rcmnd

The Inner Game of TennisBook

by Timothy Gallwey

Who uses, recommends or left The Inner Game of Tennis, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

3 people

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, author of the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-host of the Animal Spirits podcast.
lovedaffiliate link

The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey I love books like this with a simple message using sports as an analogy for other aspects of life.

His annual round-up of the best books he read that year; every book title on the page links to Amazon through his own affiliate tag (amzn.to -> tag=aweaofcomsen-20).

2025-12-21·awealthofcommonsense.com ↗

Co-founder of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation; publishes book reviews and essays at Gates Notes.
liked

But The Inner Game of Tennis is just as relevant today as it was in 1974.

Gates writes about the tennis book he first read in the mid-1970s.

2022-11-21·gatesnotes.com ↗

Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin; writes at arslan.io.
mixed

I'm mixed on this book. It doesn't really offer actionable exercises, and the Self 1 and Self 2 framing didn't fully convince me.

His year-end post listing and reviewing every book and magazine he finished in 2025.

2025-12-26·arslan.io ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.