Why Champions Never Stop After Losing — The Life Lesson Behind the Greatest Tennis Players of All Time

It started with an email I got from the parent of two young players I coach, brother and sister.

These kids are always wondering why I'm consistently correcting them.

No matter how good they get, I'm always pushing them to be better, to fix the next thing, to work on the next problem.

And their parents sent me this email.

I want to read part of it to you.

It said, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity team.

He later said he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career and lost almost 300 games.

He didn't win in spite of the misses.

He won because he kept shooting.

Roger Federer won almost 80% of his matches over his entire career, but he only won 54% of the points he ever played.

The greatest of all time lost nearly half the points he played.

His edge wasn't perfection.

It was that the moment a point was over, it was gone.

No carrying it to the next one.

Life is going to hit you.

It hits everyone.

The only question that has ever mattered is what you do in the 10 seconds after you get hit.

Do you look around for someone to blame or do you take a breath? Fix your grip and play the next point.

We are people who play the next point.

When I read that, it stopped me because that is the entire secret, not just to tennis, to everything.

I've been coaching and playing this game for 50 years.

And I want to tell you something today that I usually don't talk about because I think you need to hear it.

If you want to get to the top of anything, professional sports, building a business, raising a family, you have to learn how to lose.

You have to learn how to fail.

Figure out why you failed and then get up and do it better.