I’ve increasingly come to appreciate optimism, and it feels almost unreasonably necessary when embarking on something new. Critical perspectives are important, but so is positivity. I’ll use this post to as a catch all for material I’ve found helpful in this context.
A friend put it succinctly: you have to be optimistic when starting a big project.
Roger Federer said in a commencement speech at Dartmouth in 2024:
In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?
Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.