Sports provide us with many lessons for life. Today I lost to my friend in tennis. I lost bad. We played two sets, and he beat me 6-1 the first set and then 6-1 again the second set. Although I didn't win, I walked away with many lessons that I can apply in my everyday life and business.

Quality

While teaching how to perfect the serve in her tennis master class, Serena Williams said that the secret to perfecting your serve is perfecting your toss. If you can master the art of getting the ball tossed up the same way every single time, then you will be able to strike it hard and play around with spin as time comes. But if you can't be consistent in the toss, then your swing will be off because you're hitting at a different height every time.

In sports, its really easy to see the impact of getting each aspect right. When it comes to warehouse work, or even desk work, it is hard to see why it is important to perfect small things like a toss. We often take shortcuts with this kind of thing in our professional life. As a result, just like when our toss is off, we often have to take a second serve. In the warehouse this looks like reworking product that has already been worked on, adding an unnecessary touch to the product. In a desk job this can look the same way when you set out to do something but it doesn't match up to what your boss expects so you have to do the work again.

This is similar in all sports. In sports we call it the fundamentals. When it comes to work, this called the standard operating procedure. It is important that firstly the standard operating procedure includes every step at the most granular level. Had it not been for Serena, i would have never thought that I need to work on my toss for a good serve. She broke down the serve into the most granular steps. It starts with the toss, then there's the bend of the knees, then the swing of the racket. Each step in here has to be done perfectly in order to have an effective serve. When it comes to basketball you have to learn how to ball handle, how to shoot, how to play defense. There are different plays. If you see this formation on defense, run a pick and roll. At work, when we run into different scenarios, we need to know how to handle them. In the beginning we may need exactly what to do, but as we understand the ins and outs of the process, we may get to a level where we're able to quickly assess the situation and make calls based on what we see.

Patience

I would say the biggest reason why I lose so bad in sports like tennis is because i really lack patience. There are sports where you can get away with not being patient. Basketball, hockey, soccer, you can press forward and force your opponent to tire our by just operating at 100%. In tennis you can also do that, but I'm not that good at tennis. So if you want to break me, all you have to do is return a few of my strokes. Once you do that, I start to get frustrated and start trying to hit harder and harder to try and win the point.

Someone that has really mastered the sport can afford to do that, and it should work. But when you're not as good as the other person in the fundamentals, the other strategy you can take to overcome your opponent is to be patient and wait for the right moment to strike. My friend Shaheer is a pro at this. He will simply return my serves, forehand strokes, backhand strokes and my strikes at the net until he feels he has an edge. Today when we were playing, he was able to pick up on when I was moving up to the net in the few second between my hitting the ball and the ball landing on his side. By quickly disseminating my position on the court, he was able to place the ball in the spots where I couldn't reach it. This drove me mad, and only made me lose my patience even further.

When you lose your patience, when you lose your cool, you start missing on the fundamentals. My toss started getting worse, my quality of serves got worse. I started whiffing on easy front hand and back hand strokes, and I made foolish runs to the net.

Discipline

One of the things you must do if you want to master any craft is deliberate practice. Not just one day or two days, but you need dedicated, deliberate, practice. You have to practice things over and over until they become second nature. This is easier said than done.

You look at people like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, who are essentially automatic when the clock is running down and they have to make a big shot and you realize that its not that hard of a shot. Its a shot that they've taken thousands, possibly millions of times. What makes it different in that moment is that the stakes are so much higher. Someone asked Damian Lillard how he deals with the pressure of these last minute shots and he responded with pressure? what pressure? We're just playing basketball. There's no pressure. Pressure is the homeless man who doesn't know where his next meal is coming from. Pressure is the single mother who is trying to scuffle and pay her rent. We get paid a lot of money to play a game.

The Dame Lillard quote was a tangent. What I was trying to get at here is that when the pressure is high, we default to our training. Our fundamentals. If we are sloppy in practice and skip getting the toss right, when the pressure is high, there is no way your toss will be right.