I’ve been a little stunned—and delighted—by the sudden popularity of one of my favorite pastimes, a game with a funny name and strange terminology, such as, “dink,” “kitchen,” and “skinny singles.”

Largely confined to the Pacific Northwest for decades, it has now emerged as America’s fastest-growing sport.

I’m talking about pickleball.

It’s best described as a mash up of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. And if you haven’t heard of it, I expect you soon will.

I’ve been a “Pickler,” as people obsessed with the game like me are known, for more than 50 years.

And if you and your family are bored and looking for something to do this summer, I encourage you to become one too.

Boredom was what got this sport started in 1965.

Three dads living on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, came home one summer evening to find their children complaining that there was nothing for them to do. So, they found a net, a Wiffle ball, some ping-pong paddles, and created a game on an old badminton court that the entire family could play together.

It was a hit.

Over the next year, the three friends worked together to develop a set of rules, formalize the court layout, and introduce a larger plywood paddle that was good for striking the ball. And they decided to call it pickleball. (The name’s origins remain a matter of debate. Some believe it was named after a dog. Others say it’s a reference to a “pickle boat,” a thrown together boat made from the leftover rowers in crew races. I don’t know. I prefer to just play the game and stay out of the fray.)

Meanwhile, word slowly spread in Seattle of this odd new pastime.

My dad was friends with the game’s inventors, Joel Pritchard, a state legislator and later Washington’s lieutenant governor, Barney McCallum, and Bill Bell. He learned about their creation and by the late 1960s, he got inspired to build a pickleball court at our house. I’ve been playing ever since.

At the time, the pickleball community was very small. I doubt there were more than a thousand people in the Seattle area who had ever seen the sport when my family picked it up. And I don’t think anyone expected it would ever become a national phenomenon.

Today, there are more than 4.8 million players nationwide, a growth of nearly 40 percent over the last two years. And I expect it will only get bigger. (I knew things had gotten serious for pickleball when I opened up The Economist and found a story about the game’s newfound fame.)

I don’t know exactly what’s driven this recent surge in interest in pickleball, but I think the fact that it’s so easy to play is one big reason. People like to say a lot of sports—even hard ones like golf—are “easy to play,” but in the case of pickleball, it’s true. Everyone from the super young to the super old can take part. It takes minutes to learn the basics, games are short, and all you need is a net, paddle, and ball to get started. It doesn’t take much skill to hit the ball, either, because it doesn’t move as fast as a tennis ball. The best thing about pickleball, however, is that it’s just super fun.

I look forward to playing a pickleball game with friends and family at least once a week and more often during the summer. I’m also a lifelong tennis player, and for me, the games complement one another. Pickleball has helped me become a better tennis player and tennis has done the same for my pickleball game.

Still, I’ve spent a lot of time explaining and defending pickleball to newcomers, especially tennis players. Many people are confused by the unfamiliar court and a little skeptical of the strange terminology. There’s an area of the court within 7 feet on either side of the net called “the kitchen” or non-volley zone. And a key to being a top player is to master something called the “dink shot,” a soft shot that arcs over the net and lands within the opposing team’s kitchen. While playing doubles is most popular, singles games, including a version played crosscourt, called “skinny singles,” is another option.

Despite its silly terms and funny name, pickleball is actually quite a sophisticated game. I enjoy watching YouTube videos where I can learn about tactics and strategies from the best players. It’s amazing to see pros like Ben Johns play the game. Given all the rage about pickleball, I expect someday soon it may end up as an exhibition sport at the Olympics.

Nearly everyone in my family plays and we’ve had great fun in matches against one another over the years. We’ve all played so much that we can sometimes get very competitive. If we ever lose a game to visiting players, we’re always a little surprised and vow to take the next match more seriously.

Win or lose, I can’t think of a better way to spend a summer day than as a Pickler.

If you decide to give pickleball a try, I hope it brings you as much joy as it has my family and me.

I’ve started every day since February or March doing the same thing. Not long after I wake up, I grab my phone or laptop and solve Wordle, the puzzle where you get six chances to guess a five-letter English word. Then I do the variations where you guess four words (that’s called Quordle) and eight words (that’s called Octordle). Finally, I check my email to see how I stacked up against the friends and family who share my obsession.

Unlike some time sinks, Wordle and the other puzzles are a great way to stay connected with people, because they’re the same for everyone. Every day you can ask your fellow Wordle fans, “Are you ready to discuss it? If you haven’t done it, I’m not going to say a thing, because I could spoil it just by telling you one word was especially easy or hard.” And by seeing who sends out their scores first, we know who got up earlier and who maybe stayed up too late the night before.

Since debuting last year, Wordle has become a huge hit. Its creator, Josh Wardle, was on TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2022. Its famous fans include Vice President Kamala Harris, Jimmy Fallon, and Questlove. And it’s no longer limited to English—this site says it offers Wordles in 64 languages, including natural languages as well as made-up ones from Star Trek and Lord of the Rings. (I consider myself a nerd, but anyone who can solve a Wordle in Klingon or Elvish is on a whole other level.)

If you’ve played Wordle, you know how important it is to make your first guess strategically. I like to start with a word that contains lots of vowels, like AUDIO or OUNCE. ADIEU is a good one too.

From there, it’s a little like doing a Sudoku, where there’s a chain of logic. It helps to think about which consonants can go next to each other. I like to look for C and H, for example, or S and L. Then the consonants that are almost never paired with others—like Q, V, X, and Z—really jump out.

It’s easy to get fooled by words that start with a vowel. I have to remind myself, “That vowel could be at the start or the end of the word.” When I have two vowels, I like to try them in the second and fourth positions, like in CAGED.

Sometimes the answers will be pretty obscure words you never use in real life. I remember one that was SMITE, a word I only know because I read the Bible. I got DUCHY once because I’ve read a lot of English literature. Then there’s tricky answers you just have to watch out for, like words where there’s no A, E, I, O, or U. That one threw me until I realized it had to have a Y—the answer was TRYST.

One time, I had the last four letters of a word: A-S-T-Y. I just needed the first letter, but I was down to my final guess. Thinking of obscure words, I tried PASTY. But I’d forgotten one of the cardinal rules of Wordle: Letters can be used more than once. The answer was TASTY. I lost, thanks to that lousy double T. Lesson learned.

The worst thing is when you have four of the five letters—IGHT for instance—and the answer could be LIGHT, TIGHT, FIGHT, SIGHT, RIGHT, and so on. It’s just a matter of luck whether you get the correct word before you run out of guesses. It’s especially frustrating when you’re doing Quordle or Octordle, because all you’re doing is just eliminating one letter with each guess. You’re not adding any new information for the other words.

I usually solve the Wordle within four guesses, sometimes five. On Octordle, I once got a 10 while I was using the practice mode, but I’ve never done that well in the daily competition. The nice thing about the daily competition is that it lets you play only once every 24 hours—in the practice mode, you can play for as long as you want, which makes it super-easy to waste time. I’m the kind of person who will play an addictive game over and over if I give myself the chance.

As much as I love Wordle, Quordle, and Octordle, the version I’ve spent the most time thinking about is Nerdle. Instead of a word, you’re trying to solve an equation, and instead of letters, you’re guessing digits (1 through 9) and operators (+, -, x, and /). You get six chances to put them in the right order by thinking through all the possible cases. As a math-oriented person, I’m probably better at Nerdle than the word-related versions, though I don’t have as many friends and family members who like to do it.

Do you play Wordle, Nerdle, or any of the other variations? If so, feel free to share your favorite starting words and strategies in the comments section below.

When Roger Federer announced his retirement, I thought of a fascinating insight he once gave me into his playing style. One of the keys to his success, he told me, is his incredible ability to keep his cool and remain calm.

Anyone who saw Roger play knows what he meant. When he got down, he knew he might need to push himself a little more, but he never worried too much or got too down on himself. And when he won a point, he didn’t waste a lot of energy congratulating himself. His style was the opposite of someone like John McEnroe, who showed all of his emotions and then some.

I was glad to hear Roger talk about that element of his game, because it’s something I’ve been trying to incorporate in my own way since the mid-70s, when I first came across Timothy Gallwey’s groundbreaking book The Inner Game of Tennis. It’s the best book on tennis that I have ever read, and its profound advice applies to many other parts of life. I still give it to friends today.

Inner Game was published in 1974 and was a big hit. Gallwey, a successful tennis coach based in southern California, introduced the idea that tennis is composed of two distinct games. There’s the outer game, which is the mechanical part—how you hold the racket, how you keep your arm level on your backhand, and so on. It’s the part that most coaches and players tend to focus on.

Gallwey acknowledged the importance of the outer game, but what he was really interested in, and what he thought was missing from most people’s approach, was the inner game. “This is the game that takes place in the mind of the player,” he wrote. Unlike the outer game, where your opponent is the person on the other side of the net, the inner game “is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.”

That idea resonated with me so well that I read the book several times, which is unusual for me. Before I read it, in just about every match I would say to myself at some point: "I’m so mad that I missed that shot. I’m so bad at this." That negative reinforcement would linger, so during the next point, I was still thinking about that bad shot. Gallwey presented ways of letting go of those negative feelings and getting out of your own way so you could move on to the next point.

Gallwey had one particular insight that seems crazy the first time you hear it. “The secret to winning any game,” he wrote, “lies in not trying too hard.”

How could you expect to win by not trying too hard? “When a tennis player is ‘in the zone,’ he’s not thinking about how, when, or even where to hit the ball,” Gallwey wrote. “He’s not trying to hit the ball, and after the shot he doesn’t think about how badly or how well he made contact. The ball seems to get hit through a process which doesn’t require thought.” (Gallwey was writing at a time when it was still common to use the word “he” to refer to everyone.)

The inner game is really about your state of mind. Is it helping you or hurting you? For most of us, it’s too easy to slip into self-criticism, which then inhibits our performance even more. We need to learn from our mistakes without obsessing over them.

Gallwey and his readers quickly realized that the inner game wasn’t just about tennis. He went on to publish similar books about golf, skiing, music, and even the workplace: He created a consulting business that caters to Fortune 500 companies.

Even though I stopped playing tennis in my 20s so I could focus on Microsoft and didn’t start again until my forties, Gallwey’s insights subtly affected how I showed up at work. For example, although I’m a big believer in being critical of myself and objective about my own performance, I try to do it the Gallwey way: in a constructive fashion that hopefully improves my performance.

And although I’m not always perfect at it, I try to manage teams the same way. For example, years ago, there was an incident where a team at Microsoft discovered a bug in a piece of software they had already shipped to stores. (This was back when software was sold on discs.) They would have to recall the software, at significant cost to the company. When they told me the bad news, they were really beating themselves up. I told them, “I’m glad you’re admitting that you need to replace the discs. Today you lost a lot of money. Tomorrow, come in and try to do better. And let’s figure out what allowed that bug to make it into the product so it doesn’t happen again.”

Tennis has evolved over the years. The best players in the world today play a very different style from the champions of 50 years ago. But The Inner Game of Tennis is just as relevant today as it was in 1974. Even as the outer game has changed, the inner game has remained the same.

When it comes to books, it’s pretty rare that I get intimidated. I read all kinds of books, including ones that only the harshest college professors would assign. And yet I must admit that for many years I steered clear of anything by David Foster Wallace. I often heard super literate friends talking in glowing terms about his books and essays. I even put a copy of his tour de force Infinite Jest on my nightstand at one point, but I just never got around to reading it.

I’m happy to report that has now changed. It started last year when I watched “The End of the Tour,” a great movie with Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg that takes place when Wallace was on the road somewhat reluctantly promoting Infinite Jest. The movie made Wallace seem so damn interesting, and it really humanized him for me. In addition to shedding light on the nature of his literary genius, it also foreshadows the depression that led him to commit suicide in 2008. Recently, I also watched an amazing video of Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It is one of the most moving speeches I’ve heard in a long time.  

Then this past May, Library of America came out with String Theory, a short volume of Wallace’s essays on tennis. The book gave me the perfect opportunity to give Wallace a try, because I really enjoy tennis. I gave up tennis when I got fanatical about Microsoft. (During those intense years, my only exercise was running around the office and jumping up and down.) I’m now back on the court at least once a week and have built a pretty solid game for a 61-year old who can’t hit a lot of winners from the baseline.

I would say to anyone who likes tennis as much as I do, you have to read String Theory. You’ll take away insights that go way beyond what you get by reading the typical article in a tennis magazine or listening to a color commentator on TV. In this respect, the book reminded me of John McPhee’s classic Levels of the Game, about Arthur Ashe’s 1968 U.S. Open victory, and The Blind Side, Michael Lewis’s brilliant book about the evolution of the game of football.

Wallace is insightful about the sport partly because he was a very good junior player when he was growing up in the late ’70s, using his brilliant math mind to understand and play all the angles on the court. His personal experience gave him a lasting appreciation for the physical and mental gifts you need to be truly great.

As much as I loved the book for its insights on the game, I loved it just as much for the writing itself. I now understand why people talk about David Foster Wallace with the same kind of awe that tennis fans use to talk about a Roger Federer or Serena Williams. Wallace’s ability to use language is mind-blowing. He’s an artist who approaches a canvas with the exact same oil paints everyone before him has used and then applies them in breathtaking new and creative ways.

The first thing you have to get used to with Wallace is his non-linear expository style. You just have no idea where Wallace’s mind or story will go next, like a great tennis player who never telegraphs a shot. An essay that starts out describing his childhood tennis competitions in Illinois will flow into fascinating eddies on calculus, geometry, meteorology, and engineering. Fortunately, almost all of his narrative digressions are both fascinating and surprisingly easy to follow, even when Wallace uses lots of footnotes. (Even some of the footnotes have footnotes!)

When I was putting off reading Wallace, I assumed his writing would be pretentious. I was wrong. Yes, there are lots of words you’ll have to look up online. But even with all the SAT words, Wallace just doesn’t sound like he’s trying to prove he went to a fancy college. For every reference to Aquinas or Wagner, there’s a reference to Beavis or Danny DeVito.

I came away with the sense that Wallace felt compelled to bend language like a metal spoon not to show off his supernatural ability but simply to allow him to capture all the keen observations his mind was constantly making. It’s almost impossible to illustrate this idea with a single passage of his writing—so I encourage you to pick up String Theory or one of his other books and see for yourself. But I can give you at least a hint of what I’m talking about. Here’s a passage from a review of Tracy Austin’s memoir, which was less about the book than about our unrealistic expectations of our sports heroes: 

Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true technē so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.

With the fancy words, English-major allusions, and winding sentences, it’s the opposite of the elegantly simple language of Hemingway. But it’s no less articulate, perceptive, truthful, or profound. That’s why I’m now on a big Wallace kick. I still haven’t read Infinite Jest, at a whopping 1,079 pages, but I know I’ll get to it. Because this troubled genius, who died way too young, was the real deal.

After years of giving speeches, I am usually pretty comfortable appearing in public. But this past weekend I did something in front of a crowd that made me a little nervous: I played tennis.

The setting was the fourth Match for Africa, a fundraiser for the Roger Federer Foundation. Roger and I had met for the first time about six weeks earlier, when he was playing the Indian Wells tournament in California. He asked me to be his partner in a doubles match at Seattle’s KeyArena versus John Isner, who is ranked in the top 25 worldwide, and another Seattleite, Mike McCready from the band Pearl Jam.

It was a no-brainer. I’m a huge fan of Roger’s, so the chance to play tennis with him was a dream come true. More importantly, it was a great opportunity to shine a light on the terrific philanthropic work that he and his family are doing.

I just had to make sure I didn’t screw it up.

I play a lot of tennis, but it is one thing to practice drills with your coach or go up against a friend. It is another to play in front of 16,000 people in a basketball arena. If you think too much or let your muscles tense up, you end up hitting bad shots, which makes you more tense, and suddenly you’re stuck in a vicious cycle. No one wants to watch a match where two of the players keep double-faulting and returning serves into the net. So last week I put in a lot of practice time. Mike told me he did the same thing.

At the arena, the atmosphere was intense. The crowd was buzzing. Mike played an amazing version of the National Anthem on guitar. When the emcee introduced me, I jogged out and nearly got singed by a big flamethrower. (You can watch the whole event on Facebook.)

During the match, I tried to just stay focused on what I was doing. Keep your arm up on your serve. I settled down after I got my first one in. It definitely helped that Roger and John put on a great show. They kept the ball in play, and sometimes it seemed like their volleys would last forever. I had to resist the temptation to just sit back and watch them work. I knew they were phenomenal athletes from watching them on TV and from the stands, but up close I got a new understanding of their grace and power.

Even though John and Roger took it easy on us amateurs, they naturally hit the ball with a lot of spin. Mike and I adopted similar survival strategies: Spend a lot of time at the net. A ball with lots of spin on it is hard to return if you’re standing back toward the baseline. Up at the net, you at least stand a chance. I managed to hit one winner against John that probably would’ve gone out of bounds if he had let it go. 

John sent one hard serve my way. It is hard to describe being on the receiving end of a tennis ball going 123 mph. I had no time to get my racket around. I barely saw the ball.

Even John’s softer shots were hard to return. He is 6 feet 10, so he tends to hit the ball down, which makes it bounce a lot higher than I am used to.

Roger and I won the match, and Roger won a singles exhibition against John, but the scores were beside the point. The event raised more than $2 million for Roger’s foundation. It is an impressive organization that is partnering with local NGOs in six countries in southern Africa to improve early learning and basic education there. And in Roger’s home country of Switzerland, they are working to expand access to extracurricular activities for low-income children. Roger is learning deeply about the issues and has put together a very capable team. They are well on their way to reaching their goal of benefiting 1 million children by the end of next year.

Thanks to Roger, John, Mike, and everyone who came out to the event. It was fun to check an item off my bucket list and help a great cause too.