The Tennis Mindset: Express, Forget, and Refocus

Of all the sports I’ve ever played, tennis demands the most mental toughness.

In tennis, maintaining a positive and aggressive state of mind is crucial throughout the match. If you’re not positive enough, your muscles tighten, leading to overthinking and missed shots. Conversely, if you’re not aggressive enough, you won’t take the necessary risks to win points.

The key to staying in this optimal mindset is learning to forget points quickly. Each point in tennis carries emotional weight, whether it’s a win or a loss. However, carrying these emotions from point to point disrupts the flow state essential for a tennis player. Therefore, it's vital to let go of previous points, regardless of whether they were good or bad.

The moments between points in tennis are crucial for resetting your mindset. This brief pause is the only opportunity to unload emotions and regain focus. To move on effectively, a tennis player must express all their emotions—whether positive or critical—between points, ensuring no lingering feelings disrupt their game.

The essential lesson here is to express, forget, and refocus on the point ahead.

This lesson from my time as a boy who grew up playing sports has profoundly impacted my adult life: the necessity to express myself every day, even if it's just in my journal. This need to express is a significant reason I’m committed to writing on this blog weekly.

Expressing myself allows me to calm down and gain the mindset required to truly listen and pay attention to those around me—whether it’s my family or my team at work. This ability to express and unload my thoughts is critical because if I can’t listen, I can’t love. If I can’t listen, I can’t solve problems. If I can’t listen, I can’t support others.

Even a five-minute free-write or singing songs from my karaoke favorites playlist on the way to work helps me to express, forget, and refocus.

I am so grateful for the chance to play and watch tennis because this lesson has been so impactful in my life. To anyone whose interest was piqued by this post, my advice is simple: express yourself every day. Whether it’s writing in a journal, talking to an old friend, or taking a few minutes to draw, do something daily that allows you to embrace the tennis mindset of express, forget, and refocus.

This simple lesson from one of the world’s great sports - to express, forget, and refocus - is the key to truly listening. By listening, we create the space to solve problems and form loving relationships with those around us.

Developing courage in the new year

As it turns out, developing courage in ourselves is not so easy. We have to learn it by practicing it. There’s no YouTube video (that I’ve found at least) that we just have to watch once and suddenly become courageous. Reflection and introspection is the best method I’ve found so far (and that’s not particularly easy, either).

In lieu of a New Year’s resolution like running a marathon or reading 20 books, I’ve opted to commit to a practice which I hope helps me to cultivate courage.

In hopes that it’s helpful, here It is:

First thing in the morning, answer these two questions in notebook, quickly:

• What do I think will be one of the hardest things I have to do today?

• How do I intend to act in that situation?

Last thing at night, answer these two questions in notebook:

• What was actually the hardest thing I had to do today? Why was it hard?

• What should I do differently next time?

I’ve been on the wagon for about 6 days now. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Even considering what’s going to be hard, helps me to have a plan. That makes me feel more confident and courageous in the moment

• Debriefing and learning from the hard stuff yields benefit quickly, sometimes even the next day

• I’m really bad at predicting what the hardest part of my day will be, which is humbling. I’m excited to review the data in my journal after 2-3 months because I suspect it’ll reveal some blind spots I have in my life

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Here’s the background on why courage matters so much to me, and why I’m so interested in trying to cultivate it in myself and the organizations I’m part of:

The first obstacle to being better at anything is laziness. If we don’t get off our behind, we can’t figure out the easy stuff. This is the case for being a better spouse, parent, citizen, athlete, accountant, corporate executive, chef, team leader, musician, change agent, or gardener.

Any domain has fundamentals that are easy to learn, but just take work. We’re lucky that in our lifetimes this is true.

Before things like youtube, google, and the internet more generally I suspect it was much harder to learn the basics of anything - whether it was baking bread, grieving the loss of a loved one, personal finance, or designing a nuclear reactor. But the obstacle of laziness remains, if we don’t get out of bed we don’t get better anything.

Eventually, however, the easy-to-learn-if-you-do-the-work fundamentals are already done, because we, correctly, tend to do those first. At that point, all that’s left is hard. So we have a choice: do the hard stuff, or stop growing.

As I’ve gotten to the age where all that’s left is hard or really hard, I’ve become more and more interested in courage. Courage, as I define it, is the ability to attempt and do the hard stuff, even though it’s hard. For this reason courage, to me, is the king of all virtues: it helps us to do everything else hard, including building our virtues and character.

This is a broadly applicable skill because there are all sorts of hard things out there: technical challenges, situations requiring patience or emotional labor, bouncing forward through adversity, product innovation, leading others through solving complex problems, being vulnerable, managing large projects, having a happy marriage, being a parent…the list goes on.

Courage matters, because it is fundamental for us to even attempt the hard stuff once the low-hanging fruit in our lives is gone. Although it is non-trivial, developing courage in ourselves and our organizations matters a lot and can make a huge difference for ourselves and those we seek to serve.

The Power of Thinking in Flywheels

There are two types of growth, generally speaking - linear growth and exponential growth. And I’m not just talking about for a corporation, but for teams, culture, families, and ourselves as individuals.

The problem with linear growth is diminishing marginal returns - once your market is saturated you have to spend more and more to get less and less. The problem with exponential growth is that it’s hard and also doesn’t last indefinitely. (Sustaining exponential growth is a topic for a different day.)

Jim Collins developed an interesting concept to make exponential growth less hard, which I find brilliant - the flywheel effect. Flywheels are basically a way of thinking about a feedback loop, deliberately. He explains it well in this podcast interview with Shane Parrish on the Knowledge Project. Some of the key takeaways for me were:

• The goal of a leader is to remove friction from the flywheel, because once you get it turning, it builds momentum and starts moving faster and faster.

• Each step of the flywheel has to be inevitable outcome of the previous step. Think: “If Step 1 happens, then Step 2 will naturally occur”

• The key to harnessing flywheels aren’t a silver bullet or Big Bang initiative, it’s a deliberate process of understanding what creates value and building momentum - slowly at first, but then accelerating. To the outside it’s an overnight breakthrough, but to the inside it was a disciplined, iterative process to understand the flywheel, and reducing friction to get it cranking

I was introduced to this concept when I read Good to Great years ago, and was reintroduced to it before the Covid pandemic. Only recently has it started to click.

I’ve found flywheels to be a transformative way of thinking, both at work and in my real life. Here are a few examples of flywheels I’ve experienced and experimented with.

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Most business types will be familiar with strategies of differentiation or cost leadership. Both are powerful, value-creating flywheels:

Flywheels are even helpful at the business-unit level. This is an example of how a Chief Data Officer might think about how to create a data-centric culture within their organization.

When experimenting with flywheel thinking, it turns out Robyn and I have been operating a flywheel of sorts within our marriage, and temperature check has been a big part of that.

This is also a good example of how flywheels need to be specific to the stakeholders involved in them. This flywheel doesn’t work for every marriage. Among just our friends, I’ve seen flywheels that are organized around faith or civic engagement.

Gun violence is an interesting example of flywheel thinking because it helps illustrate how particularly complex domains can have multiple flywheels intertwined within them. These are just two dynamics I observed when working on violence prevention initiatives.

Each flywheel has different stakeholders and explain different categories of violence: at the left it’s more about influencing perpetrators making a “business decision” to shoot, at right it’s more about influencing members of trauma-afflicted communities that tend to have simple arguments end with gunfire, usually unintentionally and without pretense.

How we manage and coach is also a classic example of a feedback loop that operates like a flywheel. It’s simplicity doesn’t make it any less powerful, or easy to do in practice.

We also have flywheels that explain our behavior as individuals. For me, this is how I specifically respond well to improve my physical fitness.

My flywheel really took off when I understood and started measuring my BMI, Body Fat%, Sleep, Blood Pressure etc. I happen to love the products from Withings because they made the flywheel much more transparent to me as it was occurring, which led to rapid and permanent changes in my behavior.

Social movements utilizing nonviolence techniques (i.e., think US Civil Rights Movement, India Independence) also seem to fit the concept, showing the breadth of flywheel thinking’s explanatory power.

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Going through this exercise of identifying flywheels in a number of domains I’m familiar with, I’d offer this practical advice for articulating flywheels in your world:

Think about what is valuable to each involved party. At its core, flywheel thinking is rooted in an understanding of what drives value for everyone. What are the things that if increased or decreased would create win-wins for everyone involved? If the flywheel doesn’t encompass value creation for everyone involved, it’s probably not quite right. Zero-sum flywheels, which create winners and losers between the flywheel’s stakeholders aren’t sustainable because someone will end up trying to sabotage it.

Mind magical thinking. The beauty of the flywheel is that each step in the process is a naturally occurring inevitability of the previous step. Which means as a flywheel detectives we have to be honest about how the world really works; the flywheel has to reflect what the parties involved will actually do in real life and what they’re actually motivated by.

Identify agglomeration. In every flywheel there’s a step where some sort of resource accumulates, and that resource is one where it’s value and impact increases exponentially the more you have of it. That resource could even be things that aren’t technologies or infrastructure (cost leadership example), like data (chief data officer example), knowledge (managing / coaching example), or moral standing (social movement example).

I didn’t use an example with a network effect, but the same idea applies. These agglomerations are all critical resources to the exponential growth unlocked by the flywheel, so if you’re not seeing evidence of that sort of resource agglomeration, the flywheel is probably not quite right.

Identify interactive feedback points. Additionally, there seems to be a step in each flywheel where there is feedback or a learning interaction between the stakeholders participating in the flywheel. Maybe it’s learning about the customer (differentiation strategy example), or maybe it’s response to a measurement (physical fitness example). If there’s not interactive feedback happening, the flywheel is probably not quite right.

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I wanted to share this post because applying flywheel thinking is a huge unlock for value creation. It helps, me at least, to get beyond linear thinking and operate at a higher level of effectiveness and purpose.

I get especially excited by how this thinking can apply across disciplines. Jim Collins, who pioneered the concept, is a business guru. But the concept applies broadly, and far beyond what I even suggested - I can imagine it being used to inform feedback loops influencing decarbonization, community development, or regional talent clustering and entrepreneurship.

But flywheel thinking can also be used for nefarious purposes. Rent-seeking and political corruption feedback loops are good examples of this. Specifically, a flywheel like this quickly comes to mind:

My bet is that the sort of people who know me and read my writing are disproportionally good people. By sharing this learning I’ve had, I suppose it’s me trying to do my part create a feedback loop for a community of practice that uses flywheel thinking to make the world a better place.

Status fights and wasted talent

Companies, and really any organization, can function like a fight for status. This “fight” plays out in organizations the same way whether it’s a corporation, a community group, or a typical school cafeteria.

There’s a limited number of spots at the top of the pecking order, and the people up there are trying to stay there, and those that aren’t are either trying to claw to the top or survive by disengaging and staying out of the fray.

If you’re engaged in a fight for status there are two ways to win, as far as I can tell: knocking other people down or promoting yourself up.

Knocking other people down is what bullies do. They call you names in public, they flex their strength, they form cartels for protection, and they basically do anything to show their dominance. They become stronger when they make others weaker.

This is, of course, easy to relate to if you’ve ever been to middle school or have seen movies like Mean Girls or The Breakfast Club. However, the same sort of dominating behavior that lowers others’ status occurs in work environments.

“Bullies” in the work environment do things like interrupt you in a meeting, talk louder or longer than you, take credit for your work, exclude you from impactful projects, tell stories about your work (inaccurately) when you’re not there, pump up the reputation of people in their clique, or impose low-status “grunt work” on others. All these things are behaviors which lower the status of others. In the work environment, bullies get stronger by making others weaker.

The other way to win a status fight is to promote yourself up and manage your perception in the organization. In the work environment, tactics to promote yourself up include things like: advertising your professional or educational credentials, talking about your accomplishments (over and over), flashing your title, hopping around to seek promotions and avoid messy projects, or name dropping to affiliate yourself with someone who has high status.

Let’s put aside the fact that status fights are crummy to engage in, cause harm, and probably encourage ethically questionable behavior. What really offends me about organizations that function as a status fight is that they waste talent.

In a status-fight organizations people with lower status are treated poorly. And when that happens they don’t contribute their best work - either because they disengage to avoid conflict or because their efforts are actively discouraged or blocked. 

Think of any organization you’ve ever been part of that functions like a status fight. Imagine if everyone in that organization of “lower status” was able to contribute 5% or 10% more to the customer, the community, or the broader culture. That 5 to 10% bump is not unreasonable, I think - it’s easy to contribute more when you’re not suffocating. What a waste, right?

Of course, not all organizations function like a status fight and I’ve been lucky to have been part of a few in my lifetime. I think of those organizations as participating in a “status quest” rather than a “status fight”. In a status-questing organization, status actually creates a virtuous cycle rather than a pernicious one.

A status quest, in the way that I mean it, is an organization that’s in pursuit of a difficult, important, noble purpose. Something that’s aspirational and generous, but also exceptionally difficult. 

In these status-questing organizations the standard for performance (what you accomplish) and conduct (how you act) is set extremely high, because everyone knows it’s impossible to accomplish the important, noble, quest unless everyone is bringing their best work everyday and doing it virtuously. 

And when the bar is set that high, everyone feels the tension of needing to hit the standard, because it’s hard. Whether it’s to achieve the quest or be seen by their peers as making a generous contribution to the organization’s efforts, everyone wants to do their part and needs the help of others. 

And as a result, the opposite dynamic of a status fight occurs. Instead of knocking other people down, people in a status-questing organization have no choice but to coach others up, which ultimately raises everyone’s status. 

If you’re on a noble quest, there’s plenty of “status” to go around and the organization can’t afford to waste the contribution of anybody in the building - whether it’s the person answering the phone or a senior executive. In a status-questing organization, the rational decision is to raise the bar and coach instead of throw other people under the bus.

And what’s nice, is that in an organization with that raise-the-bar-and-coach-others-up dynamic is that the bullies don’t succeed, because their inability to raise and coach is made visible. And then they leave. And so the virtuous cycle intensifies.

So if you’re in an organization that feels more like a high-school cafeteria than an expeditionary force of a noble, virtuous quest, my advice to you is this: raise the bar of performance and conduct for the part of the organization you’re responsible for - even if it’s just yourself. And once you raise the bar, coach yourself and others up to it. 

And when you do that, you’ll start to notice (and attract) the other people in the organization who are also interested in being on a noble quest, rather than a status fight. Find ways to team up with those people, and then keep raising the bar and coaching up to it. Raise and coach, raise and coach, over and over until the entire organization is on a status quest and any “bullies” that remain choose to leave.

Of course, this is one person’s advice. Looking back on it, it’s how I’ve operated (but I honestly didn’t realize this is how I rolled until writing this piece) and it’s served me well. Sure, I haven’t had a fast-track career with a string of promotions every two years or anything, but I have done work that I’m proud of, I’ve conducted myself in a way that I’m proud of, and I have a clear conscience, which has been a worthwhile trade-off for me.

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Note: this perspective on equality / the immorality of wasted talent is well-trodden ground, philosophically speaking. John Stuart Mill (and presumably his contemporaries) wrote about it. Here’s an explainer on Mill’s The Subjection of Women from Farnam Street that I just saw today. It’s a nice foray into Mill’s work on this topic.

High-performing Government

As a father, I’ve relearned how incredibly gifted, skilled, and virtuous human beings can be. There are so many good things that our older son does that we haven’t taught him explicitly. He makes jokes, he voluntarily shares dessert, he hugs his brother and watches over him. He figures out problems and makes inferences. He helps to wash dishes and tells the truth (most of the time).

It’s really quite amazing. And a big turning point for me was a realization that yes, I can expect a lot from him. So I do, even though he’s only two.

He is smart, capable, and motivated. There's a lot that he’ll figure out, I’ve come to realize, if I set high expectations for him and am willing to coach him up.

The interesting thing about high expectations for little kids is that they meet them, much more than we think is possible. They are growth and learning machines. My son regresses a lot when I don’t set high expectations for him.

It’s so easy in our lives to have low expectations. And then what results is thoroughly disappointing.

I feel this way so often about government.

It bothers me so deeply - it offends me down to my core - that we have such low expectations of government. Any of these sound familiar?:

• “It’s so inefficient”

• “They’re incompetent”

• “Every bureaucrat is lazy and dumb”

• “Government never accomplishes anything”

• “Every politician is corrupt”

• “Government is too slow to make this happen”

• “We should cut their budgets, they won’t use it well anyway”

• And it goes on and on

I think we’re getting the government we deserve. If we’re not willing to have high expectations, if we’re not willing to invest, if we’re not willing to make government reform a priority - the government we have is exactly the one we should expect.

And that’s partly - maybe even mostly - on us.

If we had higher expectations, and actually backed those expectations up with actions, we’d probably have a higher-performing Government.

What if what we expected was more like this:

• Our government (state / local / federal) will have a 10-year strategic plan that actually makes sense

• Our government will be filled with talented, competent people - truly the best and brightest

• Our government will administer services more efficiently than the private sector; because it is more important, it should

• Our government will truly represents the population it serves

• Our government will be honest, caring, fast-moving

• Our government will have effective leaders and managers

• Our government will be incredibly good at listening to the voice of the constituent

• Our government will set concrete goals and measure results

When I served in the Detroit City Government, I had the highest expectations I’ve ever been asked to deliver upon. This was because my chain of command (Residents, Mayor, Chief of Police, Assistant Chief, Director, me) had high expectations. And damn it, most of the time we hit them even though it seemed impossible to even try.

We met those expectations, more than we thought was possible.

As a citizen, I see how important those high expectations are. In Detroit we didn’t even have the basics 10-15 years ago. Streetlights, trash pickup with curbside recycling, timely 911 response. And even though Detroit has a long way to go to be considered high-performing Government, the difference the last few years has made is jaw dropping. In my opinion, it’s on a solid trajectory toward high performance.

We’re going to keep getting the government we deserve one way or the other. Let’s deserve a high-performing Government.