“I’m going to learn how to swim,” I’ve been saying to friends for the last month. I’ve looked up classes, found out which one is the right level and price for me, and wrote down the pool schedule. Dug up my bathing suit. Even went to Tim Ferris’s blog to find out how he learned to swim “effortlessly” in 10 days.

What haven’t I done?

Swim.

Not one hour in the pool, not one toe dipped into water.

I wondered about this. Why had something i was so excited about, something which i had a deep desire to learn, all of a sudden come to a standstill?

I remembered the hours of research i did about which classes were a good fit. Which facilities were near my house. Which route I would take to get there. As we got further into April (now almost over), work tasks piled up and I went deeper into one of my projects. Soon, even balancing my daily tasks was harder than normal. I had totally forgotten about swimming.

Or had I? Although it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, the realization that I wasn’t swimming had definitely taken up a corner of mental space in my mind. I saw that
instead of it being an enjoyable tool for me to survive and have fun in water, I turned it into a looming task on my to-do list. Instead of looking at it as recreation and consciously BUILDING it into my life, I thought my work and other tasks took priority and put it on the backburner. It was no relief though, backburnering swimming. Instead I felt that I was missing out on fun, not accomplishing a goal, and had wasted time researching something I wasn’t doing.

What I should have done is given myself a strict time limit for research (instead of trying to get every last detail in place) and then started my classes. It took way more energy to think about my looming task instead of just spending one enjoyable hour in the pool.

Making the mental switch in my mind was key, as now it went from task, to something I wanted to do for myself that would bring satisfaction.

If I’m constantly telling people I’m going to do something, it’s obvious that I’m just not doing it.

Plus, if I learn how to swim, it’s one more thing off my to-do list!

In tennis, No-man’s land is not where you want to be. The space between the baseline and volley line, it’s where you’ll likely hit the least shots.

The problem with no-man’s land is that you reach too far to hit long balls and too far to hit short balls. The middle is not an advantageous position as you flail and stretch for balls that soar past you or one’s that are just shy of your grasp. You feel breathless and mixed-up.

The name itself sounds lonely and desperate, like a desert where you go to die.

When I played tennis I didn’t understand this concept. I thought the middle was the nicest, most effective place to be. Shouldn’t it make it easier to hit both long and short balls from the center? A natural hitter, I thought that positioning myself in the prime real estate nobody else wanted was an advantage.

At my coach’s behest, I consciously tried to avoid no-man’s land, but it felt like the smart place to be to prepare for whatever came in.

Pretty quickly, my tennis started to suck. I flailed around and ran speedily back to reach long balls and back as fast as I could to reach short ones. I was a chicken with my head cut off and the courts filled with little kids waiting to kick my ass. I saw that my techniques weren’t working and that perhaps heeding the advice that seemed counterintuitive to me would improve my game. I avoided no-man’s land at all costs.

I soon realized that I loved no-man’s land not because it mentally prepared to hit better, but because it didn’t force me to make a decision. The middle was safe place to be, and I didn’t have to choose my positioning based on what came in. I just hit whatever came in.

Tennis is a split-second sport. Michael Chang is intense and his feet move fast. He anticipates and makes a decision even before his opponent serves up a ball. He wins. My indecision in no-man’s land weakened everything about my game. I saw that I was scared of making a wrong decision and failing, and knew that the middle didn’t give me nearly as much anxiety as hitting from the baseline or the volley line. It was there where I could miss a shot if I chose wrong.

Being pro-active improved my game, but I also realized that failing was inevitable at times. Sometimes I chose wrong and missed shots. But at least I chose. Staying in no-man’s land was a constant failure, and the alternative of making a decision but chancing a wrong move felt much better to me.

Sometimes the things that seem most natural or smart or intuitive for us are just rationalizations because we’re scared of the alternatives. I saw this clearly with my tennis game and realized I needed to anticipate, prepare, and make the decisions that are the hardest to make-Chang-style.