Oh, I’d watched it here and there, before. I knew five tennis players: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams, and Naomi Osaka. I watched the finals of the biggest tournaments, always at my husband’s prompting. But something changed during the 2020 US Open, on the men’s side—Nadal and Federer weren’t playing, and Djokovic got defaulted for that line judge thing. Suddenly, the field was wide open, and we would have a new Grand Slam champion outside the “Big 3” for the first time in a number of years, and one of the younger guys, almost certainly…so the energy was suddenly frantic. Shapovalov almost vibrated out of his skin in the quarterfinals, he was bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Sucked in by the drama, I started watching it by myself, no husband to be found. I collected a whole array of favorites, and I knew all their head-to-heads, all their r/tennis memes, all of it. 

In that time, I started watching Daniil Medvedev, who the year before had famously trolled his way to the final (where he lost) and somehow managed to turn the unruly New York crowd that had been booing him earlier in the week into his biggest fans. Medvedev is 6’6”, and his game is weird. There’s really nothing beautiful about it. When he hits a forehand, his racquet ends up wrapped around his neck. When he hits a backhand, he sometimes folds in on himself like one of those plastic donkey toys held up by elastic bands that collapses when you push the button underneath it. His fellow players call him “octopus” and “spider”; Twitter calls him Squidward; I call him Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man. His game is absurd nonsense that commentators often seem to despise because it wouldn’t work for anyone on the planet except him. At his best, he is a wall, a confounding force of nature that renders his opponents frustrated and confused. Peak Meddy is inevitable as the tide.
 
Naturally, he is my favorite player.
 
This year he won the US Open against world #1 and arguably the best player of all time, Novak Djokovic, causing me to very nearly burst into tears and also to hurl a pillow across the room in a fit of joy. My dog was not amused.

After this victory, I read an old interview with his coach, Gilles Cervara, which said this:

Cervara explains that Medvedev does have ambitions to reach the top of the rankings. But it’s not that the 25-year-old is making that a particular goal; it’s simply that his results are naturally taking him in that direction.
“When we worked together, we were both unsure if he could get to this level,” Cervara reflected. “He’s not saying, ‘I want to win this tournament and be at this level.’ He’s saying, ‘I want to be the best I can be,’ whether it’s in the next practice session or on the next point. These are the small details that bring results.”
 

This struck me hard. It’s how I think of my career, too. I am not someone who defines “achievement” goals. There’s an obvious reason for this: Divergent catapulted me through a lot of career milestones very quickly, God bless it, when I was too young to have even articulated to myself what I wanted beyond “book on shelf in bookstore, please.” What that means is that I know what it feels like to reach a lot of very specific external goals—and I know that the feeling, for me, was a confusing mess of joy and profound fear, and I know that reaching them didn’t fix all the things in me that I was struggling with, didn’t correct low self regard or heal anxiety or solve self doubt. So while I appreciate the many good things that have come my way, and I wouldn’t trade them…they have limits. And I have felt the very edges of them.
 

The sudden absence of goals was jarring for me, at first, like stepping into an anechoic chamber only to discover that in that profound silence you are the only thing that makes noise. Your heartbeat. Your lungs. Your gurgling stomach—

your hunger.
 

I am no longer interested in goals, if I here define “goals” as the clear articulation of a theoretically achievable aim. Hunger, though—that interests me.
 

The Cervara quote tells us that Daniil Medvedev, world #2, Fifa-playing skinny nerd man, first of his generation to beat one of the Big 3 in a Grand Slam final, focuses not on achievements but on improvement. If you improve, the logic goes, the achievements will come—not always in the scoreline, but in the moment. A point, a game. One match, and then the next one. It’s not quite a “goal” because it’s not something he can ever reach. Instead, it’s a commitment to constant striving.
 

If you’ve ever watched Medvedev, you know he barely celebrates on court. He won the ATP Finals tournament last year and greeted his victory with a shrug. Even his US Open win involved a seemingly calculated “dead fish” maneuver (something from Fifa, I don’t know) rather than a sincere outpouring of relief and joy. And in interviews, he and Gilles are both very nonchalant about things. “Does this US Open win change things for you?” No. “Did you approach the match with Djokovic differently than other matches?” No. “Do you feel pressure now that you’ve won a Grand Slam?” No. Both men are always focused on the same thing today as they were yesterday as they were years ago, when neither of them was sure how good Medvedev could even get at tennis: growth. Striving. Hunger.
 

At the start of this year I saved a quote from Nietzsche in my phone. Not because I was like, reading Nietzsche—but because I was reading GRIT by Angela Duckworth, and she quoted Nietzsche. Here, just read it:
 

“Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted....They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it...because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
 

There’s a lot to unpack there, but damn, the end of it: they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.
 

If you ask Meddy about his game, he’ll probably tell you his main goal at any given time is to get the ball in the court. I’ve heard him say it several times. Which sounds like a joke, maybe, but it’s also, somehow, brilliant. And you can see it in his game—at any given time, he just does his best to get the ball in the court, sometimes twisting his entire body into knots, sometimes sliding farther than you’d think a giant man could slide without breaking in half. He does it one moment, and then the next. Doing the little things well, and not fixating on the dazzling whole.
 

Writing books is not about the dazzling whole. It’s about letting go of the dazzling whole, over and over again. Your idea of the book before you started writing—it’s not worth much to you once you get going. It’ll hang over you as you work, taunting you, because nothing you’re making will measure up to what you might have made. Or it’ll make you incapable of seeing the strongest parts of your work, the inspired parts that came out of nowhere, the unintentional, accidental, instinctual parts that are worth saving.
 

The business of writing books isn’t about the dazzling whole, either. Bestseller lists and TV appearances and movie adaptations and starred reviews and awards—they aren’t things you can control. They rely on two things: a complex system of publisher support and bookseller support that primes your book for success, and timing. You can influence those things, but you can’t control them. And even if they come to you once, they may never come again. They’re wonderful, but ephemeral. Dazzling but insubstantial. They won’t sustain you in the long term.
 

So shed them like old skin. Let something new emerge. Former Cubs manager Joe Maddon used to say “be present, not perfect.” He’s right. Writing books happens line by line, a career is built book by book, so be in the midst of both.
 

Hot take: stop dreaming so much. Emphasis on the “so much.” Dreams are wonderful and they can guide you and make you believe…but God, let them go when they’re no longer useful. Stop dreaming, and hunger instead. Find the goal that can never be reached; find the craving that drives you. Be there in your writing, in your life; be honest with yourself about what you have, about what you ought to make of it instead of the perfect thing it can never be. If you do that, you will get somewhere you never thought of. You’ll get somewhere that your work led you without you even knowing it. “It’s simply that his results are naturally taking him in this direction.”
 

“Work, work, it takes work. Work, work, tons of work,” is currently my favorite quote, spoken by Stefanos Tsitsipas, men’s tennis world #4, in a low moment, to motivate himself to perform better. I say it to myself almost daily. I say it when things don’t go my way and I get morose about the future. Work, work, lots of work—work happens right now, in the moment, in this sentence, and god, God, I love to do it, I really fucking do. If I do it now, if I do it over and over again, I’ll grow, like a house plant stretching toward a window, so slowly the naked eye can’t see it until the vine is clinging to the glass.