This is gr8tness.
What? Not what you expected?
Yeah, he hears that a lot.
Take a closer look.
Still nothing?
Here… try these.
Starting to see it?
Yeah? Good.
Stay with it…
There you go.
I know… for years I missed it too.
But before I explain this guy, I should probably tell you a little about myself.
Oh and… hang onto those glasses. You’re going to need them again later.
I’m Tim.
I’ve been playing tennis since I was ten. Coaching it since I was twenty-something.
In other words, I’ve spent the majority of my life chasing a ball.
And when I view my life through that filter… well, I’d like to think I’m smarter than a dog… but, when push comes to shove, I probably can’t prove it.
Especially now that I know dogs can play jenga!
Over the years I’ve racked up more than forty-thousand hours of coaching experience… in eighteen countries, and counting.
I’ve learned a few things along the way:
Don’t drink the water… no matter how many people tell you it’s ok.
It sucks to be a chicken… pretty much everywhere.
And life is pretty much everything we never thought it would be.
But that isn’t what you were wondering about… is it? You’re wondering if you should trust me.
Look at it this way, I’m not peddling anything, so your wallet is safe. That gives some time to decide.
I invited you here to talk about gr8tness.
No. Not mine.
This story starts around ten years ago when I watched two ham and eggers, who must have been in their late thirties, play one of the gr8test tennis matches I’ve ever seen.
You’re wondering how two mediocre players… at best, could conjure up one of the great matches?
We conflate gr8 with technique.
Did you know that the golf swing is the most studied human motion?
It’s true! There have been something like fifty thousand books written about the golf swing.
Yet the average handicap remains unchanged.
Great players may have great technique, but incredibly few of those with great technique are great players.
No… it wasn’t the way these guys were hitting the ball that caught my attention.
It was the way were playing.
They ran like crazy. Laughed. Applauded the others good play. Called the lines generously. They did everything they could to bring the best out of each other.
I spend most of my time in a culture where people do their best to make the other guy play his worst.
Their pleasure was a pleasure to watch.
They never once complained about what they did wrong… or were unable to do. Congratulations and encouraging words were all I heard.
Outside of watching Rick and Dick Hoyt race, it was one of the more genuine and inspirational things I’ve seen.
One would get a couple games up. The other came roaring back. Neither would bend. Give up? Fucking forget it.
And when it finally ended… they both acted like they had won.
This also never happens in my culture.
What kind of strange sorcery was afoot here?
I thought a lot about that match in the following days.
An odd possibility came to mind. Perhaps I didn’t watch two guys playing against each other. Maybe I watched two guys play as a team against the rat race, or monotony, or conformity, or whatever it is that swipes the magic from the average daily life.
The rackets, balls, court, and sneakers… accessories.
And with that thought came an entirely new range of thinking about play and sport.
It led me to a thought experiment: what would happen if I could wave a magic wand and give my students the perfect strokes they wanted.
I compared that with what I imagined would happen if I could steal the mojo from those two players…
… and infuse my students play with it.
It was obvious which would benefit them the most.
It quite suddenly struck me that what I saw that day… what those two players experienced, is what we’re all after. It’s what everyone who has ever asked me to help them with their game was actually asking for. Unfortunately neither of us knew it.
To be honest, I didn’t even know you could ask for it.
The conclusion was inescapable, I was teaching the wrong stuff.
It was like finding out… after many years, that the Go-Go’s aren’t singing “I love Cecile”, they’re singing “our lips are sealed”, and you remember all the times you sang “I love Cecile” at the top of your voice… and now know why people were looking at you so strangely.
Not that I know anything about that.
At the time I coached the way most continue to coach. Cause and effect. Faults and their corresponding fixes.
And I was very good at it. I even coached my former college tennis coach.
Like a diagnostic machine in sneakers, I was able to spot even the smallest technical irregularity at fifty paces. Swing planes, racket head speed, contact zones, rpms, optimum racket face angles, leverage, drills… I was fluent in every concept.
And here’s something interesting: the more precisely I could tell them how far their elbow had drifted from the “slot”, or specifically how much more to bend their knees, the more they were willing to pay.
Has a lesson in sport ever been given that didn’t include the command to bend your knees?
My students were filled with information. But it turns out that information is like a participation award.
They could all talk the game, but not one them was thrilled to lace up their sneakers and play it.
There was no playfulness to their play. To the contrary, play was stressful for them. Most approached it like a teeth cleaning, a moderately unpleasant thing they had to endure… I guess because they heard it was good for them.
And I could have carried on coaching that way. My schedule was full. My students kept returning. My bank account thriving.
Except… well… that match.
I’m curious, how many people do you know who are currently researching the human animal they teach. How many are experimenting with their methods? And tracking their results?
The overwhelming number of coaches I’ve met worldwide simply teach the way they were taught.
The long term acceptance of an idea doesn’t make it right. Furthermore, there is no right way to do a wrong thing.
“Knowledge or peace?” Hesse asked in Siddhartha. They are divergent paths.
I had to know… or get as close as I could to knowing how I could be a part of bringing that to peoples lives. Shit… how I could bring it to my life.
It was a question that led me into a crazy deep and twisty rabbit hole. And every book, study, dataset, article, podcast, and conversation dragged me deeper. Into history, evolutionary psychology, biology, biomechanics, game theory, neuroscience, philosophy… even quantum mechanics.
While I was down there I tried hard to subvert my thinking to one principle given me by Andrew Siemion, the director of SETI (The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), “assume nothing. The more you think you know, the less you will discover.”
But looking for truth is more than the search for data… or facts. It’s ultimately an excavation of self. And once you start, you have to keep going… no matter where it leads.
I found some dark places down that hole. There were times that I was lost for weeks. So many of my guiding principles were exposed as flawed.
And the deeper I went, the more obvious it became: we are all the blind men who stumbled across an elephant. Unaware that our small fiefdom is a part of the same big thing.
After nearly a decade of listening and studying. Thousands of hours of thinking… at least twice as many beers, and years of trial and error… I have something to say:
Being great is everything we never thought it was.
Our intuitions have failed us… again! Frankly, we should be used to that by now.
Remember when we thought the sun went around the earth?
Or when we thought the earth was flat?
How about the germ theory of disease?
And then there’s quantum mechanics…
The entire field of which is little but an intuition assault machine.
Our discourse is failing us too.
As anyone who has been in a long term relationship knows… our thinking has this way of becoming rutted. The more times we have the same thoughts… the more times we have the same conversations, and use the same words, and the deeper the ruts become. Eventually it becomes impossible to stay out of them and those thoughts and words and conversations lose their value.
The thousandth iteration of the “who put the empty milk container back into the fridge” conversation ends the same way as the previous nine hundred and ninety-nine.
In exactly this way the conversations we have around learning and performance and excellence and gr8ness have become more of a hindrance than a help.
We just haven’t recognized it… yet.
For example, when I say better in the context of sport, you think more wins. When I say learning, you think repetition and memorization.
And greatness… well, six minutes ago I put you face to face with it and… you didn’t recognize it. Yes, it could have been the poorly drawn stick figure but… you get the point.
They are all deeply rutted roads that lead to the same place every time. We simply cannot have a productive conversation with those terms anymore.
So a part of what I’ve spent the last several years working on is experimenting with new terms and metaphors… a new set of filters, that we can use to see those ideas anew.
This is the first in a series of posts that I will publish over the next few months. The first few will introduce the concepts that will form our new set of filters. Later we’ll apply them. If I do my job well – fingers crossed – it’ll all make sense in the end.
Your intuitions are going to be challenged along the way. But that’s the way it is with exploration. You cannot move forward without challenging what has held you back.
When I moved my family to Mexico everyone around us was certain that we’d be dead in days… our organs sold on craigslist. My daughter shipped to the sultan of Brunei.
Their fear was contagious.
We approached everyone with caution. Asking first to see both their hands before we even said hi. Slowly we saw that we were in an uncommonly open and generous place.
So I ask that in the spirit of discovery, you also adopt SETI’s approach. Please check your existing intuitions at the door. Or… better yet, store them somewhere safe.
My sock drawer was always my go to. I thought I was so clever… until years later my mom gleefully revealed to me the array of horribly embarrassing things she found in there.
So keep that in mind. No… not the embarrassing things my mom found. The idea that your safe place may not be so safe.
One more thing… in the credit where it is due department, I want to thank my friends Yoram Zarai, Leigh Oliver, and Alex Brooker.
Over the years I sent them several drafts… and I use that term loosely. They were more accurately convoluted messes that I was trying to pass off as drafts.
The fact that they read every bit of the crap I sent them deserves it’s own award. The “reading through incredibly bad shit to help a friend award”… or something like that.
Yoram kept the higher purpose of sport plotted on my radar.
Leigh kept me honest. And fixed my punctuation. (A full time job in itself)
And… whenever I became convinced that the entire lot of us coaches was a bunch of self-interested snake oil salesman, which was often, Alex inspired me with his earnestness.
I don’t think he is even thirty yet.
I am now fifty-five years old. Looking back on myself in my early thirties… despite my playing pedigree, and all the people I’d coached, I would not recommend my thirty year old self as a coach to anyone over twelve… maybe thirteen.
But I would recommend Alex to any level. He is already that good.
Alrighty then… with all that said, I’m ready if you are.
Yeah?
Let’s get this party started.