A lesson in strategic investing from professional sports players

livemint.com:

Bounce—The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, he recounts an interesting experience of playing tennis with Michael Stich, a German tennis player who won Wimbledon in 1991. Syed wanted to use this occasion to carry out a little experiment. He asked Stich to serve at maximum pace.

This was 2004. It had been a few years since Stich had retired from playing professional tennis. Nonetheless, Stich was one the fastest servers that tennis had seen and Syed was curious to see whether his own reactions “forged over twenty years of international table tennis," would enable him to return the serve.

Stich’s first serve went past Syed’s right ear “with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind". Syed then asked Stich to send down another serve. At the end of it, Stich had served four straight aces.

As Syed writes: “He told me that he had slowed down the last two serves to give me a fighting chance. I hadn’t even noticed." This story leads to a few interesting realizations. First, skills in one area aren’t necessarily replicable in another similar area.

At a very basic level, table tennis and tennis are very similar sports, where one player serves, the other player returns the serve, and then they rally. Second, Syed, having played a sport at an international level, thought that he would at least be able to return a serve against a Wimbledon champion. It would have been interesting to see how a similar experiment in table tennis would have worked.