Stan Wawrinka Reveals What It Takes To Excel In Your Field

The late-blooming Stan Wawrinka reveals what it takes to excel in your field when you’re trading blows with a triumvirate of all-time greats

- Daniel Williams

You may dislike tattoos. You may think them ill-advised. You may think them unsightly. More than that: a stain on the body as temple. But could you make an exception, if not for yourself then for a fellow traveller? How about for Stan Wawrinka, whose career as a professional tennis player has coincided with those of the three best players (statistically, at least) who’ve ever lived? If a down-in-the-mouth Wawrinka had come across a message that could lift his spirits, anytime, at a glance, would you understand his choosing to ink that message onto the underside of his left forearm? And would it boost your understanding if the quote – lifted from a story by Samuel Beckett – encapsulated one of the finest philosophies any man could live by?

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

“I can’t remember how I first saw it,” says Wawrinka, who’s speaking to Men’s Health while on a spell in his homeland of Switzerland, spending time with his nine-year-old daughter, Alexia, while recharging on the eve of another year on the circuit. “When you’re a tennis player, even when you’re in the top 5 or top 15, you keep losing during the year. And when we are young, I think, losing means negative. And I don’t really agree with that.”

Wawrinka has grasped an essential truth. Tennis, like life, delivers nonstop miniature defeats. Even on the way to a triumph there are kicks in the guts, pokes in the eye, blows to the ego. You won that war but not every battle. You did this well and you fluffed that. You performed well but behaved poorly. You performed terribly and behaved worse. Tennis has honed Wawrinka’s ability to go again, and again, after falling on his face. To find the nobility in failure. To understand that the point of all this is not the winning or the losing but the striving.