What does the world ask of me?
This is a weird question. How easy you find it to answer depends on who you are.
I recently read Andre Agassi’s gutting memoir Open, and this question is the stage setting of his first four decades.
So, what did the world ask of Andre Agassi?
The world of Andre Agassi—encompassing his demanding father, the hyper-competitive world of youth tennis, an endless string of coaches and supporters, the media, and the Association of Tennis Professionals—asked that he be the number one tennis player in the world.
But there was a second question lurking in Agassi’s life.
What did Andre Agassi ask of himself?
The wrenching heart of the memoir is that Agassi hated tennis. He says this over and over again to anyone he feels will listen. Tennis was forced on Agassi by a maniacal father, bent on forging great tennis players out of his children. Tennis was forced on him by the Bollettieri and his domineering academy. Tennis was forced on Agassi, in short, by the world.
Certainly, Agassi had some satisfaction in his early career—fame and money are clearly part of that. But he was also rudderless.
And he hadn’t answered that second question.
What was he asking of himself? Was being the number one tennis player in world something that he wanted, or that the world wanted?
The last, very satisfying chunk of the book finds Agassi attempting to answer this question. He comes up with two answers that are stunning in their simplicity.
So, what did he demand of himself? That he support his family and the school for disadvantaged kids he started in Las Vegas.
There’s no revelation there, really. The real revelation is that Agassi’s resurgent success in the last few years of his career has more to do with what Agassi wanted of himself—not what the world wanted of him.
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What does the world ask of me?
What’s fascinating for me about Agassi’s memoir is that the world had a response when he asked it this question.
The world, meaning the constellation of influences that come at us from outside, is not usually so direct with this answer.
Agassi’s father is a tragic gift—a man who demanded excellence in tennis from a little kid, who had the grit and resilience to somehow achieve his father’s dreams and more.
Many people, me included, lack such explicit direction from “the world.”
In fact, there’s an intimidating political dimension to the question.
The constellation of influences that surround us does not always have our “best interest” in mind—or even have any idea what this “best interest” is. (Nor, I should add, necessarily do we.)
Politics, media, advertising, multinational corporations—they are all constantly asking things of us, providing direction on how we ought to think, to behave, to act.
There’s a clear danger—not always a physical one, but more of a moral or spiritual danger—to not question that direction. I know that I can certainly do a better job fending off this external direction, and work on answering its opposite:
What do I ask of myself?
Taylor Coe 