Passion Project and Tennis Game: Exploring the Mindset of Common Ground
Kickstart your passion project without leaving your job or getting up at 4 a.m. (unless you want to).
While playing tennis, my best shots happen when the ball hits the middle of my racket, and it feels like magic as the ball effortlessly sails to the other side. I can hear and feel the connection in my body.
I am calm and confident, not overthinking my moves or ball placement. I am playing, having fun, and feeling joy.
I may try something new—maybe a better body rotation or a wrist movement I saw a pro use during a recent tournament in China—a little unknown, a little risky, and a little out of my comfort zone—but a winner!
Kickstarting a passion project is a lot like playing a game of tennis. When we feel calm and confident, we go for it. We might have been thinking about finally taking that dating course to find our significant other or using our carpentry skills to build those long-awaited shelves for our spouse’s substantial collection of books featuring the most beautiful villages of Europe. We even take risks and try new things, and it feels fantastic, just like hitting the sweet spot on a tennis racket.
We start to see ourselves differently, feeling more confident and ready to take the next step.
But when doubt sets in, and we overthink, we get stuck. It's like hitting the ball into the net—or worse, getting tangled in it—making excuses like not having time for why we can't move forward or stopping altogether just because the first step wasn't perfect.
The joy is in the process of playing tennis or pursuing a passion project. It's not about hitting those perfect shots every time. It's about trying, messing up, and getting better. It's perfectly okay to pivot along the way, like when we signed up for a course and found out later that it's not for us, so we continued looking for the right one, or when we prepared an outline for our book and six months later realized that it's not the topic we’re passionate about.
We reflected, we learned, we pivoted.
In tennis, we build our game shot by shot and the entire match game by game, not letting the worry about winning rob us of the pleasure of playing. With passion projects, we build while spending a few minutes every day enjoying the process and not worrying about whether it will be good enough for other people or if we're making a living selling the app we’re designing.
It’s the joy of the process and not the destination as much. The destination will show itself with consistency and accountability - we might even catch a glimpse of the snow-covered mountain top along the way. But let’s not get distracted by the snowy top; let’s enjoy the process of creating.
Ready to start your passion project?
Schedule a session with me today, and let's get that passion project off the ground for you.
