The Way of the Tortoise: Why You Have to Take the Slow Lane to Get Ahead (with a foreword by Sir Andy Murray)

To Oscar

First published in Great Britain in 2021

by Michael O’Mara Books Limited

9 Lion Yard

Tremadoc Road

London SW4 7NQ

Copyright © Matt Little 2021

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78929-260-2 in hardback print format

ISBN: 978-1-78929-332-6 in trade paperback print format

ISBN: 978-1-78929-273-2 in ebook format

www.mombooks.com

CONTENTS

FOREWORD: Sir Andy Murray

INTRODUCTION: My Journey to the Top

Part One: TORTOISE BEATS HARE

1WHY THE TORTOISE WINS THE RACE

2WHAT MAKES YOU A TORTOISE?

3HOW YOU BECOME A WINNING TORTOISE

TAKE THE TORTOISE TEST

Part Two: TORTOISE GOES TO BOOT CAMP

4A SUCCESSFUL TORTOISE NEEDS SOFT SKILLS

5TWELVE DRILLS FOR SOFT SKILLS

6OPTIMIZING YOUR TORTOISE STRENGTHS

7WINNING FRIENDS THE TORTOISE WAY

TORTOISE BOOT CAMP

CONCLUSION: All Things Come to Those Who Wait

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FURTHER READING

INDEX

FOREWORD: SIR ANDY MURRAY

Matt has been a part of my set up for over twelve years now, helping lead my performance support team and introducing cutting-edge technology and monitoring systems to my training. During that time, we’ve experienced plenty of highs and lows. In the demanding environment of world tennis, it is rare to see working relationships last more than a few years because of the daily stressors that are placed on players and support staff.

Players and their teams are typically together for at least thirty-five to forty weeks of the year, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together as well as pushing each other on a daily basis to improve. But, as with anything in life, pressure will either make or break you and in terms of my relationships with my team, the former is true, even if we don’t always feel that way.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a very tough time with injuries, captured in my recent Amazon documentary Resurfacing. It was a daily struggle for everyone involved, desperately trying to seek solutions. In order for a team to function, there has to be trust, patience and a willingness to put in the hard work and sacrifice that is all encompassing at this level. We all had to deal with pressure and many failures and setbacks before we finally saw some success. Obviously, there is a high level of technical knowledge and skill required around each expert that I employ in my team, but soft skills and ‘feel’ are important for the different and dynamic situations that arose on an almost daily basis, be it in training, recovery or any aspect of the process for that matter. Matt has been a part of that journey and been a highly effective team member every step of the way. Indeed, part of the reason that I initially recruited Matt to help me with my fitness was down to the values he has.

Creating a fun environment along with interesting, varied sessions is also vital. As seen in the documentary, this can mean getting my support team involved in my training to spice things up a bit. Those lighter, funnier moments are important, and sometimes it’s good to wind each other up a bit! After all, if I have to suffer sometimes, I want my team to suffer as well. This all links back to the repetitive nature of elite-level sport. Keeping the athlete and the team energized and focused while having a bit of fun was definitely important to me and the people around me, who have all worked with me for many years. And that is where my performance support team were crucial in helping me, through not just these recent tough times, but from the early days, too.

I know that Matt’s career journey was a long, slow rise to reach the level that he is working at today, and that’s not just as part of my team. Matt has been involved in elite-level tennis for over fifteen years, working with players and teams of all ages from the bottom to the very top of the game. Whether it’s part of the Davis Cup team that won in 2015, or his work with junior players with the Lawn Tennis Association, Matt has given his all.

I know the level of commitment, honesty, loyalty and drive it has taken to get to where we are today. Matt and I push each other hard every day to be the best we can be, and it is those values and soft skills I mention that have played a big role in this.

INTRODUCTION: MY JOURNEY TO THE TOP

Iam a rare example of someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do for a living from the age of sixteen. I lived for playing sport. I grew up in a town called Sutton in the county of Surrey, which sits just outside of London. I had a pretty normal, suburban, middle-class upbringing. Just like many boys of my age in Sutton, I spent every weekend playing football out on the fields. My parents would barely see or even hear from me from Friday until Sunday evening, when I’d crash through the door just to get to bed in time for school the next day. By our mid-teens, my friends and I had discovered tennis, and we were already hanging out at our local tennis centre every minute we could find. We were captivated by the sport and its superstars like Boris Becker and Andre Agassi.

Even though I absolutely loved sport and considered myself to be pretty good, I now look back and realize I wasn’t particularly talented. Certainly not at the level to make a living professionally. Little did I know, this would be my first Hare and Tortoise moment.

What do I mean by that? Well, let’s start with that old fable, written by an ancient Greek called Aesop some 2,500 years ago. The story of the Hare and the Tortoise is well known throughout the Western world. It tells the tale of a Tortoise who becomes irritated when taunted by a Hare about his slow, lumbering movements and so he challenges the Hare to a race. The arrogant Hare accepts immediately.

Of course, the favourite for the race is the Hare, who gets off to such a flying start that he feels he can stop for a rest. When the Hare falls asleep through his complacency, he allows the Tortoise to overtake him and ultimately win the race. Aesop’s key message is that victory isn’t always to the swift! And here, then, lies the central message of this book.

When we are young, we have visions, dreams of the life we want to lead, of blazing a trail in our desired profession. My message to each and every one of you reading this book is that, no matter what your current skill level or present knowledge around that profession, it is absolutely possible to achieve your dreams.

In my view, there are two distinct routes to getting there: the fast, risky, direct track (Hare); and the slower, patient, meandering track (Tortoise). My focus is on the latter.

SLOW DOWN TO GET AHEAD

These days, a lot of people at entry level in their careers want a fast track to their dream job. Young coaches regularly ask me, ‘How can I get to work with a top tennis player?’ The reality for most of them is that a route similar to the one that I have chosen is far more likely to get them to where they want to be. It’s going to take ten years of sacrifice, total commitment and sleepless nights to even arrive at a place where they are ready to do the job. Then, once they start, they’ll probably need another five years to become competent at that level.

You might imagine the reaction I get when I pass on this message. First, a look of baffled disappointment, followed by a verbal comeback that they’ll get there much faster and prove me wrong. While I don’t have a huge issue with this response, I’ve got a whole book’s worth of time here to share my concerns about those who are looking for a fast-track route to success.

If you’re a low-patience, high-intensity fast-tracker, you may want to skip the uncomfortable, the mundane and the unglamorous, but in doing so you’ll inevitably miss out on so many rich experiences that will give you the solid foundations to become truly great at what you do. You might avoid what you see as the humdrum nature of slowly working your way to the top, but by racing on you’ll accumulate some large gaps in your skill set that will let you down later on.

The slower route, the way of the Tortoise, not only gives you the time to take note of the finer aspects of your career when they come along, but also prepares you for the high-pressure, high-profile job when you get it. To reach that level, you will have been on a tough personal journey, gaining a broader base of experience, a more graduated exposure to pressure and more time to develop your own methodology.

So, for me, being a Tortoise is both a more gratifying approach and more likely to provide true, lasting success by giving you the necessary tools to be really good at your chosen profession. My gradual journey to success gave me the ability and stamina to turn my passion into a lifelong career and, I believe, taught me some valuable lessons that I’d be lost without.

In the opening chapters of this book, I’ll be talking about the kinds of characteristics and values that we might associate with the Tortoise, from the core traits of loyalty, passion, positivity and generosity to a range of values that every Tortoise needs to work on and develop if they are to be successful.

I will also devote some time to looking at Hares and their very different set of attributes and values, such as impatience, impulsivity and overconfidence. This is not to say that such people cannot achieve success. Many Hares can be found leading industries and even countries, but success for Hares can often be short-lived, due to both their approach in attaining it and their behaviour once they have it. Although you’re probably not a Hare yourself if you’re reading this book, you’ll certainly be familiar with them – making promises, talking up their achievements, winging it and moving at the speed of light. Doing anything, in fact, but keeping their head down.

MY PERSONAL TORTOISE RACE

My friends and I only really discovered tennis at the age of thirteen, when a local club opened and gave priority access to junior players. While visiting with school, we all absolutely loved the place and afterwards spent a vast amount of our time there, all becoming competent players pretty quickly. We idolized the professional players we saw on TV, obsessively studying their matches and sleeping on the pavement outside Wimbledon every summer to buy tickets and see them in action.

Looking back, I now realize that none of us stood any chance whatsoever of becoming professionals. The players we idolized, and even many of our peers in local competitions, had been playing a lot of tennis from an incredibly young age. And here we were, only just getting to grips with the sport in our early teens and aspiring to compete professionally. Unbeknown to us, we were thinking like Hares.

There’s an entire debate about skill levels, talent, athletic ability and competitive spirit to be had here. Had any of us possessed a fair measure of each, it could have played a significant role in our dreams of turning pro. But, knowing what I know now, I realize how rare Hares are in elite sport. To make it to the top of most sports, you need to have been a Tortoise from a young age, to have been training your whole life. As Daniel Coyle writes about in his book The Talent Code, ‘making it’ in sport can often be attributed to the simple fact that you happen to live near a great coach, coaching programme or centre of excellence, which draws you in and nurtures you well – if only our tennis centre had opened ten years earlier! However, this is no tale of woe. I absolutely loved every minute of my sporting childhood. When I quickly realized I wasn’t at the level to make any money playing tennis, I still knew I’d make a career out of it another way.

I went on to study with the specific aim of becoming an expert in the physical training aspect of the game. I have to say that my academic qualifications were not optimal for working at the highest level of professional sport. I flunked science at school, which meant that Sports Science degrees were unavailable to me. Yet, I made the best of it, going on to study Leisure Management – half business, half sports science.

Unsurprisingly, leaving university with this degree did not throw open any doors in the world of elite sport. But I volunteered, pestered, observed and travelled to wherever the top athletes trained to network and learn. I worked for years in entry-level gym positions, cleaning machines and folding towels, but at the same time taking it all in and learning from the top trainers whom I encountered, who worked with professional tennis players.

Eventually (an important Tortoise word), I earned an opportunity to work with national-level players at the tennis centre where I’d first begun to play. Here, I spent my time figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and making plenty of mistakes.

What next? Well, I plateaued, that’s what. My work with the players became stagnant. I felt like I’d hit a ceiling of opportunity at the centre. I sensed I could easily let the next ten years of my life drift by in that job without getting anywhere.

One evening, I found myself watching the movie American Beauty. The lead character, Lester Burnham, becomes bored with his dead-end existence, so he reinvents himself as an edgy, pot-smoking go-getter. Sitting there, watching Lester, I had an epiphany – and not about smoking pot. It suddenly hit home with some force that I only had one life and I’d better go out, take a few risks and find a new direction. Only I could move my life in the way I wanted it to go.

That night, I took a dramatic decision to leave everything I knew behind and travel halfway around the globe to Australia. I wanted to gain exposure to some world-leading coaches and tennis players. With its long, sunny seasons and great outdoors culture, Australia had an exceptional tennis pedigree and many professionals, both upcoming and established, had opted to live and train there, attracted by the facilities and the skilled trainers who had also flocked down under.

A few days later, I quit my job and spent the next month preparing for my trip. I wrote to every Australian state tennis centre, as well as the Institute of Sport, again and again, asking to volunteer or simply to be allowed to observe their practices.

Although I hassled and hustled my way in, people in these Australian institutions were fantastic to me. Not only did I succeed in finding paid work – with Western Australia’s state tennis coach, Mark Taylor – I gained a huge amount of knowledge and experience. Arriving in Australia with just a few hundred pounds and a credit card, I managed to make my limited funds stretch for an entire year, working other paid jobs in between volunteering.

One of the stories that highlights my ambition to make a success of the trip was when I arrived in Perth and went to meet Mark Taylor, one of the people I’d been pestering. We hit it off very quickly and, as luck would have it, he needed some extra cover to fitness-train the kids on his programme. I began immediately and enjoyed a few months working at the State Tennis Centre in Western Australia. Mark was very good at his job and was soon headhunted for a bigger role over in Sydney, leaving me back in Perth with dwindling work.

A few weeks after Mark had begun his new job in Sydney, he opened his front door to find me standing there with my backpack. I thought he was the answer to all my questions about where my life was going next, and I hassled him for more work. Putting a good meal inside me and giving me a night on his couch, he managed to bundle me out