“If you want to lead a better life – as a parent, spouse, employer or friend – you’d do well to take Novak Djokovic as your guide, says Ed Smith. The thing to note about the world’s number one tennis player is not how brilliant he is when playing at his best, but how good he is when below par. Look at this year’s Australian Open final. For two sets he was plainly out of sorts while Andy Murray was playing superbly; and when that occurs, the player on top typically exhausts his opponent by forcing him about the court. But so excellent is the Serb’s technique, so hard is he to break down “even in bad spells”, that by the time he’d regained his form, Murray was as exhausted as he was. And that’s how we should gauge our own performance in daily life. All of us, when below par, “dampen the mood at breakfast, reduce the optimism of the workplace and undermine the warmth of the evening”. The key question is: “By how much?” Are we able to control it? What we should seek as our epitaph is not: “At his best he was very good”, but: “At his worst he was better than most.” – The Week (Feb 2015)
“I remember talking in the late 1990s to Matthew Parris, then in full flow as the Times’s daily parliamentary sketchwriter. “What’s the hallmark of a great journalist?” I wondered. One aspect of his reply, flinty and unsentimental, surprised me: “Editors want to know that when you’re having a bad day, you’ll still be competent.” But Parris was right: there are many more journalists capable of being very good on their good days than there are columns to go around. Howard Marks, the legendary American investor, has explored a similar point about exposure to financial risk. It’s not just how good you are in the good times, it is how moderate you are in the bad times. Nor does the conventional concept of averages capture the risks of a sudden decline in performance. “Never forget the six-foot-tall man,” Marks points out, “who drowned crossing the stream that was five feet on average.”
I wonder if the eulogy “At his best, he was very good” should be replaced by “At his worst, he was better than most”. – Ed Smith, New Statesman (Feb 2015)
