Time & Perspective Quote by Jana Novotna

Novotna isn’t offering a feel-good platitude about “balance.” She’s quietly dismantling the myth that elite performance is a straight, heroic climb. “No matter what you do you go through stages” is the athlete’s version of a truth adults often refuse to say out loud: form fades, motivation flickers, and fatigue isn’t a moral failure. The line lands because it normalizes fluctuation without romanticizing it. She admits “a number of times when I didn’t do very well” with the plainness of someone who’s lived under scoreboard judgment and knows how quickly confidence can be mistaken for character.

The most pointed subtext sits in her phrasing around overload: “too much to combine school and tennis altogether.” That “altogether” is doing work. It signals a system that treats young competitors as full-time professionals while insisting they remain full-time students, as if time and attention were infinitely elastic. Novotna, who came up in an era when women’s tennis was intensifying into a global, year-round grind, understood that the pressure doesn’t just come from coaches or tournaments; it’s baked into the expectations families internalize.

Her turn to parents is the cultural critique. “Parents need to step in” reframes guardians not as managers of a future brand but as the last line of protection against burnout. “Take a little time off, do something fun” isn’t trivial; it’s a prescription for longevity. Fun becomes training for staying human, and staying human, she suggests, is what keeps you in the game long enough to matter.