Sir Andy Murray’s coach on The Way of the Tortoise
A New Way of Being
Simon Mundie
4.8 • 523 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matt Little, former coach to Sir Andy Murray, shares lessons about The Way of the Tortoise. He explores the power of patience, consistency, and staying true to your values. This bitesize episode is all about enjoying the journey rather than rushing to the finish line.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sir Andy Murray may have retired, but Matt Little was still part of his coaching setup for the best part of two decades. |
| 0:15.9 | And Matt wrote a book called The Way of the Tortoise. |
| 0:18.8 | It's about living according to your values, |
| 0:21.5 | enjoying the journey and not being obsessed by racing to your goals too quickly. |
| 0:29.8 | I draw the example of famous fable of the hair and the tortoise. |
| 0:34.5 | Got your hairs in life and your tortoises in life. The hairs in life are people |
| 0:38.3 | who want to shoot to the top and achieve success very, very quickly. Those are the people we tend to |
| 0:44.7 | celebrate more in life at the moment. It's your 20-year-old driving a Lamborghini on Instagram, |
| 0:49.6 | rather than your 50-year-old, he's worked his way all the way up through the ranks to becoming |
| 0:54.2 | the CEO of a company. Why do you think society celebrates hairs more than tortoises? |
| 1:02.6 | I've got my theory, but I want to hear yours first. Well, hairs by their very nature, |
| 1:07.2 | I think, create waves. They create attention because they can be quite brash. They can be |
| 1:11.3 | quite attention seeking, quite selfish in a way. And so they can achieve great things. But also because |
| 1:18.5 | of their very nature, tend to crash and burn quite quickly having achieved those things. There are |
| 1:24.4 | some that manage to sustain, but most actually shoot to stardom and then |
| 1:30.1 | crash and burn, essentially, whereas the tortoise on the flip side kind of makes these slow, |
| 1:36.1 | steady gains, little progressions, week by week, day by day, year by year, and eventually |
| 1:41.3 | manages to achieve their goal. Which one's Andy Murray? I let people make their own mind up. No, no, no. I'm not letting you off with that. You'd have to ask him, but yeah, I want people to read the book and think, do you know what, there's a lot of hair in me? Or there's actually, you know, I am a tortoise. And I think it's interesting |
| 2:01.0 | as you read the book, who you would pick out in your own life as being hairs and tortoises |
| 2:05.7 | in your workplace, because it's quite fascinating once you've read the book to kind of see people |
| 2:11.6 | through that lens, just kind of figure out actually also, like you say, which one am I? And then |
| 2:17.4 | how do I fit in the world then how do I fit in the world |
... |
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