We have never had more information, and never had less time to understand it. That sentence opens the film above, and it describes almost everyone I work with - athletes, coaches, parents, leaders. The problem is not access to knowledge. The problem is what happens between the knowledge and the person.
The story that holds together
With too much to take in and too little time, the mind does something remarkable: it builds a story that holds together. The story lets us act. And it feels like understanding.
But coherence is not knowing. A coherent story does not show what it left out - that is the one thing it cannot do. When we stop at the story that holds together, we are doing what I call coherence-only thinking: moving fast on an explanation that was never tested, mistaking the feeling of understanding for the real thing.
Under pressure and overload, coherence is often all we have time for. A player explains a bad game in one sentence. A coach explains a loss on the drive home. A parent explains a child's struggle before the car leaves the parking lot. Each story holds together. Each one may be hiding exactly the thing that matters.
The gap between what we think and what we live
There are two worlds in every person's work: what we think, and what we live. They are never quite the same. A player knows this the first time the game refuses to match the plan; anyone who has started a new job, a new instrument, or a new chapter knows it too.
Bridging that gap is what meaning does. And meaning is not one thing - it has four parts.
Coherence: what is happening?
The first part is an honest picture of what is happening - kept open to correction. Not the fastest story, the honest one. This is where meaning starts, and under pressure it is often where it stops.
Purpose: where is it going?
The second part asks for a direction that reaches beyond the next result. The next game, the next grade, the next quarter - these answer for the week. Purpose answers for the years. Without it, every result carries more weight than it should.
Significance: why is it worth it to me?
The third part is knowing why the work is worth it, from the inside. Not why it should matter, or why it matters to someone else - why it is worth it to me. When significance is missing, people can perform for a long time and still feel like they are carrying someone else's season.
Mattering: how do I make a difference to others?
The fourth part looks outward, and it asks the simplest question of the four: did I make a difference today? To my team, to the people around me, to anything beyond myself. A person can have the first three parts and still feel hollow if this one is missing - because in the end we do not only want our work to be worth it to us; we want it to count for someone.
A coach's frame
In my own coaching, these four parts become four questions. They are a frame for the conversation, not a form to fill in - the lens I carry into a talk with a player after a key moment:
Where is it leading?
Why does it matter - to me and to others?
What did I leave out?
The fourth question is the guardian of the other three. It is the one that keeps the story open.
And though my examples come from soccer, nothing here belongs only to sport. Any arena a young person loves - music, art, chess, building things - asks the same four questions of them, and rewards the ones who learn to answer.
What makes life worth living
In the end, we are searching for what makes life worth living: the true, the good, the beautiful - and at the center of them, love. That search needs time that overload keeps taking from us. Without that time, we fall back to coherence-only thinking - a story that holds together, standing in front of a life we have not fully seen.
So I leave you with the question I ask myself at the end of every day:
Martela & Steger (2016) · George & Park (2016) · Costin & Vignoles (2020)
Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946/2006)
The four-part model is a proposal building on this work.
Adaptiverse is an athlete development lab built on a simple idea: more information isn't the answer - meaning is. For athletes, we start with their own story, captured through structured reflections, test it against force-plate, Kineo and GPS data, and turn both into a direction in a personal report. For coaches, teams and organisations, we help people make sense of their work, communicate so it lands, and build the conditions to grow. Grounded in doctoral research.
