Small Margins and Resilience
Brian Scalabrine, who played for several teams in his 11-year NBA career, was nicknamed “The White Mamba.” The nickname was a play on that of his contemporary, Kobe Bryant, “The Black Mamba.” Except, while Bryant was an all-time great, Scalabrine was mostly a backup, with a career scoring average of just three points per game.
Scalabrine claims that one result of his status as a middling player who only starred in garbage time is hearing average people declare that they were better at basketball than him. This led to Scalabrine’s minor second career as someone who allows regular Joes to challenge him in a game of one-on-one basketball. Predictably—Scalabrine is an NBA-caliber player, after all—he always destroys them. He supposedly said to one person, “I’m way closer to LeBron [James] than you are to me.”
This spring, former tennis player Roger Federer gave the commencement speech at Dartmouth College. Federer made a reference to his ranking, which led me to look up the rankings of current tennis players. One thing I noticed is that, after the first 10 or 15 players, most of the people never win the major tournaments. You could watch them play and think, “This person stinks,” while forgetting that anyone ranked in the top 100 people in the world—at whatever activity—is, by definition, really, really good. They only lose because they are slightly less good than the very best.
Federer made an insightful point about the small margins of difference between top players when he said: “In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you: What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.”
Federer’s lesson to the Dartmouth graduates was that a key to success is building the resilience and fortitude to move beyond a lost point and remain present on the next one. He said:
“When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to think, ‘Okay, I double-faulted. It’s only a point.’ ‘Okay, I came to the net and I got passed again, it’s only a point.’ Even a great shot, an overhead backhand smash that ends up on ESPN's Top 10 playlist, that, too, is just a point. [...] When you're playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial because it frees you to fully commit to the next point, and the next point after that, with intensity, clarity, and focus.”
I think the lesson for all fields is that, when you ascend to top levels, you should expect to lose more often, to find people who are better than you are, and to find more critics. And one key to maintaining confidence is to not forget that you’re still better than almost everyone else.
That, and perhaps adopting the Venus Williams stance on criticism: “I know every single person asking me a question can’t play as well as I can—and never will. So, no matter what you say, or what you write, you’ll never light a candle to me.”
Leadership Wisdom
“Yes, talent matters. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it doesn't. But talent has a broad definition. Most of the time, it's not about having a gift. It’s about having grit. In tennis, a great forehand with sick racket head speed can be called a talent. But in tennis, like in life, discipline is also a talent, and so is patience. Trusting yourself is a talent. Embracing the process, loving the process is a talent. Managing your life, managing yourself—these can be talents, too. Some people are born with them. Everybody has to work at them.”
— Roger Federer