What do professionals work more on? Their strengths or weaknesses?
Greetings,
I sit here with a painful episode of tennis elbow. Yesterday, there was a doubt if I could send this newsletter out on time. Now here I am, gingerly typing while trying my best not to aggravate the injury.
Lateral epicondylitis, the medical term for tennis elbow, is a painful condition that occurs when tendons in the elbow are overloaded. This is caused by repetitive motions of the wrist and arm. Despite its name, athletes aren't the only people who suffer this injury.
In my case, it was straightforward. Tennis elbow came from overdoing tennis. But don't professional players overdo tennis? Why do we seldom hear of a tennis player withdrawing from a tournament due to a tennis elbow injury?
The repetitive motion of hitting backhand shots is what causes tennis elbow. It would be normal to assume that the ratio of forehands to backhands is even. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As a general rule, professional players hit more forehand shots. Almost two-thirds of the shots they hit are forehands. Recreational players, do the exact opposite.
If we add poor body conditioning and improper technique, what we get is the perfect setting for developing tennis elbow.
Now I needed to figure out how professional players hit more forehands, thus avoiding tennis elbow.
Work on your Strengths more than the Weakness
If someone forwarded you this newsletter, please thank them on my behalf! Welcome to Newsletter # 35.
Thoughts that crossed my mind, while I was reading…
Seven Questions with Sumaiya Balbale by Sequoia Capital
If you ever find yourself delaying a decision indefinitely for lack of a right answer, make it known there is no right answer ever. Living in indecision is worse than picking the wrong option.
A decision making process is key to choosing the right options. The process involves differentiating between reversible and irreversible decisions. If the decision is reversible, there really is no need to waste much time.
Decisions which seem correct today might appear ridiculous in the future. Lean in a direction and ways to make it work will unfold.
Twyman's Law
"Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong", following the principle that "the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another".
Coined by William Anthony Twyman, the principle mostly refers to errors in input data leading to wildly incorrect answers.
This principle can be successfully employed in a different way. In this current age of disinformation and click-bait headlines, anything that makes your jaw drop is usually incorrect.
Talking about being fit and injury free, Hiroyuki prefers to be riding on the float instead of tugging at it. For the sake of my painful elbow, I couldn't agree more.
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Stay well and see you next week.
Evian
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