Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was ranked No. 3 in the world at 18. Years later, he’d slumped to No. 24, and then slid further to No. 30.
He thought his game was over. He was just 23.
He’d turned professional at 16 and rocketed to the top, winning six ATP titles in barely two years and cracking the top ten. He blazed his way forward, until something changed.
He started losing.
Yes, there was a wrist injury, but tennis is brutal on every body, and players cling to their rankings through far worse.
With Agassi, no matter what he tried, he couldn't seem to get back to his position. He tried different coaches, and that didn't work. In a desperate move, he and his manager decided to change their strategy. They decided to take another active tennis player, Brad Gilbert, for dinner.
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During dinner, Agassi brought up the issues he was facing and asked Gilbert if he could help. Gilbert replied: “Dude, I can help you tomorrow. Let's go at 9:00.” And the two of them began working together the very next morning. However, before they started Gilbert had two pieces of advice. To this day, Agassi says it's what turned his game around.
It's the advice we could do with as well. So what did Gilbert say?
Suggestion 1: Stop trying to win every point.
Before Gilbert took over, Agassi was going for a winner on every shot. He wasn't content just to win; he had to get everything right. He sincerely believed that in order to be a great champion, he had to see off the competition by winning every point possible.
Gilbert decided this madness had to stop.
Gilbert told him he didn’t have to win every point, or hit a winner on every shot. This strategy had Agassi taking on too much risk and piling up unforced errors.
It's easy to see how we make the same unforced errors in our lives
Let's say you want to learn how to paint. You wake up one day, and there's the whole universe of watercolours in front of you. What do you do? You do what we all do: you make a bunch of unforced errors. The main error, is of course, trying to do everything. The course you've just bought covers a dozen different concepts, so you try them all.
You invariably end up with mud.
Then you decide you're not good at watercolours, you're not talented, blah, blah, blah. The reality is that you can't win every point. You can goof up on almost all the aspects of watercolours, and just work on getting the warm and cool tones right. Suddenly your work looks so much better than before. Instead of a downward spiral, you've turned your painting ability around.
When creating a strategy, we seem to make the same mistake.
When I got to New Zealand, I met with a coach. He asked me to write down my goals. I was elated. I wrote down at least two dozen things I would like to achieve. I know it sounds absurd now, but I thought it was the right way to go. He got me to choose just three goals. He then asked me to expand what I would need to do to achieve those three. Even three goals would fill a year. Instead, I’d been trying to win every point. Gilbert’s advice applied to me, too.
But the second piece of advice changed how Agassi looked at the man across the net.
Suggestion 2: You only have to be better than one guy.
“You don’t have to be the best in the world,” Gilbert told him. “You just have to be better than one guy.”
Gilbert was talking about an opponent, but the concept goes further than tennis. When you’re starting out, it’s normal to believe you need to be brilliant. In fact, you don't. You just need to be a little ahead of the one person you’re helping.
Take Lynda Weinman, who started lynda.com and later sold it for about $1.5 billion. She’s said she only knew a little more than her clients when she started teaching HTML. And that was all that was needed. She didn’t have to be the best in the world at HTML. She just had to be better than one guy.
We've been in business since 2000, and early on, I realised that it's impossible to know what the competition is thinking. What you can see is the person in front of you. To us that person was the client.
The only thing we needed to do was to be ahead of the client.
When we started the Protégé Consulting, there were no notes, no audio, no video.
Everything was created as we went along, and yes, things needed fixing along the way. The same applied to the cartooning course, the Article Writing Course, and now even the advanced storytelling course. When we do a watercolour course on site in Italy next year, the same strategy will roll out. We don't have to beat the competition. In fact, we aren't even aware of who they are or what they might be doing.
We only need to focus on being ahead of the client.
In business, we are inundated with dozens of ideas.
This information is wonderful to read, to keep on top of, but often it does quite the opposite. Instead, what we need is one or two benchmarks that we can measure consistently.
Agassi took these two small pieces of advice and turned his game around. I think we can do the same
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