Why I Write So Much (And Why I Do It in Public)

People occasionally ask why I write so much. Not politely. Not always with admiration. Sometimes it's curiosity. Sometimes it's confusion. Sometimes it's a gentle way of asking, "What are you really doing here?"

The short answer is that I'm trying to make sense of things that are usually invisible while they're happening. The longer answer is that writing is the only reliable tool I've ever found for thinking clearly in complex systems. Tennis. Parenting. Development. Organizations. Health. Aging. Identity. Decision-making under uncertainty. None of these behave the way instruction manuals suggest they should, so I write.

But that still doesn't explain why I do it publicly.

Most people are taught to hide the process. Show the finished product. Deliver the conclusion. Polish the lesson. Present confidence. The world rewards certainty and punishes hesitation. We pretend understanding arrives fully formed, when in reality it arrives messy, partial, and revised. I'm not interested in pretending. I'm interested in peeling back the curtain and showing how the sausage is made. That's where the real learning happens.

Writing Is How I Think, Not How I Perform

I didn't start writing to build an audience. I started writing because after decades in high-performance environments, I noticed a recurring problem: people kept optimizing the wrong things because they misunderstood what was actually happening. Parents made decisions based on narratives instead of signals. Coaches chased methods instead of mechanisms. Organizations doubled down on systems that no longer fit the reality they were operating in. Everyone had information. Almost nobody had orientation.

Writing is how I slow the world down enough to see it.

When something doesn't sit right, I write. When a pattern keeps repeating, I write. When a conversation leaves a residue of discomfort or insight, I write. Writing forces me to take vague intuitions and submit them to structure. If an idea can't survive sentences, it probably can't survive reality. This is not journaling. It's not therapy. It's diagnostic work. I'm not trying to sound smart. I'm trying to see clearly.

Writing From Inside the Problem

Most people believe you should write once you've figured things out. I believe the opposite.

By the time something is fully resolved, it's usually no longer useful to anyone else. The value lives in the middle. In the tension. In the uncertainty. In the moment where multiple interpretations are still plausible and the wrong move is easy to make. That's where parents of junior athletes live. That's where founders live. That's where coaches live. That's where anyone navigating a complex system lives, so I write from inside the problem, not after escaping it.

That makes some people uncomfortable. It looks unfinished. It looks exploratory. It looks like thinking out loud, and that's because it is. I'm modeling the process most people are going through privately but pretending they aren't. The goal isn't to be right. The goal is to be honest about what it takes to get right.

What I'm Actually Writing About

On the surface, it may look like I write about tennis. I don't. Tennis is the laboratory. It's the place where feedback is fast, emotions are visible, stakes are high, and failure is unavoidable. It's an unusually honest environment. You can't hide from the scoreboard. You can't outsource responsibility. You can't explain your way out of a missed forehand.

But the real subject is development under pressure. How people learn. How they misread signals. How systems shape behavior. How incentives quietly distort judgment. How adults unintentionally become the primary obstacle to the outcomes they say they want. I write about calibration. About attention. About identity. About decision-making. About what happens when people confuse activity with progress. About the cost of not knowing what you don't know. About how expensive confusion really is. Tennis just happens to be where I've seen these patterns repeat most clearly.

Why I Show the Work

Most industries present conclusions without provenance. You get the rule, not the reasoning. The framework, not the failures that shaped it. The polished model, not the dead ends that made it necessary. That creates a dangerous illusion: that good judgment is transferable without context. It isn't.

Judgment is built through exposure to process. Through seeing how experienced people weigh tradeoffs, revise beliefs, abandon cherished ideas, and sit with uncertainty longer than feels comfortable. Through watching someone realize a ranking decline reveals a technical gap rather than a motivation problem, or recognizing when increased training volume is masking a communication breakdown between coach and player, so I show the work. I leave the scaffolding visible. I let ideas evolve in public. I revise openly. I contradict myself when new information demands it. Not because it's performative, but because it's responsible. If I'm asking parents and coaches to think more clearly, the least I can do is demonstrate what that thinking actually looks like in real time.

Writing as an Invitation, Not an Instruction

These essays are not commands. They are not prescriptions. They are not meant to be adopted wholesale. They're meant to invite better questions.

If you find yourself nodding, that's fine. If you find yourself resisting, that's often more interesting. Resistance usually points to an assumption worth examining. What I'm after isn't agreement or validation, but something closer to shared orientation, the kind where people can see the terrain more clearly before they start running, even if they ultimately choose a different path than I would.

Why I Keep Going

I keep writing because the same mistakes keep repeating, just under new labels. Because families keep spending money to solve the wrong problems. Because systems keep optimizing for what's easy to measure instead of what actually matters. Because too many people think confusion is a personal failure instead of a predictable outcome of poorly designed environments.

And because every now and then, someone writes to say, "This helped me see what I couldn't see before." That's enough. Not because the writing is finished, but because the conversation is ongoing. And because the sausage is always being made, whether we admit it or not.