Bootstrapping a Unicorn: Day 11

The Method Is the Insight

A phrase surfaced overnight. Ask, Don't Tell. I wrote it into one of my early coaching philosophies and then forgot about it. It came back while I was listening to Paul Graham talk about analog versions. Graham said something about founders starting with unscaled analog versions of their work. I had heard him say it before. This time it connected to something else.

Every time I have tried to build something by telling people what it should be, the work collapsed. Every time I asked better questions instead, the thing grew. Ask, Don't Tell is not a philosophy. It is how I find structure before anyone else sees it.

Two nights ago I helped a friend who owns an academy in Florida. He brought in someone working with him on scale. The conversation turned to bottlenecks. I said what I always say. You have to find the first bottleneck because fixing the ones downstream will not change throughput. Then I admitted I had no idea where their bottleneck was. So I started asking questions.

If the owner disappeared for a week, what breaks first. Who else can do pieces of what he does. Where does attention pile up. What gets repeated. What gets avoided. What creates friction every time it appears.

They decided they needed to focus on staff training. That was not my diagnosis. Their system revealed its shape when given the right questions. I was not consulting. I was running my own method. Ask, Don't Tell forces the system to explain itself. You do not impose answers. You ask questions that make hidden parts visible.

This is how I work. Nothing comes from strategic plans. Everything comes from opportunistic collisions. A moment where reality knocks into my attention and asks to be seen more clearly. People imagine innovation as a straight line from problem to solution. It is more like excavation. You chip away without knowing where the outline is. Sometimes you uncover a structure and realize it was waiting the entire time.

Drilling down to the real problem feels strange. Like discovering the Catholic Church is in real estate. You think you are studying one system and discover it sits on top of a bigger machine. Coaches, parents, and administrators keep trying to frame this as tennis work. It is attention work. Tennis is just where the patterns showed up clearly enough to measure.

Graham's point about analog versions connected to something I already knew but had not quite linked. I have been thinking about building Court 4 inside an RV. The functions. The infrastructure. The technology. But the analog version is already running. It has been running for years. Standing behind fences counting ball bounces. Watching breath patterns. Having conversations that shift entire frameworks. Asking questions that change how parents see their kids' development.

I am building a company to scale what I can already do better than most.

I have been running Court 4 and Founders' Room in analog form for years. The technology is only the artifact. The inquiry is the system.

Day 11 arrived compact. Most study days produce long essays that circle an idea from multiple directions. Today felt tight. One phrase. One method. One recognition. It guided the Florida conversation. It framed why insights emerge from chance collisions. It answered whether I should worry about scale. Standing behind a fence counting bounces reveals more than any scaled system can right now. The analog version is enough because the analog version is where the questions live.

Ask, Don't Tell is not advice. It is not technique. It is the lens through which this work exists. It is how I find constraints without pretending to know them. It is how I build things without forcing solutions that have not earned their right to exist.

Some study days produce something tangible. Other days recognize something running beneath the surface long enough to feel invisible. Today was the second kind. The line that explains thirty five years of work.

Ask, Don't Tell. Everything else follows.