The Inner Game: Work, Life, Family, and AI
How a book about Tennis is helping me be a better person, professional, and parent.
Earlier this year, I read The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey. It was recommended by a childhood friend who I happened to run into in unusual circumstances, so I thought it would be worth following the green light. So glad I did - it's been a source of ideas and questions and thoughts since I finished it! Some on life, some on work, some on parenthood, and some even on the future of AI…
Gallwey's argument is that you have two selves in your mind at all times. He uses Tennis as the vehicle to explain, but here's my tldr: Self 1 is the loud one. The judge, the manager, the corrector. The voice that says elbow up, watch the toss, you missed that one because you weren't paying attention. Self 2 is the quiet one. The body. The pupil. Self 2 already encompases the potential and the capacity - it already knows how to do what you're trying to do. A baby is pure Self 2 as it learns to toddle and talk.
Self 2 thrives when Self 1 gets out of its way. Self 1 has to trust Self 2. Self 2 has to feel empowered to do its work. The whole human animal learns this way. Nobody has ever learned to walk or talk by being carefully coached through it. The inherent pupil just needs to visualize and a bit or room to figure it out.
There's a passage in the book about surfers I keep thinking about. Gallwey gets into an aregument wiht his dad about the nature of competition. In the moment, he thinks competition - mano a mano - is bad. And he points to surfers and more pure. But then he realizes, if the goal of the surfer was to get to shore on a wave, they'd basically ride any wave that comes along. But they don't. They wait, they watch, they pick the wave that's going to draw out the thing they've trained for. In that moment, Gallwey had the realiztion that this is what competition actually is. You want the wave. You want the conditions that pull your full capacity forward. Hoping your opponent double-faults is the opposite of competing. It's hoping the day collapses so you don't have to bring anything out of yourself.
Which, when you sit with it, is a much bigger idea than tennis. We all have waves we're waiting for.
Around the same time, I was listening to a podcast and Dan Quinn, head coach of the Washington Commanders, said something that stuck me. He doesn't call his players 'professional athletes'. He calls them professional competitors. Which, in Gallwey's sense, turns out to be the whole game. In some sense, we all are professional competitors, whether we call ourselves that or not. The question is just what match we think we're playing, and which wave we're waiting for.
Fast forward, to a couple of months ago, I was watching my five-year-old daughter try to learn how to jump rope for the first time.
As she kept tripping on the rope, I had a strong instinct to tell her to 'wait for the rope to come in front of you before you skip' or 'Hands lower.' or 'Just step over it first' I kept coaching. She kept getting more frustrated. The more I narrated, the worse the jumps got. Eventually she looked up at me, screamed, and stormed off…
It sucks being Self 1…
No trust. No learning. I knew this intellectually from the book, but watching it happen with me as the villian was humbling.
It got me thinking about how Self 1 and Self 2 don't always live in the same cranium… There's implicatons for family, for teams, as well as for self-building. They all seem to want the same thing. Trust, empowerment, and achievement. I've been wondering if Gallwey's idea hold for cognitive and social tasks the way it holds for physical ones? How do we build trust on teams so that real learning can happen, and eventually excellence? How does a family become a place where Self 2 thrives as kids get older?
And given that I'm dealing with AI most every day - I started to wonder about prompting, and agentic architecture. What are the implications of Self 1 and Self 2 here. Does AI have a Self 2? Am I Self 1? Or is the AI just a monolithic Self 1…
We're building agentic systems that have to learn and, at their best, have to excel. Can an orchestrator agent be a healthy Self 1, a good manager that doesn't drown out the thing it's supposed to draw out? Or, the more uncomfortable version of the question, are we Self 1 to the AI's Self 2? Is it the other way around? I don't have a clean answer. I don't think the question is a gimmick.
Back to humans for a bit… One thing I've learned in life is to control what I can control. When I'm at my best, mentally and professionally, I have focus and creativity. It's because I've managed to keep the loud Self 1 out of the quiet Self 2's way. However, I've noticed that on mornings when I pick up my phone as soon as I get out of bed, it puts me straight into Self 1. To-do list. Action items. Project status. By the time the coffee is done, I'm already deep into work. My Self 2 is alrwady being bossed around. I've lost agency. The day's first decent attention already spent in a reactive state…
Conversely, when I head to the kitchen in the morning without a phone, and start to make coffee, things are different… At first, it feels uncomfortablly quiet. Like Ricky Bobby "I dont know what to do with my hands." I feel like I should be checking in for… something. Responses, updates, whatever. After a few minutes the discomfort got unbearable and I needed to try something new. So I created this little ritual. I walked around the kitchen and named shapes and colors of things I noticed. 'That plate is a circle.' and 'The fridge is a shiny rectangle' It's ridiculous. I'm a grown man. What is this?
But after a minute something clicked. I was present. And attentive. My Self 1 shut up and my Self 2 woke up. And then real thoughts start showing up. Ideas. Questions. Fun plans. They actualy started arriving too fast, and I lost most of them. So I would grab paper and a pencil and jot things down. A sentence, a doodle, an idea for work, an idea for the yard.
These days, I've build Saalo to carve out 30 or 45 minutes every morning sans phone. It works for the morning, or for dinner time. It helps me set goals and track when I put my phone away. When I let Self 2 step up and lead the way. I use Saalo for this. It's been really helpful.
Whether in tennis, or teaching, or work, or in your mornings, Self 2 already knows. The job is to be quiet enough to listen and pay attention.
My sense is that somewhere in there, you can sense when the wave are you're waiting for is approaching.