#412 How Roger Federer Works

What I learned from reading The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer by Chris Clarey. Episode sponsors: Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off.

• 0:00Speaker 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 then 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.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  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 going to 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 in the Beautiful Game of Roger Federer," written by Christopher Clary, 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."

• 1:26Speaker 00

  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-10 playlist, that too is just a point.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  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

• 3:37Speaker 00

  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 read, 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.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  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's 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

• 5:02Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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

• 5:44Speaker 00

  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- 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 listened to last week's episode about Andre Agassi and that fantastic autobiography,

• 6:29Speaker 00

  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 Merka Vevernek." God bless these last names, there's no way, I'm sorry, there's no way he's pronouncing it correctly.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  "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 particularly 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.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  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, 12 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 10 or 15 or 20 to number one.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Andy Roddick, a fellow tennis player, was talking about, it was very obvious when, you know, I think Federer turns pro somewhere at 16, 17 years old. It was obviously a talent. But what was not obvious is what was ahead of him for the next 24 years of his career. So this is 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 Gaskett? 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.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  "I think it was a given that Roger is going to be a top 10 guy, a top 5 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.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  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's 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 I'm saying. Exactly what Ramp has done.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  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. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24/7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations, and they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business fully programmable corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, bill payments, accounting, and more, all in one place. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because, as Sam Walton said in his autobiography,

• 11:27Speaker 00

  "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save both time and money today. 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.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  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 breakpoint 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-barading 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 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.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Like Steve Jobs, Roger Federer learned how to have more self-control with age. There is like a 20-page afterword 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.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  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 in 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 entrepreneurs, belief comes before ability.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  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 that he was going to be the number one tennis player in the world. For Roger Federer, at age eight,

• 15:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  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

• 16:37Speaker 00

  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 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,

• 17:20Speaker 00

  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'd 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.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  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, we're 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,

• 18:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  I want to pull out some ideas from here because I think it's so important. And I think the analogy in entrepreneurship 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.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  You apply a stimulus, you let the body rest, and then a little miracle happens. You get stronger, faster, and more enduring. Baumann 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 Baumann pushed them directly against that instinct. Baumann's edge was being decades early to treating recovery as equal to work. And Baumann 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.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  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

• 21:20Speaker 00

  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'll be a lot more complicated," again, than the inner game of tennis. I read this section. I think about one of my favorite quotes

• 22:05Speaker 00

  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 at 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?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  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 dentist. 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.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  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 is like, no, I'm going to 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.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  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

• 24:58Speaker 00

  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

• 25:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  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 it says 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,

• 28:33Speaker 00

  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

• 29:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:57Speaker 00

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• 30:41Speaker 00

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• 31:24Speaker 00

  So learning to have this mental discipline, learning how to control his emotions, it was better for his game, but it also winds up being better for his business. And part of this is because he understood that as he became more prominent, as he starts to win more matches, his on-court antics and throwing this fit, breaking rackets, cursing, it actually risked defining his image. And when he'd watch his matches back and he'd see himself act like this, he was actually embarrassed. He says, "That was a career-defining moment for me. I started to feel uncomfortable after a while when you're on TV like this. It's just a bad look when you see yourself throw the racket in the corner and you're like, 'Oh, my God.' And you're looking around and you're frustrated and disappointed. And I just said, 'This just looks so stupid and silly. Let's get your act together now. You're on a big stage and you can't behave like this anymore. You're behaving like this

• 32:09Speaker 00

  when you're playing somebody like Pete Sampras or somebody else that you actually admire. It just can't be like this.'" And it was interesting that talks about "the inner rage is still there. It's just developing the skill to not let it bubble to the surface." It was enough to finally calm Federer, at least on the outside. "Inside, the blood still boils." Federer confirmed as much. "It was about learning to control the flames." This is such a great line. "It was about learning to control the flames instead of extinguishing them, about converting them into slow-burning fuel rather than a bonfire of distraction." And so all the work that he's doing, all the skills that he's acquiring, starts to pay off. And at just 21 years old, Federer wins his first title at Wimbledon.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  And it says, "A weight had been lifted, a number of weaknesses addressed, and he was ready to hit some serious heights." Go back to that coach, who was coaching him when he was 14, and say, "Hey, I'm not cutting him any slack." He was sitting there, watching this, at Wimbledon. And after he won, he says, "Look how far he has come." And then he pauses, reflecting back on this, right, from 14 to 21. "Look at how much work this guy has done. He's a completely different person. Look how far he has come." And then now 20 years later from this point, he says, and now I'm thinking about how far he went after that. Again, that is what I found most fascinating about the book, the long run of Roger Federer. And it says Roger really made up his mind that he was going to be the best player on the planet.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Not just the most talented or the most gifted player on the planet, but the best. And one thing he starts tapping into is the history of the sport. He starts studying the great tennis players, dead and living. And it says, though he had been an indifferent student in school, Federer was drawn to the history of his chosen sport, a curiosity that only deepened as he proceeded to make so much tennis history himself. "I asked a lot of questions and I had a great bunch of guys around me when I came up on tour that educated me as well," Federer said. They were like, "Look, this is somebody who played at semis in Wimbledon back in 1968, and this is somebody who won the doubles back in 1954." Kobe Bryant said the exact same thing in that book that he wrote called Mamba Mentality. So he talks about the importance of studying the greats.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  He says, "Just as important as reading about them was cultivating relationships with the greats who had come before me. Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Jerry West, James Worthy. Those guys taught me the lessons that gave me an edge over my competition." It is so important to have those mentors, those north stars who you learn from and look up to. Back to Federer saying the exact same thing on the importance of studying the greats of your profession. "They did something very special that I could profit from even today. I wish all the youngsters coming up on tour would be super, super curious to find out everything about tennis. You should know what's so interesting about these people." Something that surprised me and something that was highly unusual is that Federer would go for long stretches with no official coach.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  So in this case, he announces that he and his coach Lundgren were splitting. Says Federer made another risky choice to change a winning team. This was a pattern throughout his career. Federer was not too sentimental to break bonds when his inner voice was shouting that he needed change. Go back to what he said in that commencement address, "Trusting yourself is a talent." Federer said he felt that they had fallen into a routine. "The decision comes from me alone. I am the one who has to be satisfied, nobody else." Federer had no official coach at this stage. This was highly unusual for a great young player who could have met the salient demands of any coach of his choosing. But Federer was in no hurry to replace Lundgren. And that ability to trust himself led him to have this long career. And there's a ton of people in the book.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Where they're comparing and contrasting their approach to their game and their fitness and their training and contrasting it with Federer's approach. And so there's this one player, Safin, who's an example of this. Safin also struggled with significant injuries throughout his professional career. It is hard not to wonder what might have been if he, in his teens, had met a fitness guru like Paganini and spent some quality time with a performance psychologist like Mark Koly. While Federer came remarkably close to maximizing his abilities and optimizing his chances, Safin undeniably did not. This is what he said. "The higher I went, the more I started to be heavy in my head. I sometimes had the sparks of wow, this is really pleasant, but most of the time it

• 36:32Speaker 00

  was heavy, heavy, heavy pressure. I felt it all the time and I got burned out." So I was actually shocked at how much, in this book and in the Auguste book, and I'm starting to read on Novak Djokovic, too, the emotional pain that these guys go through. They are constantly overwhelmed with emotion and sobbing and crying and being distraught after a loss. And Federer is no different. I think the difference that Federer has is his ability to get over it quickly. He could lose Wimbledon, be crying his eyes out in the locker room or the shower, and then be at dinner with friends a few hours later. And so a source of emotional pain for both Federer and Nadal is the rivalry that they

• 37:16Speaker 00

  have with one another. And I think the author does a great job of describing how different they are, but also with the similarities they have. So I want to read a big section to you here. "Federer was increasingly accepting of being viewed as a part of a pair. In the beginning, I didn't want a rival, he said. Federer and Nadal were a great stylistic contrast. Federer was elegance, acquired cool and effortless power. Nadal was exuberance, innate fire and flexed biceps. Federer was smooth and classical. Nadal was rugged and avant-garde. Federer was tradition. Nadal was youth." Their pre-game approach was also worlds apart. James Blake beat Nadal in the semifinals in Indian Wells that year and then lost to Federer in the final.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  "It was so funny to me," he said, "the differences in dynamic in the locker room." Before the match, Rafa's got on his big headphones and he's running up and down the locker room, doing the sprints, tapping his fingers. He's like a caged animal. And then the next day, I'm playing Roger and we're talking about his house back in Switzerland, and he just bought some land. And it's about what he and his wife are gonna do. And it was honestly like we were sitting at a coffee shop as calm as can be. Yet both men were remarkable at flipping the switch when it came time for combat. Nadal's transformation came in the locker room, Federer's on the court. "I think people discredit what a killer Roger really is," Blake said. Because he is so relaxed before the match and he's saying, "Oh yeah, come out and see the Swiss countryside. It's beautiful."

• 38:43Speaker 00

  And then he goes out and kicks my ass. He still has that absolute fighter's mentality, that attitude of "I'm going to win." But there were also strong commonalities. They were sensitive and empathetic and raised by their families to believe that manners matter. Federer's motto was "It's nice to be important, but more important to be nice." And Nadal and his family subscribed to "You are not special because of who you are, but because of what you do." Both were close to their parents, but had relied heavily in their youth on a former tennis pro whose own career aspirations had fallen short. Even their choice in fitness trainer was similar. Both of their fitness trainers were deep thinkers who preferred to work unconventionally in the shadows instead of traveling the circuit.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Both have an old-school streak, a belief that face-to-face relations and traditions are worth preserving. Both increasingly used analytics to some degree at their coaches' behest, but both preferred to free their minds and let their instincts reign under pressure. "Roger," for example, "is not a big fan of stats in tennis," Nadal said. "Neither am I. He likes and respects the history of sport and respects the stories of champions like I do." Among their mutual understanding was that their rivalry was very good for business. And what was interesting to me, at least in their public statements, is just how much respect they had for one another. At one point, Nadal is just beating Federer constantly, even though Federer at this point has more Grand Slam titles, more wins.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  And Nadal was trying to direct the conversation when he's talking to the media. It's like, I'm not trying to surpass Federer. And that's not what I like about the sport. What I like about the sport is fighting. This was very interesting. And so it says, Nadal was different. To revel in suppressing Federer was not the point. The meaning was in playing each point. I love the competition. When I compete, I love to be there and to fight for the win. Maybe I like fighting to win more than to win. Rafael Nadal told Larry Ellison something very similar. I found this passage from one of the biographies of Larry Ellison that I read. Earlier, Nadal had said something that made a deep impression on Larry Ellison. When asked if he loved winning, Nadal shook his head and replied, no, I love the fight.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  If you fight hard, the winning will come. Let's go back to another reoccurring idea that helped him achieve the long game and the durable career that he had. He said in the commencement address, that life is bigger than the court. His outside life actually helped him get over losses more quickly. This happens over and over again. It's mentioned over and over in the book. He has happiness to fall back on. I just adore the fact that his family travels everywhere with him, like a traveling show. The whole family is so tight. I really admire that. And I think Roger is a really good person. He's got a good heart. And it's hard to find that when you're in a tough, tough sport. It's hard to find that gentleness. This is what Federer says about that. These are little things you start doing over the years to get away from the sport and do something different, he said.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Because tennis is a big focus, but there's also something else in life, the private side with my girlfriend and my family. I want to keep that intact as well, because I can only play good tennis when I'm happy. Federer's priority was to keep himself fresh physically and mentally, to be smart about scheduling and training loads, but also to be smart about how much he put himself in the spotlight and in group settings. Again, everything he's doing, the decisions he's making, the decisions his coaches are making, they're optimizing for the long game. He wants to avoid burning out to being a bright star in the sky that burns out prematurely. And he goes into much detail. This might be the best. He says a lot of things in the book about this. This might be my favorite part. As much as I take things very seriously, I'm very laid back.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  So I can really get let go very quickly, meaning let go of losses. I truly believe this is a secret for a lot of the players and for the young guys is to be able, when you leave the court, to say, okay, I'm leaving it behind. I still know I'm a professional tennis player, but I'm relaxing. I'm doing it my way, whatever way helps me decompress. Federer stopped speaking for a moment and showed me his clenched fist. Because if you're constantly like this, looking at his fist, then that's how you burn out. And so he's asked a question. So you never had a bit of burnout? I asked. He thought for a good 30 seconds before answering. If I do feel burnout coming on, what I've tried to do is break it down to the absolute minimum. And this is the absolute minimum.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  That's practice, matches, and family. I will do less press, less autographs, less public appearances, less stuff in the public eye. I need to gather myself, to gather my energy for the main purpose, which is the match. I had a period of three months once where I asked the tour to help me out a little bit because I was tired from the constant everyday grind of being in front of the media. That's where I felt it the most, but that was a short period of time. And then this part reminds me of this idea that's in Rick Rubin's book. The book's called The Creative Act. I just did an episode on it a few weeks ago. And he talked about that it's really important to find the time that you work best and you protect that time. And for Roger Federer, this late night alone time is key to not burning out. Late night is his therapy time. That's his alone time.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  That's his me time. He doesn't need to be Paul's player, that's his coach, or Mirka's husband, or Myla and Charlene's dad, or even Roger Federer, the icon. He protects that therapy time, that alone time, that me time. And then one thing he also does is even though he's training all the time and he's working all the time, he likes to mix it up. He likes to keep himself from not getting bored. I hadn't been around someone that had as much flexibility in their approach that Federer does. At Wimbledon, he has all these different houses all the time. He doesn't have superstitions. He doesn't always need to practice in the same place or have one favorite meal. This was a key element in Federer's career longevity. Too much routine can kill the joy. Too much constant focus can grind you down.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  And I think key to this is Federer understood what drove him. It was an inner scorecard. At the end of the day, it was a competition with himself. This is a great quote, great paragraph from Federer. "The idea is that you want to prove to yourself you can do it and not to other people." That's why for me, this rivalry with Rafa, okay, it's interesting, but in the end, I care about winning tournaments. That for me is the bottom line. And if Rafa happens to be on the other side, even better, because then I can beat the main rival or make a great story on top of that. But I think what people like I, or Tiger Woods, he's spending a lot of time with Tiger Woods at this point, but I think what people like I or Tiger Woods are more interested in is not who we're playing or racing against. You want to do it the best you can.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  It is important you can wake up in the morning and go to bed feeling good about yourself and your effort. And of course, all these different ideas made him more successful on the court, and the more successful he was on the court, the more successful he was in business. There's a bunch of different numbers in the book, but there's just a handful of highlights that I want to pull out. They give you a sense of the business that he has built. He's one of the very few billionaire athletes on the planet today, and the vast majority of his money has come from off the court. And so they call this Federer, Inc. Federer, Inc. continued on its upward trajectory. By 2013, Federer's annual income had reached an estimated $71 million. That put him second on the 2013 Forbes list of world's highest-paid athletes behind Tiger Woods and ahead of Kobe Bryant. He takes pride in delivering personalized service.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  So most of this is long-term sponsorships with these giant companies. Even in his early years, he would visit all 21 of the sponsor's suites at the Swiss Indoor Tournament to meet and to do meet and greets. He's just so good if you've seen him with sponsors, with CEOs. He just has the ability to make you feel like he really cares. About what you're saying and that he has time for you. He's never rushing you. If you're a fan at a 100 person event that one of his sponsors puts on and you're talking to him, he makes you feel he has all the time in the world to talk to you and hear what you have to say. And he would also be comfortable taking risks. He was a long-term Nike athlete. And when he couldn't come to terms with Nike in 2018, he took a giant risk on a completely different company.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  He signs a 10-year apparel deal with Uniqlo. The agreement had been reported to pay Federer, that one agreement alone, had been reported to pay Federer over 30 million a year. In 2020, Forbes named him the world's highest-paid athlete, estimating his annual income of about over 100 million a year. That same year, only 6 million was from official prize money in tennis. And then he's also a very smart businessman. Because the Uniqlo agreement did not cover footwear, Federer also invested in ON, which is a Swiss running shoe company that's based in Zurich. I actually just spent time with David, one of the founders of ON. I spent a few days with him. I found him wildly impressive. So back to this deal. So he signs this deal. He's like, okay, Uniqlo is just clothing.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Let's do a deal with a shoe company. Makes sense to do one with a Swiss running shoe company. When ON goes public, Federer's stake in the company was worth about $300 million. And so think about how crazy that is. This is why all of these ideas that you and I have been talking about all relate to each other. They all work together. Combined, they are much more valuable. The fact that he optimized for the long game, the long run from day one. Not only did he have a remarkable tennis career, but it benefited him in business. His biggest win in business came 23 years after he turned pro. Federer endured, when so many of his peers had already retired,

• 48:07Speaker 00

  of the 128 men who played singles at the 1999 French Open, which was his debut Grand Slam tournament. He was the last one still playing on tour. And I think this quote from Federer explains why. "I never fell out of love with the sport. Never."