Nick Kyrgios, Rafael Nadal and Kylie Minogue took very different paths to success. Their lives raise a deeper question about ambition, sacrifice and what it really means to fulfil our potential.

Once again Nick Kyrgios is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, testing positive for a cocaine metabolite.

After the news was announced by the Orwellian-sounding International Tennis Integrity Agency, there was a short apology from the man himself.

“I’ve always said I didn’t choose tennis – tennis chose me. But letting go of something that has been my whole life is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to face,” he said.

Many will take this to be nonsensical and avoidant: “Wake up to yourself, Kyrgios. Tennis didn’t choose you. It was you who chose to squander your God-given talent. Stop making excuses.”

Now I’m not suggesting that Kyrgios is a great philosopher, but his recent reflection points to something countercultural and profound.

Kyrgios is describing the way a life can coalesce around us before we have rationally thought about it. We often do not choose our careers, we are thrown into them.

Growing up in Australian tennis academies where Nadal was idolised for his extraordinary work ethic, Kyrgios reacted against everything the Spanish tennis star represented.

He wanted to demonstrate that you could “just have fun and be chilled” and still beat the top players.

Remarkably, Kyrgios proved that this could be done, but he has never won a grand slam and has never quite reached his potential – unlike Nadal.

The contrast between the two men could hardly be greater.

The recent Netflix documentary Rafa is billed as revealing the man behind the tennis player, someone who “opens up like never before”.

Yet after watching four hours spanning Nadal’s career, I felt that I had watched a representation of the Will in the Schopenhauerian sense more than I had come to understand a flesh-and-blood human being.

No matter how many times they showed Nadal cuddling up to his then two-year-old son, you got the impression that he never stopped thinking tennis and what he needed to do to win the next........

© The New Daily