"Everyone wants a great career, but don’t miss your life on the way to work": McEnroe returns to Stanford for commitment speech

John McEnroe is mostly known for his tennis career but the American recently went to Stanford to give a commitment speech where he drew parallels between tennis and any other career.

A tennis career is a very interesting career because in many ways you push everything in favour of it. Many players talked about the illusion that a tennis career is this fantastic and luxurious thing where you travel around the world. The latter part is true but most of the time you're on a tennis court, not really exploring the place where you're at.

It's a career of sacrifice and while many are, it's quite restrictive making you miss much of life. That's what McEnroe talked about in the speech urging those attending to don't miss out on life while building their career.

His speec had some good highlights:

“Absolutely amazing things are going to happen to you that you can’t possibly fathom right now, because just like I was at your age, you’re probably hyper focused on your career. If someone had told me all those years ago when I was leaving Stanford that I would one day get guitar lessons from the late, great Eddie Van Halen, or that most of you would know me not from tennis, but from a sitcom about an Indian-American girl on Netflix, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy, and what’s Netflix?’”

He also added:

“Everyone wants a great career, but don’t miss your life on the way to work. Work-life balance may seem impossible, but it’s worth pursuing. It took me a long time to learn that lesson. If your mentality is, ‘If it’s not success, then it’s failure’, your life will be really, really hard. Success gives us another chance to keep plugging away at what we love to do. That’s all it really is.”