on-loosing

11 Nov, 2025

#NuttyNovember 11

Roger Federer gave the commencement speech at Darthmount in 2024. He has had a very successful career run and has collected his championship titles like a kid collecting sea shells. But what was seemingly so fantastic had a very different picture when double clicked.

In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Yet I won only 54% of the points I played.

What does this mean? If you are simply looking from the perspective of points, he is not that perfect nor great. He has just scored 4% points more than his opponents. And this is exactly what Federer said that day - Perfection is impossible.

This mean, you are gonna loose. A lot of times.

As much as you are playing a game, you are playing points also. At any given point in time you are just chasing that one point. The reality is, in life too, you can loose many points. But you have to keep on going back to the perspective that it’s a match or a game too.

You have to win points. But you can still win the match even if you loose points. Loosing points are part of the game. And you have to respect the game.

Now let’s come to the key part: If loosing points is supposed to happen and will happen, how are you going to face it? I mean, what is the emotional perspective on it?

Whatever we told till now is ideological perspective. Emotional perspective is what you feel when you loose points. Very very critical. Because your brain processes and associates it with emotions when it stores and recall your memories.

And sad part is, more than not, the emotional perspective we have often is to look down on ourselves. Or to think feel about ourselves as someone who is not capable of. Or feel disappointed in ourselves.

Feeling matters! And these accumulate over time to slowly tweak your own self-image. Your relationship with yourself goes for a toss. Because, in your mind, the image you have about yourself has brought down the self love.

Thinking about past failures is half the job! Emotionally we need to go back, feel about them and put them in right perspective.

You have to love the version of you which looses points also. You have to love the version which fails and make mistakes also. This is very very hard.

My first ideal in life was: Freedom to make mistakes. But sadly that’s not enough. It is difficult to love the version of you who fail or miss the shot in the same way as you love the version that wins and getting everyone’s appreciation.