🎾 Stefi’s Shorts #3 - Do it for yourself

February 02, 2024 • 2 min read

Dear friends,

This hasn’t been an easy week but it’s ending well which is the important part. Sometimes luck is on your side, don’t take that for granted.

A few weeks ago I read the book Inner Game of Tennis. This was quite a random choice as I only played tennis for a bit when I was a kid and my lack of interest in watching matches. The spark for this unplanned choice came after watching the Netflix Docuseries Break Point. Wanting to understand tennis better, and seeingthat Serena Williams recommended the book, I decided to give it a shot.

The book is short and filled with a lot of tennis jargon which you can easily skip. One key idea that stuck with me is: “images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instructions worse than none.” While this makes a lot of sense in sports like tennis, it doesn’t fit every situation, like storytelling. Reflecting on my swim practice days, I realized that despite trying hard to follow the trainer’s improvement tips, not being able to see my mistakes, made it tough to grasp them.

This week, I began exercising at a new gym, and what stood out was the presence of two mirrors. What the trainer does with these is to place me in such a way that I can use one mirror to see my reflection in the other. This setup allows me to perform exercises while easily observing my body without having to strain or bend my neck. This made it super easy to understand how my body reacted to different movements.

3 Ideas That Made Me Think This Week

• Reading books for managers and books your manager reads even if you’re not currently in a managerial role is a great way to understand managers better and why they are doing what they are doing. Having such insights might make you also more emphatic and you will pick up skills that will help you level up in your career. I recommend: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner even if maybe you’re not a manager you could skip the technical parts and get a lot of value out of it.
• Pause to reflect and realign: With the first month of 2024 behind us, take a moment to revisit the goals you set for the year. It’s a powerful tool to assess their validity and decide whether to stay the course or consider a rethink. Besides reflecting on yearly goals it’s good to just reflect on how your work or personal week went based on what you had in mind to accomplish/do.
• Slow and steady wins: While trying to do various projects in parallel, I’m discovering the power of doing less but consistently. Focusing on one thing at a time yields more long-term benefits. A reminder that came from reading the story The Tortoise and the Hare by Aesop.

YouTube Video or Podcast of the week

With some YouTubers quitting/retiring I found this video along with the one from Marques Brownlee interesting. His take on starting a YouTube channel in 2024 you can find at minute 12:20: low production value but high intrinsic value starting out.

Lifestyle

Eat healthy, sleep enough, and spend less time online.

A gentle reminder: do it for yourself

Quote of the Week

“What happens tomorrow is not always important” - If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levi

Stefi

Read More:

• ← 🇵🇹 Stefi’s Shorts #2 - On taking risks
• 🎾 The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey - Book Notes →