Community Tennis

The process of making something that people want is the process of learning, through experiment and error, to be the kind of person who can generate needs, wants, and jobs in other people.

Making something that people want is an alternate way of seeing the world, and of responding to it.

But preparation is:

🔥 Your team’s ability to hear, sense, pivot, and move.​

🔥 Your capacity to adapt without panic.​

🔥 Knowing how to respond, not needing to be right.

It’s readiness for surprise, the surprise you want, the surprise you are waiting for.

But important work is project work.

Projects have component tasks associated with them, but they all contribute to something bigger, something that feels unlimited.

Serving the next customer at McDonald’s is a task, but building the brand into a worldwide chain is a project.

Cooking spaghetti is a task, but hospitality is a project.

Connection and comm

A strict 24-hour rule — no analysis immediately after a loss.

Let it pass, then examine. Less emotion, more insight.

I believe that life always gives you a chance. So, there is a chance for everyone, even when the world is closed. If you are engaged, if you are dedicated, if you are professional, sooner or later, you have the chance. But the chance is like a train that passes only once, so you need to be a bit lucky and work well to catch the train.

• Dr Riccardo C

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Vincent Van Gogh

Consider, for a moment, the nature of the tennis ball: its industrial-grade felt engineered to endure kinetic violence, absorb friction and trauma until it frays, and dies an artifact of effort.

Then consider the heart—not the Hallmark variety, but the actual, tireless muscle, that pounds through tiebreaks and third sets, and victory and defeat, and

Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral. But it’s also a tangible skill that’s increasingly essential. Taste is how a business differentiates itself when attention is scarce and choice is abundant. Knowing what to make is just as important as the ability to make it.

Needs arise in context—they are not context-free facts.