We Often Underrate The Need For Worthy Rivals

They are our best chance at becoming the best versions of ourselves

Image by Bessi

Fast Improvement

A few years ago, I managed to fulfil one of my teenage ambitions: play tennis regularly. A friend and I just happened to have this passion we had never committed to. We set a day a week, and we played a full match, whether it went for two or four hours. We had known each other since childhood, and we had played other sports together, but tennis was new for both of us. The experiment went exceedingly well. After a year, when friends came to see us play, they couldn’t believe how far we had reached so quickly.

Pushing Each Other

We were both as poor as you can expect from any new player. We could spend minutes making double fault after double fault, just trying to get that pesky ball to hit the right square. We didn’t let our irritation stop us, though, and we put up with each other’s incompetence. As we were both physically adept and fast in our learning, it only took us a few weeks to move from barely managing to serve to choosing how we served. However easy it may have been for us to pick up a new sport, we wouldn’t have improved so fast hadn’t it been for the other. If my friend’s serve was becoming stronger, I had to make mine just as powerful, or more…