Pressure is a Privilege.

“Pressure is a privilege – it only comes to those who earn it.” — Billie Jean King

American former world No. 1 tennis player Billie Jean King is considered to be one of the greatest tennis players of all time. In her illustrious career, she won 39 Grand Slam titles: 12 in singles, 16 in women’s doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles. One of her most famous sayings is, “Pressure is a Privilege.”

Champions Adjust

“It’s how we look at something whether we feel a lot of pressure or not, I like pressure. It helps me realize it’s an opportunity. Usually if you have tremendous pressure, it’s because an opportunity comes along. Most of the time, in work or play or anything, if you really think about it, usually it’s a privilege. That I-want-the-ball feeling. Not “please double-fault.” Give me the ball. Give me the problem to solve. Let’s figure this out. Let’s go. 1

Former world number one tennis player Bobby Riggs, in the 40s, had opined that female tennis was inferior, and at 55, he could still beat any of the top female tennis players. Riggs first challenged Billie Jean King for the “battle of sexes” matchup, and she declined, but the Australian top-ranked women’s player who had won both the 1973 Australian and French Open women’s singles titles accepted the challenge. Court lost the match in two sets: 6–2, 6–1.

“I’m taking this match very seriously. I love to win. I welcome the responsibility and the pressure. Bobby had better be ready.” – Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King accepted a lucrative deal to play Riggs in a nationally televised match in prime time on ABC dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes”. The match-up was held in Texas at the Houston Astrodome on Thursday, September 20, 1973, with a winner-takes-all prize of $100,000. Speaking of the 1973 match in her autobiography, All In, She writes:

To this day my 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match against Bobby Riggs remains cast in the public imagination as the defining moment for me where everything coalesced and some fuse was lit. But in truth, that drive had been smoldering in me since I was a child. What the Riggs match and its fevered buildup proved was that millions of others felt locked in the same tug-of-war over gender roles and equal opportunities. I wanted to show that women deserve equality, and we can perform under pressure and entertain just as well as men. I think the outcome, and the discussions the match provoked, advanced our fight. A crowd of 30,472 , then a record for tennis, came to the Houston Astrodome for the match that September night. An estimated 90 million more watched the event worldwide on TV, a record for a sporting event.”

Billie Jean’s victory, together with the passage of Title IX, is often credited with both igniting a boom in women’s sports participation and for empowering women to advocate for equal pay in all sectors of the workforce. To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the historic match, Billie Jean authored Pressure is a Privilege: Lessons I’ve Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes in 2008. In September 2017, Fox Searchlight Pictures released the film Battle of the Sexes, starring Emma Stone as Billie Jean and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Wrongness

The unexpected upside of being wrong. One of the universal struggles of life is our resistance to being wrong. We often feel a strong need to be right, and this tendency is reinforced by our cultural conditioning, which tells us that the person who is wrong is weak and foolish. And that the right person is strong and capable.

This resistance to being wrong causes us stress and suffering. It strengthens our ego and reinforces our closedness to the world around us. Often, in order to be right, we won’t even listen to others’ opinions, so we miss out on opportunities to learn or grow.

It is not our desire to be wrong that is the problem, it is our response to being wrong. We must see being wrong not as a defect or weakness but as a natural part of our path. It is a sign that we are learning and evolving. Mindfulness encourages us to challenge our need to be right through the principle of the beginner’s mind.

The beginner’s mind challenges us to approach challenges, people, and conflicts with an open mind and heart. It teaches us that every moment is an opportunity to see the world anew with childlike curiosity and openness. When we give up our need to be right, we become less authoritative and more curious, declare fewer opinions, and ask more questions.

“Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Leave Each Space a Better Place

Leave a Footprint, Take Pictures: Minimize your impact on the environment because everything you encounter in the wild plays a vital role there. As a visitor, it’s your responsibility not to disturb that delicate balance. It’s your responsibility to preserve the history and nature of the place. Wherever you go, leave it better than you found it.

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – The Heart’s Longing

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