The dose makes the poison.

Stop reading about international news. Stay hyper-local and plug into your community. Humans aren’t wired to process that a surfer was attacked by a shark in Indonesia or even the minute by minute account of the soccer kids saved from the cave in Thailand. It’s a compelling story, and you should read about it if you are interested…but wait a couple of weeks and then read about it in one sitting. Don’t follow it minute by minute on CNN.

Mute the daily updates about things you can’t control.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” – Archilochos.

When the moment comes, people go into lizard brain mode. If there’s no muscle memory, or training to fall back on then, their foundation skills are like soft sea sand that crumbles and gives away with the first bit of pressure.

Skill only develops under pressure. Pressure isn’t real in a simulator. Making the shot during a practice round when nothing is at stake is way different to a match day when there are no mulligans and people depend on you.

Practice by doing

Practice doesn’t make perfect, it only entrenches bad habits.

Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.

The deeper you go, the more mastery required.

Our moon’s orbital speed around Earth is 2,290 mph.

At the equator, the Earth spins at about 1,000 mph.

Our Earth’s orbital speed around the sun is 66,000 mph.

Our Sun’s orbital speed around our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 450,000 mph

Our Galaxy is moving towards the constellation of Hydra at
1,340,000 mph

It takes our galaxy about 250 million Earth years to
rotate once.

I’d memorize these stats. It’s a good dose of humility.

The most critical point in tennis is the last one. It’s a lot easier to win a point against a world champion when it’s two games all in the first set.

It’s a different kind of pressure when you are serving for the match in the third or fifth set. All games are not equal.

Champions close.

My father once asked Jaroslav Houba, former National Coach of Czechoslovakia what he thought of a particular tennis player. His response was “show me him when he’s down.”

True grit can only be seen when the pressure is on, and someone has something to lose.

Tennis is an individual sport, but Serena’s answer on why she continues to hit new levels of excellence, or “levels unknown” made me think about high performing teams.

When you raise the game of your weaker players, then your strongest players need to play better to stay on top.

Everyone wins. The greatest players are pushed to new levels of excellence and the junior players slipstream and learn from the best.

A team with one strong performer, but with weak teammates won’t go the distance. In the short term the star will carry the day, but sooner or later she’ll have an off day and the support won’t be there.

It’s the same with sport as it is with a healthy growing country. The core matters. The brilliant rise to new levels, but only if they are pushed by a strong core.

“Today is a good day to die.” This saying is not about giving up or surrendering to everyday life.

It means you’ve had a life well lived. No regrets, no “what ifs” or “why didn’t I”

It means you’ve stepped into the arena and played the game.

It means you can look back and “I’m ready when you are. Let’s roll.”

Make every day is a good day to die.

The English word planet comes from the Greek word Plan.

Stars appear to have fixed positions when compared to other stars, but there are other lights in the night sky that change their positions in relation to the stars and to each other. They move among the stars. The Greek name for these moving lights was plan which means “wanderer.”

We now know that the planets “wander” across the sky because they revolve around the sun.

Chew on that next time you step out for a walk.

In the 1790’s people thought that yellow fever and malaria were caused by humidity and summer heat. It took another one hundred years for humans to figure out that mosquitoes were the carriers and the cause of this sometimes fatal infection. Imagine what we’ll figure out one hundred years from now.

Maybe death is an infection like malaria. We just haven’t cracked the code yet.