friction is underpriced. the best places, ideas, and career moves usually sit one inconvenient step past where everyone else decided “good enough” was good enough. i see this same pattern show up in how i travel and in how i think about work.

2 hours past cancun

cancun is the hop everyone takes. it’s popular for a reason: good weather, good beaches, easy flights. but popularity has a cost. the longer a place has been on everyone’s list, the more crowded, expensive, and stripped of its original character it gets.

holbox is two hours past cancun. whale sharks, flamingos, water that lights up at night from bioluminescence. affordable, quiet, exactly what a relaxing trip is supposed to feel like. most people never make it there, not because it’s hard to find, but because it takes an extra two hours and a little more research than booking the resort everyone already knows about.

same pattern with ericeira, tucked just off the side of lisbon and sintra. same with utila, one ferry past roatan. these three are some of my favorite places i’ve ever traveled to, and it’s not a coincidence. the good version of the trip is rarely hidden. it’s just slightly less convenient to reach, and that’s usually enough to keep most people from bothering.

hatch

i interned at hatch in college, right at the start of covid. hatch made a night light and sound machine for babies. by the time i got there, it was already in something like 1 in 4 families with a newborn. that’s a real business. most companies would have kept mining that market forever, and no one would have blamed them.

instead they added a new product line for adults and started pouring real focus into it. an alarm clock for grown-ups felt like a strange move to a 20 year old, sleep deprived college student watching it happen from the inside. babies were the obvious market, the one already proven. adults were the unproven, harder sell, a wellness pitch to people who’d never thought about their sunrise alarm as a category. i joined a month after the first adult clock launched and didn’t really get why they were taking focus away from something already working.

i get it now. adults turned into the bigger, stickier market, and hatch is mostly known for the adult product today. i use it every day now and can’t imagine my life without it. the pivot in focus that looked unnecessary from inside a college internship looks obvious in hindsight, the same way 2 hours past cancun looks obvious once you’ve actually been.

the pattern

the same pattern shows up across the best startups. uber is the clean version: paying to get into a stranger’s car felt reckless when it launched, not a business, a liability. now we don’t think twice about it anywhere in the world. the idea wasn’t hidden. it was one uncomfortable step past what everyone already accepted as normal, and almost nobody was willing to take that step first.

the crowd stops at cancun. the crowd keeps mining the market that’s already proven. the opportunity was never really hidden, it was just one hop further than most people were willing to go, whether that hop is a two-hour ferry or a harder, less obvious market to build for.

i started playing tennis at 8. what hooked me first was that it was individual. i controlled the outcome. there was no one else to blame or credit but me.

it’s primal

theres no clock to hide behind, no teammates to lean on. just you vs the other side, battling, until there’s one winner. its true competition.

that’s also what makes it all on you:

• every point is yours to win or lose
• there’s nowhere for blame or credit to go but back to you
• which is why wins feel earned and losses teach you a tough lesson

it’s not over til it’s over

most sports are time bound. you run out the clock, or the clock runs out on you. racket sports don’t work that way.

one of my fave stories: in a doubles match in college, we played a top-10 team in an 8-game pro set. we were down 4-7, 15-40 — one point from losing the match.

we won that point. then the next. we won the set 8-7, and our team clinched a decider to win that day, a climb that elevated us to a top-15 ranking nationally. that one match, one last point, made the difference.

i think about it because of what it proved: you can be about as close to beaten as it gets, and still come back, as long as you don’t believe you’re beaten.

fundamentals are the whole game

this is why discipline in the fundamentals matters so much: it means that under pressure, you’re not thinking. you’re just doing.

years of drilling the same serve, the same return, the same footwork, until none of it required thought anymore, meant that when it mattered most, my body already knew what to do.

that’s what fundamentals are actually for — not to make you technically correct, but to make the right thing automatic, so there’s no room left for nerves to get in.

when it works: everything goes quiet. flow state. it’s addicting. competing itself is addicting the same way.

it teaches you about the real world

racket sports teach you about pressure, the ups and downs of a match:

• when to just survive a stretch, and when to take a risk and try something new
• how trusting your fundamentals is like leaning on a foundation and skillset you’ve already built, instead of trying to reinvent yourself mid-point
• how to stay in it when you’re down

that’s the mental game, and it’s directly applicable to work and life. i’ve leaned on that same instinct in rooms that had nothing to do with tennis.

it’s a lifelong sport

which is rarer than people think.

i thought i’d peak in college tennis. instead i found padel, and a brief pickleball phase, and i’m still getting better years after college. that’s so rare, and honestly so motivating.

most people peak at their sport and spend decades reminiscing. i get to keep playing the game forward. it’s also become one of the best ways i’ve found to meet people as an adult.

racket sports gave me all of this: competition, community, a reason to keep working on something. that’s why i’m still playing.