The athletes who last aren’t always the most gifted. They’re the ones who treat every variable as something worth controlling.
I trained to be a professional tennis player. That’s not the career trajectory that led me here, but it shaped almost everything about how I work.
I wasn’t the most talented player on the court. I knew that early, and so did my coach. The question was what to do with that information. I could have adjusted my ambitions, found a comfortable ceiling, made peace with it. Instead, I made a different decision: I would not be outworked. By anyone. Ever.
My coach had a phrase for it: control the controllables. You can’t control your opponent. You can’t control the weather, the draw, or the way the ball behaves on clay or grass. What you can control is the quality of your preparation: the hours on court, the warmup, the sleep, the nutrition, the mental rehearsal. When you’ve genuinely done all of that, something shifts. You know you can go the distance. And that knowledge builds something that raw talent rarely gives you on its own: a confidence and resilience that doesn’t crack when things get hard.
What I’ve noticed is that this logic doesn’t always travel. Take it off the court, into work, into study, into the decisions that shape a career, and the discipline tends to dissolve. We show up when we feel like it. We wing it. We tell ourselves ‘that’s agility.’ And then we wonder why the needle isn’t moving.
Professional athletes don’t operate that way. They understand, at a level that becomes instinctive, that inputs determine outputs. Every variable in their orbit – physical, psychological, logistical – is evaluated in terms of what it does or doesn’t contribute to performance. Nothing is incidental.
So, here’s the question I keep coming back to: what would genuinely shift in your work, your career, your studies, if you treated the next twelve months with that level of intention? Not more hours. Not more hustle. More control of the variables you actually have influence over.
I’m still working on it. But I know one thing for certain: I won’t be outworked.