Agassi

I’ve got three blog entries on the go at the moment. Two of them were intended to be posted last week, but I’ve had so much going on that I haven’t had time to finish and proof them. I had in fact intended upon doing so this evening, however moments after returning home I stumbled across a tweet from the ATP that stopped me in my tracks.

The tweet posted a transcript from yesterday’s induction speech from Andre Agassi into the Tennis Hall of Fame. Of course I bypassed it and headed straight to YouTube. Half an hour later and here I am, completely discarding my half-written posts and writing this instead. Because this is a speech by a man I believe we can learn a hell of a lot from.

The girl introducing Agassi was a bit much to take, so if you’re less tolerant than me I would suggest forwarding to the 10 minute mark. From then on all you have to do is listen, contemplate and try not to worry too much about whether he’s used a high enough factor sun cream on his head or not.  I'd recommend watching the video, but if you’d prefer, you can read the transcript by clicking here.

Enjoy…

You can read the personal tributes he talks about by clicking here.

Inspiration

After writing about TED at the weekend I got hooked once again on their content and wanted to share some of my findings with you guys. Not only does the site feature talks from its own conferences, but it also lists talks from other meet-ups and discussions and speeches from Ivy League graduation ceremonies. There are loads of grad speeches on there, including a lol-tastic one by Seth Macfarlane, but there were two I found particularly inspirational and dished out what I considered to be some pretty damn good advice. First was from the Harvard graduation ceremony in 2008 and given by a woman you may or may not have heard of… J.K. Rowling. Drawing on her own experiences, she talks about failure and achievement in the big bad world, how to deal with it and how to not lose hope. I have so much more respect for people like her than the Paris Hiltons of the world. Check out the video and the quote I found had the most impact below. J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo. “Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV are not your life.” Next was a speech by Steve Jobs at the Stanford graduation ceremony in 2005. His talk covers the story of his life, from being adopted to becoming CEO of Apple and Pixar and fighting cancer. Here’s the full video and a couple of quotes that stood out for me, the second of which I believe is some of the best advice you can give a person. “You can't connect the dots looking forwards, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will connect some time in your future... believing the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”   “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe it great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet keep looking and don't settle.”  And that’s where we leave TED… but I couldn’t talk about inspiration without mentioning a book (yes, a book) that inspired me back at the beginning of 2010.  As you know I’m not a big reader (understatement) but occasionally I’ll start reading something and won’t be able to put it down - which was exactly the case with Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open.  Thrust upon me by one of my bezzies, I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea of reading a book, but at the time I was intermittently temping, at points snowed in, and thus had a lot of time on my hands. Plus I love tennis so I figured I’d give it a whirl. I read the first few pages and didn’t look back. Agassi’s story is fascinating. I loved reading it, to the point where I had to ration myself to a chapter a day because I was literally doing nothing else – very bizarre given my relationship with books! Open inspired me so so much. For some reason I can relate to SO much of what Agassi writes about. Not the experiences, obviously, but his thought processes, reasoning and constant struggle to understand himself. In fact, as I went through the book some of his words spoke to me in such a way that I felt it necessary to make note of them. Here's a few I picked out... "What you feel doesn't matter in the end, it's what you do that makes you brave." "Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything." And finally this quote – which is one I now live by. When I’m running and I want to stop these few sentences run through my head… I may as well get one of those wrist bands and have ‘What Would Agassi Do' on it! Anyway… "This run, even if it brings on heatstroke, will give me peace of mind tonight in that all important ten minutes before I fall asleep. I now live for that ten minutes. I'm all about that ten minutes. I've been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep." So there we have it: a collection of words that inspire me and have lead me to make the decisions I have made over the past year or so. What’s your inspiration?

Haaaaaaaave You Met TED?

The other day I was killing some time and catching up on events from the Twittersphere (cool-kid lingo – check!) when I came across a tweet linking to a video about happiness. Now, for those of you who don’t know me, here’s an insight into my teeny tiny brain – as soon as it comes to figuring out life and why people do and think the things they do I’m completely hooked. I’m fascinated by how different things affect different people and the whole psychological aspect of what influences both our everyday and life choices. So discovering TED.com was like discovering a secret stash of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk during a lengthy stint in the USA.

TED (which stands for technology, entertainment and design) is a non-profit organisation made up of two annual international conferences and a bunch of smaller projects dedicated solely to discussing and spreading ideas. No matter what your background, religion or race, TED is about sharing knowledge and inspiring others in order to change attitudes and lives.

Each year at the two main conferences, the world’s most captivating speakers are invited to each give an 18 minute speech on whatever takes their fancy… as long as it’s relative, that is. There’s no chat about favourite family holidays or who should have been voted off last week’s X Factor. The conference is extremely popular and ridiculously expensive, but luckily for us mere peasants all the talks are uploaded onto their website for our viewing pleasure. Excellent if you like to dabble in all things philosophical, not so excellent if you have a life to lead and deadlines to meet. I wrote off almost an entire Saturday because of this site. In fact I was so absorbed by it all that I believe I even missed a meal.

So anyway, this video about happiness had me engrossed from the word go. Over the past couple of years my main aim has been to achieve a good balance of happiness in general life and work, but it’s not something I’ve managed to grasp just yet. As a result, the ideas discussed in this video induced what I can only describe as an absolute headf**k. By the end of it I was questioning EVERYTHING. Is leaving England the right thing to do? Do I really want to do it? Did I really just miss a meal? Oh. God. 

This 20 min talk by Srikumar Rao, a teacher, writer and life coach, explains the concept of how people use what he calls the ‘if/then model’ (If I do this, then I will be happy), how it’s flawed because we’re constantly changing the ‘if,’ and thus how we’re ultimately setting ourselves up for failure by using it. This worries me a lot because my whole reasoning for leaving was something along the lines of: “if I go somewhere new, meet different people and follow one of my ambitions then I’ll be happier than I am now, sitting in this dungeon of an office and doing something irrelevant to my life.” But by this guy’s reckoning, once I do all that, I’ll find myself unhappy again and I’m just going to change my ‘if’ to something else, like: if I go back to England and get my dream job, then I will be happy. Ahhhhh! So am I just setting myself up to fail? AM I? I hate this website.

Mr Rao explains that the reason the model is flawed is because people do not accept the world for what it is. When you see a rainbow you stand back and admire it, you don’t stand back and say “that’s a nice rainbow but it would be better if you moved it a bit to the left and that tree wasn’t blocking part of it.” Which is exactly what we do with life… “I’ve just got my dream job but it would be better if it didn’t have a one hour commute” … “My boyfriend bought me some beautiful earrings but I wish they were the ones I pointed out to him last week.” We say stuff like this all the time.

As for accepting the world for what it is, I’m a little confused. During the several months after I graduated I definitely didn’t accept the world for what it was, but then that was hugely influenced by other people rather than my own judgement of situations. After that, my only way of digging myself out of the disaster that was 2009 was just to accept what was going on a roll with it, even though I was far from happy. Back then I was definitely guilty of using the ‘if/then model’ – if I get a job then I will be happy. Well, we all know how that’s worked out… But then on the other hand I don’t believe we should accept what happens to us just because that’s the way the world is. Yes, you can apply it to mother nature – rainbows are great and hurricanes are bad but either way there’s nothing you can do to change either; but when it comes to what we do with our lives surely it’s up to us to accept what we do or do not settle for? I’d rather strive to achieve my goals than sit back, accept my bad luck, wait for something to happen and then regret all that I didn’t bother trying for. 

But Srikumar Rao reckons there’s still hope. Apparently the way to combat this flawed model is to invest in the process rather than the outcome. That way if the process fails then it doesn’t mean you’ve failed to meet your goal, just that you need to try a different method of reaching it; and I think that is more appropriate to me. I don’t believe that moving will miraculously solve all my problems and make me happy. If anything, it’s going to be one of the hardest challenges of my life. I need to make new friends, find somewhere to live and find a job, and do all of it on my own. Even though I have a visa I’m fully expecting it to be just as hard, if not harder, than finding a job here in London. I know there’s every chance I may fail, end up travelling until my money runs out and return to the horrible job market and recruitment agencies of London with my tail between my legs. But at least I’ll be living. Ultimately, all I want to do in this next year is challenge myself and prove to myself that I’m not totally worthless as a human being – like I was made to feel in the months after graduation. 

I suppose the biggest issue I have with this ‘if/then model’ is that I can’t focus on the outcome because I don’t really know what it is I’m aiming for. I have no idea what’s going to make me happy which means I must be investing in the process rather than the outcome… right? All I know is that I want live abroad for a bit and I enjoy writing so that’s what I’m going to do. Writing this blog is all experience and, even if it’s not a paid profession, one day it may help me in some way.

So that’s that. Analysis over. To be honest I’m not really any clearer on the matter so I’m just filing it away in my brain as ‘food for thought.’ Maybe you can make more sense of it…