Big news! We are thrilled to announce our new book: The Way of Excellence.

We’ve been working on this project for the last decade. It is our most personal work yet. Researching and writing it changed our lives, and we think it will change yours too.

The book began with some simple questions: What can you do to feel more alive, fulfilled, and satisfied in a crazy and chaotic world? What does it look like to commit to a path of genuine excellence, to combine your natural gifts and hard work to pursue your own version of greatness? How can you sustain it?

Whether you are pushing your limits at the gym or on the track, practicing guitar, coaching or leading a team, honing a craft, practicing medicine, or finally taking on that big creative project, this book will help you create, contribute, maximize your potential, and be the best and most authentic version of yourself.

Steve Kerr, nine-time NBA champion and coach of Team USA, read an early copy and called it “an absolutely beautiful book...it captures a lot of what I believe as a coach.”

Pre-orders are a huge help to us and the best way to support our work. They are also a great deal for you. As a newsletter subscriber, if you pre-order today, you’ll get access to incredible exclusive bonus materials—including a professionally produced 90-minute masterclass, a workbook with interactive exercises for each chapter, a comprehensive reading list, and more. It’s an absurdly good value.

To get a limited first edition copy plus great exclusive bonuses, pre-order The Way of Excellence from ​Amazon​, ​Barnes and Noble​, or ​Bookshop.org​, and then fill out ​this form​ with your order number to receive your bonuses today.

Read on for more about the book and time-limited preorder bonuses:

I (Brad) first started thinking about excellence in 2007.

I was finishing school and feeling aimless. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hiked in the Himalaya.

I began to flesh out a philosophy of life that centered on the pursuit of excellence. Since then, excellence has been at the heart of everything I do and has defined what we believe at The Growth Equation. We haven’t been able to get the idea off our minds.

There is no shortage of pseudo-excellence: hacks, quick fixes, and perfectionism. There is also an epidemic of burnout, numbness, and going through the motions. But what we’ve come to know is that actual excellence—challenging yourself in worthwhile endeavors, focusing on what matters most, and expressing the unique qualities that make you who you are—is an antidote for so much of what ails us. It is a powerful force that makes us feel alive and gives rise to our greatest accomplishments and contributions. We kept looking for a book that outlined this kind of excellence and we couldn’t find one. So Brad decided to write it.

​The Way of Excellence​ includes cutting-edge research, a range of inspiring stories, and is full of big ideas and practical takeaways that you can begin applying to your life right away. This book will guide you on your personal path to excellence.

Here’s just some of what you’ll learn:

• How to set better goals and define, live, and work in alignment with your values

• How to cultivate focus and concentration

• The power of prioritizing consistency over intensity

• How to build durable confidence

• The connection between mastery and mattering—and how to cultivate more of both into your life

• How to develop the courage to care deeply

• How to design environments that support excellence

• How to find more fulfillment in the process of striving toward achievement, selecting goals based not just on what you want to achieve but on who you want to become

• How to overcome the traps, pitfalls, and barriers to excellence, including: alienation, chasing a never-ending supply of dopamine, addiction to external validation, and getting caught up in the opinions of others

• How to apply the principles and insights of excellence to one’s teams, organizations, and communities

If you find value in our newsletter, you’ll love this book. It is an engrossing deep dive with all original thinking and evidence-based insights and practices. If you don’t believe us, just check out some of the reviews below.

Pre-order The Way of Excellence from ​Amazon​, ​Barnes and Noble​, or ​Bookshop.org​, and then fill out ​this form​ with your order number to receive your bonuses today.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS:

“An absolutely beautiful book that captures a lot of what I believe as a coach. The gratification that comes from truly losing one’s self in a process is an amazing gift. It brings joy, peace of mind, and a sense of pride. These are things we frequently talk about with the Warriors, and I believe are part of our success.” — Steve Kerr, 9 time NBA Champion, Coach of the Golden State Warriors and Team USA

“In a chaotic world filled with shallow distraction and performative busyness, The Way of Excellence is a must-read book that offers a path toward something deeper: the disciplined pursuit of mastery, competence, and mattering. I highly recommend it!” — Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

“Stulberg’s examination of excellence as both a concept and practice is food for thought for every profession and discipline—and for life itself. A riveting narrative that shows us that everyone is capable of growth. I loved reading this book.” — Hilary Hahn, international violin soloist and 3-time GRAMMY winner

“A transformative read for aspiring high performers of all disciplines and all levels. Brad’s words help me to hone my own process and ensure I’m keeping the most important things the most important things. This book is the best reminder that the way we do what we do matters.” — Chelsea Sodaro, Ironman World Champion

“Readers are invited to rethink what it truly means to be at their best—not through perfectionism or shallow success, but through purposeful growth and meaningful engagement. The Way of Excellence reveals how excellence is a deeply human process: a powerful alternative to burnout culture and digital distraction, showing how anyone can cultivate a life of focus, vitality, and authentic achievement.” — Charles Duhigg, author of the bestsellers The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators

Exclusive, Time-Limited Pre-Order Bonuses:

Order the book now so it will be on your doorstep the day it comes out and get all the great material below! Each bonus was constructed with loads of effort and serves as incredible complement to the book and its application in your life.

Pre-orders also go a long way to help us as authors (it is the best way to support our work and this newsletter) and all the retailers offer a lowest price guarantee. So if you think you are going to get the book anyways, ordering today is a win-win: you get everything below and support us in a big way. Don’t miss out!

Preorder now and you’ll receive:

• Documentary and Video Masterclass: with more than 90 minutes of practical applications and behind-the-scenes content

• Interactive Workbook: self-guided exercises and reflections to enhance the reading experience and help you bring the ideas in The Way of Excellence to life

• Reading List: Brad’s personal reading list on mastery, meaning, and excellence that most influenced the writing of The Way of Excellence

• Core Principles of Excellence: a one-page ‘Cheat Sheet’ with habits, mindsets, practices, and values to keep in mind every day

How to Get Your Bonuses

1. ​Click to pre-order​ The Way of Excellence

2. Fill out ​this form​ with your order number to receive the bonuses.

Note: if you order directly from your indie bookshop, that’s great too! You’ll be able to indicate that in the form. These offers are valid from wherever books are sold.

Bulk Orders for your organization or team!

Make a bulk order for your organization or team and you’ll get all the above bonuses, plus:

• Brad will join you and your colleagues, team, friends, or family, for a live virtual book-discussion via Zoom.

• Heavily discounted in-person speaking to your organization.

• Just respond to this email if you’re interested in a bulk order.

We appreciate your reading our stuff and we look forward to continuing to unpack and wrestle with the ideas and practices in ​The Way of Excellence​. We hope you ordered the book today!

-- Brad and Steve

There is no denying American health is in trouble. Forty percent of us are ​obese​. More than seventy percent are ​overweight​. America ranks last among comparable countries in ​life expectancy​. Our maternal and infant ​mortality​ rate is among the highest of developed nations. More Americans report deep ​loneliness​ than ever. These are but a few of many scary statistics we could cite. On the whole, Americans are not doing well.

This isn’t new. America has been trending toward worsening health for years. Both of us (Brad and Steve) remember sitting in class in college two decades ago discussing the same topics we are now: obesity, heart disease, life expectancy, diet, exercise, cancer, and so on.

But contrary to popular opinion, the country hasn’t just been sitting on its hands. Many world-class scientists and public health officials have been trying to do something for a long time. For example, the “exercise is medicine” movement was introduced in 2007 by the American College of Sports Medicine. Michelle Obama pushed a large initiative to minimize processed foods, improve school lunches, and get kids moving in 2010. Many states have attempted to institute taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. Municipalities have overhauled their built environments to include more sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks to encourage physical activity. We’ve also seen the introduction of lifesaving vaccines, and recent breakthroughs in medications for cancer (immunotherapies) and even obesity (GLP-1 antagonists).

Many of these efforts have made a big difference. And yet, there’s no denying the health of our nation continues to decline. Which brings us to today.

A surge of interest has developed for improving the health of Americans. RFK Jr. coined the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign and was recently nominated to be the director of Health and Human Services, America’s biggest governmental health agency. Many of the top podcasts in America claim to be about health and well-being. The weekly lists of bestselling books almost always include those on nutrition and exercise.

We love it when health and well-being take center stage. These topics comprise both of our academic backgrounds, and we’ve been appointed to teach and lecture on them at major universities.

Unfortunately, when these topics come up in the public discourse, we end up with a lot of showmanship and grift instead of substance. We get simple solutions to complex problems. Just look at nutrition, where we routinely shift from demonizing one nutrient to the next for the cause of our obesity epidemic. (It’s carbs, no fat, no sugar, no trans fats, no seed oils, no high-fructose corn syrup, and on and on). We also see the health grift on the internet, from secret supplements that we’re promised will fix our gut (with zero studies behind them), to cold plunges being sold as a weight loss supercharger, to all sorts of other elaborate kabuki that you can only get from the influencer who is telling you about it, or from their podcast’s sponsor.

These podcasters, influencers, and gurus are popular as ever, following in a long line that started with Dr. Mehmet Oz. But even so, America’s health continues to decline. Which makes you think that perhaps the root problems and solutions lie elsewhere.

We are about to get hit with a deluge of misinformation on health. Much of it will be fear-mongering. Some will have a hint of truth. Often, facts and data will be twisted as lifelong grifters take advantage of the complicated nature of research and a layperson’s (understandable) lack of knowledge of the minute details of a topic.

We expect to see the intensification of an ongoing cycle, characterized by a rapid succession of trends or fear factors. Once the nutrient/substance/idea that’s being demonized has gone out of vogue, the grift will move to the next. The cycle is fueled by fear and misinformation. The result is the capture of our attention (which is almost always monetized) and, in some cases, our money. This is true whether it’s the ​vaccines cause autism myth​; the latest and greatest supplement, or the seed oils are one of the biggest health concerns in the world proposition, which, of course, is absurd.

There is a difference between individuals who use health, longevity, and wellbeing primarily to grow a podcast or increase their fame, and those who genuinely want to make a meaningful impact in these important topics.

Before we dive into what the evidence shows is most important for making America healthy again, we want to give credit to the MAHA movement. America probably shouldn’t have cereals and other processed foods with an ingredient list three times as long as in Europe. We would welcome regulations in the style of Europe that require an ingredient to be shown to be safe before using it as an additive. But that European model doesn’t immediately demonize all chemicals or additives; rather, it uses science to test what is safe or harmful. A similar approach in America would be great.

We’d also welcome policies that would regulate ultra-processed foods, especially if these were considered in conjunction with subsidies for more satiating and nutritious options. The problem with the MAHA movement is that it combines good ideas (e.g., less processed food) with ones that lack any scientific justification or worse, that could be extremely harmful to society (e.g., creating unsubstantiated fear around vaccination and autism).

If we actually want to make America healthy again, here are 11 principles to guide the path:

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1. The social determinants of health matter. A lot. In particular, we need policies and incentives to build more housing so that the cost of stable and desirable living spaces declines. Other social determinants of health include poverty, education, access to healthcare, access to food, and safety. A quick look at differential life expectancies across US counties shows it is far more complex than seed oils or greens supplements.

2. Vaccines should continue to be tested for safety and efficacy in large trials, and when they are safe and effective, they should be used widely. Vaccination has reduced more human suffering and death than any other technology outside of sewage and sanitation. We have ​an incredibly large analysis of data​ on childhood vaccines that has routinely found them to be effective and safe.

3. Overweight and obesity are serious concerns. Excess body fat is associated with increased mortality (death) and morbidity (disease). Two things can be true at once: we should not judge or stigmatize people who are overweight or obese (nearly 3/4 of Americans), and we should enact tactics to reverse overweight and obesity, including medication, lifestyle interventions, and food policy. You can love yourself at the same time as wanting to reduce body fat.

4. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs)—those with added fats, sodium, and/or sugars—are not good for health and well-being. It is unlikely that any government policy will reduce the universality of UPFs (this would require eliminating fast food establishments, convenience stores, and gas station food, for example), but we can and should start somewhere, such as overhauling school lunches. (Michelle Obama attempted to do this in 2010 and was stopped by Republican politicians who were in the pocket of big food and who screamed, “It’s an encroachment on our freedom!” This was dumb then, and it’s dumb now.) We should not demonize specific nutrients—sugar is the problem; no fat is the problem; no carbohydrates are the problem—and instead focus on the harms and ubiquity of ultra-processed foods.

5. Physical activity is the single most effective behavioral intervention for physical and mental health. Physical activity should be prioritized in the school system in the same way that literacy is. This is not about sport performance or body type; it’s about instilling the value of movement for everyone, starting at a young age. For adults, we can’t just tell people to move more often. We need to make it easier. This includes bike lanes, sidewalks, parks, and so on to give people easier access to movement. We need to look at gym memberships, personal trainers, and coaches as preventative interventions. We need to increase the number of running clubs and fitness groups in parks.

6. Loneliness and isolation are terrible for physical health, mental health, and civil society. Modern society has replaced genuine community with the illusion of connection. We look for our tribe online instead of in the real world, leading to what Sherry Turkle ​calls​ being along together. The best thing many people could do for their health is trade listening to a three-hour podcast for coffee with a friend. We need to create more spaces for genuine connection. For as hard as we’ve been on the cold-plunge fad (and for good reason), there’s a cold-plunge place where Brad lives in Asheville that he thinks is a great idea. Why? Because it’s communal—people put away their phones and get freezing and then hot together, laughing, talking, and bonding with their neighbors. This is the real benefit of something like a cold-plunge, dating all the way back to ancient Greece. It’s not doing it alone on your back deck at 5 AM and recording yourself for Instagram. The same goes for just about every other “wellness” trend. Be it religious institutions, bowling leagues, run clubs, board game nights, book clubs, or countless other possibilities, we need more local opportunities to build genuine and durable belonging into our lives.

7. Access to health care is important, but we cannot expect doctors to fix all that ails us. Health insurance should cover preventative and acute interventions that are proven to reduce human suffering, but not elective, cosmetic, or anecdotal care.

8. Medical training should not be a place where young people go to get depressed. The current medical training program was created by a maniac who was addicted to cocaine. It’s time for an overhaul. Yes, being a doctor is hard. And yes, it is perhaps the most serious craft to master. But there are ways to make it more sustainable. At the same time, ​we should not baby trainees on culture war issues​. Medical training ought to be similar to becoming a pro athlete: an arduous and meaningful journey without bullshit and filled with honor, mutual respect, and appropriate rest and renewal.

9. Educate people on the potential benefits and harms of new health trends, such as continuous glucose monitors, sleep scores, full-body MRIs, and supplements. What currently happens is these products and services are presented by people who have money to make on them, and therefore, only potential benefits are mentioned. But there are also plenty of potential harms, such as poor validity, obsessive tracking leading to worse outcomes, incidental findings, and wasting time and money.

10. Prioritize clean air and water. Most of us can remember the tragedy of Flint with lead in its water a few years ago. Well, a 2016 ​survey​ of local water by Reuters found that over 3,000 areas in the U.S. have higher lead levels than the crisis in Flint. A ​2018 study​ in The Lancet found that lead exposure may be leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.

The point is simple: We don’t need to create controversies over ‘toxins’ that likely aren’t really toxic. We have substances in our air and water that we know cause problems. Why not tackle those? (The answer traces itself back to principle number one: generally, poor water is found in poor areas, and poor areas don’t get the resources they need.) That doesn’t mean we ignore other chemicals. But we should let research drive our priorities instead of creating a new boogeyman every few years to continue the attention-grabbing grift.

11. Call out lies and bullshit loudly, whether they are coming from the right or left. There are not 75 childhood vaccines. In fact, vaccines are easier on our immune system now, as ​we use 10% of the total antigens​ we used 30 years ago. Body fatness is not a cultural construction of the patriarchy; it is a biological process that increases the chance of disease and early death. A cold plunge does not have substantial health benefits beyond the community in which you do it. There is no single nutrient that is killing us, and there is no single diet that will save us. The more outrageous and enticing the claim, the more attention it gets, and the more someone makes money. But if we are to actually make America healthy again, it cannot be fueled by a marketing grift.

At The Growth Equation, our mission is to be a signal amidst the noise. It’s to provide you with evidence-based insights that have been validated by actual science and that have proven results in the real world, along with habits and practices that can actually help you live and perform better.

In the coming months, we are going to do our best to separate the wheat from the chaff and look at what actually matters when it comes to health. We’re largely going to focus on the individual, because we want you to walk away with actionable advice you can apply in your own life, but when appropriate, we’ll mention society-wide issues too.

The above list is not exhaustive, and our analysis is just one of many possible good ones. The point is that if we are going to have a national conversation about making America healthy again, we should be rigorous in how we do it.

— ​Brad​ and ​Steve

“Was it worth it?”

“Would you do anything different?”

“What advice would you give your younger self?” I get these questions a lot. And despite knowing that they are coming, I often struggle to give an answer on the spot. I could offer something trite and cliché, but these demand something deeper, essentially a glimpse into my soul and the essence of who I am as a person. Especially in my case. You see, these questions don’t just pop up out of nowhere. They are a result of my experience as a whistleblower in one of the largest doping and abuse scandals in modern sport. My new book, ​Win the Inside Game​, starts by detailing a moment where I was standing in a hallway at the Nike headquarters after seeing documents suggesting top athletes were engaging in nefarious practices, faced with a singular decision that would shape the direction of my life. Would I remain quiet and go with the flow, or risk my livelihood and career to take on some of the biggest names and the biggest companies in sport?

My whistleblowing journey took nearly 10 years of my life. It started when I was fresh out of graduate school, in my first real job. What would I tell the early 20s Steve who thought he hit the jackpot in working for Nike and coaching Olympians? What would I say to myself when I stared down the possibility of never working in running again, of saying goodbye to the sport I loved?

There are no good answers, but here’s my best attempt.

—-

Dear Younger Steve,

Depending on when you read this, you are either on top of the world, about to start your dream job, or living through what surely feels like a nightmare. Maybe you are debating whether or not to hit send on that e-mail to anti-doping authorities, despite everyone around you telling you to let it go and that standing up will ruin your career before it gets started. Maybe you are in the depths of the craziness that followed your sending that email, with the FBI knocking on your door.

Regardless of what’s going on, here’s what I wish I knew.

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1. You will go against your values. What matters is how you respond.

You are going to screw up. That’s normal. We all do and will. When we’re young, we walk around with this simplistic view of the world: there is good and evil, right and wrong. At some point along the way, that view gets shattered. First, it happens with other people. You may see a ‘good person’ go against the grain. Then, it happens to you. You do or say something that goes against everything you’ve been taught, and perhaps, everything you’ve even stood for.

You won’t be the first or the last. In fact, those who think they will never do anything wrong are most susceptible to doing so. Part of growing up is recognizing the complexity and messiness—within the world and within yourself. We all mess up. We all take the occasional wrong turn. What happens next is vital. What are you going to do? Research tells us that most people justify, rationalize, or double down. They default towards protection. We have an inbuilt psychological immune system, and its job is to keep the story that we are a good, decent person alive. When evidence is presented that points in the other direction, our brain goes on a mission to make sure our self-image is protected. Just look at the lengths frauds in business or cheats in sport go to rationalize their decision-making process. Our natural inclination is to protect our ego, to keep our sense of self intact. That may save us from some guilt or anxiety in the short term, but it prevents the most important part of any challenging experience or misstep: learning, adapting, and growing. When we rationalize, we prevent reflection; when we double down, we close off pathways to reverse course and make things right. Regardless of what happens or how bad you may feel, focus on what comes next. How do you respond? That’s the defining piece that will shape your future.

2. Who you surround yourself with matters more than you think.

The old saying that you become the five people you spend the most time with has more than a kernel of truth.

We tend to think of our beliefs as fundamental aspects of who we are. We have strong and defining individual ethics and morals. That’s the child’s storybook version. It sounds good, but reality (and the latest science) tells a different story. Your tribe does more to determine your morality than your morality does to determine your tribe. As researchers summarized when studying how political affiliation influences our beliefs, “We will switch our moral compass depending on how it fits with what we believe politically.”

When our identity becomes intertwined with groups, then we go where the tribe goes. ​Research​ tells us that the closer we feel to someone, the more pull they have over our ethics. The point is this: we like to think that we’ll be the holdout, the person who stands firm, standing up for what they believe in, no matter what. But research tells us that it is highly unlikely. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of us will be nudged in the direction of our boss, teammates, co-workers, or friends. It’s hard to resist the pull. What this means is that one of the most important decisions you can make is who is in your inner circle. Choose wisely. Your mom was right when she asked if you’d jump off the bridge if your best friend did. Little did she know, it’s not just teens who have this proclivity. All of us do.

3. Learn how to care deeply but be able to let go. The thing that makes you great eventually gets in the way.

There’s no doubt about it, you’ve got to care to get the most out of yourself and perform well. You cared a lot about running, so you ran more than 100 miles per week. You cared a lot about coaching, so you read every physiology book you could find and talked to every successful coach who would answer. That drive is important. But it will also get in the way.

Working hard, caring deeply, and obsessing over any single thing narrows our sense of self. We become attached to the activity, and our motivation shifts from internal curiosity to external rewards. We start worrying about the result, the payoff. We start to see every performance as proving ourselves again and again. When we fall short, it’s not that we failed at skateboarding or running or riding. It becomes, “I am a failure.”

The antidote? Let go, just enough. One day, you’ll learn it’s the secret to great performers. You’ll learn from Sara Hall about how she stopped chasing a record and focused on the experience and feeling of racing, only to then perform her best. You’ll hear from a sports psychologist who will tell you of an Olympian who broke through by finding hobbies. And research backs this up. Contrary to popular opinion, going all-in, burning the boats behind you, and being relentlessly obsessive does not make you a better performer. Research from athletics to entrepreneurs shows it mostly backfires. Being all-in makes you fragile. Caring, but with just enough space, frees you up to take risks, to enjoy the experience, and to see what you’re capable of, without it being a threat to your sense of self. As your nowadays collaborative partner, Brad likes to say, “You can be all in, but not all the time. You need more than one room in your identity house.”

4. Separate your identity from what you do

Speaking of identity….You are a runner. You are a coach. That’s how you identify yourself, and how the small niche of runners in the world identifies you. It’s something that you take pride in. It’s a badge of honor.

It feels great now, but it will become a problem. When you tie your identity too closely to what you do, anytime you fail at running, you will take it as a failure of your entire self. It won’t be that I failed at running. Instead, it will be Steve who failed at being Steve.

If you can’t separate yourself from what you do, the losses will hit particularly hard. A downward spiral will soon follow, as you beat yourself up looking for an answer to why you aren’t better. If you fall into the trap of “hard work” being the answer, you’ll double down on your efforts, which will be entirely counterproductive and put you deeper into a hole. Steve, I’m begging you, don’t run yourself into the ground.

Instead, embrace your complexity. Understand that running is something you are really good at. It’s a passion. Embrace how much you care about the sport. But always remember it isn’t who you are.

5. Don’t chase accolades, achievements, and medals. It’s all bullshit.

I know you may be surprised, younger Steve, but hear me out: It’s never enough. For anyone. If you chase the external, you will always end up never satisfied, always wanting more. The richest man in the world ​will lie about his accolades playing video games​…why? It’s never enough, even if you have sent rockets to space and back and have more money than anyone to ever step foot on the planet. It’s the great trick of life to convince you that chasing the external is what matters. It’s not. Even the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, warned us of this so many years ago: he said we need to balance striving with tranquility and contentment.

A meta-analysis of over 100 studies found that when individuals’ extrinsic aspirations dominated their intrinsic ones, it was “universally detrimental” to their well-being. It’s not that we need to have solely intrinsic motives. We aren’t Jesus or Buddha. It’s the balance that matters. When we tip too far to being driven by the external, we languish instead of thriving. When winning is all that matters, it might work in the short term, but over the long haul, we increasingly play out of a place of fear, and ironically, perform worse. You’ll see this in your career, meeting many people who have achieved at the highest level but are miserable human beings. You can still strive and obtain the accolades, but those are byproducts of finding things that interest you, pursuing them with zeal, and enjoying the journey along the way.

6. Remind yourself of your principles.

When you are challenged or stuck in an uncertain situation, you will need something to fall back on—a light that acts as a beacon, guiding you through the fog.

Your principles are what guide. Developing them seems challenging, but it is actually rather simple. Find what you value, what truly matters. Those are your principles.

Take your time and make sure you perform a particularly deep dive on this subject. Don’t settle for the superficial. Don’t rely on others to tell you what matters. Find what sticks in your core.

This will require some deep reflection, but it is well worth it. When you are at your lowest of lows, if you stick to your principles, you will always find a path forward.

These will be tested again and again. As I wrote earlier, sometimes you will falter and fail to live up to them. But try to reorient and make sure you align yourself with what you value. Everyone has principles. When life is easy, it’s when you are challenged that having a firm foundation will pay off.

7. Life works out if you let it. Don’t force things.

You are going to experience some tremendous highs and some depressing lows. You’ll question why you do this sport, your job, and much more. At times, life will appear meaningless.

But it works out.

I know that sounds silly to say, and very unscientific, but it does. You just have to figure out what actually matters to you, and work hard towards that. This doesn’t mean that it will be smooth sailing; in fact, it won’t. You will continue to be tested in every way imaginable. You will suffer, triumph, and face boredom, thrill, complacency, and just about every other emotion possible along the way.

The enjoyment comes from the work. Sometimes it leads to phenomenal results; other times, nothing. That’s fine. Just don’t try to force things.

When you force things, you become anxious. You start pushing the boundaries of your principles as the external result begins to supersede the work. Don’t let that happen.

Like most things in life, an analogy to sport is apt: You will soon learn the hard lesson (again) that you can’t force a breakthrough. You can’t shove your way towards a peak performance. All you can do is do the work to put yourself in a position to succeed, and see what happens next.

Let it come to you. Don’t force it.

8. Embrace the Messiness.

We crave simplicity. We want easy answers, clear-cut solutions, and a world that makes sense. But the truth: life is messy, complicated, and full of contradictions. We’re messy too—full of flaws, imperfections, and misaligned values and actions.

We often try to ignore this messiness, to compartmentalize our lives and present a perfect picture to the world. But that’s not how we grow. Real growth, the kind that sticks, comes from confronting the messiness, from acknowledging our flaws and imperfections, and figuring out how to make them work together.

Think of it like creating a work of art. If you try to make every brushstroke perfect, you’ll end up with something stiff and lifeless. But if you embrace the imperfections, the unexpected turns, and the occasional smudge, you’ll create something truly beautiful and unique. That’s the power of embracing the messiness. It’s in the imperfections that we find our true selves.

9. Own your story.

You are the author of your story. In a world that will increasingly intertwine with social media, it can feel like we lose control of our story. That we hand it over to others to control and define. Don’t let others define your narrative.

In studying how people navigate life’s challenges, psychologists Dan McAdams and Jack Bauer found that how we tell our stories matters. Those who tell redemption stories, where we go from a low to a high, turning our suffering into something positive, score higher on measures of well-being than those who tell “feel-good” stories, where everything is generally pretty good. The old adage that the bad makes the good better holds true.

But it’s not just the arc that matters. Bauer found it’s “growth themes” that make the difference. It’s integrating our experiences into a cohesive narrative where we are able to explore, learn, and grow. As he concluded, “It appears that well-being has more to do with interpreting meaning in one’s life than with interpreting life as turning out well without a stated reason.” It’s about finding meaning and making sense of the struggle.

Own your story. Tell it well.

10. No one gives a shit.

In the future, an NCAA champion is going to share some powerful advice. Listen to her. Phoebe Wright will tell you rather abruptly that “When I get nervous before an Olympic Trials or a big meet, I try to zoom way out, and remember that it’s just track. And in the end, no one really gives a shit about track.”

Phoebe’s not trying to downplay the sport you love. You could substitute any number of pursuits, and the saying would hold true. It’s not that they aren’t important, but you aren’t performing surgery to save someone’s life, you aren’t saving the world from nuclear disaster. You are just running around in circles or writing words on a page. (Shout out to all our surgeons and first responder readers, by the way. We do give a shit when we’re on your table or you're saving us from disaster, and respect the burden and responsibility you hold.)

Keep things in perspective.

It doesn’t mean that running or any of your other interests aren’t important; they are, but they should be important to you. Not for anyone else. You get to decide how much value you assign to each craft you undertake. You do this every day by giving it your attention.

11. Explore more. Go Broad.

We’re often told to specialize, to find our niche, to go all-in on mastering a single pursuit. But the truth is, we need breadth as much as depth. We need to explore, dabble, and try on different hats before we can find the one that fits us right.

Think of it like building a house. If you start with a narrow foundation, you’ll be limited in what you can build on top. But if you begin with a broad base, you’ll have the flexibility to create something truly unique and expansive.

The same applies to our crafts and identities. When we go broad and explore, we open ourselves up to new possibilities, new perspectives, and new ways of being. We may even discover talents and interests that we never knew we had. And if one path doesn’t work out, we’ll have plenty of others to come back to. Don’t be afraid to wander, dabble, and try new things. It’s in the exploration that we discover who we are.

— Steve

If this resonated, it pulls from my new book, ​Win the Inside Game​.

It’s my most personal book yet, leaning on my experience (and lots of research) to show there’s a better way to strive for our potential. Any book you write is a sense-making process. This one helped me understand the messiness of striving for success, and how many of us go astray, including myself.

Our brains are fried. Or at least that’s what it feels like for most of us. Chances are you’ve experienced at least one of the following:

You sit down to read a book, only to find that your brain isn’t complying. You read a paragraph but don’t remember it a second later. Your attention can’t stay focused, and your mind keeps jumping from thought to thought.

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You’re at dinner with your friends and family; your phone is tucked away in your pocket, but every minute or so, your mind drifts off to what you have to do for work, or what the score of the game is, or if that Instagram post has gotten any more likes. Your friends and family may even ask if you are there…to which you reply yes, but their asking is proof that perhaps you aren’t.

You’re sitting down to work and feel a buzz in your pocket. You grab your phone, slide your finger to open it, only to see that there isn’t a notification. Welcome to the phantom vibration.

There’s even a name for this forgetfulness and inability to focus: Digital Dementia. There’s no secret. Just about every one of us is on our phones or digital devices too much. Ourselves included. We’re losing the battle to the engineers who are designing devices and apps to keep us scrolling and pulling the digital slot machine.

What we want to cover below is how to fight back; how to tilt the battle in your favor just enough so you don’t lose your mind to your phone. First, what’s going on in your brain: A slew of ​research​ shows that our phones hamper our attention and cognitive capacity. We’re pushed to a kind of partial attention, filled with frequent task-switching that prevents us from ever being deeply focused on any one thing. Our brain wasn’t built for this. We suck at multitasking, yet our phones demand it. As a result, research shows that our working memory, focus, and cognitive flexibility are impaired. If you set out to design a device for the sole purpose of deteriorating our attentional skills, it would be hard to beat an app-filled phone… Other research shows that constant task-switching and information overload dysregulate our stress response. We end up getting frequent hits of stress without a true action to alleviate or act on it. It’s like those rodent experiments where the mouse gets shocked but can’t do anything about it and eventually succumbs to chronic fatigue. We are the mouse. This combination of cognitive decline and stress dysfunction explains why researchers​ found that the higher someone scores on a smartphone addiction scale, the worse they are at self-regulated learning, staying in the present, or experiencing flow. So what do we do about it?

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind:

A common tactic is to put your phone on silent or do not disturb. While this beats having notifications buzzing and beeping at all times, it’s not much better. ​Researchers​ found that the mere presence of a phone, even if it is face down and off, tends to lower concentration and cognitive performance. In these experiments, scientists even used someone else’s phone (instead of the participant’s) as the distraction. Guess what? Same impact, even though participants knew it wasn’t their phone. Our environment invites action. We’ve trained our brains to think that the rectangular object is the most important thing in the world. It doesn’t just represent social media or text messages; it’s a reminder of all that we have to do and can do in the world. It’s why even if your phone is on silent in your pocket, you can’t stop thinking about the work you have to complete, though your kid is asking about your day.

Your brain is designed to lock on to valuable information. For our ancient ancestors, it meant the rustling of the leaves that could signal danger (e.g., a lurking mountain lion), or the person sitting across from you at the campfire, because your survival may depend on them at some point. Now, it’s your phone. If you want to break free for periods of deep-focus time, you’ve got to remove it from sight altogether.

2. Leave it Out of the Bedroom:

Most of us charge our phones beside our beds. It’s convenient, as the phone acts as an alarm. But it also reinforces our addiction—just think about it: the last thing we see before we go to bed and the first thing we grab for when we wake up isn’t a book, diary, or our significant other; it’s our phone. It’s the ultimate addiction training. It also makes us sleep worse.

In a ​longitudinal study ​on young adults, researchers found that nighttime phone use correlated with feeling stressed and depressed. Other ​research​ found that keeping your phone near your bed is associated with worse sleep. A ​review of research​ linked nighttime phone use to later bedtimes, longer sleep onset latency, shorter sleep duration, insomnia, reduced sleep quality, and daytime tiredness. The best solution is the simplest: Move the phone out of the bedroom, far enough away so that even if you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you aren’t tempted to be a degenerate and check your phone. For some, that means charging the phone in the closet. For others, that might mean downstairs in the kitchen. It might mean getting an analog alarm clock. Or perhaps turning the ringer on loud, while it’s charging in the other room, in case of emergencies. Or maybe even get a separate pared-down flip phone for emergencies only. But the point is that small inconveniences can be worked around.

3. Observe a Digital Sabbath:

Every Saturday, Brad turns off his phone and laptop, locks them away, and goes a full day without utilizing them. At first, it was miserable. Like an addict, he craved the checking, stimulation, and reprieve from boredom But the benefits are immense. A kind of mental reset that happens. Your brain lets go of the need to devote a large portion of its cognitive resources to keeping track of your device. You learn to engage in the world again, to be okay with being bored, and to let your mind wander.

Before adopting these practices, Brad felt scattered, on edge, and psychologically exhausted more often than he would have liked. Not only did his ability to enjoy the present moment suffer, but his creative work did too. It came to a head in 2022, when we ​published an essay​—and really, a self-diagnosis—coining the term ​internet brain​, in which we wrote “Internet brain results from spending too much time online. It manifests as an inability to focus for long periods; a strong desire to ‘check’ something—be it social media, email, trending topics, or your favorite newspaper’s landing page—even when you don’t actually want to; a constant feeling of adrenaline that is somewhere between excitement and anxiety; a lack of patience for anything that is inherently slow; and a significantly harder time being present in offline life, such as constantly needing to pick up your phone.”

Writing that piece led Brad to a simple solution: he needed to mandate more time offline, something that would only occur with explicit constraints. It’s not too dissimilar from ​research​ that finds that spending a few days out in the wilderness has a restorative effect on attention and cognition. Scientists have found that nature does a great job of turning down the volume of the constant noise, novelty, and stimulation of urban and digital life. While nature might give you an extra boost, simply being without digital devices has a remarkable effect as is. If you can’t handle locking up your phone, consider investing in a tool like ​“the brick.”​ It’s a simple device that locks specific apps on your phone, essentially turning it into something that only makes calls. In short: live like it’s the 1990s again, even if it’s just for a day.

4. Read Hard Copy Books

Over the past few months, we’ve been having a similar conversation with all of our closest author-friends. Our ability to read feels like it is eroding after we’ve spent too much time on the internet. Our job is to read and write. Although we’ve spent a lifetime doing that, if we aren’t careful, we quickly lose the ability to do so. It’s not too dissimilar from research showing our ability to use maps (or our internal navigation skills) erodes without use. For many people, someone could drop you in the middle of your own city, and you’d have a hard time getting back home, thanks to our collective overreliance on phones and GPS. The same is true for books. Someone could hand you a great book in your living room, but if you are suffering from “internet brain”, you may not be able to read more than a page.

The good news is that we can build back our attentional muscles with a little training. One of the best ways to do this is deep reading. Set aside a few blocks each week where it’s just you and a book. Your brain might resist at first, but the more you get into it, the easier it becomes to find that groove again and focus on the task at hand.

It’s beneficial because reading is one of the greatest sources of knowledge, creativity, and joy there is. It’s also beneficial because the ability to focus is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in today’s world.

5. Set Aside Daily Time Alone in Your Head:

Go for a walk? You’re probably listening to a podcast.

Go for a run? Music blaring.

At a stop light while driving? A brief moment to check your DMs.

On public transport? Scrolling.

Standing in line? Can’t be bored for a moment, grab the phone.

We’ve replaced the times when we used to be forced to be alone in our heads with an instant adult pacifier: our phones. No need to feel restless. No need to be bored. The solution is always in our pocket. But if we never spend time alone in our heads, our very own minds become foreign to us—uncomfortable and unfamiliar places that our brains go on high alert to escape. We need to regain familiarity with our inner world. To develop interoception, or an ability to slice and dice apart the feelings we all experience, instead of trying to push them away or avoid them. Pick something you do regularly and do it without external input. It doesn’t have to be full-blown mindfulness meditation. It could be every time you wash the dishes. Or leaving your phone at home when you go on a walk or run. Or putting your phone in the glove box when you commute to work. Or not pulling out your phone when at a restaurant and your dining partner gets up to use the restroom. These bite-size moments are great training, and very important. They remind your brain that you don’t have to fill every second of nothingness with stimulation. You don’t need to outsource your brain’s attention and entertainment. There’s a reason so many great scientists experienced their breakthroughs on long walks. It’s wild to imagine that if Darwin, Curie, or Einstein had been addicted to their phones, they may not have made their incredible leaps in thinking, and we’d all be suffering as a result. A recent ​article​ in the Financial Times asked if humans have “passed peak brain power.” We don’t think there is anything internal that is inherently making us dumber, but our addiction to devices very well might be.

6. Unsubscribe from Newsletters

That’s right. Even though our newsletter is at the center of everything we do, we’re telling you to unsubscribe from newsletters. Here us out:

If your inbox is always overwhelming, then your brain is always going to be overwhelmed. If you have multiple newsletters that you don’t read, or that you don’t find particularly useful, then it just creates a lot of noise which makes focusing deeply and finding a true signal harder.

There are so many newsletters. Daily ones (and even twice daily ones). Weekly ones. Monthly ones. There are newsletters you once read but no longer do. There are newsletters you never read. And there is everything in between. It’s only going to get worse in a world where people have artificial intelligence write their material for them. There will be marketers sending 30 newsletters to 30 cohorts of people, and everything about it – from idea generation to writing – will be done by robots. Heck, this is already happening now.

Though we hope this one makes the cut, we’d be dishonest if we didn’t encourage you to unsubscribe from all the newsletters that don’t. It only takes about 30 minutes (or less), and it creates so much space in your inbox, and in your mind. It also helps you to engage more deeply with the newsletters that you actually value, so they don’t get lost in the sea of mediocre (or worse) content.

***

With everything above, think: practical and good enough, not perfection. When it comes to digital hygiene, too often we try hard to radically limit our use with a large dose of willpower, and then when that inevitably fails, we give up. We tell ourselves some version of, “It’s just the times we live in,” while our kids, friends, or family notice us drifting off scrolling while we lay in bed or eat dinner, instead of living in the real world. The goal is not necessarily to shun all digital devices or rewind the clock to 1990. It’s to place enough constraints in your life so that you can be creative and present. So that you own your phone instead of your phone owning you. It’s pushing back just enough so that you can think deeply and focus intently again.

-Steve and Brad

Eight weeks ago, one of us (Brad) was struggling mightily in the weight room.

After a powerlifting meet in the Spring, he had taken three months away from heavy deadlifting. The break wasn’t because he was hurt but because he wants to play the long game, and occasional time off from the big lifts is smart.

When he first got back into it, he felt awful.

Three hundred and sixty-five pounds, a weight that normally moves lightning fast and feels light, felt heavy as can be.

On the third week back, he turned to his coach and said, “This feels like walking on an open blister. I can’t believe how terrible and uncomfortable it is. Maybe I’m just done deadlifting.”

His coach chuckled and told him it’s par for the course.

“But it was only a three-month break. I was training hard, just not deadlifting,” remarked Brad.

“Practice what you preach. Stay patient. Trust the process. Give me a few more weeks,” said his coach.

Ten weeks later, Brad hit 500 pounds for two reps with more in the tank—a lifetime PR. He went from questioning what he was doing to feeling strong, full of energy, and performing at his best. All of this in just 70 days.

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It’s a prime example of something we write about frequently: progress is nonlinear. It’s also why the advice to get “just one percent better every day” works great, until it gets in the way.

When you are new to something, the harder you work, the better you get. But once you get pretty good, progress slows and becomes harder to come by. If you are addicted to visible improvement, you may find yourself tempted to give up. You can think of it as the end of the honeymoon period.

But so much of the good, interesting, and most fulfilling stuff comes after the honeymoon period. You’ve got to stay patient and find value and satisfaction in the work itself even, and perhaps especially, when you aren’t making observable progress—even when it feels like you are walking on an open blister.

It’s not just strength training.

It’s writing. It’s music. It’s leadership. It’s running. It’s just about any worthwhile pursuit. One of the biggest traps is the plateau or valley. But much like Brad recently experienced, oftentimes, the plateau or valley precedes a breakthrough. It’s just how it goes once you get pretty good at something.

Add in time off, injury, illness, family obligations, travel, and all the other stuff of life, and for all that we know about human performance, it becomes harder to predict and more of a mystery.

Process over outcomes. Patience. Persistence. Consistency.

We research, coach, and write on these topics. We’ve also been fortunate to work with many of the world’s best performers on them. And yet, when it’s us needing to be patient, when it’s us experiencing a plateau or valley, it’s still really dang hard.

Brad probably wasn’t ever going to quit deadlifting. But having a coach to support and remind him that this is just how it goes certainly didn’t hurt. When we're on a long plateau, the devil on our shoulder convinces us that maybe we should consider throwing in the towel. We need a counterbalance. It's one of the reasons we write this newsletter. It may not be filled with the latest fad or protocol that promises a quick fix, but it does contain nudges and reminders to help keep you (and ourselves) on the path.

Because at the end of the day, the goal is the path and the path is the goal, and so much of success is simply a matter of staying on it.

Excellence, performance, and greatness can be quite simple, but simple does not mean easy. It’s vital to surround yourself with people, writing, and other material that consistently reminds you to fall in love with the process—to stay patient, to stay focused, to stay consistent, to stay hungry. Do that, and eventually the process loves you back.

– Brad and Steve

If you aren’t a track and field fan, you may have missed the most impressive high school performance in the history of sport. It sounds like hyperbole, but in this case, there’s no other way to describe it. At the USA championships, Cooper Lutkenhaus, a 16-year-old sophomore, ran 1:42.27 for 800 meters. How good is that? It’s over 4 seconds faster than the previous American high school record, which itself was so fast that it had stood since 1996. It’s the 18th fastest time in history among all ages, and until a year ago, it would have broken the outright American Record. There’s also the fact that Lutkenhaus took on one of the most impressive fields of American pros and finished 2nd, just a tenth of a second behind the winner, who happened to be a World Champion at the event. The runners he beat included two other world champions, ranked among the top five in the world.

Again, in case you forgot, we’re talking about a sophomore in high school, in a sport where peak performances don’t occur until much later. There have been otherworldly high school athletes before—Lebron, Tiger, Phelps, Ledecky, Wembanayna—and yet this performance stands out. But we’re not here to debate who is the high school GOAT. We want to cover what comes next.

How do you nurture talent? How do you handle pressure? This isn’t just for the young; it’s a guide for all ages to navigating the inevitable rough spots that follow breakthrough performances.

We’ll draw not only on our research, reporting, and writing, but also on our firsthand experience. One of us (Steve) was a former high school prodigy who didn’t live up to the hype. The other (Brad) worked at McKinsey and then the White House straight out of school, before burning out.

Since those early days, we wrote our first major book together at a young age and it took off, only to be followed by a book that didn’t sell nearly as many copies. Yet we figured out how to stay steady, and we've had multiple successes since. We are imperfect (at best), but we care deeply about figuring out what it takes to achieve sustainable progress.

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1. Improvement won’t be linear.

When you’re a novice or early in your career, you get fooled. Improvement comes easily, and it follows a predictable pattern: work harder, see immediate payoff. Energy comes easily, as concrete progress is one of the foremost keys to intrinsic motivation. But as you develop further, that formula breaks down.

Progress becomes messier. Instead of the straight line, it starts to look like a toddler's drawings: squiggly, sometimes backwards, other times all over the place. Motivation wanes; you stop seeing a clear path forward; and before you know it, frustration builds and you’re left asking: Why isn’t my hard work paying off anymore?

You’ve got to realign your expectations with reality: at some point, progress will slow down and eventually stall. In those moments, you need not panic. Trust the process. A big part of that includes viewing progress more accurately and acknowledging its nonlinear nature and complexity.

2. Expand Your Definition of Success.

As we just mentioned, progress is rocket fuel for motivation. If you see a path forward, you’ll persist. If you don’t, the drive to move forward becomes much more diminished. Perhaps this is shown most clearly in rodent experiments—when mice are in a maze with a path forward, they are stoked to figure it out. If mice are in a maze with no path forward, they panic and then shut down. In many ways, humans aren’t too different.

If your definition of progress or success is too narrow (e.g., "Did I win?" "Did I run a PR?" "Did I get the promotion?"), you’re setting yourself up for fragility. But if you expand your definition of progress, you stoke your motivational flame and increase your persistence. You can finish third, but recognize that you improved your tactics in the race. You can sell fewer books, but see that your skill in writing has expanded greatly. Switching from judging progress solely based on outcomes to a more nuanced view of performance allows you to stay in the game and keep the motivation flowing. It’s about prioritizing mastery over any single result.

3. Build a support system that removes pressure, not piles it on.

When psychologist Ellen Winner studied prodigies, she found that those who had parents and teachers who supported but didn’t overwhelm them were able to translate their precocity into later success. Sadly, too often we get support systems that try to live vicariously through us, seeing it as their own shot at fulfilling the dreams they never achieved. This amplifies pressure for the phenom, making it seem like the only thing that matters is whether you run faster or score more points. A good support system does the opposite.

It takes the load off. It provides an outlet and perspective. It’s there to help you zoom out when the world zooms makes you want to zoom in. It reminds you of who you really are, beyond how fast you run or how many deals you win.

4. Don’t foreclose your identity.

When you’re good at what you do, especially if it’s clear early in life, the world will try to turn that into your entire identity. You become “the runner”, or “the musician”, or “the whizz kid.”

A ​singular identity​ is a ​fragile one​. People who sustain great performance over long periods have outlets that provide a temporary respite from their main pursuit as well as a sense of meaning to hold onto when their main pursuit goes awry.

A broader identity makes you tougher and more robust when your main pursuit punches you in the mouth. You’re much more resilient when one result can’t define you. Psychology researchers call this developing self-complexity, and it’s key to being ​rugged and flexible​ and enduring over the long haul.

When your identity starts to narrow on a single activity, it’s important to broaden it. If you want to be great at what you do, then you have to be all-in. But you can’t be all-in, all the time. You need to have other outlets, other parts of life that bring you meaning.

5. When things get hard, resist the urge to double down.

The most common mistake people make when they hit a rough patch is to double down on the work: train harder, become more obsessed, try to force your way to a breakthrough.

But this kind of forcing almost always backfires. It brings tension and a feeling that you have to get to the next performance step in order to validate yourself and your pursuit. The truth is that the opposite approach is often what leads to the breakthrough you are so desperately seeking.

Take a break, gain some perspective, and spend quality time with friends and family. Do what you can to release the pressure, loosen the grip just a touch, and good things tend to happen.

This is much easier said than done. When every cell is urging you to double down, that’s often a telltale sign you need to back off. Everyone messes this up and then learns the hard way (an injury, illness, period of burnout, or performance decline). But if you’re at least aware of this paradox, hopefully you won’t falter too many times (or too seriously).

6. Remember why you enjoy the pursuit in the first place.

Here’s how the story usually goes: you pursue a sport, activity, or job because it sparked curiosity and interest. It’s not because you thought it would make you a lot of money or bring you fame. But once you get good, everyone and everything starts to convince you that the rewards, accolades, and achievements is what it’s all about. You see the dollar signs, the large increase in followers, the fame, the status. We’re human. We can’t escape our attraction to shiny objects. But too often we lose the very attributes that helped us become great in the first place: our interest, joy, and curiosity get put on the back burner. You see this all the time in sport as athletes transition from amateur to more serious levels. You also see this when someone’s hobby becomes a job (it happened to both of us with writing).

You need to counterbalance this pull. Remind yourself of the reason you fell in love with the pursuit in the first place. Maybe it’s ripping your favorite workout instead of the “optimal” one. Or taking time out of your workday to “play” with a project. It’s about shifting from a mindset of I need to exploit this for productivity to I get to explore this because I’m curious. It’s also vital to surround yourself with the right people—this does much to help make even the hard and tedious work more fun.

7. Go on a quest.

As we’ve ​written before​, when researchers looked at Olympic medal-winning swimmers, they found that they moved from a performance to a quest approach to their sport. It’s not that winning didn’t matter. It’s that they started to see their sport as a quest for fulfilling their potential, as a venue to understand and figure out who they were. This simple shift allowed them to stay in the sport longer. It recalibrated their motivational systems away from trying to prove themselves to the world and toward the never-ending path of mastery for mastery’s sake.

When you pursue mastery for mastery’s sake, you can thwart, even if only a little, the roller coaster of highs and lows and stay committed to long-term progress and discovery.

8. Enjoy the ride.

You never know when it will end. You never know what will be your best performance until well after it’s over. It may be cliché advice, but too often when we are in the midst of our pursuit, we don’t stop to enjoy the ride. We’re hyper-focused on the next workout, the next sale, the next iteration. Don’t take the fact that you get to pursue something at a decently high level for granted. After all, it’s that journey that makes us feel alive. You only spend a minute on the podium. But you spend 99.9999 percent of your time and energy in the pursuit of getting there. Take a moment to pause and appreciate that you get to go on a quest to see how good you can be—and damn, is that an exhilarating experience.

-Steve and Brad

For the first 90 games of the season, the Detroit Tigers were the best team in Major League Baseball. But the hot streak dates back even further. They finished last year on a tear. When they made the playoffs and upset the Houston Astros in the first round, many analysts thought it was a fluke. They said the team was too young. Too inexperienced. Yet the Tigers quickly put those ideas to rest with their play in the first half of this season. They were the first team to reach 60 wins. A whopping 45 percent of the starting lineup for the American League All-Star team were Tigers.

So, as surprising as their dominance in the first half of the season was, what happened after 95 games may have been even more so. The Tigers went on a horrendous streak, losing 12 of 13 games, including to some very bad teams. The local newspaper, The Detroit Free Press, called the Tigers “​historically bad,​” and provided all sorts of data to back it up. The Tigers nosedived from having the best record in baseball to the eighth-best record in the span of just two weeks.

To quote the Free Press, “Nothing was working.”

But then, their star hitter, Riley Green, who had been slumping worse than anyone, grew a mustache. And sure enough, he started hitting bombs again. Next thing you know, all the players on the team—a bunch of grown ass men—were rubbing Green’s mustache before their own at-bats. And then they, too, started hitting bombs again. Since the arrival of Green’s mustache, the team broke the slump, started hitting again, and has gone 6-4.

Baseball is a long season. 162 games to be exact. It is, as much as anything, a test of patience. There are going to be good streaks and bad streaks. When the Tigers hit their historically bad streak, they didn’t make any major changes to their lineup or strategy. But they did make a major change to their mindset. They went from being the best team in baseball with a bunch of all-stars carrying the weight of the world and everything to lose… to a bunch of guys rubbing each other's mustaches.

That is to say, the Tigers started to have fun again. And then they started to win again.

It’s easy to fit theories onto reality post-hoc. Perhaps it was natural reversion to the mean, and the Tigers were going to start winning again regardless of the mustache. But if you watch the team regularly, you couldn’t help but notice the energy shift once the mustache came to life. It certainly didn’t hurt.

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There’s an extremely important lesson in here for everyone: In whatever endeavors you choose, you’ll inevitably face rough patches. Sometimes there is a clear reason, and that clear reason can (and should) be addressed with a material fix. But other times the cause of a rough patch is mysterious—it’s bad luck; it's bad weather; it's bad vibes; it’s who knows what. In those latter instances, when there is no material change to make, it’s often useful to inject a jolt to change your mind. You want to do whatever it takes to shift out of a downward spiral and toward having fun and competing.

That's because when pressure mounts and things go south, the default is to tense up, which almost always makes matters worse. Researchers call it the difference between a performance avoidance and a performance approach mindset. The former is when you play tight and not to lose. The latter is when you play free and to win. As you can guess, ​research​ shows that a performance approach mindset is almost always advantageous.

Riley Green's mustache helped the Tigers transition from a performance-avoidance mindset to a performance approach mindset. It was the headspace they inhabited at the beginning of the season: an underdog, not expected to do anything, and most importantly, a group of guys having fun.

It can be a funky outfit. A pair of goofy shoes. A trending song. A different haircut. A different hair color. Or yes, a mustache. Whatever it takes to break up the monotony of a long and hard stretch, whatever it takes to get out of a performance avoidance mindset and into a performance approach one.

The hustle-culture excellence and performative greatness types that dominate the internet tell you that everything is about grit and being tough and suffering and being super serious all the time. It’s the David Goggins approach to greatness. No doubt, there is a time and a place for that. But there’s also a time and a place to grow a mustache and have fun. And as the Detroit Tigers are showing us, the latter is every bit as important to actual excellence as the former.

-- Brad and Steve

An ever-increasing trend in the world of optimization is striving to be perfect.

You often see this advice online: Never drink coffee. Always do an exacting workout. Get that 100% sleep score. Don’t have the Fritos or Oreos because you need to eat clean. Perfectionism is worn as a badge of honor, a show of one’s dedication to the pursuit of health or performance. But if you peel back the layers, a blinding obsession with being perfect doesn’t help health or performance. It almost certainly gets in the way.

Perfectionism is a mask. It’s a way to deal with a lack of control. The person who is afraid of their mortality becomes obsessed with all of the longevity trappings to an extreme degree. The person who ties their entire identity to being an athlete transforms into a neurotic mess who will do nothing that could possibly hurt their performance. The anxiety drives the compulsion. It’s a way to cope with the uncertainty and fragility that accompanies striving for something that means a lot to you—and potentially falling short.

These fears are common. I may not be good enough, or I have limitations, or I am mortal, or I could fail are all frightening confrontations. Convincing ourselves that we can be perfect and therefore eliminate uncertainty gives us some comfort that we can control the outcomes, even when that is almost always an illusion.

You see this most clearly in extremes: eating disorders, OCD, and clinical anxiety. The control temporarily eases one’s symptoms, only to make things worse in the long run. But these patterns are not exclusive to the extremes: they affect nearly everyone in day-to-day life, and have big implications for performance. The best athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists we’ve been around all have some degree of obsession. But they don’t let that tip into neurotic perfectionism and over-controlling. They have an occasional drink with friends (unless they are in recovery), sometimes stay out late, or indulge in dessert instead of eating hyper clean. They understand that it’s the totality of the work and lifestyle that matters, not any one thing. A big part of what allows the greats to stay dedicated over the long haul is the brief moments where they let their guard down and release the pressure just enough.

Trying to be perfect is a surefire path to burning bright for a day, week, or maybe even a few months. But eventually, you burn out. It’s like the Simple Plan song: I’m sorry I can’t be perfect.

What elite performers actually do is productively direct their obsession, with just enough perspective to realize what matters and what doesn’t. Those trapped in the myth of perfectionism convince themselves that never getting a bad night’s sleep or never eating Chik-Fil-A is what makes them great. Meanwhile, the best athletes know they need to show up even after a bad night’s sleep, like ​JJ Spaun did​ when he won the U.S. Open after caring for his sick daughter at 3 AM. Usain Bolt ate ​1,000 McDonald’s chicken​ nuggets at the Olympics before performing at a level that had never been seen in history. Part of what makes great performers great is an ability to focus deeply on what makes the most difference, while simultaneously letting go of what’s not make-or-break. We’re not saying wake up at 3 AM or binge on McDonald’s! But we are saying you don’t have to be perfect.

Don’t major in the minors. Keep the main things the main things.

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If you keep telling your brain that every single little thing is life or death, that a cookie could ruin your diet and disrupt your health, then your brain receives a very clear message. It learns to be on high alert, predicting disaster if the slightest deviation from your plan occurs. It’s the athlete who lost the game before it even started because they couldn’t sleep well the night before. Or the longevity influencer who can’t stop ruminating over the chocolate they had at dinner—it’s not the piece of chocolate that’s making them feel sick, it’s their obsessive perfectionism and anxiety! They’ve trained themselves to think that one slip-up is the end of the world, and their brain complies.

Walking around saying you never consume sugar, always sleep 9 hours a night, etc., seems like dedication. It makes you feel good—you tell yourself you are so dedicated that you are leaving no stone unturned.

Many equate themselves to the cycling team that popularized “marginal gains,” obsessing over the team’s pillows and mattresses to optimize sleep, measuring the distance the riders walked to their bikes, and optimizing every single small detail. It’s a good story. But more often than not, it leaves you fragile and insecure. There’s a reason the team that popularized marginal gains was, in reality, part of a doping scandal. It wasn’t the marginal gains that made the difference. It was the maximal ones. They kept the main things the main things—only in their case, the main things were cheating with drugs that worked!

It’s no different than the influencers online telling you that the key to their performance is such-and-such special tea, supplement, or sleep protocol when in reality they are doping, plagiarizing, air-brushing their images, staging their lives, lying about their profit margin, and on and on and on. It’s a grift that is as old as time.

Make no mistake: if you want to be your best, you need habits and systems. You need to control the controllables. But you also need to let go of the uncontrollables, to not cling so tightly to every little thing that your entire sense of stability crumbles under the weight of your own perfection.

A much better aspiration is to be like the elite performers we know who play the long game. Those who are actually excellent. (And who don’t cheat!) They live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. They aren’t thrown off by whatever wrench life throws their way, because they’ve learned they can still show up and do the work, even in imperfect conditions, be it a baby waking them up in the middle of the night, limited food options in a foreign country, or just the need to chill out for a while.

Perfectionism trains our brains to freak out. Real performance is about training our brains to be flexible enough. Because inevitably life will get in the way. When it does, we can either spiral or we can realize that we’re okay and find a way through. Every day, we get a choice as to what route we’ll practice.

Be good. Control what you can. But don’t fall for the trap of thinking that perfectionism is making you strong when, in fact, it’s making you fragile.

— Steve and Brad

It's time for a new term: zombie burnout.

It represents the half-dead, half-alive shuffling through the day that leaves you both restless and exhausted at the same time. It depletes performance in just about every endeavor. And it's increasingly becoming a risk for everyone in modern life.

Two Types of Burnout

Yes, you can burn out from working too much. But you can also burn out from not doing enough of what lights you up.

​Data​​ from the Gallup Polling Group shows that over 75 percent of people feel burnout at some point during the year, and only 32 percent are highly engaged in their work and life. These numbers are essentially unchanged from a decade ago, when we first started writing about this topic in Peak Performance.

But there is also ​​data​​ showing people are working less. The drop off isn’t major—from 44.1 hours per week in 2019 to 42.9 hours per week in 2024—but it’s not like we’re all grinding away and working 60-hour weeks either.

This tells us that burnout isn’t just about how long or hard we are working. It’s also about the way in which we are working, and the why behind our work.

When we use burnout as a blanket term, we flatten its meaning, and it becomes harder to make progress on the problem. Here, we want to propose breaking down burnout into two subtypes:

Type-1 burnout (overwork) comes from doing too much work without enough rest and recovery. It’s how people conventionally think about the issue.

Type-2 burnout (zombie) comes from not doing enough of what lights you up, from not taking on challenges that align with your values and goals.

Two people can work the same number of hours in a similar work environment. One person burns out. The other thrives. The only difference is that the one who burns out doesn't find the work meaningful, whereas the one who thrives does.

We see this in our coaching and reporting, and we see it in ourselves. When our work (and lives) feel tedious, when we are going through the motions, we start to feel burnout. When we are engaged in what we are doing, when we are taking on meaningful challenges and working at the height of our powers, we feel great. Same effort. Completely different result.

Data shows this theme to be true at every number of hours worked.

Of course, the two types of burnout are not exclusive.

The most damning cases occur when you are experiencing both overwork and zombie burnout, when you are working a ton of hours and find your work tedious and meaningless. You can also love your work, find it full of purpose, and still burnout—for example, if you are going to the well for consecutive 80-hour weeks.

But an observation we’ve made over the last few years is that zombie burnout is becoming as much a risk, if not greater, than overwork burnout. Especially because zombie burnout isn't just about work, it's about all aspects of life.

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How Zombie Burnout Creeps Up On You

We live in a convenience-first culture. Everything is engineered to be fast, seamless, and effortless. It can soothe us and help us zone out. But over time, zoning out leads to its own kind of restless exhaustion. If we don’t have any friction in our lives, we all too easily become numb and hollowed-out zombies. There’s a reason the movie WALL-E is not a utopia, but a dystopia.

What we really crave isn’t ease—it’s meaningful engagement in things we care about. This requires putting ourselves in the arena. It requires ditching the too-cool-to-care attitude that is really just fear of embarrassment or failure. It requires overcoming the “epidemic of nonchalance.”

Ideally, you have a job that is full of meaning and challenge. But this isn’t going to be the case for everyone. And that’s fine! Even if your job is just a job, you can find sources of aliveness, challenge, and meaning outside of work and dramatically reduce your risk of zombie burnout.

But if you don’t have these sources of meaning, challenge, and aliveness anywhere in your life, then you end up spending a lot of time going through the motions. Perhaps you become so desperate for resonance, so desperate to feel anything, that you start doomscrolling, gossiping, getting caught up in outrage politics, and checking and re-checking news websites all day. These temporary hits of excitement and anxiety feel like focus, but they are synthetic, shallow, and fleeting—and leave you worse off than before.

We know from decades of research that people thrive when they are taking on meaningful challenges, engaging in activities that make them feel alive, and being present with others. This is a far cry from the stream of synthetic content and shallow experiences that threaten to drown out our days.

A recent and popular post on the platform “X” came from someone who goes by the name Blue:

“We have normalized overconsumption. Listening to a podcast while we walk, scrolling reels in the toilet, listening to music while we cook, watching a show on Netflix while we eat. It’s as if there is NO breathing space for your mind. You’re constantly trying to fill the void, the stillness, and yet here you’re complaining about feeling groggy and demotivated.”

It near perfectly encapsulates zombie burnout. Underneath it all is a hunger for more genuine sources of meaning and aliveness in our lives.

Do Hard Things—But Not All Hard Things Are Worth Doing

Hans Selye, the pioneer of stress research, made a vital observation: The same stressor can strengthen or break you—depending on what it’s for. When a challenge is meaningful, your nervous system adapts better. You recover faster, respond more effectively, and stay healthier.

But stress without purpose, especially when it’s chronic, is corrosive. It raises inflammation, dysregulates your nervous system, and wears you down. It feels like running a race with no finish line and no reason to be running. You’re not building capacity—you’re just burning through it.

Still, many of us end up chasing goals we don’t really care about. We follow the crowd, mimic metrics, and say yes to things that look good on paper. But imitation without meaning breeds fatigue. It’s not just the weight of the work. It’s the emptiness behind it.

This is one of the biggest problems with optimization culture. The cold-plunging, waking up at 4 AM, and going to boot camps is great if you genuinely find that stuff meaningful. But if you don’t, it just creates more fatigue.

It's also true that if we don't have any stress in our lives—if we aren't working on meaningful challenges, if we don't cultivate a reason to wake up in the morning—then that, too, degrades our vigor, health, and well-being.

In other words, we thrive off some stress in our lives, and stress is mediated by meaning. We need to do hard things, but not all hard things are worth doing.

(For more on the art of doing hard things, listen to our recent podcast episode on the topic. ​Apple​/​Spotify​.)

Avoiding and Reversing Zombie Burnout

You don’t need to be a world-class anything. But you do need something that lights you up. A project, a practice, a purpose that asks something of you—and gives something back. Sometimes you can find it at work. Sometimes you can find it out of work. If you’re lucky, it’s both.

The remedy for type-1 burnout is resting, recovery, and scaling back.

The remedy for type-2 burnout isn’t necessarily to do less, but to shift how you are spending your time and energy.

Train for a marathon. Start on a reading list. Get back to guitar. Go to the woodshop. Get involved in community. Stop doomscrolling. Stop going through the motions. Find activities that light you up. Make sure you don’t outsource your entire life to AI.

Realize that creating the illusion of working hard is often more tedious and tiresome than actually working hard. Also realize that if you think you are protecting yourself from the pain of failure by not really trying at anything, what you are actually doing is diminishing the richness and texture of your life.

Zombie burnout is subtle. It creeps up on you. It doesn’t crash your system, it dulls it. The way to prevent and treat zombie burnout is to identify what numbs and distracts you and then do your best to trade it for what makes you feel alive.

In all our talk about burnout, we’ve lost sight of just how important it is to burn in the first place. The goal isn’t to stop burning altogether. It is to burn bright without burning out.

-- Brad and Steve

The number one golfer in the world just called winning major championships “not fulfilling.”

It's making headlines in the sports world, and people are sensationalizing his comments. But what we actually saw is someone who is the best in the world showing that he's still human, and articulating it in a direct way.

There is no greater trap than thinking that the accomplishment of some goal will fulfill you. What will fulfill you is who you become in the process of going for it.

Despite two Masters wins and a PGA Championship before turning 30, Scottie Scheffler was honest as to what he finds empty about reaching the mountaintop of his sport in a recent press conference.

"This is not... fulfilling," Scheffler said.

"It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but [winning] is not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart," he went on. "It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes... It only lasts a few minutes."

It’s hard for most of us to imagine how that could possibly be true.

How do you dedicate your whole life to standing on a podium, wearing a green jacket, or raising a trophy, only to feel empty by the time your head hits the pillow?

Scottie Scheffler is describing the arrival fallacy, a concept we've written about (and experienced) extensively:

Wherever you are, the goalpost is always 10 yards down the field. If you develop a mindset: “If I just accomplish _____, THEN I’ll arrive,” you are in for a rude awakening.

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There is no arriving. The sooner you realize this, the better. This is true for Scottie Scheffler, and it holds true for anyone else striving for a significant goal.

Win a gold medal, you are on the stand for 3 minutes, and celebrate for a few weeks. Get a big promotion, you feel good about it for a day or two before it’s time to work again. Hit the New York Times bestseller list, you toast to your success, maybe even frame it and put it on the wall. But staring at a cut-out from a newspaper eventually gets boring.

We both thought we'd be content after each of our books first became national bestsellers. That lasted about half a day before we were asking how we could make the New York Times list, too. Recently, I (Brad) hit a PR deadlift: 520 pounds, which for me is a big lift. I remember thinking I'd order my favorite pizza to celebrate and maybe shift away from that kind of training for a bit. It was truly four minutes (I know this, because I didn't even take up the full five-minute rest interval) before I was thinking about what it'd take to hit 550.

The human brain is wired to want more. We are suckers for the chase. We struggle to be content. The neurochemical associated with wanting (dopamine) is much stronger than the neurochemical associated with liking (serotonin).

Becoming aware of the arrival fallacy should not be a downer. It is actually supremely freeing! You no longer expect accomplishment or achievement to fulfill you. Instead, you start doing everything you can to find happiness, fulfillment, and energy in the process of pursuing your goals rather than having false expectations about what will happen when you do (or don’t) attain them.

We spend 99.9999 percent of our lives in the process. The results are mere blips in time. If you want to find fulfillment, then you’ve got to find it in the striving itself.

You've got to enjoy the process of self-discovery. Soak up the good moments along the way. Find joy in the relationships you forge. Inspire others and be inspired. Be of service to others—help, mentor, teach. Have fun doing the hard work.

It's okay to be ambitious, to want to achieve. Just like Scottie Scheffler wants to win Major Championships, we want our books to hit bestseller lists. We don't hide it. We push hard for it. And that’s great! We think you should push hard to achieve your goals, too.

It's just that you've got to realize that no achievement will be as satisfying as the effort that went into it. That's why it's so critical to find joy, meaning, and satisfaction in the process.

In the words of the great Robert Pirsig: "There is no zen on the tops of mountains. The only zen you find on the tops of mountains is the zen you bring up there."

-- Brad and Steve

“That’s impossible. I can’t do that.”

We’ve all said it at some point in our lives. Most commonly, we’re starting a new endeavor, looking at what it’s going to take, and the task before us seems insurmountable. We’re the primary school students staring at the blank screen, unsure how in the world we’ll get to 15 double-spaced pages. We’re the novice athlete who shows up to a new running club and wonders what in the world we’ve gotten ourselves into when we hear that one of the groups is going 10 miles. We’re the junior associate who just got a stack of work dumped on her desk, and we can’t imagine reading all of it in time, let alone filing the report that goes with it.

The Beginner’s Trap

When we take on a new challenge, what might seem “normal” for others seems unimaginable for us. But normal is relative. It depends on our comparison point. When our comparison point is set too high, it is hard to understand how we’ll ever measure up. We can’t process how it’s possible. There’s too large a gap between where we are and what we’re being asked to consider.

Both of us have experienced this. If we think back to when we were novice athletes, a four-mile run seemed like a long way, a task that would make us need to lie in bed to recuperate. When we built up to four miles, eight sounded impossible. When we made it to eight, fifteen was insane. And yet, when we were running fifteen miles, eight became an easy day, and four was a recovery run. The reference point for “normal” shifted.

This isn’t just about sports. You could say the same for writing, music, or any number of other activities. Whenever you step up to a challenge, your brain runs a mental calculation: what are the demands of the task, and are you capable of handling them? But your mental model is only as good as the data you are feeding it. So if you’ve never run four miles, let alone known anyone who has, then your brain rightfully sounds the alarm. “Danger, Danger, Do NOT attempt this!” Your brain is protecting you, which is what it evolved to do.

But the problem is that the alarm system often stands in the way of progress. It prevents you from getting started because the demands of a new activity seem too hard. You can’t fathom taking the first step, because the end-goal is lightyears away.

You have to shift what normal is. And for the most part, that means incrementally bridging the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It’s about taking on just manageable challenges to ever so slightly push the bounds of what is possible. You don’t jump from writing a tweet to a book, from a mile to a marathon. You gradually increase your capacity, giving your brain evidence that you can pull it off. Step by step, mile by mile, page by page. Slowly but surely, what once seemed unmanageable becomes a real possibility.

Over time, your benchmark for what is “normal” shifts. As it does, you’re able to push harder without the mental burden. When you’ve written a book, a regular article doesn’t seem so daunting. It takes less mental energy to get started. When you’ve run a few marathons, an eight-mile run requires less willpower to get out the door, because now it’s considered short. Your perspective has shifted, and so, too, has the activation energy needed to get going.

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The Expert’s Trap

In most contexts, working toward gradual progress is the best path forward. We incrementally rewire our reference point, our sense of normalcy. But once we’ve reached a certain level of expertise, we often get stuck in a different type of impossibility: We become so experienced at what we do that we can’t imagine going a step further. We know our capabilities well. We’ve been in the arena so many times that our performance is predictable. We start going through the motions and risk losing the initial spark and curiosity to find out what we’re capable of.

When you find yourself stuck in a rut of expertise, you need a different kind of perspective shifter. Not gradual, but drastic.

In ​Win the Inside Game​, Steve wrote about how once or twice a year, he’d do a “Go See God” workout. The entire point was to go as far into the well as possible. The goal wasn’t to run a certain time, but rather to drastically change his perspective of how far he could push. It was permission to take a big swing, even if he fell short. The adaptation he was going after wasn’t physical. It was psychological.

When Steve wrote his first book, ​The Science of Running​. He had no business doing so. It was rejected by all agents and publishers. He took a big swing. It wasn’t perfect. There were a ton of mistakes. Even so, it sold over 50,000 copies as a self-published book and gave him confidence that with the right help, writing could be a career.

Still, it’s important not to be reckless. When Brad first locked out 500 pounds for the deadlift, he didn’t jump into it. Rather, he pulled from blocks, which essentially means the bar has to travel a bit less, making the lift less fatiguing and risky. But simply seeing that he could lock out that weight was the entire point. It was a psychological shift. A few weeks later, he pulled 510 off the ground.

When he wrote ​The Practice of Groundedness​, Brad didn’t quit his day job. He took the big swing, but he made sure to have a cushion, which, paradoxically, allowed him to take an even bigger risk. Why? Because even if he failed, he could still make rent.

You break the expert’s rut by taking big swings in ways that are kind of crazy but not dangerously so.

A Tool for All of Life

You see the importance of shifting “normal” in so many different contexts.

For instance, when people are recovering from injuries or managing chronic pain, the evidence-based approach is first to gradually expose the system to more stress, desensitize the alarm system, and help the nervous system realize it no longer needs to protect itself. If that doesn’t work, sometimes you just go for it (again, in a thoughtful way) to show yourself (or your patient) that they are actually okay.

You can even see the effect of shifting the normal collectively. It’s a common occurrence that when someone breaks a long-standing record, many more tend to break it shortly thereafter. All of these are examples of resetting the reference point for what is possible, for what is within the realm of normal.

It’s true for our daily lives, too. You see it with our reliance on technology. A few hours away from the phone here or there might feel nice, but it never pushes us over the hump of feeling what it’s like to truly be free. To break the spell, we often need to go without our devices for an entire day, if not longer.

So much of what holds us back is our own expectations. We define what is normal before we’ve even given ourselves a chance to explore and see what may be possible. Often, the solution is to gradually increase the effort. But every so often, you need to do the equivalent of a “go see God” workout, and completely shift the reference point, disrupt the system, and prove to yourself that you are capable of more.

Normal is a moving target. It’s up to you to shift it.

-Steve and Brad

Amid all the craziness in the broader world, over the last few months, there have been a handful of extraordinary moments in the world of sports. And since, at their best, sports are a mirror for life, each offers important lessons for us all.

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Respond not React

First, there was the golfer Rory McIlroy’s incredible focus on the final day of the Masters. After making multiple devastating unforced errors and playing the worst hole of his career on 13, he came back and made arguably the two best shots of his career on 15 and 17. Then, on the final hole, McIlroy missed an easy putt (if such a thing exists) to win. He choked—the consequence of which was a sudden death playoff. Somehow, he kept it together and went on to play textbook golf in the playoff, winning the Masters after over a decade of chasing it, and becoming just the sixth golfer in history to claim a career grand slam.

On the way into the playoff, after all the ups and downs and the choke on 18, McIlroy’s caddie and longtime friend, Harry Diamond, turned to him and ​said​: Well, Pal, we would have taken this on Monday morning.

McIlroy (and Diamond) taught us the importance of responding, not reacting, and playing the game in front of you. Not the game you wanted to happen. Not the game that was happening. Not the game you thought would happen. But the game that is happening.

McIlroy could have spiraled on multiple occasions. Instead, he let his emotions move through him, took a deep breath, and re-focused on the task at hand. It’s a masterclass in something we write about often here at The Growth Equation: ​The 4Ps of responding not reacting​: pause, process, plan, and proceed. He did this not once, not twice, but at least four times in the final championship round.

"Next-Play" Mentality

Next, there was the Tennis player Carlos Alcaraz’s remarkable comeback during the finals of the French Open. He was down 2 sets to 1, 5 games to 3, and 40 points to zero in the fourth set, and he was playing against Jannik Sinner, perhaps the most methodical—consistent player in the game today.

Probabilistically, coming back from that sort of deficit is like getting hit by lightning twice, and maybe in the same week. And yet, somehow, he did: one stroke at a time; one point at a time; one game at a time; one set at a time. The comeback extended the match to 5 hours and 29 minutes, and Alcaraz, remarkably, won.

It’s easy to talk about being present. It’s much harder to actually be present, especially when the entire world is watching. No helmet. No face mask. No curtain to hide behind. Alcaraz stood his ground. He didn’t quit. He overcame insurmountable odds by being so in the moment that his mind couldn’t drift off into the future to consider just how unlikely his comeback was.

Alcaraz demonstrated a next-play mentality: when things are going great, ride that momentum, but don’t get complacent or stuck in the previous moment. When things are falling apart, when you make an error, when you find yourself losing, learn from what happened if you can, but then forget about it and get back into the game. A next-play mentality is crucial in tennis and all of life as well.

“It’s time to keep fighting, trying to find your moment, your good place again and just for it,” Alcaraz said after the match. “I think the real champions are made in those situations when you deal with that pressure, with those situations in the best way possible. That’s what the real champions have done in their whole careers.”

Focus on the Craft, Not All the Noise Around It

There’s also Caitlin Clark, who is, simply put, crushing everybody in the WNBA. In only her second season in the league, she is leading in votes for the upcoming All-Star Game. She’s had unprecedented spotlight and pressure. We haven’t seen a young talent exceed already astronomically high expectations like this since Lebron James. Not to mention, her opponents are playing exceedingly rough at times, and she's been consistently fouled while maintaining her composure.

Clark shows us the importance of returning to the craft itself, which in her case is basketball. It’s easy to get caught up in the social media storylines, hype, and what other people are saying. But those are all distractions, none of which Clark can control. But what she can control is her preparation and, at least to some extent, her execution on the court. She’s focused there relentlessly. She hasn’t taken the bait on social media. She plays the game and lets the work speak for itself.

It’s an example of greatness that all of us can follow: put the work first, do what you can to tune out distractions, let other people think and say what they want. Everything beyond the court is not your problem, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Energy is limited. Save it for what actually matters, for what actually moves the needle and brings you satisfaction and fulfillment.

Especially in today’s digital world, there are endless opportunities for all of us to talk about the thing, post about the thing, try to game LinkedIn for the thing, worry about what other people are doing in the thing, and on and on and on. But none of this is as powerful as doing the thing, and doing it to the best of your ability—this is where meaningful progress resides.

Compete Fiercely and Respect Deeply

And finally, there are the Oklahoma City Thunder, who recently won their first NBA championship. They may have been the favorites once they arrived at the finals, but for the preceding decade, they were an afterthought: a small-market team that wasn’t willing to spend on megastars.

But wait, you may be thinking, what about their current star, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was named league MVP? Hit rewind, and you’ll remember that Gilgeous-Alexander came to the team in 2019 as a relative unknown, via a trade in which the Thunder were giving away superstar Paul George to the Los Angeles Clippers, who were chasing a championship with big-name players. (The Clippers have yet to make it to the finals.) At the time, many said the Thunder were giving up, dumping talent. Turns out, they were slowly and steadily building a championship team.

Not only did the Thunder win a championship with a team-first approach, but they did it with remarkable class. Perhaps the most memorable part of the finals occurred when Indiana Pacers’ star Tyrese Haliburton went down early in Game 7 with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Gilgeous-Alexander was one of the first people to check on him. The game was in Oklahoma City. Brad chatted to a few people who were there, and they all said essentially the same thing: the stadium went quiet, and for the rest of the game, the entire vibe shifted. Yes, the Thunder and their fans were hellbent on winning, but they also recognized and held in reverence what Haliburton lost.

The Thunder team teaches us that a great team is more than a bunch of great players on the court at the same time. Chemistry matters. They also teach us that you can compete, like winning is the only thing that matters, and hold the utmost respect for your competition.

The above examples show us that excellence does not mean control or perfection.

It means the ability to meet the moment with presence, flexibility, and a next-play mentality. It means staying in the game. It means giving your all. It means responding instead of reacting. It means caring deeply. It means laying it all on the line. It means coming up short. It means exceeding expectations. It means doing all of this while staying grounded, maintaining respect for your competition, keeping your head up, and continuing to show up as best you can.

What's true in sport is true in life.

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-- Brad and Steve

One of the hardest things in coaching is seeing someone’s potential when they can’t see it for themselves. It’s right there in front of you, as clear as day, and yet for whatever reason, you can’t quite get that person to see what they're capable of.
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Now, take that same situation as a parent. Your task just got one hundred times harder. You know your kid is capable of so much more, but they’re in that phase of life when nothing you say or do registers. Recently, Steve made an Instagram post on how when Mom or Dad force their kid to show up to practice or turn in their homework, those same kids may struggle once they are on their own. Good parenting relies upon building intrinsic motivation instead of relying on fear or force. But a common—and for good reason—response to that: What do you do if you see the potential, but there’s just no drive there? ​
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You can’t force motivation. You can’t make someone passionate. But what you can do is plant the seeds and ensure the environment is conducive to growth. Those seeds might not sprout for months or even years, but if you plant enough seeds and tend the soil, then chances are, at some point, flowers will bloom.

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​In The Practice of Groundedness, Brad used this metaphor to illustrate the difference between letting development happen versus making development happen. “The seeds that you water are the seeds that grow.” You can’t force a seed to sprout. If you mess with it too much, you end up killing it. But you can’t neglect it either. You’ve got to plant it, tend it, and let it grow.

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It’s no secret that Steve grew up as an obsessed runner, the kind who ran 16 miles a day as a teenager in the summer heat of Houston, Texas. He once did a track workout in the middle of a hurricane—why? Because it was on the schedule. Steve was self-driven to the max. In fact, his parents probably wished he were a little less driven so that they could vacation without needing to ensure Steve got in his two hours of running each and every day.
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But Steve wasn’t always this way. As he wrote in Win the Inside Game, early in his sporting career, he chose soccer over running. After just missing the elementary school record in the mile and being offered the chance to train for it, he quit the first day of practice. And, instead of demanding he try to seize the glory or finish what he started, his dad was okay with it. Years later, when he was finally dragged out to train for high school cross-country, he puked on a suburban lawn and wanted to throw in the towel after his first run. Even when Steve had finally committed to running for the high school team his freshman year, he initially didn’t train on weekends or days when the team didn’t have official practice. For a while, Steve even told himself that he was just using cross-country to stay in shape for soccer.
​

Brad had a similar story with writing. Dating back to first grade, he had some natural talent and tested into a gifted program for verbally inclined kids. But he didn’t last long, for the simple reason that he wasn’t into writing. Fast forward to high school, and Brad was sacrificing grades in just about every other course so that he could spend more time writing and reading. Even when he got rejected from prestigious journalism schools and went to college for a different degree, he took nearly all his elective courses in writing. He wrote for the college newspaper. He turned down partying to read. He wrote as a side gig without making a penny for over a decade before he got his first paid assignment. All that drive now, but all of it lacking when Brad was a young child.
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What changed for both of us? The people with whom we surrounded ourselves started planting seeds and tending to the garden. And we matured.
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For Steve, it began when a couple of upperclassmen, Matt and Dane, dragged him out to run. It didn’t start well (the aforementioned puking…) but as they kept inviting him back, he was left with little choice but to show up. After all, as an incoming freshman, when two seniors with cars want to hang out every day—even if that hangout was a humid 60-minute run—you show up. To fill those seemingly unending minutes of running, they’d often talk about the sport itself. It started with their goals and aspirations, like making history and getting the team to the state championship for the first time. But it gradually expanded. It was on these runs that Steve first heard the names of running legends like Steve Prefontaine and Jim Ryun.
​

For Brad, it was two high school English teachers: Mr. Ozar and Mr. Pittman. They brought the material to life. They read Brave New World and discussed the parallels with the culture we were then living in (parallels that have only intensified). Mr. Ozar had all kinds of tattoos. Mr Pittman was a collegiate basketball player. They showed Brad that you could be captain of the football team and still be a 'nerd,' that you could be cool and write.

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When your knowledge base and role models expand, so does your appreciation for the thing you’re doing. You start to see narratives for your own potential in a higher resolution.

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The people you surround yourself with shape you by their own motivations and interests. As kids turn into teens and start to tune out their parents' messages, they need adults in their lives who can model motivation and interests and open their eyes to new paths. Who, just by the virtue of not being Mom or Dad, may have their sentiments and behaviors sink in.

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Steve found this in his coaches, Mike DelDonno and Bob Duckworth. They saw a freakishly talented kid who had no idea how good he was. But they didn’t tell Steve that initially. Even though it was clear to everyone that he was one of the school’s top runners as a 14-year-old, they slow rolled it, letting Steve taste victory in a few freshman and then JV races, before finally pulling him up to the varsity squad. As we know from decades of research, making concrete progress is one of the core ingredients to intrinsic motivation. We all want to get better. And we can tilt the scales in our favor by shifting the comparison point.
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Then there were the subconscious hints. The running magazines scattered in the locker room that served as the go-to thing Steve killed time with in the days before cell phones. There was a library full of running books that these coaches had in their classrooms for those who wanted to go deeper. And then, the periodic and much-welcomed day when the team only had a short jog for the workout, but then watched videos of old Olympic races.
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They took a kid who was clueless about running and provided context. It started with a viewing of the Steve Prefontaine movies at a pre-race dinner. It continued with videos of past Olympics, and passing along the classic novel, Once a Runner.

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And then came the ultimate seed plant: Coach DelDonno pulled Steve aside one day during his freshman year of track season and started talking about Jim Ryun. Thanks to the unofficial education from his teammates, Steve knew who Ryun was: the first boy to run under 4 minutes in high school, who still held the high school record at the time, and who went on to set the world record. Steve was enthralled. Coach Deldonno already had him won over, but then he planted the final seed no less: “We haven’t had a high school boy run under 4 minutes in over 30 years. Only three high schoolers have broken the barrier, all in the 1960s. I think you have a shot to join that club.”

His prediction ended up being one second off.
​

But that conversation was the final domino. Steve went home and wrote "3:54" on his wall (Ryun had run 3:55). He couldn’t quite wrap his head around beating the legend, but it was enough to get Steve hooked on the sport. He saw a new path, and for once, began to unpack where his potential may lie. Steve’s Coach didn’t have that conversation when he first saw Steve’s potential, but rather, planted seeds and waited until Steve was ready to see what he was capable of.

​We often have the wrong idea about motivation and passion. We think that it’ll be like a Disney fairytale, that we'll find our proverbial Prince Charming and instantly fall in love. That we'll find the thing that ignites our passion, and never look back. Real life seldom works that way. Most passions grow slowly. It’s why research shows that if we have the fairytale, prince charming, perfect fit view of passion, we tend to give up on our pursuits early. As researchers put it, “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”

​From a practical standpoint, this means allowing yourself (or your kids, athletes, or employees) to explore your interests. People need breadth to see all of the available paths, whether it's playing multiple sports, exploring a diverse array of subjects, or even trying out different majors in high school or college. Exploration sets the stage. But then we need both peers and mentors who help us move from broad to deep. These people allow us to see that our pursuit is meaningful, and that we might have more to give than we once realized.

We need to plant seeds, tend the garden, and then give ourselves a long enough time to see if anything grows.

– Steve and Brad

The parent of a high school baseball player recently asked us for tips to help his son manage nerves before critical at-bats. We’ve been asked a version of this question countless times: by lawyers arguing at the Supreme Court, musicians about to take the stage, surgeons before operating, and students before exams.

Everyone faces performance anxiety. It’s part and parcel of being human. The goal in these situations is to self-regulate, to get your nervous system into a state where it can perform optimally.

Working with Nerves

The most common advice revolves around calming techniques, i.e., mindfulness, box breathing, the Andrew Huberman popularized "​physiological sigh​,” visualization, and positive self-talk. No doubt, there is a time and place for these tools—and with practice and in the right circumstances, they can be quite beneficial. But there is another approach that may be more powerful: Accept the sensations you are feeling, and instead of labeling them as something bad that you need to get rid of, label them as a sign that you care, as your mind-body system gets ready to perform.

We know from decades of ​research​ that the worst way to make anxiety go away is by trying really hard to make anxiety go away. What you resist tends to persist. Trying to get rid of pre-performance nerves is a big gamble. If your breathing, visualization, or other calming technique doesn’t work, then you’re going to spiral—not only have you labeled what you’re feeling as bad, but now, you can’t even get rid of it! This is not a state you want to be in as you step into the batter’s box, be it an actual or metaphorical one. Not to mention, if you care deeply enough, you're always going to have some nerves. There is no way around it.

A ​study​ of swimmers found that both elite and non-elite competitors experience the same physiological sensations before a big race. The only difference is that the non-elite swimmers labeled them as anxiety and tried to make them go away, whereas the elite swimmers labeled them as a part of the sport, as a sign of caring, and the body getting ready to perform.

Other ​research​ on public speaking found the same thing. Those who tried to get rid of anxiety before presentations fared worse than those who sat with the feelings and reframed them as “excitement.”

In our experience coaching and counseling high performers, one of the biggest unlocks is helping people realize that pre-performance anxiety is normal and that acceptance and reframing are often the best paths forward. But there is nuance, and it’s important.

When to Calm Down and When to Accept

Let’s use the Olympic sport of Biathlon as an example. In Biathlon, athletes ski as fast as they can until they reach specific junctures where they must fire a rifle at a target 50 meters away.

If a biathlete is feeling nervous on the start line before a race, the best advice would not be to try and get rid of those nerves, for all the reasons above. Instead, we’d counsel that athlete to accept the nerves, to remind herself that it’s completely normal—it means you care! It would be more of a problem if you weren’t feeling any nerves! Sit with the feelings, reframe them as your nervous system preparing for the task at hand, and wait for the race to start. Once it does, you’ll be fine.

But now let’s say that same biathlete gets to a target mid-race, her heart rate redlining from skiing, and she misses the first shot. In this instance, a technique like positive self-talk—I’ve got this: breath, sight, shoot—or perhaps a specific breathing protocol (assuming she’s practiced and trained it) would be helpful.

If you’re nervous before public speaking, a big meeting, or an exam, accept the nerves; tell yourself they are a sign you care (because that’s precisely what they are); and remind yourself that once the actual event starts, you’ll settle in.

If you stutter, lose your spot, your pencil breaks, or someone interrupts you when you least expect it, that’s a great time for self-talk, a quick visualization, or a breathing technique to help you regulate and reset.

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There is No Substitute for Experience and Guts

All of the podcasts and influencers who spend hours upon hours trying to help you make pre-performance anxiety go away (or any anxiety, for that matter) have a severe misunderstanding of how anxiety works and what it means to be a human (versus a machine).

The way to make strong sensations dull is by getting reps under your belt, by facing the nerves and taking them along for the ride, over and over again. It’s why the first at bat of your career is always more stressful than the 3654th one. It’s why the gold-standard treatment for clinical and generalized anxiety is "Acceptance and Commitment," which, in its simplest form, means accepting the nerves and committing to showing up and living out your values anyways. Do that, and after a while, the nerves usually fade. It’s simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. It takes guts.

A long time ago, before we fully understood the psychology and science behind any of this, Steve and I were in the back of a taxi crossing the Bay Bridge on the way from San Francisco to Oakland for our inaugural major book talk. It was right after Peak Performance was released, and the first time either of us would be in front of an audience of thousands. I remember the ride being silent.

Steve turned to me and said, “Dude, are you nervous?”

I said, “Very.”

Steve, looking slightly relieved, said, “Me too. My palms are sweaty.”

I said, “I think that’s fine, we know our material like the back of our hands.”

Steve said, “It’s just like before a big race. You can be nervous on the way to the race, and even while standing on the start line. You just have to wait for the gun to go off, and then you’re fine.”

And guess what, he was right. We were nervous until the 'gun went off', until we got to that first slide, and could talk freely about the book we knew so well. Since then, we've given hundreds of talks, and while we still get nervous, we know that if we've done the preparation and don't fight the nerves, eventually they will fade.

So the next time you are facing nerves or performance anxiety, instead of trying to fight it or make it go away, normalize what you are feeling. Reframe the sensations as a sign of caring and readiness. Get to the starting line. Wait for the gun to go off. Let your training take over. And give yourself some grace for being a human and experiencing human feelings.

Anxiety isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes, it simply means that what you are attempting is hard, and that you care. Nothing is wrong with that. Caring is fuel. Learning to ride the waves is an important skill, and like any other skill, you get better with practice.

– Brad and Steve

“I said to myself: what the hell am I doing here... I just didn't want to be there."

“All I want is to get this over with.”

As a big performance approaches—whether it’s in the boardroom, surgical operating theater, or on the track—anxiety and fear can send us spiraling. Our legs feel heavy, our mouth dries up, and our brain isn’t firing like it should. In these circumstances, it’s easy to think today just isn’t my day. Everything feels off, and that means we are not going to rise to the occasion. Maybe it’s best if we pack it in and try again another time. Or, if we’re forced to start anyway, perhaps we should accept that our best performance is out the window.

But the quotes above aren’t from a weekend warrior or from someone who relegated themselves to a subpar day. Murray Halberg said he didn’t want to be there when describing how he felt before becoming the surprise champion of the Olympic 5k race. Herb Elliott said he just wanted to get it over with in the hour before he went on to win Olympic Gold and set a World Record in the 1500.

We often think that how we feel before stepping into the arena will dictate how the main event will unfold. If our legs feel dead before a race, we panic. If our mind feels sharp before a pitch, we know we’re ready to step into the batter’s box. If the notes are popping off the strings, we’re ready to take the stage. If not, it’s going to be ugly.

At one point or another, all of us have probably pre-judged performance, anticipating how we’ll do before we’ve even taken our first step. It’s a common habit of mind. But in doing so, we set ourselves up to fail. We don’t allow for the breakthrough performances and surprises that Elliott or Halberg experienced. That’s why it’s so important to reverse this habit and replace it with a better one.

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If there’s one sport where a warm-up ought to predict performance, it’s Olympic shooting. After all, the warm-up is the same exact thing that you’ll do during a match. You fire at the same target, using the same gun, and in the same manner. The only difference is that an announcement has been made letting you know it’s no longer warm-ups, but now everything you do counts. In a recent conversation with 2016 Olympic shooting champion Ginny Thrasher, she told us that it’s vital to disconnect how she feels right before the competition and the competition itself.

It’s easy to pre-judge. If you couldn’t find the target in warm-ups, your brain naturally jumps to this is how it’s going to go during the match. But that kind of thinking backfires—even when the warmup is going great; here, you often see shooters rush the shot, or not account for the additional stress that knowing it’s go-time causes. Alternatively, if you can’t find your sight to save your life in warm-ups, it can send you spiraling towards despair. Thrasher says that you have to figure out how to turn off the “predictive mechanism…I always say to young shooters: Bad sights, good first target. Good sights, good first target.” In other words, you’ve got to let go of how you feel during the warmup and realize that you can show up and perform your best anyway.

This advice isn’t just for world-class shooters, it’s for all of us. And yet our minds are constantly inundated with the exact opposite.

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Consider social media and podcast land, where we put the emphasis on the perfect routine or ritual to get us in the right state to perform. You need to stare at the sun, drink your coffee at the exact right time, jump into your cold plunge, and on and on and on… all to get to the exact state where you can finally conquer the day. Or maybe your WHOOP or Aura Ring needs to show you a good (or at least not terrible) “readiness” score. But that mindset makes you fragile.

When you can’t nail your routine, or when, for whatever reason, your routine doesn’t leave you feeling energized or “ready,” it’s so easy to hit the mental eject button: today’s just not my day. But this isn’t necessarily true. Yes, routines really can help. Yes, every great performer uses routines. Yes, you should probably have a few routines yourself. But they are not destiny.

One of the best things that can happen is that you feel horrible before you start something that matters, and then surprise yourself during the activity itself: The great race after a warm-up filled with dread. The productive writing session when you were half-asleep going in. The pitch that blew your boss away when you wanted to be anywhere else before you opened her office door. These experiences help you realize that you don’t need the perfect warm-up to perform well, that you don’t have to feel great to get going. You just need to get going. Sometimes, you just might surprise yourself.

When you’re feeling great, ride those waves. But when you aren’t, it can be helpful to say: Don’t pre-judge the main event based on how I feel during the warmup. Anything can happen. How I feel now doesn’t dictate how I’ll feel when the gun goes off, when the curtain is pulled back.

Human performance is complex. For all we know about what contributes to our best days, there is still so much that we don’t. Let’s say that peak performance tracks perfectly to how you feel during the warmup about seventy percent of the time. That leaves us with the thirty percent, it doesn't. Thirty is a big number, especially throughout a lifetime. This ought to be plenty of reason to give yourself a chance. You never know what’s going to happen: Bad sights, good first target. Good sights, good first target.

-- Steve and Brad

There’s growing pushback against a “too cool to care” attitude—and thank goodness. People are tired of cynicism and apathy. We’re hungry for depth, for meaning, for people who try.

Consider Gen Z’s reaction to Timothee Chalamet’s Screen Actors Guild award ​speech​, in which Chalamet said, “I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five-and-a-half years of my life, I poured everything I had into playing [Bob Dylan]...I’m really in pursuit of greatness; I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats, I’m inspired by the greats.”

Chalamet wasn’t mocked. People didn’t throw sarcasm his way. Rather, the speech trended on the internet for over a week—young people from all over applauding him with some version of this is what it's all about.

The same thing happened last year when Shohei Ohtani may have had the greatest baseball season in MLB history. One of Brad’s most popular New York Times pieces was an ode to Ohtani’s greatness, and how it can be used as inspiration for all of us. And it’s still happening every time the Indiana Fever play, thanks to the continued success of Caitlin Clark.

It’s great that greatness is back in vogue, that people are being inspired by excellence. In a world that is increasingly chaotic and increasingly automated (all at the same time), real, deeply felt human excellence is a balm for the soul.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of grifters and influencers capitalizing on the trend. As so often happens, the pendulum swings from one extreme (cynicism and not caring being fashionable) to another (performative nonsense and empty hustle culture).

But there’s a big difference between hustle-culture greatness and true greatness, between performative excellence and the real thing. It’s worth taking a minute or two to clear the air.

True greatness is not about chest-thumping or optimizing every second of your day. It's not about perfection, or who has the most extensive morning routine, either. And it's definitely not the curated grind culture that so many influencers are selling.

True greatness is something quieter and far more powerful. It's a heartfelt dedication to a craft, person, or cause. It's a consistent and attentive practice. It's giving a damn.

Some people think excellence is reserved for Olympians. Others imagine it's about winning at all costs. But those definitions are too narrow and miss the broader point. Yes, the pursuit of excellence often yields incredible feats. But it's the pursuit that holds the value, and the pursuit is available to all of us.

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Excellence is a philosophy of life, a set of attitudes that can be applied to anything you care about:

• Commitment and consistency.

• Hard work and rest.

• Caring and vulnerability.

• Learning and growth.

• Intensity and joy.

• Focus and attentiveness.

• Resilience and gumption.

• Respect for one's craft.

• Respect for oneself.

Excellence can live in the baker perfecting a recipe. A parent juggling work and family. The artist refining their skills. The leader setting the tone for her organization. The high-school or college athlete trying to get a little bit better than they were before. The person winning an Olympic gold medal or the person running their first marathon. It’s less about what you do and more about how you do it.

Excellence combines mastery and mattering.

Mastery means building skill and making progress in projects you care about. Mattering means knowing your effort counts, that it has significance. Even if no one else sees it, you know. Psychological​ ​research​​ has found that when people experience mastery and​ ​mattering​​, they report higher life satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment. At a moment in history when it feels like ​mastery and mattering are being crowded out​, we need to protect them at all costs.

Anyone who cares about what they do and pursues it with integrity and intention can aspire toward excellence, can reap the benefits of mastery and mattering.

Yes, objective results and performances matter. But the real reward with excellence is how you shape yourself by showing up and giving your all. What you work on—and the way in which you work on it—also works on you.

“I was engaged in furniture making as a creative process, the practice of which would help me to forge a good life… For the past decade, I had been imagining that my goal was to make furniture that expressed certain values. Now I saw that what I had really wanted all along was to cultivate these same qualities within myself,"​ ​writes​​ the furniture maker Peter Korn.

Mediocrity is overrated. So are delusion and despair.

Find things that light you up and give them your all. The world doesn't need more people who are going through the motions. The world needs more people who are fully alive, who give a damn and care deeply about what they do and how they do it.

Pursue greatness. Aspire toward your own version of excellence. But don’t be fooled by the fake or shallow versions. Be about the real thing. At the Growth Equation, we’re committed to these ideals, and we’re here to help you on your path.

-- Brad and Steve

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We often write about actual greatness versus pseudo greatness here at The Growth Equation.

Often, it’s from a distance, an example of an elite athlete or world-renowned artist who gives us a glimpse into the nature of striving to be the best.

But recently, we had the opportunity to see it up close. A few weeks ago, Steve attended a statue unveiling and celebration for Coach Tom Tellez.

For the uninitiated, Tellez is a legend in track and field. He’s on the same level as Phil Jackson or Nick Saban. His list of accolades is long, including coaching Olympic legends like Carl Lewis, Mike Marsh, and Leroy Burrell.

But perhaps the best demonstration of his coaching success occurred in the 4x100 relay. In the modern era of track and field, the 4x100 relay world record has been set by individual countries bringing together their best athletes at an Olympic Games or World Championship, with one single exception: In 1991, four athletes from Tellez’s training group broke the world record. Not four athletes from one country, but four athletes from one coach. When Tellez took the job at the University of Houston, his family thought it was nuts. He was a top assistant coach at UCLA, then the premier track program in the country. When he arrived in Houston, the program didn’t even have an actual track, just some old-school cinder. But Tellez had a vision, and he was willing to put in the work to achieve it.

At the statue’s unveiling, Carl Lewis stood up and told the story of how he chose Houston over more vaunted programs. At every recruiting trip, Lewis asked a simple question, “How are you going to help me jump 29 feet in the long jump?” Most coaches gave generic answers and directed their attention to what Lewis would get: fancy jerseys and state-of-the-art facilities. Tellez pulled out the film and showed him what jumping that far required.

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“70 years ago, I just wanted to be a biology teacher so I could coach. All I ever wanted to do was coach,” says Tellez. Once, at a local Houston track, after a workout Steve participated in, Tellez saw a junior high student practicing his 40-yard dash with his father. Tellez stopped what he was doing and spent thirty minutes coaching this kid on his start. The father had no idea who this old man was, and Tellez never once mentioned his accomplishments. He just saw someone he could help. So he helped. For Tellez, the whole point was mastery. He was notorious for being unafraid to tinker. While other coaches were afraid to screw someone up, Tellez was the one who did the seemingly absurd and changed Lewis’s takeoff leg in the long jump after he’d already set the high school national record. Why? Because it was part of the process. He’d famously tell the sprinters he coached to “focus on your lane, not the others.” It was a constant reminder to stop worrying about your competitors, to focus on executing your race, to keep your head in your proverbial lane, and the rest would take care of itself. When Steve was in college, he had won his first race of the season and was ecstatic. He’d run his fastest time in over a year, had pulled off the victory, and thought it was a sign of great things to come. But when he made his way over to Tellez, he said, “What was that? You didn’t try anything we had worked on.”

His point was simple. That race was about learning a new tactic, trying to test out the mechanical changes we’d made in practice. Instead, Steve had reverted to the old way, just trying to win. And while the result was solid, he’d missed out on the opportunity to develop a skill that would help him over the long haul. While many coaches talk about the process, Tellez lived it. He judged races by how well you executed your process, not the end result.

In professional sports, we often reference coaching trees. For example, you can look around the NFL and see the coaches that Bill Belichick mentored who went on to become head coaches or the same with someone like Gregg Popovich or Tara VanDerveer in basketball. In track, the Tellez coaching tree is made of legends—a testament to true greatness. A sprawling coaching tree symbolizes your willingness to share and mentor. To pass down the torch, instead of “hiding your secrets.” With Tellez, there is never talk of hacks or quick fixes. There was no ego puffing or performative nonsense. When Tellez spoke at his statue unveiling, he put it simply: “I had a lot of good athletes, but more importantly, they were good people.” In a world of performative nonsense, it’s a refreshing reminder that true greatness is about mastery. It’s about the process. It’s about sharing and mentoring. It’s about the people you meet and the personal growth you experience along the way. It’s about a love of the craft. It’s about focus. It’s about attention. It’s about dedication.

Of course, results matter, but they take care of themselves if you're patient and do all the other stuff right. It’s a universal truth: from the track to the lab to the operating room to the classroom to the artist’s studio.

– Steve and Brad

A common theme among high performers—ourselves included—is a drive to keep pushing for progress. You never want to become complacent. You always want to ask yourself, "What can I do better?" This mentality is core to a growth mindset; it lies at the heart of greatness, excellence, and mastery.

However, while you are pushing yourself and finding weaknesses to improve, it’s crucial to learn to be kind to yourself, too. Otherwise, you risk becoming bitter, angry, and resentful.

Brad was recently providing counsel to a highly skilled and sought-after surgeon. This person (let’s call him Dave) was being exacting and hard on himself. It was, of course, a learned behavior. His unrelenting intensity and unforgiving accountability helped him to become one of the best. And in this current moment, much of what he was saying was accurate and true. He was falling short in certain areas. There were things he could improve upon (there always are). And yet, what Dave was completely overlooking is how truly excellent he already was. The surgical cases he focuses on are long and exhausting. Navigating his career, family, and friendships is hard. Holding himself to such a high standard is hard.

It took Brad pointing this out to Dave multiple times for him to realize he could accept himself as he was—and even be proud of himself—while at the same time striving to improve. These two attitudes don’t need to be opposites. It was a huge unlock for him; not just hearing it, but coming to truly believe and embody it. Not only did he feel better, but he started to perform better, too.

So much performance and personal development content gravitates toward extremes: On one end, you’ve got the drill sergeants, hard ass, get your shit together I’m going to break you down messaging. On the other hand, you’ve got the let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, life is hard, it’s not your fault, the systems and structures are stacked against you.

But this is a gross oversimplification, a reductionist view of the mindsets actually required for excellence.

Regardless of what you do, if you want to get the best out of yourself and live a full and meaningful life, there is no avoiding confronting the limits of your personal responsibility and acting with agency. Study after study shows the power of self-efficacy. “Over the last 34 years, educational researchers from diverse fields of inquiry have used the notion of self-efficacy to predict and explain a wide range of human functioning, from athletic skill to academic achievement,” write the authors of a 2012 ​review​.

And yet, if you are always beating yourself up or judging yourself, you are not going to last long. If you constantly compare yourself to people in completely different situations from yours, you are never going to accurately appraise your progress.

Consider the popular personal development aphorism we’ve all got the same 24 hours in the day. This is bullshit. Some people have kids to take care of, others don’t. Some people have cancer, others don’t. Some people live in poverty, other people have multi-million dollar trust funds to back them up. Sure, there are 24 hours in the day, but there are also very real constraints on what someone can do in those hours.

The 24 hours in the day thing is obviously true across the population, but it’s also true within ourselves. All of us will experience seasons of life that are less chaotic than others. All of us will undergo injury, illness, and loss. Nobody escapes unscathed.

It’s not meant to be a cop out. We shouldn’t sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. We should acknowledge the difficulties and challenges that each one of us will face while doing everything in our power to take agency and improve.

It’s not either-or. It’s both-and.

Trying to get the most out of yourself, show up consistently, and be excellent is hard under even the best circumstances. So many people go through the motions. So many people blame others for their problems. So many people are okay with mediocrity. Stepping into the arena, making yourself vulnerable, risking failure, trying to achieve your own personal greatness—this stuff is hard! Doing hard things becomes a bit more sustainable when you learn to have your own back.

It doesn’t mean brushing off accountability or responsibility. It simply means acknowledging that being a good person and striving for excellence is not the default path, let alone the easy one. As you walk that path and do everything under the sun to improve, there is room and need for self-kindness, too.

There is no conflict between being a badass and having your own back. If anything, the latter helps to support the former.

Brad and Steve

It’s easy to brush off the struggles of men or the rise of the online ​“manosphere”​ as the patriarchy’s last gasp or an overblown and manufactured crisis solely for the culture war.

But that’s a mistake.

The data show that young men are truly struggling in unique ways—graduation rates are steeply declining; suicide rates are four times that of women; and loneliness and isolation are on the rise. If thoughtful people don’t address these struggles, then the likes of Andrew Tate, Liver King, or other miserable influencers will.

It’s why we’ve spent the last two episodes of our podcast — FAREWELL (​Apple​, ​Spotify​) — doing a deep dive on the topic. The first, a conversation with Richard Reeves on the cultural and social forces that have created these problems. For the second episode, ​out today, we came together to debrief on that conversation, hear a couple of clips from other voices who have thought deeply about these issues, and offer potential solutions or ways forward.

With that in mind, let's start with the hormone most associated with the “alpha” male movement: testosterone. Traditionally, testosterone is thought to be about aggression and dominance. It’s why every social media bro hems and haws about being “high T” or tries to insult those they claim are “low T.”

Unsurprisingly, the social media ecosystem misunderstands and misrepresents complex biology.

Testosterone isn’t mainly about aggression, it’s about status. And it’s context-dependent. In a dominance-incentivized environment, increases in testosterone lead to aggression. But in environments that prioritize competence or prestige, that same hormone nudges us towards pride, affiliation, and prosocial behaviors. As University of Oregon psychologists wrote in a recent ​review​, testosterone “functions as a competition hormone that readies and calibrates an organism’s psychology for the pursuit and maintenance of status and by doing so maximizes fitness across competitive contexts.”

Put differently, in the context of UFC, testosterone leads to aggression. But in just about every other context, testosterone leads to wanting to be recognized and appreciated, be it by constructing bridges, building companies, or helping out a neighbor.

The manosphere (online communities that are broadly anti-feminist and misogynist) often emphasizes dominance as the only path forward; however, this is in opposition to research that shows we can obtain status in other ways—such as prestige, virtue, and competence.

Here's why the misrepresentation of dominance matters: When the world feels overwhelming, and other paths towards status seem hopeless or out of reach, when men (often young) are told that the only solution is to “dominate” to prove their worth, what happens? They avoid and shut down (think: incels), or they latch onto whatever movement promises them a solution in the short-term (think: Andrew Tate’s version of masculinity).

Without a clear, meaningful path to status, young men risk withdrawing or falling prey to toxic shortcuts and pseudo solutions. Isolation, bitterness, and extremism become attractive. Andrew Tate isn't the disease; he's a symptom of a deeper void, a deeper sickness in our society.

We all need status. It’s part of being human. The ​latest theories in psychology​ posit that we have an in-built status monitoring system, the hierometer. Essentially, our perceived status—how much we feel respected, valued, and needed—acts as an input that adjusts our internal sense of self-worth, which in turn influences our emotions and behaviors. In simplistic terms, if we don’t feel valued, we experience negative emotions and adopt avoidant coping mechanisms and anti-social behaviors. Status isn’t an individual pursuit. It’s socially dependent. Are you contributing, providing value, and displaying significance in a community? There has been a significant decline in connection and belonging in recent years; it’s hard to sustain tangible status when you have no actual friends, when you have no impact in your physical world.

It's important to note that women also need and seek status. We’ve rightfully worked to increase women’s opportunities in the workplace, especially in jobs in STEM fields or opportunities to rise up in corporate hierarchies. This is all great—and not just for women, but for all of us. We want the smartest and most capable people doing their best work. But at the same time, we’ve seen a decline in roles and opportunities where men traditionally obtained status:

• Physical jobs have declined in quantity and prestige.

• We’ve emphasized college degrees for all, while downplaying the trades and craftsmanship.

• In high school, thanks partially to the No Child Left Behind Act, non-core academic classes like shop class have declined precipitously.

• We’ve turned youth sports into a professional pipeline instead of a socialization and character development opportunity.

• We’ve seen the rise of what we call “a watching society” in place of a doing one: less playing sports, more observing; fewer hobbies and craftsmanship, more scrolling; less dating, more reality television and porn.

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We also see the need for status in another recent trend: the rise of the lifting bro on social media. ​Research​ shows that for men in particular, physical strength serves as a signal of status. If it feels like you can’t get status anywhere else, what do you do? Lift some weights to boost your internal status monitor. We think strength training is great, but the rise in the health optimization world points to men trying to find status in one place they can control: their appearance of strength. (And if the number of social media trolls who call Steve a pencil neck nerd is any indicator, many wear this badge of status as their only useful measure of identity…)

But even here, there is a key distinction to be made: the appearance of strength versus genuine strength. The appearance of strength can be manufactured with steroids, which are on an ​exceedingly steep rise​ in young men. Genuine strength must be earned through hard work and respect for the craft and yourself. There’s a big difference between training alone, taking steroids, and watching YouTube all day versus getting the most out of yourself and pushing against your natural limits in a community of other people doing the same. The problem is that so many young men are being sold (and pursuing) the appearance of strength versus genuine strength, and not just in the gym, but in life itself.

We desperately need to provide a more diverse array of status opportunities for men that don’t just include dominance, but also prestige, virtue, and competence. We need to model these opportunities to young men and celebrate those living them out in diverse ways. Collectively, we should try to:

• Reverse the decline in men volunteering for service organizations or leading their local scout troop. These provide avenues for status through virtue and role modelling for younger generations.

• Change the narrative on certain professions. We desperately need more male teachers, nurses, and therapists. We should encourage these professions, not just for men but for women too! You can easily argue that nothing is more important than raising the next generation and caring for those in need.

• Make tradespeople feel valued. As AI and automation encroach on many professions, understanding how to fix a plumbing emergency is becoming rarer and more valuable by the day.

• Improve our isolation crisis among men and women. And no, not through AI bots as Mark Zuckerberg suggested, but through opportunities for genuine connection. Men tend to form ​friendships​ through “side-by-side” activities where they are doing things together, versus face-to-face conversation. We need more sports, crafts, and activities to provide opportunities for this.

• Provide more avenues for mastery. From youth sports to art to theater to craftsmanship, mastery provides status through competence and prestige. That means initiatives like rolling back the “pay to play” youth sports model and making sure shop class is available in more high schools.

• Raise the profile and status that comes from being a good and loving father.

As Richard Reeves explained in our ​recent podcast,​ the first step is to acknowledge that status isn’t zero-sum. We can have men and women rise together, and that should be the goal. This is the opposite of what much of the manosphere professes: turning the rise of equality into a boogeyman, an enemy to rally against. It’s the classic “us vs. them” tactic to direct one’s anger, fear, or outrage at something external instead of taking personal responsibility and accountability. It might help create followers for the Tate brothers on social media, but it doesn’t help any of the young men who fall for the trap. It only creates hate, resentment, and further isolation. The solution is not the “protein to MAGA” pipeline. It’s not to create a left version of Joe Rogan. It’s not to say that men need to suck it up and that there’s no issue. It’s to provide avenues for significance, direction, and connection that aren’t toxic and shallow. It’s to provide opportunities for young men and women to thrive. It’s to create cultures and highlight role models who emphasize competence and virtue as meaningful paths forward.

- Steve and Brad

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