It's the Men's 2022 Australian Open Final. It looks like a changing of the guard is finally due. 25 year-old Daniil Medvedev is up 2 sets against the legendary Rafael Nadal. With this win Daniil will cement the next generation of young players as grand slam contenders against the perennial champions, Nadal and Novak Djokovic. In the 3rd set Medvedev hits a flying down-the-line backhand to go up 0-40 on Rafa's serve. One more point and the 3rd set will likely be his, and with it the championship. But it was not to be. Medvedev starts to hit safe, weak shots or unforced errors. He seems to suddenly have no weapons left, and a veteran like Nadal is able to easily maintain his own quality enough to capitalize on the weak play. Medvedev would go on to lose the game, the set, and the entire match. Tennis fans rightly credit the incredible fighting spirit Nadal showed to pull off one of the greatest slam comebacks ever seen. Nadal had been missing many tournaments the previous year due to injury, and the Australian Open was arguably his worst slam. It's undoubtedly one of his most inspirational wins. And yet for fans of the younger generation, it was an all too familiar result. The past few years had seen slam after slam look promising for the next-gen, only to fall short to one of the big 3(Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer). Mental weakness was an oft-cited cause of these results. The big 3 had incredible abilities, but their ability to come alive and maintain an elite level in the most critical moments seemed to define their edge. The younger players could show flashes of brilliance, but eventually something wouldn't go their way and their game would crumble. They might choke just on the edge of victory like Medvedev had. In fact, after this win 3 of the most promising next-gen players(Medvedev, Zverev, and Tsitsipas) had all lost a slam final from 2 sets up, needing just one more to win the match1. What separates the greats from the rest? I believe it's because the greats were those that had the ability to execute and continuously improve, but also realized one key fact: practice and performance are opposites.
If you've ever tried to improve at any sport or game, you've probably heard the mantra: "Practice like you play". It's a common saying meant to impart that if you want to play at a high level, you've got to practice at a high level. Especially in taxing physical sports, the temptation to take it easy during practice is always there. Coaches want players to push their abilities and improve during practice, so that temptation must be fought. You simply won't run a 4:30 mile on the day of the meet if you never push yourself to run that fast during practice. This is one of those self-evident pieces of advice that is hard to imagine any reasonable objection to. The problem is that this advice insidiously implants another idea into the heads of those that follow it. If you practice like you play, then maybe practice IS play. Maybe you should treat every soccer practice as if it were a match. Do your gameday preparation every time. Curse your losses and celebrate your wins. Or not... Most people will be sensible enough to realize that the results of practice don't matter too much. The important thing is that you brought the intensity of a real game to your practice. Intensity is great, absolutely. You want to be pushing yourself to do things just outside your ability, and practice certainly requires just as much focus as performance. There is a critical difference though that most people never realize. It all comes back to mentality. In practice, your mentality should be negative, but in performance your mentality should be positive.
The key distinction of mentality comes from what ideal practice and performance fundamentally are. Ideal practice will be "Deliberate Practice", a term coined by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. Deliberate practice should be a focused period where you are consistently trying to perform a skill just beyond the edge of your current ability. On every attempt you should be getting quick and clear feedback on whether you achieved your new goal. Once you finally get it you need to keep pushing to the next level just beyond you. It is incredibly taxing mentally, meaning it isn't fun. It is and should be quite uncomfortable. Ideal practice is all about leaving your comfort zone. Ideal performance is instead all about staying squarely in your comfort zone. You want every action that you need to perform to be so natural that there is virtually no chance of failure. This is what makes great performance seem so incredible. The magician who effortlessly pulls off a trick requiring impeccable timing and dexterity seems like an improbable feat to the audience, yet to the magician himself it is routine. He's done the trick thousands of times alone, so he's completely comfortable executing it flawlessly on stage. In tennis a passing shot that hits the corner of the court in tennis looks superhuman, but the player has drilled that shot for dozens of hours with his coach. This crucial difference of comfort vs discomfort is one aspect of why practice and performance are distinct. But the difference goes even deeper than that.
The opposite of Defend Mode is Discover Mode. Just as defend mode is ideal for practice, discover mode is ideal for performance. Discover mode is opportunity-seeking. Ancestrally this was useful for foraging for instance. It enabled you to walk through a forest with a wide focus, scanning for food sources. Discover mode also helped socially, making you friendly and approachable while on the lookout for potential mates or friendships. Keeping a broad focus makes you flexible to what your environment throws at you, allowing you to react quickly and calmly. This is what makes it so useful for performance. You can't know exactly what challenges a performance will throw at you beforehand. In any direct competitive sport your opponents are deliberately trying to do things that you won't expect. If they catch you off guard you don't have time to hyper-focus on your mistake. You have to be able to quickly shrug it off and focus on the next thing. Novak Djokovic is a master of this. He frequently gets visibly upset when he misses a shot or gets outplayed, but by the next point he is completely calm and focused. If he wins a great point after he'll celebrate triumphantly, without any indication that he had just been frustrated. By keeping himself calm he is able to easily make the great shots that are routine for him. It's only when you flip to defend mode that the routine becomes difficult. Complex, fluid motions become rigid and error-prone due to the stress response. It's no coincidence that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow state is characterized as "fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity". Flow state is often used to describe elite performers. It's obvious that they would be engerized and involved, but the enjoyment is also critical. Is it any wonder that the new tennis phenom Carlos Alcaraz is noted for how much he smiles on court?