I was 24 and very convinced I was finally figuring life out. In hindsight, I had a lot of growing up left to do.

Somewhere along the way, tennis started changing more than just my life. It started changing me.

Not just because I married a tennis player, or because the sport changed where I travel, my content, who I meet, or became intertwined with my career. Those are the obvious ways tennis changed my life.

I mean tennis itself. The psychology of it. The discipline, the uncertainty, the constant negotiation between effort and outcome, confidence and doubt, control and acceptance.

And I’ve learned all of it from the sidelines. I don’t really play tennis. And after years of watching it this closely, I know this for sure: I needed tennis.

That’s the beauty of the sport. You don’t have to play it for it to change you.

It has changed the way I think about effort, disappointment, patience, success, failure, and probably most of all, control.

I’ve always deeply believed that you are in control of your life, or at the very least, in control of your attitude toward it. I think a huge part of why I’ve trusted myself to go after the things I want is because I’ve always believed that if I work hard enough, care enough, and keep going, I can figure almost anything out. And for the most part, that belief has served me really well and been true.

But I would be lying if I said that those same personality traits haven’t also made me a control freak.

And control is an interesting one for me because so much of my own career requires me to let go of it.

I can control how kind I am, what content I make, what I say, and what I put into the world, but I can’t control how people receive it, interpret it, or what they decide to think of me. And the more I’ve tried to control that part, the less like myself I’ve felt.

Tennis has made that lesson almost impossible to ignore.

Watching my husband play hundreds of matches, and spending so much time around other players doing the same, has made this impossible not to understand. I’ve watched incredible wins and heartbreaking losses. I’ve watched players prepare perfectly, work incredibly hard, do everything “right,” and still lose. I’ve watched athletes play better for almost an entire match and still walk away without the win. Tennis is brutal like that. At some point, you have to trust the work, show up, and accept that the outcome isn’t entirely yours to control.

I think that’s the distinction I didn’t understand before: believing you have agency over your life is not the same thing as believing you can control every outcome.

That final line is important. It resolves the apparent contradiction without making you abandon the belief in self-determination that has been a huge part of how you’ve built your life.

And I realize most of you reading this probably don’t follow tennis (you should!) which is partly why I want to write this.

You don’t have to be the one playing to absorb what tennis teaches about being a person. I think that’s uniquely powerful about the sport, and I know a lot of tennis fans would agree. You can see it in the culture and conversation that have surrounded tennis for generations: people don’t just watch the game, they study its psychology, its momentum, its characters, and what it reveals about human nature. I grew up downhill ski racing and around other individual sports, but tennis has taught me things from the sidelines that I never learned while competing myself.

Trying your best actually has to be enough.

This might be the biggest thing tennis has taught me.

I think most of us grow up with some version of: work hard and good things will happen.

And obviously, I still believe in working hard. But tennis has taught me the much harder second half of that lesson:

Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.

You can train incredibly hard. You can eat perfectly, sleep perfectly, and prepare perfectly. You can want something desperately. You can play really, really well.

And someone can still be better than you that day.

There’s no teammate to blame. No clock to run out. No one to sub in. You stand there by yourself, shake the other person’s hand, pack your bag and leave.

Watching someone I love experience that over and over has completely changed the way I understand effort.

I used to think “I tried my best” was almost a consolation prize. Tennis has made me realize it might actually be the whole point.

Because if your happiness is entirely dependent on the outcome, you’re going to be miserable. There are too many things you cannot control.

What you can control is how you showed up.

And over time, I’ve realized that applies to almost everything.

Character matters more when things aren’t going your way.

It’s very easy to be gracious when you’re winning.

Tennis has made me pay much more attention to who people are when they aren’t.

How do you behave after losing something you desperately wanted? How do you treat the people around you? Can you be happy for somebody else? Can you admit that they were better that day without deciding that means you’re terrible? Can you go back to work without turning disappointment into bitterness?

And I’ve realized this doesn’t only apply to the person competing. I’ve watched what this sport can do to the people around it, too. When you love someone and become deeply invested in their success, it’s surprisingly easy to start experiencing their wins and losses as if they belong to you. I’ve watched people around the sport become consumed by results: overly involved, obsessive, even unkind, competitive like they are the ones playing, because somewhere along the way, supporting someone turned into attaching their own identity to that person’s success.

That has been a lesson for me, too. I had to make a conscious decision that I refused to let that become my reality, or the role I played as part of my husband’s team. Loving someone doesn’t mean carrying every loss for them, finding someone to blame, or turning their disappointment into your own. Sometimes being a good partner, friend, or member of someone’s support system means understanding what isn’t yours to carry. You can care deeply about the outcome without allowing it to consume you.

I’ve watched Tommy have incredible weeks and heartbreaking ones. And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking the impressive part was winning.

The impressive part is continuing with the same effort and positive attitude.

There is something incredibly grounding about loving someone whose job requires them to publicly fail all the time.

And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

You have to let things go.

Tennis careers are long. Progress isn’t linear. Rankings move. Bodies change. Confidence comes and goes. A breakthrough everyone else sees as sudden can be the result of ten years of completely unglamorous work.

Being around that has changed my relationship with my own career too.

I have become much less interested in whether something is happening fast enough and much more interested in whether I’m building something I can keep getting better at.

There are seasons.

You cannot control everything.

Try to get very serious about the small number of things that actually belong to you, instead of trying to control things you have no chance of controlling.

Your preparation. Your attitude. Your effort. Your response.

I think I used to spend an enormous amount of energy trying to control outcomes indirectly. If I could just work harder, explain myself better, anticipate every problem, make everyone understand me, then maybe I could protect myself from disappointment.

Tennis has slowly beaten that instinct out of me.

Not completely. Let’s not get carried away.

But enough that I notice it now.

Four years ago, I thought growing up meant becoming more certain.

I actually think it has been the opposite.

I’m much more comfortable now with not knowing how something is going to turn out.

I understand that a bad day doesn’t necessarily mean anything about tomorrow. That losing doesn’t erase the work that came before it. That somebody else’s success doesn’t diminish yours. That you can be disappointed without being defeated. That you can desperately want something and still be okay if you don’t get it.

And maybe most importantly, I’ve learned that there are very few individual moments in life that deserve the amount of power we give them.

There is almost always another point.

So here I am, four years later, at my fifth US Open.

Of course I want Tommy to win. I want that more than I can explain.

But tennis has taught me that loving someone isn’t just wanting the outcome for them. It’s loving the work, the person they are while doing it, and the person they are when the outcome isn’t the one either of you wanted.

You show up. You care deeply. You give life everything you have. And eventually you realize that peace doesn’t come from controlling what happens next, but from trusting yourself through whatever does.

And wow, am I grateful for a sport brutal enough to teach me that.

This highly addictive cucumber salad is loosely inspired by my favorite cucumber salad from Raku, my favorite Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. I loved how simple, spicy and vinegary it was, and at some point I started making my own version at home with whatever was growing in my garden.

It’s cold, crunchy, a little spicy, super acidic and aggressively herby. Basically everything I want in a summer salad. No precious measurements needed!

What you need

• 4–5 Persian or small cucumbers

• A handful of mint

• A big handful of basil

• A VERY BIG handful of cilantro

• A handful of parsley

• A small handful of chives

• 1 jalapeño

• Juice of 1 lime

• Rice vinegar (I love this yuzu rice vinegar if you are feeling fabulous)

• Flaky or kosher salt

Make it

Smash the cucumbers with the side of a knife or the bottom of a glass, then roughly chop them into chunky pieces.

Throw all of your herbs and the jalapeño into a blender with the lime juice and a good splash of rice vinegar. Blend until everything turns into a bright green sauce.

While that’s blending, generously salt your cucumbers.

Pour the dressing over the cucumbers and toss everything together. Because I’m cilantro obsessed, I obviously garnish with even more cilantro. If cilantro tastes like soap to you, I am deeply sorry for your loss and you should probably leave it out of this recipe entirely.

Eat immediately while it’s extra cold and crunchy, or store it in the fridge and let everything marinate.

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Being funny is risky now. Having a point of view can get you in trouble. Nuance is impossible.

We’ve overcorrected the humanity out of everything.

So let’s start here: what actually makes someone give a shit?

Tip 1: People can tell when you mean it.

Your audience may not know why something works. They just know when it does. They can tell when a feeling is real and when it’s being performed. People know when something is true, and truth is rarely perfect.

As humans we’re naturally messy and contradictory and sentimental and sometimes embarrassing. We love things we can’t explain. We change our minds constantly. Our best memories are beautiful because they’re flawed.

That’s where marketing gets interesting to me.

Marketing is figuring out how to make people care. Creative direction is figuring out what you want them to feel, and then building a world that makes them feel it without having to explain it.

I think some of the best marketing starts with creative direction. Before you figure out how to sell an idea, you have to know how to translate it. You have to understand the feeling well enough to build a world around it.

And if you can’t, the answer isn’t to market it harder. Change the concept, sharpen the idea, or find someone who can see the world you’re trying to build.

Tip 2: Watch old movies.

Study how they make you care about people you’ve never met, places you’ve never been, and lives you’ve never lived. They can make you fall in love with someone deeply flawed, even unlikeable, because they make you understand them. You don’t have to share someone’s exact heartbreak or joy to recognize something human in it. Good storytelling makes you feel something before you’ve had time to explain why. It makes you want to crawl inside a life that isn’t yours.

Tip 3: Figure out what you’re good at and what it costs you.

The older I get, the more I think curiosity is the whole job.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to understand myself. Why I notice so much, feel so much, care so much about what people think and why they think it. Getting older hasn’t necessarily made me less of those things. It’s just helped me understand what they’re for.

I’m good at noticing how people feel, but I’ve had to get better at accepting that I can’t control how they feel about me.

And weirdly, my job has helped me understand that. The more I’ve grown into myself in the past few years, the more I’ve realized that some of the things that make being me exhausting are also the exact things that make me good at what I do.

There’s something really comforting about realizing that the parts of you that once felt difficult can become useful when you give them somewhere to go. This work has given mine somewhere to go. And that has given me more than a career.

As someone with severe ADHD and dyslexia, joining a platform centered almost entirely around writing is certainly a choice.

Fortunately, I’m wildly optimistic, so I feel great about it.

More than anything, though, I’ve always loved long-form storytelling. I miss when the internet felt a little more human. I’ve been craving a quieter corner of it, a place where I can be more reflective, a little more vulnerable, and let ideas exist in their full context. Somewhere I can share ideas without worrying about a camera or how I look.

This weekend I sat down and wrote a handful of different posts, some I’ll publish soon, some I might never share.

But anyway, this felt like the right place to begin: a good old-fashioned introduction.

Hi, I’m Paige Paul. (Formerly Paige Lorenze)

I’m 28.

I recently married my best friend, Tommy.

I grew up between Connecticut and Vermont with parents who believed time outside could solve almost anything. They taught me hard work, grit, and determination. More importantly, they let me become exactly who I was.

I was (and, to the occasional annoyance of everyone around me, still am) deeply competitive, slightly intense, and perpetually on some kind of side quest.

I think the word influencer needs a better publicist.

The version of me most people know exists in sixty-second increments.

I’m both opinionated and open minded, which makes life interesting.

I try to be great at everything I do.
This has proven difficult.

I have an unreasonable amount of faith that things will work out. I honestly think it’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to build the career I have.

I don’t do well with complacency.

I’ve always believed most things are learnable.

Thanks to Tommy’s profession, I fell completely in love with tennis.

I’ve since made it a significant part of my personality.

My brain is very good at seeing patterns, remembering unnecessary details, and connecting dots other people usually miss. I think that’s part of why this work has suited me. Or maybe I’m just delusional enough to keep introducing myself to strangers on the internet.

I love building brands because they’re really just worlds people choose to believe in, belong to, and find joy in. I think it is what I was always meant to do.

I love girlhood. Sharing a love for the same things with other women has always felt comforting to me.

I’m deeply sentimental. Home has always mattered more to me than almost anything. Family comes first. My close friends are my family too.

For a while, I was better at editing photos than accepting what I actually looked like.

I think nostalgia might be the strongest emotion there is.

I’ve kept every note anyone has ever written to me because I never want to forget what it felt like to be loved in those moments.

Tequila has never once looked at me and thought “let’s keep this low key”.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Some of them are archived online forever.

A small group of strangers online has created an entire fictional character out of me. Credit where it's due: they're committed.

I move the goalposts constantly. As soon as I build one thing, I’m already dreaming about the next. It’s probably one of my greatest strengths. It’s definitely one of my biggest flaws.

I’ve spoken before I’ve thought. More than once. I’ve gotten defensive when I should’ve stayed curious.

I’ve been confidently wrong in public.

But I’m grateful for all of it. Every side of me, every mistake, every version. They all shaped me, but none of them changed the part of me that couldn’t stop making things or trying to become a little better.

I ended up building a life where I get to do both every day.

I feel so blessed.

So, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Love,

Paige Paul