The Circle
1. THE MOMENT
George arrived just after finishing soccer training.
The dojo sits in one part of the space. The room opposite is simple and intentional. Two chairs where I often sit in conversation with the boys. The lighting low.
It’s a place that sits slightly apart from the noise of school and home.
I have known George since he was thirteen. He is nineteen now, training as a goalkeeper with Melbourne Victory and about to leave for Columbia University in New York to begin college. Some sessions are around his movement, some are recovery, and sometimes we simply sit and talk.
This afternoon, we were talking about one of the younger boys in the program, whom George happens to tutor in maths. Somehow, we got onto mathematics itself, and George, who studies more advanced maths, started describing a certain type of word. A word, he said, for something you approach but never reach.
He began with something simple.
Finding the area of a square is straightforward, he said. Length multiplied by width. Exact. Final.
But circles are different.
To calculate the area of a circle, you use π, a number that never truly ends. An infinite sequence of digits that never completely resolves.
Mathematicians approximate the area of a circle by filling it with smaller and smaller rectangles. As those rectangles shrink, the estimate gets closer and closer to the true area. But it never becomes perfect. There is always another decimal place. Another smaller gap.
George paused.
“Maybe people are more like circles than squares.”
2. THE PATTERN
He kept going. The way he does when something has caught hold of him.
In sport, he said, the difference is in the small things. The habits people don’t see. The extra effort. The accountability you hold yourself to when no one’s watching.
“Some people see two squares in a circle and call it close enough. But some people keep finding as many squares as they can.”
He talked about how far you’re willing to take something. It depends on how many doors you’re willing to open. At school, he said, you stop early. You learn the formula. You get the mark. But you never really learn the why or the how or why that thing is there in the first place.
And then he found the word.
An asymptote. A line that a graph approaches forever but never quite touches.
Your journey toward it isn’t linear, he said. It goes up and down. It depends on what it is. But the theory holds. As you approach infinity, your value approaches that line.
Most boys his age are handed clean edges. You’re talented, or you’re not. You made the team, or you didn’t. The world draws squares around them and calls it clarity.
George was describing something harder to hold. That you keep getting closer, and you never fully arrive, and that this isn’t failure.
3. THE REFLECTION
These kinds of conversations only happen over time. Over the years, George and I have trained, talked, struggled, laughed, reflected, and slowly watched things change.
I did not teach George this. He arrived at it himself. Which is the thing I keep learning to trust. That my job is often not to deliver the insight but to hold open the kind of room where a nineteen-year-old feels safe enough to follow his own thinking somewhere he didn’t expect to go.
4. THE DRILL
This week, find a moment with a young person where you don’t correct, redirect or teach.
Just listen as they think out loud.
Let them reach for something they haven’t fully formed yet. Sit in the imprecision with them. Resist the urge to tidy it up.
5. THE CONVERSATION
“So, the area of a circle, you can never get the exact answer?”
“No. You get close. Very close. But there’s always another gap. You can round it, you can cut it off, but it’s not exact.”
“And there’s a word for that? The line you can’t reach?”
“An asymptote. It’s the line you draw when something is approaching, but it will never reach it.”
“So it’s like... mastery isn’t done.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, you keep working at it. You keep finding smaller areas inside you that you can work at. But there’s always space. There’s always another door. And behind that door there’s other doors.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It used to. At school I think I stopped early. I stopped at like the first door. You get the answer, move on. You don’t really look at why it’s there.”
He went quiet for a moment.
“But I think that’s what keeps it going, isn’t it. Someone else might have a tiny little square that you don’t have. And you might have one they don’t. And you take from each other and it builds you a wider circle.”
“So what changes?”
“How far you want to take it. How much you want to look into it.”