of times before I was old enough to drive.
I once had a match won. 6-1 first set. Up 5-2 in the second, serving, 40-15. Two match points. A ball I had hit ten thousand times came to me, and I missed it.
Then I lost the next point. Then the game. Then the match. I gave away something I had already won, in front of everyone, and had to walk off the court with all of them having watched it happen.
At the time it felt like the worst part of the sport.
It was the best part.
Because here is what almost nobody learns growing up: how to fail where people can see you, and get up the next morning anyway.
Most people spend their whole lives avoiding exactly that. They don't start the company because it might fail in public. They don't apply because they might get rejected in public. They don't post, pitch, ask, or try, because someone might watch them come up short.
I don't have that fear. Tennis burned it out of me before I turned 16.
Every time I've built something that flopped, cold emailed someone way out of my league, put an idea online that got ignored, or walked into a room where I didn't belong, one quiet voice says the same thing.
You've lost in front of people before. You survived every time. Serve again.
The scoreboard was never the lesson.
Learning to lose where everyone can see you and come back the next point is the only skill that ever transferred to everything.
Written by Dhruva Arya, an ex-Pro Tennis Player and successful entrepreneur.
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