Throughout 2024, I am dedicating 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’s focus is a topic that is near and dear to me: hacking the system.
The concept of hacking sometimes gets a bad rap. In the broadest sense, hacking is a creative and unconventional modification or improvement of systems and processes to achieve some desired result. While it is frequently associated with computer exploitation, a fundamental aspect of my day job, the art of hacking is actually finding innovative solutions to everyday problems. The concept of hacking emphasizes ingenuity and resourcefulness, encouraging individuals to think outside the box and push the boundaries of what is possible.
The chapter from the book that inspired this weekend’s posts provides specific tips and tactics for job seekers. After all, Designing Your Life is, first and foremost, a career counseling book, and obtaining employment is a fundamental part of that. I highly recommend that material to anyone who is looking for a job in any industry, including tennis. However, this chapter is also fundamentally about how to best understand a system in order to most efficiently work with and within it to achieve personal objectives.
I have a low tolerance for people who can’t be bothered to learn how the systems they interact with work yet harbor no hesitation to criticize it. A really good tennis-specific example is the people who complain about tournament scheduling and make special requests for specific playing times without any inkling of awareness that court capacity is constrained. I could write for a month about the delusional and self-entitled perspectives that many players in the tennis ecosystem have about the USTA as well as the service providers in their area.
I am astonished at the number of people on both the competitive and administrative side of organized tennis who lack a deep understanding of the rules, regulations, and operating procedures that should govern their interaction with and oversight of the system. It is particularly scary when people who lack the insight to understand the full ramifications work in a decision-making capacity.
Designing Your Life is basically a book about teaching people how to apply engineering thinking to achieve individual objectives. The core concepts are also applicable at the organizational level. This chapter is about the need to understand systems to maximize one’s success within them. Similarly, the organizations that create and sustain systems must have deep insight to correctly administer and modify them to return the desired impact.
Many of the previous posts in this “Design Your Tennis Life” series have revolved around understanding the problem you are trying to solve. So far, we have mostly covered that topic from the perspective of on-court performance. This weekend, we are extending the concept to tennis organizational systems. Tomorrow, we will approach this topic from an individual perspective: understanding systems to get better individual results. On Sunday we will shift to an organizational focus, specifically how critical it is to fully understand the system as well as the problem that needs to be solved before making permanent changes.
In other words, this weekend is all about hacking the system.
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.
