So, I was watching some tennis the other day. You know, just flipping channels. Landed on a match, I think it involved that Czech player, Marie Bouzková. Don’t really follow rankings much anymore, but I remember watching her play. What struck me wasn’t some amazing winner, but just how she seemed to get so many balls back. Like a wall, almost. It looked kinda simple, you know? Just relentless consistency.
Got me thinking about my own pathetic attempts at playing tennis on weekends. My shots are all over the place. One good forehand followed by three into the net or way out. So, inspired by watching her, I thought, “Okay, I’ll practice consistency. How hard can it be?”
My Big Plan
The next Saturday, I dragged myself to the local courts. No fancy drills. My big idea was just to hit crosscourt backhands. Over and over. Like she does. Keep the ball in play, deep and steady. Simple, right?
- First 10 minutes: Felt okay. Focused.
- Next 20 minutes: Getting bored. My arm started to feel it. Not pain, just… tired.
- After 40 minutes: I was spraying balls everywhere. Worse than usual! My focus was totally gone. All I could think about was how tedious it was.
Seriously, hitting that yellow ball back in the same spot, again and again… it was mind-numbing. And I wasn’t even doing it well! On TV, it looks smooth. Maybe even a bit boring sometimes if you’re looking for flashy shots. But trying to do it? Man, it’s work. Real, repetitive, grinding work.
It made me laugh, thinking about it later. It reminded me of this time years ago, I tried to learn coding from some online course. The instructor made it look so easy. Just type this, click that, boom, you’ve built an app. I spent a whole weekend, got frustrated as heck, and ended up with basically nothing that worked right. The gap between seeing someone skilled do something and actually doing it yourself is just massive.
People see the highlights. They see Bouzková winning a point after a long rally, or some tech company announcing a cool new feature. They don’t see the thousands of hours of hitting boring backhands, or the programmers fixing bugs at 2 AM. They just see the result and think, “Oh, I could do that,” or “That looks easy.”
It’s the same everywhere, I guess. Everyone wants the shiny outcome, nobody wants the grind. They talk about passion, but passion doesn’t get you through the millionth repetitive drill or debugging the same stupid error for the tenth time. That’s just grit. And watching her match, then failing miserably myself, just kinda hammered that home for me again. It’s mostly just hard, unglamorous work. Simple as that.
