Constantly Adapt to Evolve

Becoming a great tennis player is similar to being an excellent professional, you're constantly analyzing your weaknesses and strengths, and adjusting your game.

You can sabotage yourself by getting frustrated or being defeatist. Learning how to precisely manage yourself, and to stay calm and to dig deep in high pressure, high stakes situations can turn the tide of a match and a career.

Great tennis players are unfazed by failure in the moment, they wait until the match is over to let emotions set in. 

Getting accustomed to failure and learning how to handle it well is what success is built upon.

Serena Williams has found herself on the losing end of the set early on in the match and requiring two set wins to take the match. In these situations, she holds her head high and keeps fighting.

Do not throw in the towel. As long as there’s still time on that clock, you’re still in the fight.

Serena Williams: “If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration.”

If you also want to become the best at what you do, developing the right focus is essential.

Serena Williams started playing tennis early on. Back in 2011, she had a major injury that caused her to plummet from being number 1 to 172. In 2013 she gained her rank back.

She decided to persist regardless of her injuries and losses.

In 2015 Serena Williams already had 21 Grand Slam titles. She was only 1 title away from scoring 22nd one, which was only done by Steffi Graf. She made it happen by winning Wimbledon 2016. 

Never give up. If someone else is winning, you can do it too. 

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. It’s true for companies, and it’s true for products."

• Find out if the problem really exists, and why. This will open a path to alternative ways of solving it.
• Some problems, which seem complex, often have simple solutions.
• What is the surest thing in that complex problem? That becomes your First Principle, your starting point.
• List out the possible solutions
• Focus on one good solution while removing the rest.

Routines and rituals are sets of habits that, when practiced consistently, lead to profound, long-term results. Most billionaire routines start early in the day and include exercising, reading and contemplating.

It doesn’t matter when you do your routine activities. What counts is that you commit to doing them — even when you don’t feel like it.

Billionaires love setting aside alone time. .. To think. They might do this by meditating or some other relaxing activity they enjoy.

Future-proofing your career to stay relevant isn't about learning how to code or going back to college.

It is about having a career plan with a long-term vision, taking into account the current job-market conditions, economic factors, emerging opportunities, personal interests, and family realities.

A life cycle of a job is shrinking rapidly, and if you're not re-inventing yourself or pivoting on time, you are rendered out of work sooner than in the past decades.

We need to check our career plan and ask ourselves what skills need to be developed to pursue future opportunities, in this shifting economy.

The 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany were supposed to demonstrate the Aryan racial supremacy. But Jesse Owens, a black athlete, won gold in the 100m, 200m, the 4 x 100m relay, and the long jump.

After the latter event, German athlete Carl Ludwig Long was the first to congratulate Owens, and the two walked arm-in-arm to collect their medals. It took a lot of courage for Long to befriend Owens in front of Hitler, something that Owens had great admiration for at that moment.

In 1948, UK neurologist Sir Ludwig Guttman, who worked with war veterans suffering from spinal injuries, added sport into his patients' rehabilitation program.

Others started copying Guttman's methods, and athletic competitions ensued. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Guttman brought 400 wheelchair athletes to compete in the Parallel Olympics. Since then, the Paralympics have gone from strength to strength.

• Meditate.
• Eat. If your blood sugar is low, you are far more likely to succumb to destructive impulses.
• Exercise releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that makes your brain feel soothed and keeps you in control of your impulses.
• Sleep. When you are tired, your brain cells’ ability to absorb glucose is highly diminished.
• Ride the Wave. Desire has a strong tendency to ebb and flow like the tide. Waiting out this wave of desire is usually enough to keep yourself in control.
• Forgive Yourself when you slip up. Focus on what you’re going to do to improve yourself in the future.

Slow things are slowly driving us crazy. Society is now on a fast pace, and this has wrapped our sense of timing.

The accelerating pace of society has set off a cycle, resetting our internal timers. Rage for others who are slow eventually sabotages our timers. This is a downward spiral, where will power doesn’t work, and can even be detrimental.

Evolution has given us impatience. We are given the impulse to act, to choose, to abandon or to chase something else, in the limited time we have, instead of spending time in a single unrewarding or slow activity.

Taking into account the speed of communication that is now 10 million times faster than before, and human movement, which is now 100 times faster, we can see society picking up speed and becoming increasingly impatient.