This book is a favorite of Bill Gates and Steve Kerr but it’s not about technology or basketball

November 10, 2026

In 1974, a Harvard tennis captain named Timothy Gallwey wrote a short book called The Inner Game of Tennis. It is still in print fifty years later. Bill Gates calls it one of the five best books he has ever read and wrote the foreword to the anniversary edition. Steve Kerr calls it his bible in the NBA. Pete Carroll handed it to his quarterbacks at USC. Itzhak Perlman recommended it to young violinists.

None of them were reading it for the backhand tips. The book is about something else: how people get in their own way when pursuing excellence, and how to stop.

What the book says

Gallwey noticed that his students played worse the harder they tried. They talked to themselves on every shot. Bend your knees. Watch the ball. That was terrible. They knew what to do, but the instructions got in the way of doing it.

He split the player into two parts. Self 1 is the voice that narrates, judges and gives orders. Self 2 is the part that actually hits the ball. Self 2 is capable of far more than what Self 1 believes. Most of the time, the job is to get Self 1 out of the way.

That is the whole idea. It applies to almost anything people care about doing well under pressure.

Performance is potential minus interference

Gallwey later wrote The Inner Game of Work and spent years consulting for companies like AT&T, Coca-Cola, Apple and IBM. He boiled his approach down to a simple formula. Performance equals potential minus interference.

Most companies try to raise performance by adding things. More training, more process, more targets. Gallwey’s formula points the other way. A team usually has more ability than it is using. Something is in the way. Fear of blame. Too many priorities. A boss who second-guesses every call. Remove the interference and performance rises on its own.

When a business is struggling, this is a useful first question. Not what do these people lack, but what is stopping them from doing what they already know how to do. Where is the interference?

Describe it, don’t judge it

Gallwey asked his tennis students to notice where the ball went without calling the shot good or bad. Just see it. The judgment, he found, made people tense and the tension made the next shot worse. Plain observation let them relax and adjust.

Bill Gates took this to Microsoft. He wrote that the book changed how he showed up at work and how he gave feedback. His summary: “We need to learn from our mistakes without obsessing over them.”

The same is true of a company’s numbers. A team that is punished for bad news learns to hide it. A team that can describe what happened without fear can fix it. The facts are more useful than the verdict.

Trust the preparation

Steve Kerr got the book from Chip Engelland, the San Antonio Spurs’ shooting coach, when Kerr was a bench player who worried about every shot. He read it twice, took notes, and still rereads it every offseason. He keeps copies in his office to give to players.

What Kerr took from it was simple. You do the work in practice. In the game, you stop thinking about mechanics and let the work show up. A shooter who is analyzing his elbow in the fourth quarter misses.

Leaders do the same thing to their teams. They prepare well, then hover over every decision. The hovering is interference. At some point the job is to trust the people and the preparation, and let them play.

Pick one thing to watch

Gallwey had a trick for quieting Self 1. Watch the seams on the ball as it spins. It gives the anxious mind a small, concrete job, and frees the rest of you to play.

In business, the equivalent is to fix attention on one observable fact. Not whether the quarter will be a disaster, but what this week’s orders were. Not whether the launch will work, but whether the first ten customers came back. Fear is about outcomes. Attention is about what is in front of you.

How a tennis book became executive coaching

The book’s largest effect on business came through one of Gallwey’s students. Sir John Whitmore was a British racing driver who trained with Gallwey in the United States. He brought the Inner Game to the UK and ran tennis and ski schools under Gallwey’s license.

Whitmore then took the ideas into companies. He helped develop and popularize the GROW model: Goal, Reality, Options, Will. It became one of the most widely used frameworks in executive coaching. Its premise comes straight from Gallwey. The coach does not give the answer. The coach asks questions that help the person see the situation clearly and find their own way through it.

So when a manager today sits down with a coach and is asked what they want, what is really happening and what they could do about it, they are using a method that started on a tennis court in the 1970s.

Getting out of your own way

The Inner Game of Tennis lasts because the problem it describes never goes away. Capable people, under pressure, interfere with themselves. They judge instead of observe. They think when they should act. They worry about outcomes instead of watching the ball.

Gates read it as a book about feedback. Kerr read it as a book about trust. Whitmore read it as a book about coaching. All three were reading the same idea. Most of the work is removing what is in the way.