#412 How Roger Federer Works

**David Senra** (0:00)
I spent years whining, swearing and throwing my racket before I learned how to keep my cool. My wake up call came early in my career when an opponent publicly questioned my mental discipline. He said, Roger will be the favorite for the first two hours, and I'll be the favorite after that. I realized what he was saying. Everybody can play well in the first two hours. You're fit, you're fast, you're clear. After two hours, your legs get wobbly, your mind starts wandering, and your discipline starts to fade. It made me realize I had so much more work ahead of me. My parents, my coaches, everyone had been calling me out, and now my rivals were doing it. I am eternally grateful for what he did because it made me work harder and train harder, a lot harder. That was an excerpt not from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, but actually from Roger Federer's commencement address that he gave at Dartmouth after he retired. And before I get into this incredible book that I read about Roger Federer, which is called The Master, The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer, written by Christopher Clarey, I want to pull out a few quotes from Federer's excellent commencement address. And so Federer had three main ideas that he shared in the commencement address. Number one, effortlessness is a myth. Number two, it's only a point. And number three, life is bigger than the court. I want to jump to point number two. This is my favorite part of the entire commencement address. He says, perfection is impossible. It is only a point. In the 1,526 single matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%.
In other words, even top ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to say, okay, I double faulted. It's only a point. Okay, I came to the net and I got passed again. It's only a point. Even a great shot, an overhead backhand smash that ends up on a top ten playlist. That too is just a point. Here is why I'm telling you this. When you are playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world. And it is. But when it's behind you, it's behind you. This mindset is really crucial because it frees you to fully commit to the next point and the next point after that with intensity, clarity, and focus. The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you're going to lose a point, a match, a season, a job. It is a roller coaster with many ups and downs. And it's natural when you're down to doubt yourself and to feel sorry for yourself. And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt too. Don't ever forget that.
But negative energy is wasted energy. You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That is, to me, the sign of a champion. The best in the world are not the best in the world because they win every point. It's because they know they'll lose again and again and again and have learned how to deal with it. You accept it, cry it out if you need to, and then force a smile. You move on. Be relentless, adapt and grow. And then these are a few sentences that really jumped out at me from his third point, which is life is bigger than the court. Even when I was just starting out, I knew that tennis could show me the world, but tennis could never be the world. I knew that if I was lucky, maybe I could play competitively until my late 30s, maybe even till I was 41 But even when I was in the top five, it was important to me to have a life, a rewarding life full of travel, culture, friendships, and family. These are the reasons that I never burned out. And never burning out is one of the most important stories from Roger Federer's career and from this book. I love the subtitle, The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer. And the reason I wanted to start with those three ideas from his commencement address is because as I went over and over again and reread my highlights and my notes before I sat down to talk to you, I realized what was most interesting to me was not the biographical account of Roger Federer's life and career. What was most interesting to me was the ideas that helped him have this long run and beautiful game. So what I did is I stripped everything away except the ideas that contributed to his top performance and his durable and long lasting career. And so you'll see some of these ideas just reappear over and over again throughout the decades of his life and his career. I want to go back to what he just said at the beginning of the commencement address, and it is tied to the fact that he seeks immediate feedback and then something that his coaches and people around him noticed for his entire career is how fast, how quickly he is able to apply the things that he learns. And so he talks about the benefit of the fact that his occupation, his career, his mission, his dream had to be played out in front of a live audience. And there's a benefit to that immediate feedback loop. And this is what he said, playing in front of a live audience, you get the review right away. You know if you're good or bad. It's like a musician. And I'll tell you, it's a good feeling to have. Even if you're bad, it doesn't matter. All you have to do is then go work at it. At least you know you have some work to do. And if you're great, it gives you confidence and motivation and inspires you. And I think that ties to this idea that you and I talk about over and over again, that all of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs, they constantly preach the value of being close to the customer, of getting immediate feedback from your customer and from the people that work for you that are actually servicing the customers. This is all tied to this idea that Federer, throughout his entire career, they talk about, look how effortless it is. And he actually took partial offense to that. It made it seem like it was completely natural that he didn't have to work hard to make it look effortless. And so that's something that reappears over and over again in the book. It says, Federer was widely perceived as a natural, and yet he became a meticulous planner who learned to embrace routine and self-discipline, plotting out his schedule well in advance and in considerable detail. Though it was rare to see Federer sweat, there was tremendous toil and ample self-doubt behind the scenes. And that leads us to another idea that helps him make it look effortless. And the way I think about this is this maxim from Charlie Munger, that your job as an entrepreneur is to build a seamless web of deserved trust. So much of this book is about the people that helped Federer on his journey, the team that he built, the people that he surrounded himself with. If you listen to last week's episode about Andre Agassi and that fantastic autobiography, it was the exact same thing for Agassi's life. Agassi, just like Federer, repeat over and over again, I would not have had the success I had if it wasn't for the people that were around me. And Federer picked really carefully, he says, Fortune indeed played a role for Federer. He might not have become a champion, at least not a tennis champion, if an Australian journeyman pro named Peter Carter had not decided to take a coaching job in a small club in Basel, Switzerland. Federer might not have had the staying power if he had not met a cerebral, sensitive and gifted fitness trainer named Pierre Paganini, or crossed paths with Mirka Wevernick. God bless these last names. There's no way, I'm sorry, there's no ways I'm pronouncing it correctly. An older Swiss player who eventually became his part-time press agent, organizer, and most importantly, his wife. And one thing that his coaches, his fitness trainers, the people around him would constantly remark on is that Federer wanted to see how far he could take it. He believed that stagnation is regression. I absolutely love this part. He says he did stop school at 16 and was not a particular serious student, but he approached adulthood and the tour with much more rigor. He had both an abiding love of the game and the drive to demand more of himself. He believed that maintaining the same level in pro tennis was actually losing ground. This is something he's going to have in common, this belief with one of his rivals, which is Novak Djokovic. This is what Novak Djokovic said. The number one requirement to succeed at this level is the constant desire and open-mindedness to master and improve and evolve yourself in every aspect. I know Roger has talked about this a lot, and I think it's something most top athletes in all sports can agree on. Stagnation is regression. And so something that Novak and Federer and Agassi all had in common is they wanted to be the best. From a very young age, they talked about, they're six years old, seven years old, eight years old, twelve years old. They would say, I'm going to be the number one tennis player in the world. And I think that's one of the benefits about reading this book and reading Agassi's book, you realize how much work it takes to go from ten or fifteen or twenty to number one. Andy Roddick, a fellow tennis player, was talking about, it was very obvious when, I think, Federer turns pro somewhere around sixteen, seventeen years old, it was obviously a talent. But what was not obvious is what was ahead of him for the next twenty-four years of his career. So that's what Andy Roddick said. I think it had progressed past the point of, is this guy going to be really good? I think that was a given. The question was, is he going to be Roger or is he going to be Richard Gasquette, who is someone who is really, really good? I think people are lying to you if they say they can tell the difference at that stage because the difference is inward, it is so important. I think maybe the most important thing about reading about these tennis players, and it's the same for founders, is how much of success comes down to what's going on in your mind. Back to this quote from Andy Roddick. I think it was a given that Roger is going to be a top ten guy, a top five guy, but there's a big difference between that and someone who is number one, who wins a slam and is a relevant result maker for 10 years. I had the accidental good luck of actually having dinner, I think it was probably like two years ago, with a mental coach of some of the top tennis players in the world. This is not a coach that has anything to do with the aspect of your game, like the physical aspect of your game. He focuses solely on the inner game of tennis, what is going on in your mind. And he said something that blew my mind, that he said that the gap between the number four player in the world and the number three player in the world is massive, that the 200th ranked player in the world is closer to number four than four is to number three. And he said the main driver of that was their mental discipline. Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp, and I think there's a lesson in here that is applicable to anyone who's trying to make something great in the world. The founders of Ramp know, just like Steve Jobs knew, that you always bet on talent. The founders of Ramp want to bet on talent in everything that their company does. To Steve Jobs, this was mandatory. Steve Jobs said you must find extraordinary people, that a small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. And so you must build a team that pursues the A players. That is exactly what Ramp has done. There is a reason that Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. They are chasing excellence. Like Roger Federer, they are only interested in being the best. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. Last year, Ramp hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. 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That is ramp.com. Now, when I got to this next section of the book, this is when I realized what the most fascinating thing to me about Roger Federer, about reading this book, was how much he changed from the 16 or 17 year old player over the next two decades. The parallel to Steve Jobs jumped off the page for me. So let me read this to you. There was a second realization. We all watched him and it looked like he was not sweating. It looked like his heart rate was 30 It didn't look like anything was affecting him. Like it was clear that there was not going to be any bad decisions because it's a break point and he is nervous because the crowd is a little into it or something. What we were unaware of was how far Federer had come in the behavior department from the racket chucking, self berating episodes of his youth. It just looked like this is what he was ready for and he could handle whatever situation came up. Go back to what Federer was saying that his wake up call came early in his career when he was talking to the commencement address. That was not the case. His opponents called him mentally weak, that he had no mental discipline, that I can wear this guy out and take advantage of him and beat him. And there's example after example in the book. And as I'm reading this, I'm like, this is just like Steve Jobs. Like Steve Jobs, Roger Federer learned how to have more self control with age. There is like a 20 page afterward that I highly recommend you read. It's an Ed Catmull's autobiography called Creativity, Inc. It's called The Steve Jobs We Knew. And Ed was partnered with Steve Jobs for more consecutive years than anybody else. And so I asked my personal AI assistant, which is trained on all my notes and highlights and transcripts, I go, how did Ed Catmull describe how Steve Jobs changed over the 20 year partnership? And there's a few things I want to read to you. Ed's point was that Steve Jobs changed profoundly over the two decades they worked together. So much so that the popular one note caricature of Jobs as a relentless perfectionist and an emotional tone deaf bully misses the real story. Catmull watched him evolve in real time. Catmull said early on, Jobs could be dismissive, that he could create ill will, that he would overreach in negotiations. But Catmull emphasized that Jobs learned from the backfires and explicitly told Catmull that he learned from his mistakes. And over time, Steve became fairer and wiser and his understanding of partnership deepened, not in a way that diluted his innovation standards, but in a way that strengthened them. And if the only thing you take away from Roger Federer's life is that, his ability to learn how to control his emotions, he would have not had the long run and the beautiful game if he never developed that skill. And I think there's two things that helped him do this and succeed in other areas of his career. And this is that this idea where, you know, most of his education is entrepreneurs. Belief comes before ability. They have excessive self-confidence even before other people think they deserve to have that confidence and they're obsessed with control. So a lot of these European, I've been reading a lot about European tennis players, a lot of them in their youth, they're like, oh, I like tennis, maybe I could play soccer too. But they're usually control freaks. And so there's this example of him picking an individual sport on purpose. There was something in him that wanted full ownership, a strain of perfectionism that made him realize he would have struggled to accept other shortcomings when he already had so much difficulty accepting his own. And then just like Novak Djokovic, just like Andre Agassi, Novak Djokovic would go around at six years old. When he was six years old, he said he was going to be the number one tennis player in the world. For Roger Federer, at age eight, Roger was going around and telling his friends that he was going to be number one. And then I want to give you another example, something we've already talked about a few times. Roger has this ability to apply what he's learning rapidly. And he had this from a young age. So one of his youth coaches, when he was still a junior player, said he had never seen another player who could apply his advice so quickly. It was an observation that many coaches would make of Federer throughout the decades. And so he's smart enough to build a team around him that hold him to high standards. And he also holds himself to high standards. This goes back into just how, by his own admission, that he had a weak mentality that he had a lack of self-control. There was another undeniable weakness in those early years. Federer's mentality. I was a terrible loser. I really was, Federer said. Federer's self-control was lacking. This is what he says. I knew what I could do and failure made me mad. I had two voices inside me, the devil and the angel. And one self couldn't believe how stupid the other one could be. He fixes this inner monologue, by the way. How could you miss that one voice would say? Then I would just explode. My dad used to be so embarrassed at tournaments that he would shout at me from the side of the court, telling me to be quiet. And then on the way home in the car, he might drive for an hour and a half and not say a word. Federer's lack of mental discipline was the biggest reason he was not a can't miss prospect. He clearly had the talent and seemed to have the ambition, but the mental game is often what makes the difference between mediocre and good and between good and great. And so as a teenager, he realizes, well, if I'm going around saying I'm going to be the best player in the world, I'm going to be number one, it's going to require exceptional talent and drive, a solid support structure, plenty of luck and sound decisions. And you can't make sound decisions if you can't control your emotions. There is a line in the commencement address that he says that I think is really important. And he says, trusting yourself is a talent. And so when Federer was 14, he goes away to boarding school and he considers this critical to his later success. It says, when he gives advice to younger players, he often recommends that they take the opportunity to leave home for a stretch to build their sense of self-reliance. This is a key trait in a brutally competitive individual sport where trusting yourself can be every bit as important as trusting your forehand. None of this works if you can't trust your own judgment. And so, it's going to come down to the talent and the skill and the play of Federer on the court. But he's also got to choose the people that's going to help him on his journey. And one of the best decisions he ever made was picking this esoteric and unusual fitness coach. This was not an obvious choice, and here's why. He was a much older man who never played tennis competitively, but who played a major role in Federer's long-running success, perhaps the decisive role. This is Pierre Paganini who was Federer's fitness coach. Paganini was much more than a clever and hyper fit taskmaster. He was Federer's sounding board, occasional spiritual guide, and the final word on scheduling. A subtle yet convincing lobbyist for the benefits of dedication and moderation. This is so important. Remember, going back to this idea of the long game. From the start, Paganini had a long-term view of Federer's health and path. The central message was that tough, consistent work was necessary, but so were rest and escape if Federer wanted to last in a sport whose repetitive rhythms and patterns can wear down a player. And he also focused on the mind, too. Fresh legs were vital, but no more vital than feeling fresh in the head. When other people are asked to describe Paganini, the word you usually hear is unusual. And so this is really Paganini just saying this is the goal. This is what we're trying to do with Federer, and we're trying to do it from the very beginning. To have potential is one thing, but to express it for 70 matches a year is something else. That is Roger's goal, to be consistent in each match he plays and each training session he does. So this idea of, hey, we're going to emphasize the long game, we're going to assume that your career is going to last many decades, and so we're going to develop a training schedule that allows your body to survive and thrive over decades. This part made me think of the co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman. Bill Bowerman was Phil Knight's track coach at Oregon, and he had these ideas decades before anybody else. I read this excellent biography of Bill Bowerman probably six years ago. I want to pull out some ideas from here because I think it's so important, and I think they analogy entrepreneurship, which just jumps off the page, it's completely obvious. Bowerman's core point was that rest and recovery aren't a break from training, they're a central part of the mechanism that makes training work. Bowerman explains training as a simple loop, stress, recover, improve. You apply a stimulus, you let the body rest, and then a little miracle happens, you get stronger, faster, and more enduring. Bowerman immediately pairs that with a warning, work too hard plus rest too little equals injury. A big part of why this mattered is that culturally, many athletes felt rest was weak willed or ignoble, and Bowerman pushed them directly against that instinct. Bowerman's edge was being decades early to treating recovery as equal to work, and Bowerman didn't mean rest as laziness. He meant rest as intelligent restraint in service of long-term consistency. That is exactly where we are in the story. Intelligent restraint in service of long-term consistency. That is excellent. And so there's a series of coaches and people in Federer's life that see his talent and are trying to help him understand how much work is ahead of him and constantly holding him to high expectations. And so Federer's a teenager at this time. He's around 14 or so and this one coach who they describe as no nonsense is teaching a young Federer about how much self-sacrifice and self-discipline were required to succeed in the way that Federer said he wanted to succeed. And the way he did this is he said, I didn't cut him any slack. It's not in my nature. I didn't give these young players any room to breathe. And one thing that he observed about Federer is that he had a natural inclination to want to play all the time. He was overflowing with emotion and energy. He had to play. He had to move. Above all, he's a player. And we see the exact same thing from Federer as a teenager that we saw when he was eight years old, that he wants to be the best, that he wants to be number one. He's with all these other young junior players. They're all in the same program. And they're filling in a form in which they're supposed to state their tennis goals. Most of them wrote down that they hoped to break into the top 100 in the world. Roger was the only one of us to write that he wanted to become number one. And this no-nonsense coach notices the exact same deficiency in Federer that he notices early in his career that he winds up fixing. He said, I could see no barriers when he played. The only thing that could stop him was his head. And I said to him, try not to be your own enemy because it will be a lot more complicated. Again, the inner game of tennis. I read this section. I think about one of my favorite quotes comes from Brad Jacobs. Brad Jacobs wrote in his book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, so much of success in business and life is keeping your head in a good place. And Federer is going to have a few different ways to keep his head in a good place. One, he's going to get this mental coach, which I'll talk to you about in one second. He does this early on in life. And number two, he does something really smart, especially the very beginning. You're going to doubt yourself enough. You can't have other people around you doubting you. You have to run away from naysayers. And there's a funny story in the book about this where Federer literally switches his dentist because he didn't want to hear any negativity. And so he stops formal schooling at 16 to pursue being a professional tennis player. And so he visits his dentist and his dentist is like, so what are you doing now? And Federer is like, well, I'm playing tennis. And his dentist goes, okay, well, what else? And Federer goes, that's it. I'm just playing tennis. And he looked at me shocked. He said, that's it, just tennis? And so Federer changed dentists. This is why I never went back because I just felt like he's not really understanding what I'm trying to do here. I'm chasing a dream. I'm trying to aim for the stars and he's trying to pull me back. I don't want to be surrounded by people like this. And one of the funniest ways to deal with people like this, I actually read in Arnold Schwarzenegger's biography, the one that he wrote when he was in his 70s. One of his mentors was Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball was probably the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time she starts mentoring Arnold. And she gave him hilarious advice that he actually applied verbatim. Says, Lucille Ball gave me advice about Hollywood. Just remember, when they say no, you hear yes and act accordingly. Someone says to you, we can't do this movie. You hug him and say thank you for believing in me. I absolutely love that. You hug him and say thank you for believing in me. Let's go back to this again, on having high standards, on being held to high standards and wanting to be the very best. He talks about the cultural differences of all the tennis, the Swedish, excuse me, the tennis players in Switzerland. And he felt that it was important for them to actually aim a little higher as we just saw. You know, like, oh, maybe I can break into the top 100 And Federer was like, no, I'm gonna be number one. I did feel it was possible for me to aim for the stars. I think we could do a little bit better job to believe, like in America, that anything is possible, that we should dream big. I feel sometimes we don't believe because we're kept in education, a job and safety and security. I feel that can sometimes block us from going all out and saying, let's take a chance, let's go for it, let's follow our dreams, let's see what happens. But half and half doesn't cut it. If a guy in China or Russia or America or Argentina or wherever trains five hours and you only train two, how is that going to work? It's not realistic then to become the greatest ever. It's not by dreaming that you're going to be top 250 that you're ever going to win Wimbledon. So this is when he begins working with a mental coach. His mental coach is this guy named Christian Marcoli. I think this is one of the most important ideas in the book. The idea was to provide Federer with some tools to change his patterns and manage his emotions more systematically, especially when matches got tight. Federer chose to address his mental weaknesses when he was still quite young. He was not yet 17 when he began collaborating with Marcoli. And so, Marcoli describes it this way. There's another fundamental component, which is, are you at peace with yourself? Is your overall life plan more or less in place, which gives you the fundamental joy to be here, or would you rather be somewhere else? Roger has always had the passion to win. At a certain moment of his career, he made the choice to learn how to use this energy in a constructive way, so he could reach his maximum potential. That was the focus of our work together. This is so important, just like his fitness coach, the ideas that his fitness coach had, they were not what everybody else was doing, the same thing. This shows how important this was. Consulting a performance psychologist or a mental coach was then still widely viewed as a sign of vulnerability. It also did not dovetail with the rugged individualism that Federer adopted and enjoyed projecting once he reached maturity, going significant stretches without a formal coach or agent. Again, I think that speaks to how important it was. Neither Marcoli nor Federer has publicly explained their work in detail because that is Federer's wish. That part is fascinating. They only worked together for a short while, and then they both agreed not to go into detail about what exactly they did. This kind of reminds me of, I read this biography of Alexander the Great, and his tutor, his one-on-one tutor when he was a young man was actually Aristotle. And much later in life, there was a rift between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, because Alexander did not like that Aristotle was teaching publicly what Aristotle had taught Alexander privately. Alexander did not want his opponents to have the edge that he had. And so go back to what Federer was saying in the commencement address, that everybody for years was calling him out on this, since he was a little boy, all the way to a teenager. And so I'll read this one paragraph from the book. So many people in his early life say exactly this, Roger was fragile emotionally. He could not accept defeat. He was mediocre in training. He was not a big worker. He was fooling around most of the time. To me, that is the core to this story. The fact that he adapted, the fact that he changed, the fact that he improved over time. And the beauty of this is this is a skill he could keep his entire life. This is his now mental coach, not talking about the 16, 17, 18 year old Federer that he was working with, but now looking back after Federer retired. When I see Roger today, I always tell him, what you do on the court is extraordinary, but how you handle your life to me is out of this world. The game doesn't care where you slept, what you did, how many people you met. The game is pure. And he managed over 20 years to come out and play it with humility, and that same amount of connection it takes to be able to keep winning matches. The way he approached his work, the dignity, the level of concentration, to me, he's a role model. And I think a large component of the work they did that was successful is the fact that you can be, Federer can now be in the moment. This point in front of me is the most important point in the world. But then when it's behind, it is behind. So this is what fascinated me about Roger then and still is that he managed to live in the present. He has a great ability to take things as they come. He lives a moment, experiences it fully, takes pleasure in it and finishes it and then moves on to the next. It is the reason you have the feeling that things happen very naturally with him. It is a talent and it is a talent that even today fascinates me more than his tennis. This is exactly what people would say about Michael Jordan. I've done a bunch of episodes on Michael Jordan, but this quote from episode 340, which is on Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant together, I love and it's exactly what they're talking about with Federer. If one thing separated Michael from every other player, it was his stunning ability to block out everything and everyone else. This dedication to learning how to control his mind is mentioned over and over again. He was able to shut out everything except his mission. Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future. Michael is a mystic. He was never anywhere else. His gift was that he was able to be completely present. The big downfall of otherwise gifted players is thinking about failure. He would say, why would I think about missing a shot I haven't taken yet? And so whether it's his decision to work with this esoteric and unusual fitness coach, going against the trend to have a mental coach, even having his wife work with him, all of these decisions helped because he was building what Charlie Munger said is some of the best, most important piece of advice is that you need to build a seamless web of deserved trust. And so as many times in the book, it talks about the value of the team that Federer built. The other component is to trust that life is going in the right direction and to trust that the close people around you do a great job and that you don't need to worry or think about something else. And I think Roger always had the ability to surround himself with people he can trust and he does fully trust. It takes a while to get that trust, but once you're in, nothing is second-guessed.