Tennis Life Lessons: Invest Early

I used to play junior tennis. I lost a lot of matches, but the ones I won, I won by a large margin. The score would often be 6–0, 6–0 or a similarly one-sided score.

Why win by such a large margin? 6–0 is the same result as 6–4.

The reason is margin of safety. The difference between being up 2–0 serving vs. 1–1 is infinite. If you lead by 2 games you can afford to lose one game and still win the match.

While professional tennis players will continue to compete regardless of the score, junior tennis is heavily mental. Every player I competed against had a “point of no return” where they would stop trying because the odds of winning were stacked too heavily against them.

That meant junior tennis was a game of competing the hardest at the beginning for a small lead that would compound over time as games become easier for the winner to continue winning and harder for the losing player to come back.

This pattern applies to almost every part of life. Hard work earlier in life compounds exponentially later on. The converse is also true, the work required to make the same amount of progress will be exponentially greater and harder when done later in life.