Unforced Errors

In racquet sports like tennis and badminton, an unforced error is a mistake caused by a player's own mis-judgement or poor execution, rather than anything their opponent did. It has nothing to do with pressure or an exceptional shot. It's simply a point that shouldn't have been lost. It could be a double fault during serve, an easy smash into the net or hitting the shuttle long when there was no pressure. Instead of making your opponents earn their points, you give them away.

At every level of play, the player who commits fewer unforced errors usually has the advantage. Looking honestly at my own games, I know that's an area I need to improve. Sometimes I go for the spectacular shot instead of a high-percentage one.

A fancy shot feels great when it works. But if I can only pull it off half the time, I'm also giving away the other half of those points. When both players are evenly matched, reducing unforced errors is often the easier and more reliable path to victory.

Winning by Making Fewer Mistakes

There are two ways to win a game: score more points than your opponent, or give away fewer free ones. We tend to admire the flashy winners, the impossible shots, the bold strategies and the moments of brilliance.

But over the long run, success often comes from something much less glamorous. It comes from a focus on making fewer avoidable mistakes. This isn't just true in sports, but in many aspects of life.

We think we need to pick the right stocks to generate strong investment returns. We assume our health would improve if we just adopted the perfect diet that everyone is talking about. We put too much emphasis on finding the winning move and ignore the unnecessary mistakes that are quietly dragging us down.

Giving Away Returns

In How Not To Invest, Barry Ritholtz talks about the common mistakes that prevent ordinary investors from capturing the market's long-term returns. He deliberately focuses on false beliefs, poor decisions and behavioral errors rather than complex portfolios or sophisticated strategies.

We tend to gravitate toward picking the hot stock everyone is raving about rather than dollar cost averaging into a boring index fund. Even though most fund managers, whose main job is to pick stocks, underperform the market long term, we still feel tempted to try our luck picking the next NVIDIA.

For most of us who are not dedicating our lives to staring at stock prices, the better focus is on avoiding losses from trading fees, poor timing and avoidable taxes. Picking individual stocks also introduces additional risk of permanent capital loss if a company performs poorly or gets delisted.

The simpler and more reliable strategy is to put most of your investments in low-cost index funds that track the entire stock market. This approach automatically captures the winners while avoiding risk of being heavily exposed to a few losers. It is a boring but effective way of matching or outperforming most investors over time.

Protecting Your Health

This pattern also plays out in how we treat our bodies. When we decide to get healthy, we tend to look for the flashy, dramatic winner. We search for the perfect, highly restrictive diet that everyone on social media is talking about, buy expensive supplements or sign up for grueling workout programs designed to push us to the limit.

But for most of us, optimal health isn’t achieved through extreme interventions. It is achieved by eliminating the unforced errors we commit every day.

We don’t need a revolutionary wellness routine if we are consistently giving away free points through poor lifestyle habits. Chronic sleep deprivation, dehydration, convenience-based eating of highly processed foods, and hours of uninterrupted sitting are the physiological equivalents of hitting an easy smash straight into the net. They are completely avoidable mistakes that quietly erode our baseline. You cannot out-exercise a lifestyle filled with unforced errors.

Just like a steady game of tennis, the high-percentage path to long-term health is incredibly boring. It’s sleeping seven to eight hours a night, drinking enough water, walking daily, and eating mostly whole foods. Master the defensive basics first, and you’ll find you rarely need miracle interventions.

The Boring Path to Success

We live in a culture that celebrates outliers and extraordinary success. We applaud the venture capitalist who picks the unicorn startup, the influencer who transforms their body in ninety days, and the athlete who hits the impossible cross-court winner. Because excellence is exciting, we assume the path to achieving it must be exciting too.

But the reality of long-term success, whether on the court, in your bank account, or in your biology, is often remarkably dull. It is a game of patience, consistency and restraint. It requires passing up the flashy, low-percentage gamble in favor of a boring, reliable baseline.

You don’t need to be a genius to win. You just need to be disciplined enough to stop beating yourself. By shifting your focus away from chasing the perfect, impossible shot and toward eliminating the unforced errors under your control, you stop giving away free points in life. It is a boring, unglamorous way to play, but one of the most reliable paths to success.