Hacker News Reader

Comment by redler | Hacker News Reader

I love how, among the more strategic thoughts on life, he mixes in advice about how to play one specific point against Agassi in the 1995 Australian Open. 20 years later, a fierce competitor still litigating where he should have placed one serve.

View on HN

I thought the same thing. Winning 4 out of 5 is pretty definitive -- you're going to obsess over some possible way to win the 5th all these years later?

I've heard it said that champions like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Sampras, etc. are motivated more by avoiding the feeling of loss than by than having the feeling of winning. They are motivated by negative emotions rather than positive. That jibes with this anecdote IMO.

I would probably congratulate myself on 4 out of 5, which is why I'm not a champion :)

Actually I think it's slightly different.

Champions don't fear loss otherwise they would never try for the last second winning shot. Champions like Michael Jordan, etc, believe they should win every single time because they are the best. When they take that last second shot, they believe it is going to score. A championship is theirs for the taking and if they lose, it's because they fucked up, not because someone else beat them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eTZlsmhSZ4&t=825

This is a common thing, not something that just champions do. I would argue that champions do the opposite - risk a lot for a big reward.

[1]http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2406852...

I think this is true for many of us in our lives; we tend to remember and obsess over our failures more than our successes, particularly the large ones. If we learn from our mistakes, maybe we learn the most from our most expensive mistakes?

I think very often, such obsessing over the details of our failures is just wishful thinking. We are trying to rationalize our failure. Rationalizing is much easier if you distill the causes of failure to one simple event. In this specific case, that modification of strategy would have saved the set, perhaps, and given him a chance to continue fighting in the match. A win would be far from guaranteed, counterfactuals are hard to construct and almost always impossible to verify.

Tennis is a sport where you will rue every single point in a lost match. It lends itself particularly well to the if-only-I-did-that-one-thing-differently rationalization. It is due to the hierarchical (game-set-match) nature of the scoring and how one only needs to win one crucial point to get past their competitor (e.g. at 30-30, 30-15, the players are really sitting on a knife's edge).

Well, it is strategic to him, as he would have probably gone on to win the match and the tournament (a 'major' which is a very big deal) had he won that one point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com