The Power of AND, 16 Years Later

I recorded this video about 16 years ago. Watching it now, I hear plenty of things I'd say differently. I'm not nearly as interested today in glorifying the sacrifice of sleep, and when I talk about education now, I'm thinking much more broadly than classrooms, degrees, or the traditional path through college. But the central idea has survived almost untouched: AND is a much more powerful word than OR.

We tend to frame development as a series of choices. Are you serious about tennis or serious about school? Are you pursuing performance or building a life outside the sport? Are you competing to win today or developing the person and capabilities that will matter years from now? High performance has never worked that way for me.

The challenge is figuring out how to hold important things together rather than prematurely choosing between them. The athlete needs to pursue excellence and learn how to learn. They need ambition and perspective. They need commitment to the immediate competitive problem and an understanding that even an extraordinary athletic career occupies only a small portion of a life.

Sixteen years ago, I expressed much of that through the language of education, because that was the infrastructure most readily available for preparing someone for what came next. Today, I'd use a larger word: development. Education may include school, but it also includes curiosity, financial literacy, communication, judgment, adaptability, technology, relationships, and the ability to walk into an unfamiliar problem and begin figuring it out. That distinction matters even more now.

Much of the work I'm doing today is built around the same underlying principle. We don't have to choose between developing the tennis player or developing the person, between giving athletes structure or giving them ownership, between pursuing results or creating an environment in which experience compounds into something they can carry forward. The interesting work lives in the AND.

I didn't have all of the language for it 16 years ago. I certainly didn't have the systems I've built since then. But apparently I was already circling the same question:

How do we pursue what matters immediately without sacrificing what will matter eventually?

I'm still working on that one.