I play a lot of pickleball. It’s a great sport—coed, multigenerational, and one where you don’t need to be an athlete to excel.
Fast hands, long arms, and even the ability to scoop the ball off the ground are helpful, but there are workarounds if you don’t have them. For example, if bending over is tough, you can buy a small suction cup that attaches to the paddle handle to make ball pickup easy.
By far the best pickleball shots I take when I am playing are misses. They come when you are aiming for the back left corner, but swing too fast or hard, and the ball ends up going in a 90-degree angle to the target and lands instead on the front right side. It works because the smart play and the place your eyes are focused on are nowhere near the actual landing spot. Everybody on the court is fooled, and you get the point.
Typically, this shot and other gems are the result of the ball hitting the edge of the paddle instead of the sweet spot.
Of course, you shouldn’t aim for the edge. Most of the time, those mishits send the ball out of bounds or into the net—great for the other team, not for you. If you have too many of these types of misses, your partner will wish they had a different partner. We all prefer a partner who is consistently hitting the ball flush and not relying on luck to win the match.
In life, I have found this miss-hit approach to be successful as well. More times than I can count (or care to count), I have had someone say to me, ‘Your advice has changed my life.’
I’ve been credited with everything from promotions to job changes—even weight loss—because of things I supposedly said. These are cases where somebody says something to the effect of, “When you told me to talk less and listen more, my boss noticed and now I am getting a promotion.” I had no idea what they were talking about, so I asked them when I gave them this sage advice. They told me of the time and place. I recalled the conversation but didn’t remember the exact advice.
Another person told me they used my lifestyle advice to lose weight, and it worked. Clearly, if I were an expert on weight loss, I would apply it to my own situation. I have never intentionally given weight loss advice. I have often flippantly said the ticket to losing weight is to eat less and exercise more. When I say it, I am joking and assume everybody knows it, but on at least one occasion, a friend took it as wisdom.
But it gives me pause. How often do you say things, and people take them to heart? At times, those comments turn out to be gems, career highlights. But do some of my comments have the opposite effect? Are they real-life equivalents of hitting the ball on the side of the paddle and causing more harm than good?
Probably. I need to make sure I am living up to the value of treating others the way I want to be treated and keep the number of misses coming out of my mouth to a minimum.
