Motivation Quote by Jennifer Capriati

Capriati is describing the quiet trade athletes make when talent stops feeling like magic and starts feeling like labor. The line sets up a before-and-after: the younger version of herself played on instinct, the raw, reactive gift that makes prodigies look untouchable. The older version doesn’t claim to be worse; she claims to be different. “Now I don’t have that instinct as much” sounds like a loss, but she immediately pivots to “knowing what to do,” swapping mystique for method.

That pivot matters because it reframes decline as adaptation. Tennis worships “feel” - the idea that great players just see the game. Capriati strips that romance away and replaces it with a technician’s checklist: shots to hit, placement, decision trees. It’s the language of someone who has been through the machinery of professional sport long enough to understand that intuition isn’t just a gift; it can be fragile, and it can be disrupted by pressure, injuries, and the mental grind of living under a microscope.

The subtext is also biographical. Capriati’s career was famously nonlinear: early stardom, burnout and public turmoil, then an improbable comeback. “Instinct” here reads like youth and volatility; “knowing” reads like survival and control. She’s not bragging about being smarter now so much as admitting the cost of staying in the arena. Greatness, in this framing, isn’t a permanent state. It’s a series of revisions: when the body or the mind stops giving you shortcuts, you learn to win by map instead of radar.