Open: An autobiography by Andre Agassi

"An Outlier's life Opened'"

Andre Agassi is an outlier. His autobiography ‘Open’ appears to be a frank and honest narrative from the heart of champion. Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers) would be glad to read this - it substantiates a lot of what Malcolm has wrote on what creates outliers.

I don’t usually read autobiographies - so it is difficult for me to compare this with others. Nevertheless I would not hesitate to recommend this book to readers - it is inspirational and has many lessons for all professionals. What does it take to be successful and then how do you handle success? Agassi’s life is a lesson to all of us.

It is so surprising that the media initially highlighted Agassi’s confession of his ‘drug experience’ when the book was published. However, thankfully that is only a few pages and in no way is the important part of this book. Everybody makes mistakes and hopefully Andre got his ‘catharsis’ by the confession. But there are much more important insights one can learn from this book. I would invite all to read this and find out for yourselves.

The best confession that I liked is when Agassi says in the last page of the book that he ‘was late in discovering the magic of books’ and that is what he would put near the top of his list on what he would want his children to avoid. I wonder why none of the media quoted this?