I Never Abandon My Shots: On Staying Your Own Course

I was playing competitive pickleball the other day, and we play it hard. Properly competitive, every point contested.

One of the players I was up against is someone I've earlier beaten fairly often since he started playing with us. He is someone who drives a lot and does not like resets and dinking.

Somewhere in the middle of the game, he started talking.

"You've got that shot wrong ninety-nine percent of the time tonight."

A few rallies later: "Only one out of every three of your dinks land."

I recognised what was happening straight away, and honestly, I didn't mind it.

It's a smart play. He wasn't commenting on my game; he was trying to change it, getting me to abandon my strategy and start playing his.

So I told him I still win more overall. And after a pause, I added the part that mattered:

"I never abandon my shots."

What the comment was really for

Here's the thing about that kind of remark. It isn't information. I already knew which shots had missed.

The point of saying it out loud was to make me doubt the shot, start avoiding it, and play a narrower, more cautious game.

A player who abandons his shots becomes predictable, and a predictable player is easy to beat.

It's an old trick, and it works on almost everyone at some point, because it exploits a real weakness in how we judge things.

We give enormous weight to the last few results and very little to the long record.

Never judge a shot on its last three attempts. Judge it on the scoreline.

Three missed dinks is a tiny sample. The shot's real value only shows up across hundreds of rallies, dozens of games, and the overall result.

And the overall result, in this case, was that I was still winning.

Founders abandon their shots quite often

So what does that actually mean off the court? It means a lot of sound strategies get dropped for the wrong reason.

A founder commits to a positioning, a pricing model, a way of working, a market. Then a bad month arrives. A peer mentions that something isn't working.

An investor, a relative or a well-meaning friend points at the misses. And the founder abandons the shot, often just before it would have started paying off.

The mechanism is identical to my opponent's banter. Someone highlights a small sample of failures, and the mind treats it as a verdict on the whole approach.

Sometimes the person doing it means to throw you off your game. And at other times, they don't.

They simply don't have the context. They see three missed dinks and none of the scoreline.

Everyone has a path they would like you to follow

Off the court, this pressure rarely sounds like banter. It sounds like advice. And sometimes it sounds like warnings.

You should be doing this. You should try that. Look at what I'm doing; you should do the same. It comes from friends, family, relatives, colleagues and occasionally opponents.

Sometimes it's deliberate. And sometimes, it comes from people who genuinely believe they're helping, and who are recommending the path that suits their life.

It takes a certain maturity to see that what is right for them may be wrong for you, and the other way round.

They are running a different race. They may have started earlier, or later. They may be finishing soon, or have decades left.

They have different constraints, different goals, and a different definition of winning. Advice from inside someone else's race is mostly a description of their race.

When I was younger, staying on my own path cost me a great deal. It took struggle, some hard decisions, and a willingness to stand up for myself in rooms where that wasn't welcome.

There was real conflict with people who weren't prepared to let me walk my own way, and some of them actively put obstacles in front of it.

Over the years, many of those people fell away. There are fewer people in my life now. And I'm far more content with how things have turned out than I ever was while I was trying to satisfy everyone.

There's a poem I come back to often, Charles Bukowski's roll the dice.

It's about going all the way with the thing that matters to you, even when it costs you company, comfort and approval, and about the strange, burning sense of rightness that waits on the far side of all that.

I won't pretend every step of my path has felt that way. But enough of it has.

The Stoic word for it

Ryan Holiday writes about an idea I read years ago and still return to regularly. In a short piece on trusting yourself, he draws on Seneca and the Greek word euthymia, and describes it as trusting that you're on the right path instead of doubting yourself by following "the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction."

Seneca's own description, in his essay On Tranquility of Mind, is quieter still: a mind that keeps a steady, untroubled course, not lifted too high by wins or dragged down by losses.

Holiday's version tells you where to look: at your own path, and away from everyone else's. Seneca's version tells you how it should feel while you walk it: steady.

Notice that neither asks for certainty. You don't need to be sure about every step.

You need a settled confidence that you're heading generally in the right direction, which is exactly what I had on the court. Of course, you might lose sometimes, but that is part of playing the game.

Adjust as you go; you'd be foolish not to. Just don't let someone else's commentary make the adjustments for you.

Input worth weighing, and noise

Not every voice is an attempt to knock you off course, and not every piece of feedback should be ignored. The skill is telling the two apart.

That last row is worth remembering. The most destabilising input almost always arrives at the moment you're least able to evaluate it.

Mid-point. Mid-quarter. Mid-decision. If it's genuinely valuable, it will still be valuable after the game.

Why staying on the path compounds

Here's the part that matters for the long game.

A path only compounds if you stay on it. Every year spent on your own road builds on the year before: the skill, the judgement, the relationships, the reputation.

Switch paths every time someone points at a miss, and you spend your life collecting the first few years of many roads and the full rewards of none.

There will be wins along the way, and probably some losses. That's part of the game, on the court and off it.

But the scoreline is the thing to watch. Not the last three shots.