ADHD on Crack

# ADHD on Crack

A parent of a client once called me that. He said I was one of the brightest people he had ever met, though coming from a personal injury lawyer I chose not to read too deeply into the compliment, and then he told me I frustrated people by constantly changing. He was not wrong about any of it. I have never tried to correct the changing part.

Continual change is not a personality flaw. It is a cornerstone of anyone who has operated at an elite level long enough to watch others stall out. Whether we are talking about athletes or companies, the moment an organization decides it has arrived is the moment it starts losing ground. The fields of competitive sport are full of players who were dominant on their block, outstanding in their college program, and unbeatable in their region, who ran directly into a ceiling the second they stepped onto a bigger stage. That ceiling was not external. It was built from every habit, every pattern, and every identity they refused to abandon when the level of competition demanded something new from them.

The best athletes I have been around did not walk onto a court hoping to compete. They walked onto a court expecting to separate. Steffi Graf did not accumulate 22 Grand Slam singles titles because she was better than the competition. She accumulated them because of how she thought about every single match she played. If she knew she could typically put an early-round opponent away in 35 minutes, her question walking onto the court was whether she could do it in 27. That is not competitive drive in the conventional sense. That is a compression model, a systematic way of closing the distance between what you are capable of producing and what you are actually producing, and it leaves no room for good enough.

Jack Welch asked something similar inside General Electric. When evaluating every business the company operated in, the question was not whether it was profitable. It was whether the company could honestly reach the top three in the world in that space. If the answer was no, the next question was whether they would have entered that business to begin with. If that answer was also no, then staying in it had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with inertia. Most people are not comfortable applying that standard to themselves. It demands you evaluate your own work by the same criteria you would use to evaluate someone else's, and loyalty to what you have already built gets in the way every time.

When I began coaching, the purpose was clear. I wanted to help young people navigate adolescence. That was the whole picture. Over time, across years of watching players develop and plateau and break through and sometimes collapse entirely, the deeper value revealed itself. It was not in helping people succeed in the moment. It was in helping them understand that greatness is a test of longevity, not a single result. The players who were operating on the cutting edge of development were quietly setting the baseline for what everyone else would eventually call average. The standard moves. It always moves. The question is whether you are pulling it forward or getting dragged along behind it.

What the work became was not about teaching tennis. It was about reinvention as a practical reality, not a concept. Shepherding athletes through the frustration of pulling apart what used to work, through the discomfort of being temporarily worse at something before they become genuinely better at it, is the central thread running through everything I do. Each athlete's journey shares the same general shape but like a desert the terrain is always shifting underneath it. The ones who can tolerate that uncertainty keep moving. The ones who need the ground to be solid stay exactly where they are.

I ran a program where six core members went three years and lost exactly one match combined to someone they had previously beaten. One match. Across six players. Over three years of competitive tennis. That was not a coincidence and it was not a product of superior raw ability. It was a byproduct of refusing to let people operate at a standard that felt comfortable. Once you beat someone, that match is closed. The measurement resets. The question becomes who you cannot beat yet, and what specifically needs to be built to change that answer. When an entire program runs that way, the results compound in a direction most programs never reach because most programs are too busy celebrating what already happened.

As a parent of three daughters, I understand why families resist this. Routine makes life manageable. Consistency gives structure to what can otherwise feel like a process with no floor. But raising high-performing human beings is not a comfortable undertaking, and comfort and that kind of growth are largely in opposition. The process demands adaptation and discomfort and forward movement that rarely shows up on any predictable schedule, and it asks the same things of the adults around the athlete that it asks of the athlete.

The original version of this was written when I was living in Frisco, Texas. I am in Austin now. The location changed. The principle did not. Being present in my daughters' lives still anchors everything else I do, and the belief that forward progress requires constant evolution has only hardened with time and with watching what happens to the people who chose the alternative.

The families and athletes who leaned into this process consistently outperformed their peers. Not because of superior resources or circumstances, but because they were willing to hold themselves to a different standard than the people around them. They were not trying to be competitive in their market. They were trying to become something the people in that market could not keep pace with. The ones who needed the process to be more predictable, who needed the instability of real growth to feel like something safer, stayed where they were. And the ones who accepted the discomfort as the price of the distance they wanted to cover found out that the gap between them and everyone else had a way of taking care of itself.

My real value has never been in having the answers. It is in refusing to let people settle for the ones they already arrived with.