Throughout 2024, I have dedicated the first full weekend of every month to exploring the application of design-oriented thinking to improve our tennis lives. This series is inspired by a practice and philosophy described by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. This weekend marks the final posts in that series as I reflect on the overarching lessons from this journey.
For me, this iconic career development book is one of the best resources ever published about the pursuit of happiness. One key aspect of succeeding in that endeavor is embracing the reality that there is no such thing as perfection. Life is messy, and even when things appear to be going well, it is usually an ephemeral, transitory state. That fundamental truth applies to everything—careers, relationships, and, yes, even tennis.
Designing Your Life provides a framework for disruptive innovation by providing a structured method for pursuing change. It takes courage to push toward improvement and optimization when things appear to be going well. The rhythms of our lives tempt us to settle into comfortable and reliable patterns, especially when they produce acceptable results. Disrupting the status quo requires bravery because it often means stepping away from something familiar in pursuit of something uncertain.
Design-oriented thinking isn’t a program for radical overhaul but instead encourages small and incremental steps to explore new possibilities. It uses prototyping as a method to try out new things in a manageable and low-risk way to gather feedback and learn what works. These small experiments create a foundation for refinements or changes in direction. It’s a journey of a thousand small steps, each building momentum toward something that aligns more closely with your aspirations.
These concepts are an extremely powerful way to guide and inform our individual experiences in tennis. Design-oriented thinking in that context might involve testing new strategies, refining strokes, or experimenting with fitness routines to discover ways to elevate performance. Similarly, the approach can also be focused around maximizing enjoyment of the sport. Just as there is no such thing as perfection, an ideal joyful tennis life will most likely vary significantly from person to person.
The design-oriented mindset also encourages us to consider how we contribute to the larger tennis community. Anyone can actively support the tennis ecosystem by taking small intentional actions that can spark meaningful outcomes. The tennis delivery system is dynamic and ever-evolving rather than frozen in time. We are blessed with opportunities for innovation within the sport to help it grow and thrive.
After I write posts with themes like achieving high-performance competitive tennis, social recreational play, and the importance of tennis activism, people occasionally approach me to say that those aspects aren’t what they are personally looking for from the sport. My response is always the same: “Exactly!” We are all on an individual journey, and that’s precisely the point. Tennis, like life, is not a one-size-fits-all experience. Design-oriented thinking respects and embraces this individuality. It encourages each of us to craft a tennis life that aligns with our personal values, goals, and definition of joy. There is no singular right way to engage with the sport. Instead each of us should do what resonates most deeply with our individual wants and needs.
As this series winds down, I’m reminded that there is no such thing as perfection and no singular path that defines success or fulfillment in tennis or in life. Every journey is as unique as the individual taking it. The beauty of design-oriented thinking lies in its adaptability and focus on exploration and growth rather than a fixed destination. It empowers us to embrace the messiness, try new things, and take small, intentional steps toward crafting the life we want. It’s not about chasing an unattainable ideal but rather about discovering what sparks joy and how to contribute to the world around us meaningfully and impactfully.
Design oriented thinking helps us grow, adapt, and thrive, one intentional step at a time.
Throughout 2024, I am publishing a series of essays imaging how to apply the principles in ‘Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life‘ (<- sponsored link), which is a non-tennis book that I have come to believe that everyone should read.
A chronological summary of all posts on this topic is available on the Designing Your Tennis Life summary page.
