Macro or Micro?

 In a tennis match, winning comes from dozens of small points that eventually add up.In high school tennis, a win can take as few as 48 points but can go as far as 150 points. That’s more than triple, but either way, stressing over every single one doesn’t make sense. If your opponent hits an insane shot past you that you can’t do anything about, he still needs to win at least 47 more points. Whenever I play tennis, I think about Roger Federer’s Dartmouth speech: “What percentage of the points do you think I won in my career? Only 54%.” Him being one of the greatest players of all time yet only winning every other point and still earning 20 Grand Slam titles shows the power of his mindset: “It’s only a point.” 

Federer’s commencement speech at Dartmouth had one major goal: to have graduates understand that things will not always go their way, but what’s important is how they see the bigger picture and keep moving. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water commencement asked graduates to notice life’s small, obvious details rather than running on autopilot. Wallace argues that meaning comes from paying close attention to the ordinary things we often ignore. But in life and in tennis, I don’t think this ideology always holds. In tennis, if every time I lost a point I truly slowed down, focused on it, and thought about it, I’d start overthinking every single shot I hit. The same applies in life. While it is important to look at small things deeply, it is more important to focus on the macro scale rather than the micro—whether the moments are good or bad. So rather than repeating Wallace’s reminder, “This is water,” I find a more realistic approach in Federer’s: “It’s just a point.” A perfect example of this in tennis is Carlos Alcaraz at the Roland Garros 2025 where he was down and all the odds were against him, but he didn't let past points get to him and he won.