In 2021, I wrote about a non-tennis book for my final book review of the year. ‘Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers‘ is about cybersecurity (my day job) written for a non-technical audience. I continue to recommend that book to everybody in my orbit as it conveys important information about cyber risks and influence operations that are extremely relevant in our current societal discourse.
I have decided to close out this year with another non-tennis book recommendation. ‘Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life‘ is a book I wish had been available earlier in my career. It encapsulates the philosophy that shapes the interactions with my mentees at work. I recently realized that this book has relevance beyond technical career development, which is what finally prompted me to share it here.
Designing Your Life was effectively born out of the frustration that the authors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, were experiencing with career counseling services at Stanford University. The process centered around helping students create a development plan around something they had already decided they wanted to do. This book focuses on the arguably more important and elusive part: figuring out what you want to do in the first place.
The authors realized that Stanford was an epicenter of what they have termed “design thinking.” Their idea is that the innovative products and services surrounding us are intentionally designed to solve a problem or achieve an objective. Their breakthrough concept was to describe how the engineering processes taught at Stanford could be applied to design and build a career and also more meaningful lives.
The ideas presented in Designing Your Life have broad applicability beyond career development. I have recently decided that I want to push those boundaries by considering the applicability of individuals to engineering the tennis life that would be most fulfilling for them. In fact, that will be the recurring monthly theme for the “Unplugged” posts on the first weekend of each month throughout 2024.
In the “practice what I preach” department, the launch of this blog four years ago was actually prompted by the ideas presented in ‘Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.’ Specifically, I was wondering if the deeply technical (and often highly confidential) writing done at my day job would translate to more recreational topics.
Fiend at Court was started as an experiment to determine whether or not I would enjoy writing about tennis on a sustained daily basis. The result of that initiative… is an exercise left to the reader.
I highly recommend ‘Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life‘ (<- sponsored link) as a book that everyone should read.
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Thank you for continuing to write this blog. I look forward to reading it every day. I am surprised, amused, and impressed by your insights about our game. I recommend it frequently to coaches and players as a great read.