Andre Agassi has a love affair with learning.
An eighth-grade drop-out, Agassi has devoted much of his post-tennis career to the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in his native Las Vegas.
More: One-On-One With Andre Agassi
The Hall of Famer sat down with the Harvard Business Review to discuss tennis, learning and life in Life's Work: An Interview with Andre Agassi.
Agassi and Pete Sampras had a 34-match rivalry that gave him insight into his strengths and weaknesses. Agassi tells HBR:
A great rival is like a mirror. You have to look at yourself, acknowledge where you fall short, make adjustments, and nurture the areas where you overachieve. There were times my rivals brought out the best in me; there were times they brought out the worst. They probably helped me win things I never would have otherwise; they also cost me titles. I don’t know how you quantify what it would have been like without a rival like Pete Sampras. I would have won more. But I think I would have been worse without him.
On his ability to create comebacks:
It’s about recognizing that regardless of what the score is, the most important point is that next point. If you can get yourself into that state of mind, you just are who you are. People give you more credit for coming back than they do for blowing somebody out, but both require the same skill set. After a blowout, nobody says, “Wow, how strong and focused you are.” But you really are.
On how elite players are driven by the quest for "perfectionism" Agassi tells HBR:
You need an arsenal of tools that give you an advantage over the field. It helps to have two or three possible game plans, especially in those matches when you’ve got to figure out a way to win. When you get on the court, it’s all about what you’ve done leading up to that day—whether you’ve done your homework, prepared right, trained hard enough, put enough fluids in your body. You have to do all those things a little bit better than the person you’ll be measured against. It’s really perfectionism.
On the difference between wife Steffi Graf's skill set and his own:
She had an athleticism over her peers that was quite a luxury. When she was in full form, she was just a horse that wasn’t going to be caught. For me, it wasn’t like that. I couldn’t just steamroll past people because I was such an athlete or talented in all these different ways. I had a couple of strengths, but I had to out-think everybody and implement my strategies one piece at a time, like a puzzle. That’s more exhausting, and you don’t get the results as consistently.
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