Roger Federer and the Psychology of Losing
Tennis legend Roger Federer told the class of 2024 at the Dartmouth College commencement:
In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. (…) The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job, it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. (…) You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion.
You can’t always win. This is true in sports, business, and life. When you make decisions under uncertainty, remember that there is no such thing as a crystal ball. You can try to know the future but it’s impossible. Some bets simply won’t pay off.
However, if you seize the opportunities to be found in your loses, perhaps you can build a long-term edge.
Federer’s story reminds us that success is rarely about perfection; it’s about persistence. Small victories create momentum that compounds over time.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth and colleagues famously found that “grit”—defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals—predicts achievement beyond IQ and conscientiousness.1 In other words, persistence in the face of difficulty often matters more than raw ability.
Likewise, research on “post-error learning” demonstrates that errors can enhance learning if they are framed as information rather than failures.2 Losses, then, become not endpoints, but data points in the learning process. As the study explained:
Experimental investigations indicate that errorful learning followed by corrective feedback is beneficial to learning. [...] If the goal is optimal performance in high-stakes situations, it may be worthwhile to allow and even encourage students to commit and correct errors while they are in low-stakes learning situations rather than to assiduously avoid errors at all costs.
It’s as Federer shared later in his speech:
The best in the world are not the best because they win every point. It’s because they know they’ll lose again and again, and have learned how to deal with it. You accept it, cry it out if you need to, and then force a smile. You move on, be relentless, adapt, and grow.
Sébastien has more than two decades of leadership experience. As an author, he believes breakthroughs often happen when experts venture outside their field. That is why, in "The Psychology of Leadership," he went beyond finance and economics to study research in psychology.
He is currently Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in assets under management.
Sébastien won research paper awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022 and the Financial Analysts Journal in 2010 and 2014. In addition to The Psychology of Leadership, he is the author of Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation (McGraw Hill, 2020) and the coauthor of Factor Investing and Asset Allocation (CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2016).
Sébastien is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group). He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.
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Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087.
Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044022.