How to Improve Anything

Coaching, Control, and the Business of Getting Better

In the previous post, I confessed: I am not good at pickleball.
It’s not very different from sports I’m more used to – squash, tennis, badminton, and ping pong – but it’s also not exactly the same. It requires different skills – just different enough to have a bit of a learning curve. (Not helping here is the fact that the racket sport I’m best at – squash – is least like pickleball.)

But what struck me, more than the game itself, was how specific and learnable improvement turned out to be. My serve was OK. My returns were really bad. But when I worked on just one thing – controlling my returns – and got feedback from someone just slightly ahead of me, I got better. Fast.

This post is about what that actually takes. Not just in sport, but in business. In IP development. In trust-building. In leadership. In life.

Improvement isn’t magic. It’s design.

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1. The Bounce Is Never What You Expect

The first surprise about pickleball is how unpredictable the bounce is.
It’s not like tennis. It’s not like table tennis. You hit, and suddenly the ball dies in the air, or spins backward, or lands in exactly the wrong place with no warning.

I kept swinging as if I were playing tennis.
And the ball kept doing something else.

It reminded me of what happens when a company enters China after succeeding in Singapore. Or when a skilled translator tries to write original content for the first time. Or when a CEO trained in Western leadership suddenly has to manage a Southeast Asian team.

You think your instincts will carry over.
They won’t. Not directly.
You need to recalibrate.

Improvement begins with that realization:
“What I already know isn’t useless. But it isn’t enough.”