seeing the court clearly - by Molly Mielke - Moth Fund

I’ve been watching Wimbledon lately. The players’ mastery fascinates me — what qualities led them to get so good? Their excellence starts with the presence they bring to every stroke and movement — a powerful quality that often ends up dictating the outcome of the match. Tennis, like all professional competitive sports, is about the pursuit of perfection by athletes who are all at minutely different levels of excellence — winning comes down to a player’s ability to react to each new shot with fresh eyes, steering the game toward their strengths and their opponent’s weaknesses as much as possible. We see a similar trend in business. At the beginning, a startup’s strength is probably its ability to execute — the company’s speed and capacity to see opportunities clearly without being beholden to the past. Take Microsoft in the 1980s, when Bill Gates made the strategic decision to retain the rights over PC-DOS, setting Microsoft up to capture a great deal of the value accrued at the softwa

I’ve been watching Wimbledon lately. The players’ mastery fascinates me — what qualities led them to get so good? Their excellence starts with the presence they bring to every stroke and movement — a powerful quality that often ends up dictating the outcome of the match. Tennis, like all professional competitive sports, is about the pursuit of perfection by athletes who are all at minutely different levels of excellence — winning comes down to a player’s ability to react to each new shot with fresh eyes, steering the game toward their strengths and their opponent’s weaknesses as much as possib