I have an eight-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. My kids will be the first to tell you I’m no parenting expert. When I look at the world, I see a chaotic, uncertain place changing faster than ever. It’s hard to predict what skills will be relevant next year, let alone a decade from now. And yet there are two in which I have a high degree of confidence: how to shoot a basketball and how to read a book. Taken together, they comprise a large part of my parenting philosophy. Let me explain.

1. How to Shoot a Basketball

Slight bend at the knees. Feet and shoulders square to the basket. Elbow in tight. Lift through the hips and trunk. Extend the arm as the body rises. Finish with a flick of the wrist. Hold the follow-through. Some coaches may have minor objections, but this is more or less how you shoot a basketball. It is simple but not easy. You improve via repetition. The results are objective and concrete—the ball either goes in the hoop or it does not. It’s hard. It’s fun. There is a direct line between effort and result.

My son loves basketball, at least for now. It’s still a bit too early to tell for my daughter. Maybe she will, maybe not. And that’s okay, because there’s nothing particularly special about shooting a basketball. It could just as well be playing the violin. Or striking a soccer ball. Or painting. Or acting in the theater. Or learning how to dance.

What I’m getting at is the development of a real skill in the real world. Something that is challenging and at times uncomfortable. Something that forces you to push against limits; to overcome resistance, setbacks, failures, and keep going. Something with stakes. Something in which to build competence.

It’s never been easier to coast. You can sit around on screens all day and be a passive recipient of a homogenized, soulless algorithm. You can use AI to answer questions, write papers, and even date. You never really have to put yourself out there. You never have to risk failure. These are deeply concerning trends. Learning how to shoot a basketball confronts them head-on.

You can’t automate or fake shooting a basketball. As such, when you learn how to do it, you develop what psychologists call self-efficacy: an evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up, navigating challenges, and excelling as a result of your own hard work. Decades of research show that individuals who score high in self-efficacy tend to have better outcomes across various measures of life satisfaction.

I don’t expect my kids to be wizards at everything. I want them to try a range of activities and find what they enjoy. But I do think it’s important that at least one of those activities is learning how to shoot a basketball—be it actually or metaphorically.

2. How to Read a Book

Recent research from University of California, Irvine professor Gloria Mark suggests the average adult attention span is currently 47 seconds. That’s pathetic.

Almost everything worthwhile—appreciating art, creating something novel, falling in love—requires sustained attention. The quality of your attention shapes the quality of your life.

I believe reading books is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to build your attentional muscle. Reading teaches you to experience distracting thoughts and feelings and to return to the text in front of you, again and again. Eventually, the distractions subside. Perhaps you even lose yourself in the narrative. This sort of deep focus is a wonderful feeling, a reward in and of itself. Experience that rewards enough, and eventually you start to choose focus over distraction in other areas of life too.

Yet learning how to focus is only a small part of what makes reading profoundly valuable. It exposes you to ideas across geographies and eras. Reading is far more active than listening or viewing. It is also slower and more imaginative. You have to create the mental imagery and tone of voice. You have to dictate the pace at which you consume the text, think about what you are consuming, make connections in your mind, and then continue on.

Reading develops agency—which is precisely why every totalitarian regime throughout history is eager to ban books. Learning how to read is learning how to create the conditions to think for yourself: slow, deliberate, contextual, and without interruption. It’s in direct opposition to the synthetic slop-stream that encompasses so much of modern life.

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None of this means my kids don’t ever watch television or play NBA 2K. (They do, within reason, at least most of the time, but sometimes it rains for hours in the summer.) It simply means that we rarely go a day without reading, and that working toward competency in an age-appropriate way—it has to be fun!—is an ever-present force in our lives. When you combine the two, you increase the odds that your kids will be fulfilled and successful in life.

Another important quality I want my kids to develop is kindness. Sadly, this too seems to be falling out of favor. Cruelty increasingly gets rewarded with attention, especially online. As Derek Thompson recently wrote, we’re in an era of vicemaxxing, where treating people well is framed as naive, as something that makes you a pushover.

But disregarding kindness is a path to nihilism; in the body politic and in the individual body, too.

The least kind people I know are also the most empty. Small kindnesses—saying thank you, holding open doors, paying attention to other people—enrich your life and fill your heart. Much like shooting a basketball or reading a book, kindness is a skill. You get better through practice and repetition. My job, as best I can tell, is to ensure my kids get enough reps—at home, with each other, out in public—so that kindness becomes a habit before society tries to wring it out of them.

Perhaps my parenting philosophy is countercultural, which is fine by me. The prevailing culture rewards the opposite of all three: passivity, distraction, and contempt. I’d rather my kids be out of step with that.

Get competent at something. Learn how to read. Be kind.

I want to try something new here—a brief weekly round-up that will include three parts: a timely story containing a practical lesson; a philosophical idea; and something I am personally digging.

Let’s dive in.

1. Don’t bet against the badass who is having fun

NBA star Donovan Mitchell just led the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first conference finals without LeBron James since 1992.

(As a Detroit Pistons fan, the way this series concluded pained me, but that’s besides the point.)

After falling behind 0-2 in the series, Mitchell was asked about pressure.

“I don’t feel pressure,” he said. Getting your next meal is pressure. Where am I going to live? That’s pressure. This is an opportunity. This is fun.”

Contrast this with podcast bros who say you’ve got to be angry, that if you’re not suffering, you’re doing it wrong. Smiling and having fun are weaknesses. Hate your opponents. Play like everything is on the line, it’s life or death.

Y’all—these “alphas” are unserious clowns.

Steph Curry. Alysa Liu. Victor Wembanyama. LeBron James. Aryna Sabalenka.

All world beaters. All badasses. All have loads of fun.

Some people were confused as to why I included a chapter about having fun in my new book on excellence. People generally don’t put the two together. But in my research and reporting, I found the opposite: fierce intensity and deep joy can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

Meanwhile, here’s what I think is at the root of the alpha bro, be-angry-all-the-time approach to greatness: These guys are generally not elite at anything other than attracting attention—so they make up for it with enticing, performative nonsense. People in the arena realize that if you want to last, you’ve got to learn how to have fun.

The best performers in the world are focused, determined, a little bit crazy, at times obsessive, and live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring. All that is true.

But the best performers in the world also have a whole lot of fun.

2. Fear of Failure Shrinks Your Life

There’s an increasingly pervasive attitude where people are so scared of failure that they don’t even try. It’s really tragic. You’ve got to get over it.

Every good thing in life requires putting yourself out there.

Doing hard things that align with your values is one of the most underrated, satisfying things there is. You gain discipline, self-respect, and self-confidence. You gain evidence that you can navigate discomfort.

A good life requires choosing to put yourself out there, face discomfort, and risk failure. It’s the cost of entry. There’s no way around it.

I’ve come to think of it as a humanist manifesto:

I will care deeply.
I will take on challenges.
I will explore my potential.
I will build relationships.
I will put myself out there.
I will create.
I will contribute.
I will learn.
I will keep going.

It’s not always easy to uphold these commitments. But it is always important, and feels that way more-so now than ever.

3. The Best Writer on the Best Coach

Wright Thompson is my favorite magazine writer. Steve Kerr is my favorite coach. So as soon as ESPN dropped Wright’s massive profile on Coach Kerr, I dropped everything I had planned to read it. It’s an incredible piece of craft. Every time Wright Thompson does a profile like this, I say there is no way writing this well is possible. And then I wait 18 months or so, and he somehow outdoes himself.

The piece took me a little over an hour to read. I’ve been sending it to everyone I know. Savor it.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup. I’ll catch y’all soon!

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been asked several times what books I’d recommend for new graduates. It’s a fun question because I’m about to turn 40, and it’s prompted me to go back in time and imagine 22-year-old me, but in today’s world. What would I find useful? What ideas and tools would help me to better understand myself? What would inspire and motivate?

What follows is a list of books I pulled from my shelves, along with brief descriptions of each. As I was finalizing the list, it occurred to me that I’d recommend all of these books to someone who is 30, 40, 50, or 60 too. So hopefully it inspires you to grab a few books to gift the new graduates in your life, and also to grab a few books for yourself.

We are living in an extremely serious time dominated by extremely unserious people. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: reading books is becoming a radical counterculture act, and it’s more necessary than ever.

Enjoy the list. Pick one or two books to gift and to read. Be the counterculture.

Written in 1985, this book argues we are getting so caught up in entertainment and performance that we losing sight of what’s serious, let alone the ability to act on it. Postman predicted a reality TV star would be president over 40 years ago. There’s a reason people call him an oracle. Amusing Ourselves to Death is must-read to understand some of the biggest problems of today, and also to protect yourself from getting swallowed by the slop-stream.

A comprehensive look at the difference between chest-thumping fake toughness, (which is pervasive these days) and the real thing (which is rare and desperately needed). Steve has been my collaborative partner for years, and Do Hard Things is his biggest idea—and his best book—to date.

My favorite book on how to do focused work in a distracted world. Cal Newport, who happens to be one of my best friends, coined the term “Deep Work,” and it’s never far from my mind. (I actually think about and use it almost every day.) I’ve come to believe that Deep Work is key to not only a productive life, but also a good one.

A philosophical exploration of the limited time each of us has on Earth, and how to ensure we are focusing on what matters most in that limited time. Four Thousand Weeks will help you reflect on what is worth doing, and just as important, what is not.

The book on the power of sticking with things—even, and perhaps especially, when they get hard. If you want to be the kind of person who can hang in there when the going gets tough, when you face setbacks and obstacles, Grit will help.

A great overview of how we think about money, biases and traps to avoid, and how to develop a good relationship with saving. The Psychology of Money is like financial literacy 101, only for the human psyche instead of a spreadsheet.

An ode to the power of the human spirit, resilience, and the skill of staying hopeful in trying times. Hope in the Dark shows how people can come together and do incredible things, even against the odds, even in trying times. It’s essential to understand and hold onto this, because once you lose hope, there’s not much left.

Being a generalist, amassing diverse experiences and exploring your interests, can be the greatest competitive advantage there is. It’s true even in unlikely places such as sports. Range shows you how and why.

A poignant reminder that each and every one of us carries doubts and insecurities; it doesn’t mean we are broken. It means we are human. We can use those doubts and insecurities to help lead us toward an authentic life of connection and meaning. Herein lies The Wisdom of Insecurity.

If grit is a crucial skill, so is knowing when to quit. This book, from a world-class poker player, explores when to hold em and when to fold em—and not just in cards but in all of life. A huge key to success is knowing when to grit and knowing when to Quit.

The Comfort Crisis was written ahead of its time. Over five years ago, Easter argued that if you engineer too much friction out of your life, you begin to suffer. A life of convenience and ease sounds nice, but it’s actually pretty empty. We need to struggle, albeit in the right ways.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include what I think is my best book. The Way of Excellence is an urgent call to reclaim the lost art of excellence and to aspire toward it in our own lives. Based on a decade of research and reporting, it outlines the mindsets, habits, and practices that give rise to an excellent life.

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Let’s start with two recent remarks:

“I hate this whole men’s mental health stuff that they talk about.1 Unfortunately, when you’re a man, you are the provider, you can’t be that guy posting on social media, oh I had a bad day and I’m so sad. It’s unattractive to other males, let alone women.” —Dana White, CEO of UFC

“If my mental health was a priority I wouldn’t be as successful as I am… I obviously never would have buried myself alive for seven days. There’s a reason no one makes videos like me, not even close. Because no one wants to live the life I live” — Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr Beast, the YouTube star.

White is worth north of 500 million dollars. Donaldson more than 2 billion.

Set aside whatever you think of White or Donaldson’s character. Both are channeling a now-familiar cultural script about hard work that insists there are two ways to live—and two camps you can belong to.

The first one is full of therapy-speak, talking about your feelings all day, downplaying ambition, still expecting to achieve success, wondering why you don’t, and then blaming other people. You can have it all, this camp says. You can be perfectly balanced.

The second involves suppressing your feelings, pushing through everything, and disregarding the toll it takes on your body, your relationships, and the people who depend on you. The missed birthday. The cot under the desk. Burnout, broken marriages, public meltdowns2, the occasional early death—these are just the cost of greatness, or so the story goes.

This is an overly simplistic dichotomy that plays great in short clips on a hyper-polarized, tribal internet, but that is utterly removed from the truth of actual greatness. The people who embrace this dichotomy—whatever side they identify with—are badly misinformed.

***

Here’s a useful metaphor: imagine there is a powerful force, an inner mongrel, a dynamic drive. If you channel that force in the right direction, it can fuel your greatest contributions and accomplishments. But to channel that force productively, you need to build a pipe that directs it and is durable enough to contain it. The materials that combine to create the pipe will vary from person to person, but include things like friends, intimate relationships, therapy, sleep, and exercise. The greater the force inside of you, the stronger the pipe must be. The pipe can withstand the occasional weak point—say, a three-week period of intensive work where you skip the gym, sleep less than usual, and cancel social plans. But if the pipe’s casing starts to rust or weaken more broadly, the force will burst it, degrade your performance, and potentially destroy your life.

The truth about hard work and aspiring toward greatness is that it is very hard! You absolutely have to make tradeoffs, sacrifices, and have some dog in you. It’s not for everyone. There is a certain kind of temperament that is driven, hard to satisfy, and not accepting of the default. You will not be balanced. There will be times in your life, perhaps especially when you are young, when you may be singularly focused on your craft. You will wonder how some people are content to work a traditional 9-5 and simply enjoy their life. You may even find yourself jealous of them. But you are wired differently, and no amount of meditation or yoga will compete with that wiring.

But what is also true is that if you don’t have any constraints around your drive, if you neglect relationships and health and the basic hygiene of being a functioning adult, if you try to white knuckle everything always, if you refuse to ask for help when you need it, if you never allow yourself to process your feelings, if you take pride in how worn down and psychologically broken you are, then not only will you be miserable, but eventually your performance will suffer and you won’t last very long at whatever it is you do.

The most common objection: What about Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant? Both are known for their fierce intensity and ruthless ambition. Surely they’re proof that grinding yourself into dust is what greatness demands? I actually think they are perfect examples—only for my argument, not against it.

Both Jordan and Bryant worked with the same renowned psychotherapist, George Mumford. And both were coached by Phil Jackson, basketball’s resident mindfulness guru. I’m not trying to take anything away from how incredibly talented and driven they were, but it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that each would have self-destructed without Mumford and Jackson. At the very least, I don’t think they would have won as many championships. You also can’t help but wonder if their metaphorical pipe-coating had been just a little stronger, might they have still been world-beaters on the court without all the personal turmoil off of it?

Put simply, Jordan and Bryant are maniacs. Their drive for greatness is otherworldly. They outworked everyone around them. They made next-level sacrifices. They also had just enough constraints on their drive to keep it productive. If you don’t sacrifice enough, you’ll never be great, but if you sacrifice too much, the force underlying your greatness is likely to turn into anger, depression, and despair.

This is the truth about hard work. It’s why I can’t stand takes like Dana White’s and Mr Beast’s, and it’s why I also can’t stand people who say you can have it all, be perfectly balanced, and achieve great things. Both are selling lies to audiences that want to be lied to.

The truth is harder than either lie. You have to figure out what you can sacrifice and what you can’t. How long can you push, and when must you pull back? What buffers do you need to protect yourself from yourself? What values are integral to your character? These aren’t questions you answer once. Wrestling with them again and again is the actual hard work.

1. The best way to stay sane is to find the people and activities you love and give them your all. Distraction, attention vampires, and rage bait are lurking everywhere. But you still have some agency to choose where you focus your attention. Do everything you can to stay locked in on what matters.

2. Challenge yourself. Do hard things. It’s how you grow. It makes you feel alive. Suffering for the sake of suffering is dumb—that’s not what I’m advocating here. I’m talking about meaningful struggle, where you step outside your comfort zone and prove to yourself you are the kind of person who can overcome and find a way.

3. Move your body every day. Eat your fruits and vegetables.
(And when you forget, simply begin again.)

4. You don’t find your passion and then get good at something; you get good at something and then find yourself passionate about it. Competence breeds caring.

5. Stop worshipping status. Lots of famous people are totally unhinged. Know your values, the things you stand for, and live in alignment with them. If you do this it’s easier to fall asleep at night.

6. Become known for your consistency. Some days are better than others. Show up. Give what you’ve got. Rinse and repeat. Small steps really do compound for big gains.

7. It’s better to be kind than clever.

8. We are all mirrors reflecting onto one another. The people with whom you surround yourself shape you. You don’t always have a choice, but when you do, choose wisely.

9. Do what you can to respond, not react. You can’t always control what happens to you but you can control what you do about it. Responding not reacting is a muscle you can strengthen with practice. Like it or not, life gives you plenty of reps.

10. Set aside time to focus deeply on work that is important to you. Put the phone in the other room. Turn internet browser off. Periods of deep-focus work are key to a good life.

11. Confidence comes from evidence. If you want to be confident about something, put in the reps and give yourself the evidence.

12. Just. Get. Started. If you wait to feel 100 percent certain and fully ready you’ll spend your entire life waiting. Lower the bar to ready enough, step into the arena, and learn as you go.

13. Do not worry about being the best. Focus on being the best at getting better. Being the best is ephemeral, it comes and goes. You either get it or not, and then what? But being the best at getting better—that’s a pursuit that lasts a lifetime.

14. Better is more than just objective results and points on the scoreboard. It also means becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser. The world needs better performers and the world needs better people. These things need not be exclusive.

15. It is impossible to be happy all the time. Focus on living a meaningful and textured life. (The irony is you’ll be happier as a result).

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16. Everyone faces anxiety, fear, and doubt. Try not to let these emotions shrink your life. Take them along for the ride. Do what enlarges you.

17. Start where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where other people think you should be. But where you are.

18. Life is hard and nobody is coming to save you, which is why you need to practice self-discipline; it’s also why you need to practice self-kindness.

19. Having fun is the greatest competitive advantage there is. Intensity and joy can coexist, and in the best lives, they almost always do.

20. Strength without flexibility is rigidity. Flexibility without strength is instability. You need both.

21. There is no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. Be patient. Play the long game. The bigger the goal, the smaller the steps. Almost everything good in life requires effort and takes time.

22. Sleep when you are tired.

23. Motivation is overrated. You don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to give yourself a chance to feel good. Show up. Get started. Give yourself a chance.

24. Doing the hard thing today often makes tomorrow just a bit easier.

25. When it comes to your career, think about money, lifestyle, and challenge. It’s almost impossible to have all three, but most good jobs can give you two.

26. Don’t stress if you aren’t “balanced.” It’s impossible to do all the things. Part of being a mature adult is making tradeoffs. It’s okay to have different seasons of life for emphasizing different activities.

27. People who say that money doesn’t matter are full of it. People who obsess over money are miserable. Money is a thing. But it’s not the only thing.

28. Don’t compare your actual life to someone else’s fiction. Most of what you see online is not real. Let’s call it The Influencers Law: The more someone feels the need to post how great their life is the less likely they are actually satisfied with their life.

29. Curiosity is an antidote to fear and boredom. Never stop learning. Find mentors. Read books. Be interested in things.

30. The best relationships and pursuits make you forget about yourself. It’s actually true for pretty much everything. We are stuck in these bodies and selves and yet we feel the most alive when we forget about it. What a wild paradox.

31. Nobody escapes life unscathed. Everybody faces periods of pain, hurt, and feeling lost. Don’t be scared to ask for help. What comes around goes around.

32. Keep the main things the main things. It’s true in craft and it’s true in life. Define your priorities. Pursue them relentlessly.

33. Being nonchalant is lame. Risk something. Care deeply. Give a damn.

34. You are going to fall off the path. Everyone does. When this happens, do what you can to learn from it and get back on. Over and over again.

35. Life is long. You never know what’s going to happen next. Keep going.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable you’ll love my new book, The Way of Excellence. It’s currently 23% off here. (It makes for a great graduation gift too!)

Mental health challenges affect so many people, myself included.

My experience with anxiety, depression, and OCD isn’t something I love writing about. Revisiting my darkest days still isn’t easy. Part of me always worries that somehow even just writing about it could pull me back. But a piece of my own recovery is facing that fear, and I promised myself I wouldn’t shy away, especially when I’m in a place solid enough to reflect. With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, I think it’s important to talk about.

My Story, In Brief

In 2017, I was blindsided by intense anxiety and depression. Eventually, I was diagnosed with OCD.

Intrusive thoughts and feelings took over my life. I was debilitated for the better part of a year. I had just published a bestselling book called Peak Performance, and yet here I was, struggling even just to leave my house.

I felt like a fraud. Worthless. Crazy.

After nine months, I wrote about my experience. It was not easy, but I learned that I was far from alone. I received hundreds of messages from others sharing their own experiences with depression, anxiety, and OCD. What surprised me at the time—but doesn’t anymore—is that many of these people are world-class at what they do.

For many, depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses are as real as the seasons. Not everyone faces these challenges, but for those who do, the experience is vexing, scary, and above all, isolating.

Mental illness does not make you less of a person. It does not take away from your accomplishments or expertise. It does not make you permanently weak or broken.

It is also not something to romanticize. When you are in it, it f**king sucks.

And yet to this day, so many people suffer in silence, confusion, and shame.

Ideas That Have Helped Me

In the early months of my mental health crisis, I was mainly focused on surviving.

But as I progressed in my recovery, I began to explore anything and everything that could help. It broadened my view of the human experience. It also changed my perspective on my job. It’s shown me that it’s important to have practices and tools not only for minor setbacks and when everything is clicking—which is generally the focus of my writing—but also, and perhaps especially, for when it’s not.

1. Reach out.

If you are experiencing a level of distress that feels abnormal for you, find someone you can share it with and don’t be scared to get help. It’s the most important thing you can do. You may feel deeply embarrassed or ashamed but please have the guts to ask for help.

2. Be patient.

Navigating mental illness is a nine-inning game. You may desperately want to be in the bottom of the eighth inning when, in reality, you are in the top of the third. Do everything you can to hold onto that long view. When you’re in it, a year or two or maybe even three feels like forever, but on the other side looking back it doesn’t seem so all encompassing.

3. Make a promise to yourself that you will keep showing up.

And when that feels uncertain, make a promise to yourself that you’ll share those feelings with someone who can support you in that moment.

4. Know that your brain is playing tricks on you.

It will tell you this is forever, that you never had a past without feeling this way, and that you’ll never have a future. Do everything you can to remember these thoughts and feelings are not facts, and they are impermanent.

5. Be kind to yourself.

It takes massive self-discipline to show up and navigate mental illness. You’ve got to learn self-kindness too. This is what’s happening right now. It’s really, really hard. I wish I weren’t feeling this way, but I am. And I’m going to do the best I can.

6. Resist dogma.

Explore all the evidence-based tools available to you: therapy, medication, exercise, and support groups. Stigma around each of these is flat out stupid. All can be effective.

7. Try to accept what you’re going through.

I know, at first the word “acceptance” sounds crazy. But anxiety, depression, and OCD resist control. Acceptance isn’t passive resignation—it’s acknowledging what’s happening, taking skillful action, and letting it move through you. One of the biggest paradoxes of anxiety, depression, and OCD is that obviously you want to try to make what you’re feeling go away, but if you try hard, the feelings just get sticker.

8. People want to help, and yet they may not understand.

Don’t hold it against them. I used to think depression was like sadness and anxiety was like worry. It wasn’t until I experienced these things firsthand that I realized they are in a different universe. Keep being vulnerable. It will help you find others who have undergone similar experiences. Lean on these people.

9. Just Hold On.

It takes time for therapy to work. It takes time for medication to work. It takes time for the seasons to change. What feels like forever now won’t in the future. Keep trudging on.

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You Aren’t Alone

Part of why I share my story is simple: maybe it helps someone feel a little less alone.

The hardest parts of depression, anxiety, and OCD? How time seems to freeze, and how isolated you feel. Both are tricks of the mind—hallmarks of the conditions. But what feels endless isn’t. And however alone you may feel, you aren’t. People have gone through something similar. People are going through something similar. People will go through something similar.

The word "compassion" comes from co (with) and passio (to suffer). Compassion means to suffer with. Mental illness is brutal. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But if there’s any consolation, maybe it’s that it deepens our compassion—for others, and hopefully for ourselves.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned: if you are struggling with mental illness, there is no need to be ashamed or embarrassed, no need to keep it to yourself. Talking to others who have had similar experiences can help. Therapy can help. Medication can help.

If you or a loved one is in any kind of deep hole, please seek out the support you need, especially from trained professionals.

(You can talk to someone right now at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.)

I know it may feel harder than there are words to describe. Even though it may seem impossible, it can get better. Keep going. ❤️

Which brings me to what happened this past weekend.

On Sunday, April 26, Sabastian Sawe became the first person ever to run a marathon in under two hours—1:59:30 in London.

The following morning, I woke up to this message from his coach, Claudio Berardelli:

It’s extraordinary to see the book being read by (and helping) people at the highest levels of their crafts. All the credit goes to Sabastian and Claudio, who did the work. It’s a truly groundbreaking and inspiring performance. If my ideas and words played even the tiniest part, well, that’s so cool.

What’s also so cool is another message I got later that day:

There’s something about the timing of these messages hitting me in such close succession. To be honest, it actually makes me pretty proud. (It’s not often I feel this way, but I’m working on it.)

I wrote the book to argue that the pursuit of genuine, heartfelt excellence is the ultimate human endeavor—and to show people of all ages, crafts, and skills that getting on the path is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling things there is.

That the book is inspiring and being used by the greatest athletes on the planet and also 84-year-old Nanas is everything I’d hoped for.

If you haven’t already, please get the book. I promise it will help. It’s currently $7 off here. If Claudio and Sabastian don’t inspire you to order a copy, maybe Nana will.

I. Shitty Flow Is All Around Us

In 2021, the psychologists David Pizarro and Paul Bloom coined the term shitty flow to describe the experience of being in a flow state, but in ways your higher self does not desire. Examples of shitty flow include: doomscrolling on X, mindlessly swiping reels, making one prop bet after another, or constantly checking news sites for the most shocking headlines.

During these experiences, you may undergo certain hallmarks of flow, such as becoming fully immersed in what you are doing, losing a sense of time, space, and perhaps even yourself. But afterwards, you’re left with the sobering reality that your attention and energy could have been better spent. You feel anxious. You feel empty. You feel shitty.

A particularly stark example of shitty flow comes from the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who studied people playing slot machines in Las Vegas. She found the stickiness of gambling addiction is less about the potential for winning and more about the trancelike state gamblers achieve while using the machines. She coined the term machine zone to describe the experience of daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness slipping away.

Modern life is increasingly becoming one big machine zone.

II. Everything is Automated

With the click of a button, you can: order groceries; buy a car; sell a car; find a date; cancel a date; make millions of dollars; lose millions of dollars; fall in love with your favorite influencer; come to hate your favorite influencer. For $20 per month—the current cost of many AI models—you can also write essays, receive an answer to any question, and have a silicon data warehouse indulge your wildest fantasies, all within seconds.

It’s a wild time. And a weird one.

For over 99 percent of our species’ history, we lived in scarcity. Abundance is a recent phenomenon. Even more recent is the engineering that underlies ultra-processed food, ultra-processed entertainment, ultra-processed information, and ultra-processed connection. Evolutionary biologists use the term dysevolution to describe the disconnect between our hardwiring and our modern environments—and that disconnect is larger than ever.

We evolved to conserve energy and effort, to crave convenience. This is for good reason. Our early ancestors had no choice but to do hard things all the time: hunting, foraging, forming alliances, building shelter, making tools, finding mates, starting fires, and protecting children from early death. Today’s world is very different, and that’s a good thing. Nobody wants to go back to the life of a caveman.

However, if we cease to have any struggle in our lives, then our lives become empty. Because much like we evolved to crave convenience, we also evolved to exert ourselves on meaningful pursuits. The best lives contain a tension between both of these drives. Not everything should be hard. But not everything should be easy.

It’s the difference between the good kind of flow and the shitty kind. By design, you enter shitty flow without any real effort—you simply click a few buttons and numb out. Attaining the good kind of flow, however, requires effort: first, the effort to discern if it’s a worthwhile activity; and then, the effort to actually pursue it. It’s the difference between falling in love with an actual human versus falling in love with a programmable sycophantic machine. Getting into the zone writing an essay versus telling Claude or ChatGPT to write one for you. Catching fire in a basketball game versus gambling on one.

Shitty flow leaves you feeling like shit precisely because it requires no effort. Good flow leaves you feeling satisfied because it is earned.

III. Meaningful Struggle

I could wake up every morning at 4 AM and cold plunge alone on my back deck, and that would be very hard, no doubt. But I’m not sure I’d get anything out of it, aside from being very cold. For some, a regular cold plunge is life-changing. For me, not so much.

Meaning lies in the eyes of the beholder. It manifests when what you do aligns with your innermost values. I value craft, integrity, excellence, and love. The hard things I aspire toward—writing well, telling the truth, being there for my wife and my kids, increasing my deadlift via training hard—align with my values. I am happy to automate, outsource, and follow the path of least resistance in other parts of my life, but if I used AI to write for me, told people lies they wanted to hear, let screens raise my kids and replace my marriage, or used a forklift at the gym, my life would be decidedly worse. I’d have extra time, extra energy, and a dearth of meaning in my life—all of which I’d probably fill with shitty flow.

Herein lies a modern paradox: Life is easier. Life is emptier. There’s a reason Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopia, not a utopia.

In 2022, a team of neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal showed that when we apply effort to challenging tasks, it boosts activity in brain regions that respond to rewards. Essentially, the researchers looked under the hood and found the neural networks underlying the contentment and satisfaction we feel after a hard day’s work on something we care about. But here’s the catch: The neural activity associated with reward, along with the accompanying real-life feelings of accomplishment, was significantly greater in participants who viewed their effort as worthwhile. The more you believe your hard work matters, the more rewarding and satisfying you’ll find it.

There’s a difference between suffering for the sake of suffering and building meaningful challenges into your life. You can do a random hard thing because everyone else is doing it. Or you can do a hard thing with deliberate intention because it tracks with the person you are and want to become. Sometimes you need to do the former to jumpstart the process of figuring out the latter, but it’s the latter that leads to a good life.

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IV. The Fight Against Diabetes of the Soul

What I dislike most about AI writing is that it converges around a homogenized mean. The whole thing has a synthetic feel to it: It’s not this. It’s that. It’s real.

What it actually is is soulless.

No doubt, in the short term it feels great to generate a fairly polished 1,000-word essay with the click of a button. But in the long term, it erodes your ability to write, and honestly, to think, for yourself. You become conditioned for convenience and ease. Your tolerance for effort declines. You trade the potential for genuine flow, and all the satisfaction it brings, for shitty flow. This theme explains much of the ennui that accompanies modern existence.

Arguing with anonymous idiots on social media instead of meaningfully disagreeing with a real person over a beer. Obsessively gambling on sports instead of actually trying to get good at one. Dating a robot instead of a human. Scrolling from one short-form video to the next instead of reading a book or watching a feature film. In all of these instances, not only are you surrendering to shitty flow, but you’re also eroding your ability to work toward and experience the real thing.

I’m not trying to be a moral purist. I gambled a ton my freshman year of college—that is, until I met a girl. A serious girlfriend, and all that came with it, was way more exciting than gambling. So much of our addiction to shitty flow stems from the fact that it fills the holes that, at one point or another, all of us share. The difference between my college gambling experience (over twenty years ago) and today is that now, gambling is at our fingertips and more enticing than ever. The same goes for nearly all the other common sources of shitty flow.

Studies show heavy consumption of short-form videos (e.g., TikTok) leads to a significant decline in frontal lobe brain activity, focus, agency, and self-control. Sports betting delivers anticipatory dopamine on demand, no effort required. Over time, the brain builds up tolerance to dopamine, requiring higher risks and bets to achieve the same satisfaction. As this tolerance builds, research shows it becomes harder to find enjoyment in sport for the sake of sport, and eventually, in all of life. This is the neurological mechanism of shitty flow: you’re overwhelming your reward circuitry without doing anything, all the while making it harder to exert effort on the types of pursuits that actually lead to a meaningful life.

If all you eat is Skittles and M&Ms, eventually you mess up your entire metabolism and get diabetes. Our collective addiction to shitty flow is giving us diabetes of the soul.

The treatment for diabetes of the soul is similar to the treatment for diabetes of the endocrine system. For the latter, you’ve got to replace ultra-processed shitty food with more nourishing whole foods. For the former, you’ve got to replace ultra-processed shitty flow with the real, more nourishing variety.

The average American is overweight and unhealthy. Yes, it has much to do with our system. In an ideal world, the environment would be designed to encourage and facilitate a nutritious diet and physical activity. There wouldn’t be fast food establishments on every corner. There wouldn’t be poverty. But while we work toward a more ideal world, we also need to acknowledge that we don’t live in one, and we don’t have magic wands to wave to create one.

The same is becoming true with the average American soul. It, too, is increasingly unhealthy, and I fear it will get much worse before it gets better. No policymakers are coming to save us. The systems profiting from shitty flow are the same ones lobbying against regulation. Not to mention, many of our legislators have already had their own brains turned to sawdust by shitty flow. Which means, at least for the time being, each and every one of us needs to fight this battle ourselves and in our local communities.

It’s not easy, especially when you are surrounded by shitty flow—when it’s on your phone and in your browser and sold to you at every commercial break. But just like you still have some agency to drive past the fast food restaurant instead of entering the drive-through, you still have some agency to bypass shitty flow in favor of the real thing. And the prescription is not complicated.

Train for a marathon. Learn an instrument. Join a choir. Make art. Coach a team. Read 30 books in a year. Play rec league sports. Write using your own brain. Get involved in a local theater group. Go on hikes. Watch sunsets. Train to deadlift three times your body weight. Grow tomatoes. Meet people in the real world. Put yourself out there. Challenge yourself.

None of these things requires a policy solution or a technological breakthrough. They require you to close your laptop, put down your phone, and maybe delete certain apps. The shitty flow will be waiting when you get back. It always is. But you might find you don’t miss it as much as you thought you would.

Thank you for reading. If you found this resonant, you’ll devour my new book, The Way of Excellence. It’s an instant New York Times bestseller that goes deeper on all the above.

Of all the great storylines from the recent Masters golf tournament, the one that is most relevant doesn’t involve golf at all.

Augusta National has a simple rule: no phones allowed anywhere on the property for the entire week of the tournament. The course, the driving range, the clubhouse—all of it is off limits.

The rule isn’t just ceremonial either. During this year’s tournament, former major champion and four-time Ryder Cup participant Mark Calcavecchia was escorted off the premises by security. His offense? Having a cell phone on him.

When Golfweek reached out to Calcavecchia, he didn’t deny the allegations or even complain about the punishment. He simply explained: “I’ve got nothing negative to say about Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters, so I think we should literally hang up right now.”

A Deep Life Requires Intimacy

Traditionally, people think of intimacy in terms of a relationship with another person. While that certainly can be the case—and is a beautiful thing when it happens—you can also develop intimacy with an activity, craft, or community. It is a sense of familiarity, respect, and attention that helps you feel connected to what you are doing and to yourself. It requires minimizing distractions and getting as close as possible to your pursuit. It’s being in the pocket of a deadlift, song, or painting; it’s being immersed in developing an idea, leading a team, or learning a new skill; it’s sharing an experience with a group during which everyone is present.

I have no doubt that a big part of the aura at the Masters is its intimacy. This would be impossible if everyone had their phones.

The Master’s no phone rule is in stark contrast to how many of us navigate the world.

You try to read a book and can’t focus. You’re out to dinner with loved ones and find yourself checking your phone under the table. You don’t even have your phone on you, and yet you still feel it buzz in your pocket.

The result of our compulsive phone use is what psychologists call digital dementia or brain rot. It describes the forgetfulness, foggy thinking, and fatigue caused by the chronic overuse of our phones. Our brains become so accustomed to fractured attention that they lose the ability to focus deeply on anything.

Multiple studies show structural changes in the brains of heavy cell phone users—which is to say, nearly all of us. A 2024 systematic review found reduced gray matter volume in brain regions associated with decision-making, emotional processing, and self-control among problematic smartphone users. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking and impulse regulation—shows reduced activity the more someone uses their phone. Persistent cell phone use also messes with your nervous system. It puts you in a constant state of alert and low-grade stress. As a result, you’re never really off, but you’re also never fully on. You’re constantly in this middle-ground state, leading to a (very modern) feeling of restless exhaustion.

Compare this to the Masters, where you can feel the depth of focus and attention in the air. Greatness requires it.

Fortunately, a 2025 study found that restricting smartphone use for just three days—which is essentially what the Masters does—altered brain activity in regions linked to reward processing and cravings, showing patterns similar to those seen in substance addictions. The tournament lasts a week. Augusta National is accidentally running a mass neurology experiment every April. And the results are startlingly positive.

I’ve been told by people who attend the Masters that the first day or two can be hard, but then they quickly ease into the phone-free experience. They stop feeling phantom vibrations or even thinking about their phones. It’s no surprise that come mid-tournament, everyone is utterly locked in. Instead of trying to capture an experience on a phone, they are fully experiencing it. People feel fully present and alive. It’s a powerful antidote to modern feelings of disconnection, dissociation, and numbness.

There’s Much to Learn from the Masters

We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love.

Research consistently shows that people are most fulfilled when they care deeply about meaningful projects and experience presence in relationships and community. Nobody feels or performs their best while mindlessly scrolling. The things that make life worth living—deep work, physical intimacy, creative expression, genuine connection—all require the type of sustained attention that our phones are systematically eroding.

Perhaps the greatest risk of the modern world is that we go wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along a pixelated conveyor belt to nowhere. The only thing that separates us from this dystopia is ourselves. Our agency—our attention, our capacity to think, create, and love—must be fought for. When you work with deep focus on an activity or craft, or when you throw yourself fully into an experience, you feel the opposite of existential longing. You feel situated in yourself and the world.

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If we want to perform our best, feel our best, and experience depth, meaning, richness, and texture—essentially all the good stuff in life—then we need to create our own versions of the Master’s no-phone rule.

If we value education for our children, there should be no phones in schools. If we value intimacy with our partners, there should be no phones in the bedroom (at least at night). If we value books, we should turn our phones off and put them in another room while we read.

These are three of many examples, but I give them because there have been stark declines in scholastic performance, sex, and literacy—all of which have coincided with the rise of smartphones.

On education: The 2024 Nation's Report Card shows that American students' reading scores are at their lowest point since the early 1990s. Around 40 percent of fourth graders now score below the basic level in reading—the largest percentage in over two decades. Eighth-grade reading scores have been falling in a straight line since 2017.

On sex: According to the General Social Survey, 55 percent of American adults reported having sex weekly in 1990. By 2024, that number had fallen to 37 percent. Among young adults ages 18 to 29, the share reporting no sex in the past year doubled between 2010 and 2024, from 12 percent to 24 percent. This isn't just a young person's problem either: among married adults, weekly sex dropped from 59 percent to 49 percent over the same period. As sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas put it, "The smartphone is generating new and interesting content, which is slowly but surely supplanting the people around us."

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On literacy: Only 14 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27 percent in 2012. A 2025 study using 20 years of American Time Use Survey data found that reading for pleasure has declined by about 3 percent per year.

All three declines map onto the same timeline: the mass adoption of smartphones, which reached saturation among American teens around 2012-2013—precisely when test scores peaked and began their slide, when sexlessness among young people began its sharp rise, and when reading for pleasure started its accelerating decline.

The point isn’t to be a purist. After all, many of you are probably reading this article on a phone right now. Digital devices are a part of modern life and for all they disrupt, they also carry many incredible benefits. Regardless, they aren’t going away, which is all the more reason to carve out times and spaces where we don’t use them.

There’s a reason the Masters feels different from every other sporting event. It’s not just the stunning azaleas, or the history, or the green jacket. It’s that for one week a year, thousands of people put their phones away and actually watch. They listen to the ping of a driver, follow the arc of a ball against the sky, and erupt together in real time, in real life, shoulder to shoulder.

It’s crucial to ensure the Master’s isn’t the only experience like this, because focus and intimacy are necessary not only to excellent golf, but also to an excellent life.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love my new book, The Way of Excellence. It’s a practical guide to the pursuit of deep focus and personal excellence in a chaotic world, and an instant New York Times bestseller. You can purchase it here.

When shots are falling—focus on the process.

When shots aren’t falling—focus on the process.

So much of success comes down to showing up, weathering storms, staying in the moment, trusting your training, and making the next best shot.

In golf. In sport. In life.

After last year’s roller coaster victory at the Masters, Rory McIlroy came out in the 2026 version firing on all cylinders. After 36 holes, he led by 6 strokes, the biggest margin at that juncture in 90 years of tournament history. It appeared as if he’d finally put his doubts and limits and ghosts behind him. He was taking big swings and playing to win. It was a joy to watch.

But then, on day three, he played a terrible round that included 3 bogeys and a double bogey. His entire lead was erased. He entered the final round tied for first place with an extremely tight race behind him, including many of the best players in the world.

McIlroy began the final round with more erratic play and by hole six was multiple shots back. As a big fan of McIlroy, it was genuinely hard to watch.

And yet, throughout it all, McIlroy stayed calm and collected. No thrown clubs. No screaming or shouting. No poor body language. Just a relentless focus on the next shot—whether it was from the sand, wood chips, gallery, behind a tree, or whatever other predicament he found himself in.

He hung in there. He stopped the descent. He prevented his bad holes from becoming awful holes. And then, stroke by stroke, he slowly began to turn things around. He started making pars and reclaimed the lead on 11. He made birdies on 12 and 13 to go up two shots. He never looked back. The rest is history.

McIlroy won the Masters for the second year in a row, becoming only the fourth golfer ever to do so, along with legends Nick Faldo, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus.

“One of the things that I love is focusing on the process over the prize... I would say to myself a lot: ‘Process over prize. Process over prize. Process over prize, just to take myself away from the outcome,” McIlroy says. “I can get real caught up in the outcome. I just really need to remind myself that the outcome will ultimately happen if you just focus on the process. It takes care of itself.”

McIlroy’s instinct is backed by research.

Multiple studies find that those who focus on outcomes—winning, rankings, scores—experience more anxiety and reduced engagement. People who focus on the process—technique, the next action, what’s in their control—perform better under pressure.

The reason is that outcome goals activate threat responses in the brain. Process goals keep you in the present moment. Researchers call it the difference between a threat response (scared and doubtful) and a challenge response (revved up and ready for the next action).

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What’s true in golf is true in life

Anyone can show up when everything is clicking. But things will inevitably go wrong. You’ll make a great effort and still fall short. The winds will blow one way, then another. You’ll face moments where your emotions flare and things fall apart.

What matters most isn’t the adversity. It’s how you respond. Again and again and again.

There’s a reason so few people repeat at the Masters. There are so many variables. It is so hard to stay focused and play to win with history riding on the line. When you think you’ve got it in the bag, you’re almost always wrong.

In today’s final round, there were four different leaders and every single one fell off, except for one: Rory McIlroy, who maintained his lead for the last 9 holes.

It’s not that outcomes don’t matter. (They do.)

It’s that what gives you the best shot at achieving your goals is focusing on the process and digging where your feet are. When you focus on the process you put the shot that could have been or should have been or might have been behind you. You play where you are. Which is the best way to play.

You can’t just call upon a process mindset when you are down three strokes on the final day of the biggest golf tournament in the world and expect it to work. It needs to be an ongoing practice.

We cannot control how someone receives our work, the weather on the day of the big event, the judge’s mood during a competition, or all manner of other factors that impact outcomes, in work and life. Sometimes we do everything right and the outcome still doesn’t go our way, even in spite of our deepest desires. All we can control is our process. How we show up in the next moment. The next action we take.

People often think excellence is about control or perfection. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Excellence is about stepping into the arena. Caring deeply. Giving your all. Beginning again. Responding instead of reacting. Laying it all on the line. Falling short. Bouncing back. Exceeding expectations.

It’s doing all this while staying firmly grounded in the process, which means trusting your training, showing up, and meeting the moment.

Thanks for reading. If you found this resonant, you’ll love my new book The Way of Excellence. Parts of this post were excerpted from it. The book goes deep into the science and practice of a process mindset, and how to cultivate one yourself.

The struggles of men are back in the news with major stories in places like the New York Times (“The Manosphere Continues to Devolve”) and The New Yorker (“The Camps Promising to Turn You—Or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male”).

Both articles highlight data showing declining educational and work attainment; increasing loneliness, isolation, and nihilism; and rising political polarization. They also call out the grift that is the manosphere, where you can spend 40 hours per week listening to podcasts, watching streamers, and, if you want an IRL experience, pay $3000 to cosplay as a soldier at a weekend retreat.

The problems are real. The longing is real. But what legacy media always misses are solutions.

It’s not a “Joe Rogan of the left” or rage-baiting socialist streamers. It’s not to pretend there are no differences between men and women. It’s not to call masculinity toxic. It’s not to give up hope or say there’s no use for men in a post-modern society.

Rather, what we desperately need is to separate performative masculinity from the real thing. And to point out the absurdity of the former while offering examples of the latter—which, as you’ll read below, are more plentiful than you may think.

Let’s start with performative masculinity. It is not about developing world-class men. It’s about converting anxiety and loneliness into anger and tribal loyalty. It’s about turning a young man’s real feeling of being lost into a superficial sense of dominance and belonging, even if that dominance and belonging come from bullying, trolling, and demeaning others or shouting into a void on the internet.

Performative masculinity is extravagant wealth, fancy watches, and sports cars that are the fruits of exploiting a lonely and isolated audience. It is big muscles, often the result of steroids. (It’s never the supplements the alpha male is selling. It’s always the steroids he doesn’t disclose.) It’s online courses, seminars, and overpriced retreats. It is undeniably attention-grabbing but not particularly useful. It sits around, navel gazes, and streams all day. It’s all talk.

You might be tempted to dismiss all of this as being too online or an overblown part of the culture war. But I believe it points to something deeper: whenever you see a bunch of shallow influencers herding around a topic, it’s almost always because there’s an audience to exploit. In this case, there is a crucial need to provide men who are feeling lost with a purpose and path. That purpose and path can be one of performative bullshit, or it can be one of substance. Right now, the performative bullshit variety is winning. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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All humans have foundational psychological needs: to belong, to participate in meaningful endeavors, to feel competent, to cultivate hope for the future, and to have a direction to follow. In short: we all need sources of mastery and mattering; we all need paths to pursue personal excellence.

On average, men (especially young men) have more testosterone than women. People think testosterone is about sex drive and physical aggression, but more than anything, testosterone is associated with a strong desire for status. Understanding this is key to understanding the crisis of modern masculinity.

There are two main routes to status:

1. You can gain it through competence and respect.

2. You can gain it through rote power and domination.

If men don’t feel they have avenues for the former, they all too easily default to the latter. This explains the popularity of the manosphere and chronically online grifters.

The manosphere offers young men the feeling of status through domination—dunking on people online, performing wealth, asserting dominance over women— because it's faster and easier than the very real work of developing one’s character, earning respect, and gaining competence in a craft, career, activity, or sport.

In a chaotic world where young men don’t know where they belong or where they are headed, they grasp onto groups and ideologies that make them feel good in the short term but backfire over the long haul. Without better alternatives, the Andrew Tates of the world fill the gap.

Too many men are being fed the junk food variety of masculinity. They are being forced to choose between the deadbeat dad or the magic bullet, use steroids, dominate others, or the ‘get rich quick’ variety. We’ve got to offer something better, a path that ultimately leads to more success. It starts with being honest about what masculinity looks like when it’s authentic.

It’s okay to be strong. It’s okay to bench press and deadlift. It’s okay to be competitive. It’s actually great. We need to do real things in the real world with real people, perhaps now more than ever.

The problem is when this gets steeped in an us-versus-them mentality; when everything is zero-sum, when you can never ask for help or show vulnerability, when there is always a boogeyman to blame for your problems.

Instead of talking about being an alpha, high-T lion, or whatever other pseudoscientific garbage is on the internet, we need to refocus our attention on what genuine masculinity looks like in practice.

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It’s not that there are no great men. There are millions of great men.

The challenge is that these men are too busy out in the world living their lives and being useful to sit around all day preying on young people’s fears.

They are coaching their kids’ baseball team. They are volunteering in their community. They are raising their children. They are mentoring at local gyms. They are starting small businesses. They are working in the trades. They are supporting their wives. They have integrity and honor. They protect the weak. They help their neighbors. They show up consistently. They care deeply about others.

The men who spend all day on the internet building platforms generally aren’t the best examples to follow. Interestingly, these guys seldom have wives or kids, and they certainly don’t do things like coach youth sports, teach, or volunteer. For us to make progress on the crisis of masculinity, we need to get young men out doing stuff in the real world so they can be exposed to real men: on sports teams, in places of worship, in the trades, in men's choirs, in service organizations.

I’m writing this from a family vacation on a cruise. There’s a basketball court on the top deck. It’s called “The Hero Zone.” My 8-year-old son is increasingly getting the basketball itch, which means we’ve been spending multiple hours per day in the hero zone. It’s generally been the same group of 30 or so people. 25 boys, 3 girls, and a few dads (yours truly included). My son is the youngest. Most of the kids are between 12 and 20. Black, White, Indian, Asian. Tall and short.

What I’ve witnessed over the last four days has given me hope that the young men are okay. They’ve included everyone. They’ve played hard but with respect. They’ve worked out confrontations about fouls. They’ve made sure the younger kids get shots off. They’ve joked around and had loads of fun. They’ve even been kind and deferential to the Dads.

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What none of them have been is on their phones—because they are too busy playing with each other in the real world. And I think this is the most instructive point of all.

It also reminds me a little of when my community in Western North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene in late 2024. It was absolutely terrible, and there was so much loss of businesses, homes, and lives. But one ray of light was seeing the community come together in rescue and recovery efforts, along with an outpouring of aid from all over the country. This involved all kinds of men. Men with chainsaws. Linesmen. Truckers. Fearless dudes with ATVs. All of these men suddenly had purpose and respect, and it was hard-earned. So many of these men—perhaps usually overlooked by society—were now heroes. They walked with their heads held high. They had status that came from competence and respect.

A basketball court on a cruise is just that—a basketball court on a cruise. And I’m obviously not suggesting that we engineer natural disasters. However, both examples show that there is nothing inherently broken about modern men. When men detach from the internet, cable news, or manosphere podcasts, they contribute and thrive.

All of which makes me think that if there is any battle, it’s not men versus women; it’s the battle of performative masculinity that benefits nobody but the grifters who are peddling it, versus a more genuine masculinity that benefits us all, men and women alike. It is important to win this battle, and it will take many role models stepping up from all walks of life—in schools, in places of worship, on the playing field, and in diverse careers.

My son doesn't know any of this yet. He just knows that the older boys passed him the ball, and that his dad was there to watch. That's enough for now. That might be enough, period.

This past weekend, I was in Washington DC to visit family and record two of my favorite podcasts: Plain English with Derek Thompson and Deep Questions with Cal Newport.

While both podcasts were ostensibly focused on The Way of Excellence, we spent a lot of time talking about deadlifting. At first I found this strange. Is lifting a barbell from the ground to my hips really the most interesting part of my life?

But the more I sat with the question, the more I think I understand it. It’s not that deadlifting is special. It’s that deadlifting is concrete and unfakeable—which, in a world that is increasingly ephemeral and illusory, makes it rare, if not in some way, even countercultural.

You can’t outsource deadlifting to AI. Deadlifting isn’t concerned with the velocity of the internet. There is nothing ephemeral about it. It’s not lifemaxxing or retardmaxxing or whatever other bullshit maxxing is trending on the internet. You can’t SEO or market your way to a good deadlift. You either lock the bar out, or you don’t.

Deadlifting is but one of many examples. Others include pottery, woodwork, cello, glassblowing, or gardening. What all of these activities share is a path toward satisfaction that is not wishy-washy or contrived. These pursuits do not entail grandiose visions of changing the world or reinventing industry. They are neither politically motivated nor do they require schemes.

What they are is simple and real.

When the barbell drops, it drops. When you want to run a marathon in under three hours but go 3:04, the result hits you right in the face. When the legs of the chair don’t fit into the base, the dilemma is as material as anything. The blank page either fills with words or it does not. The flower either blooms or wilts. The joke either lands with laughter or is met with awkward silence.

It is extremely satisfying to be working with integrity on something concrete, when your successes are earned and your failures cannot be rationalized by technical jargon, corporate mumbo jumbo, or social media hot takes. Striving for excellence of this sort—­doing real things, in the real world, with real results—keeps you grounded, both literally and figuratively.

In his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” many jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.” Ask certain white-­collar professionals what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need at least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinions of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors. But ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next marathon, on their next deadlift, or in their pottery studio, and the answer becomes much simpler.

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Psychologists have a name for this. They call it an autotelic experience: the fulfillment that arises from doing something well for its own sake, when you can connect your result directly to your effort. Autotelic experiences require a clear standard; not a contrived one set by a manager or an algorithm, but one built into the activity itself. The weight goes up or it doesn't. The pot holds water or it cracks. That directness is what makes these pursuits feel so different from much of modern life, where feedback is filtered through layers of opinion, politics, popularity, and abstraction. When the loop between effort, skill, and outcome is honest, something in you settles.

There’s a reason competence porn became a meme on the internet to describe shows like The Pit and The Bear. We are innately drawn to real people exerting real skill in the real world. Most people intellectually grasp its importance. But few actually do it.

It’s easier than ever to run around like a crazy person, cycle between a million hacks and fads, have 19 AI agents working on your behalf, and become an influencer on the internet without ever doing much of anything concrete or real. This may have surface-level appeal, but it’s decidedly shallow. And I think people can sense this, both in others and also in themselves.

The painter Frida Kahlo put it more bluntly: “I often have more sympathy for carpenters, cobblers, etc. than for that whole stupid, supposedly civilized herd of windbags known as cultivated people.”

The things that you work on also work on you. A disciplined practice humbles you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stuck on a certain weight for weeks, even months. All my normal defenses and workarounds are useless. All there is to do is show up and train. This sort of experience forces you to face your limits. It makes you uncomfortable. It teaches you about resilience and setbacks. It demands you pay attention. It slows you down. It makes you appreciate the mundane. It teaches you about hard work. It forces you to confront gravity.

Even so, during the last few years, I’ve repeatedly wondered: Should I just stop deadlifting? I’m busy enough as it is being a dad and husband, trying to be a great author, hosting a podcast, coaching, walking my dog, and so on. I’d be so much more productive if I had that time and energy back. I can’t quite say why I’ve stuck with deadlifting, or even if it’s the right choice. But for now, my decision makes sense.

Just because you deadlift doesn’t necessarily make you a wise or interesting person. But I’m starting to think that it’s hard to be a wise or interesting person without a pursuit like this in your life—something that resists abstraction, that won’t let you hide behind cleverness or automation. Not just because it makes for good podcast conversation (though apparently it does), but because it's good for the soul.

Let’s start with two stories of actual greats:

Alysa Liu won Olympic gold after eating chocolate lava cake for breakfast. When asked about the rumor that she’d been eating it every morning at the Olympic Village, she laughed: “Oh my God, yeah, that’s a lie. But I did eat it for breakfast one time.” She then went on to admit, “I actually haven’t been waking up on time for breakfast, so that’s why it’s only been once.” She won two gold medals anyway—one individual, one team—becoming the first American woman to win an individual figure skating gold in over two decades.

Usain Bolt won three gold medals fueled by 1,000 McDonald’s chicken nuggets. In his autobiography, Bolt wrote that they were “the only food I could properly trust” after a bad experience with local cuisine. He ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then he went out and broke three world records.

Far too many people confuse perfectionism and optimization with excellence.

The Internet Loves Bullshit Optimization

A well-known health and performance influencer went viral for saying that eating a granola bar before bed made him sick for an entire day. Another one said that a glass of apple cider caused severe insomnia for a month. 24 million people watched that interview.

Y’all—this is insane.

The internet is full of strict rules and protocols for health and performance: Eat this way. Sleep that way. Wake at this time. Do this single exercise. Follow this guru, not that one.

But this content is more about the performance of being great than the actual pursuit of greatness itself. It attracts attention because it sells the illusion of control. In an increasingly chaotic era—an unpredictable economy, new technologies, geopolitical turmoil, 24-7 “breaking” news—control, even if it’s not particularly effective or meaningful, is an enticing force. We are desperate for it.

It’s easier to follow a specific protocol than it is to accept that life is uncertain, scary, and hard. There’s always a chance of illness, injury, or failure. It’s normal to have some level of anxiety, but trying to control every little thing doesn’t help. This sort of optimization and perfectionism makes you fragile—because if you need everything to go a certain way, you are going to struggle to get by, let alone thrive, as a mature adult. If you’re always holding on so tight to everything, eventually your neurosis gets in the way of your performance, and perhaps even makes you sick.

It’d be one thing if all this optimizing was beneficial, or even neutral. There’s something to say for the feeling of exerting agency, even if the things you’re exerting agency on don’t make much difference. The problem is that optimization is counterproductive.

Studies find that both self-oriented perfectionism (needing to follow your own rigid rules) and socially-prescribed perfectionism (needing to follow the internet’s rigid rules) predict anxiety, declines in performance, and burnout.

Researchers find two primary causes:

1. It’s utterly exhausting: In the world of optimization, once you’ve opened Pandora’s box, there exists a never-ending list of things you could be doing “better.” You find that there is a better way to hydrate in the morning, a better way to get sunlight, three new supplements to try, a peptide, two new health tracking tools, special glasses, a particular sauna to sweat in, a specific temperature for your ice bath, and on and on and on. (Never mind that the vast majority of these interventions have little to no evidence of benefit.) Eventually, you confuse what actually makes a difference toward your goals versus a whole bunch of elaborate nonsense—and the amount of energy required for the latter leaves you too tired for the former.

2. It’s lonely: Optimization also leads to isolation. For example, severe constraints on diet, routines, and sleep schedules lead to missing out on experiences with friends or family. You skip the birthday dinner because the restaurant doesn’t fit your macros. You can’t have a glass of wine with your partner because it’s not on the protocol. The more you optimize, the smaller your life gets and the less opportunity there is for productive spontaneity.

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Actual Excellence is a Different Game

I interviewed over one hundred people who are the best at what they do for The Way of Excellence. Olympians, authors, musicians, and entrepreneurs. When I asked, “How often do things go according to plan?” No one has ever responded, “100% of the time.” Not once.

One of my favorite stories comes from golf. In the span of 8 years, JJ Spaun went from being ranked 584 and missing the cut in many big tournaments to capturing a major championship. But the night before he won the US Open, Spaun was awakened at 3 A.M. by his 2-year-old daughter Violet, who had fallen ill. She couldn’t stop vomiting. Spaun ran to CVS to get medication while his wife tended to his daughter. He described the sleepless night as “chaos.”

The next day, he outplayed the field and won the championship.

There is a scene in the Beatles documentary Get Back that begins with the band stumbling into a recording session with hardly any energy. Paul McCartney is visibly frustrated, noting that “Lennon’s late again.” George Harrison is yawning and struggling to keep his eyes open. Ringo Starr appears exhausted and zoned out. Nobody wants to be in the studio. Nevertheless, McCartney lazily begins strumming an A chord on his bass, gibbering ad-lib lyrics as he goes. Eventually, he lands on the words “get back.” Those two words have an immediate effect on Harrison and Starr, who return to life. Lennon finally enters the studio, grabs his guitar, and joins in. Herein lies the genesis of one of the most iconic songs ever written.

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Imagine if the Beatles had decided not to get started that day. Or if McCartney had referenced a wearable that, based on a black-box algorithm, told him to “optimize” his performance, he would need to stay in bed and rest. Or if the band had told themselves, Today just isn’t the day, and created a self-fulfilling prophecy around that thought. We wouldn’t have one of the most iconic songs ever written.

For all that we know about human performance, it’s still wildly mysterious. If you think you need to control all the variables to perform at your best, then you will leave so many of your best days on the table. It is a fragility mindset that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my own life: I’ve done my best work—at least based on critical reviews, bestseller lists, and reader comments—with two young kids, a dog, and two cats. Sleep is never what I wish it were. The house is always loud. Bedtime is an ordeal. I’m frequently exhausted. I coach soccer, baseball, and basketball; there are always games and practices. And yet, here I am. Yes, sometimes just surviving; but on my good days, perhaps even thriving.

I have non-negotiables: daily exercise, blocks of deep-focus work, not getting drunk, and at least trying to sleep at night. But otherwise, there’s no point in fighting the messiness of life. All it would do is exhaust me further, shrink my life, or perhaps both. I don’t think it would make me better at my craft, or happier.

The point isn’t to throw the baby out with the bathwater, go wherever the current takes you, and blindly accept the default options. That never works. A good life, let alone an excellent one, demands constraints. However, holding on too tight and trying to micro-manage everything doesn’t work either. If you fall into the endless spiral of optimization, you are chasing a false promise. You’ll never be able to control everything—and for all your efforts, you may be left more fragile than when you began.

This isn’t unique to me. Great performers figure out the hills worth dying on, but also how to be adaptable too. There’s a well-studied skill that makes it possible.

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Self-Efficacy

Rather than worry about optimizing everything, we’d be wise to focus on developing what psychologists call self-efficacy: an evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up, working through challenges, and excelling in uncertain or highly charged circumstances.

Decades of research show that individuals who score high in self-efficacy are better able to work through moments when they feel lost or stuck, be it on the playing field, in the studio, or in the boardroom.

If you are insecure about your process and abilities, then you’re liable to catastrophize when the path forward is unclear or when things feel off. You’ll turn to whatever promises your favorite internet influencer is peddling. But if you are secure about your process and abilities, if you have evidence to lean on, then not much can faze you.

The best way to gain self-efficacy, the research shows, is through experience. Which means that one of the best things you can do for your confidence is feel off and still perform well. It frees you from the need to have perfect conditions to give it a go. You provide yourself with the evidence that you are resilient, durable, robust, and can get the job done.

Human beings are not robots. Performing your best is not about optimizing a score on a screen or never having french fries. It’s about showing up consistently over a long period of time, expecting the ups and downs and obstacles in life, surrounding yourself wisely, and giving what you’ve got to give.

Resist the temptation to major in the minors. Figure out the main things in your craft (and life) and keep them the main things. It’s easy to over-control everything and burn yourself out. It’s much harder to focus on what actually matters and have the confidence to let go, even if only just a bit, on the rest.

Strength without flexibility is rigidity.

Flexibility without strength is instability.

You need both.

This post is adapted from my latest book, The Way of Excellence, an instant New York Times bestseller. If you found it resonant, the book is for you.

Twenty years ago, Ryan Coogler thought he was destined for the NFL. He was a standout player at St. Mary’s College High School in Berkeley, California. He went on to play wide receiver for Sacramento State University on a scholarship.

Last weekend, he won his first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for writing the breakout movie Sinners. (Which he also directed and produced.)

When Coogler was in college, he took a creative writing class. He loved it and was encouraged by a professor to pursue the craft. Later in his collegiate football career, it became increasingly clear that the NFL was out of reach. So he pivoted off the athlete track and enrolled at USC’s film school.

He brought football with him.

“A lot of the things I’ve learned, I learned from playing football. You gotta lead a group of people against sometimes insurmountable odds. Every week, you’ve got to prepare for an opponent. You watch game tape. You prep. You get all your players up. But you get out there, you never know what to expect… This is a high-intensity job. You’re responsible for a lot of money. You’re responsible for a lot of people’s livelihoods, and more importantly, you’re responsible for the audience’s dreams and expectations. There’s no way I’d be able to do this job if I hadn’t had the experience I have from playing organized sports. I’d be a different person,” says Coogler.

That transition—from wide receiver to film school—marked the genesis of Coogler becoming one of the most celebrated directors of his generation. He never would have gotten there if he hadn’t given himself permission to change paths.

Building an Identity House

A trap that everyone faces at some point in their life is when their identity gets tied to one thing. You become the athlete. The writer. The chef. The entrepreneur. The doctor. Researchers call this identity foreclosure.

“[Football] was life, it was how I self-identified, how I saw the world and for me it was my ticket out of my hometown,” Coogler says. “It was a dream of mine to get a full ride, full scholarship, and I ended up doing that and I loved it.”

The tragedy of identity foreclosure is that it shrinks the imagination of your own future. It ties you so closely to one path that it keeps other opportunities, interests, and passions at bay. Because you are so locked in on one thing, you can’t even imagine, let alone explore, others.

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In The Way of Excellence, I discuss identity in terms of a house: If you live in a house with only one room and it floods, then you will be forced to move out of the house altogether. It’s an utterly disorienting experience.

But if you live in a house with multiple rooms and one room floods, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage.

The goal is to build an identity house with more than one room, because you never know when you’ll need to find strength and stability in others.

There’s a saying that athletes die twice: when they actually die, and when they retire from their sport. I can only imagine how painful it was when Coogler’s talent for football reached its limit. But perhaps the blow was softened, even if only just a bit, because he had another room in his identity house: creative writer. He didn’t have to move out of the house altogether. He walked down the hall and began pouring his time and energy into a different room.

Still, it wasn’t easy. One of his former teammates, Brett Shelton, can recall the conversation he had with Coogler about going to film school. “You could tell he was nervous,” Shelton recalls."That was a big leap of faith for him. That was a time when I knew he was serious. I have never really seen him fail at much. We have setbacks, but the guy is a worker."

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Fit then Grit

Research shows that a diverse sense of self leads to greater long-term success. Athletes who play multiple sports before specializing are more successful than those who specialize too early. A study published in Nature Communications examined the career trajectories of artists, film directors, and scientists. Those who explored many interests had higher rates of breakthroughs than those who confined themselves to a narrow range. In Coogler’s case, he did both sport and art.

The qualities you build and train in a field like sport—discipline, patience, focus, consistency, strength, resilience—are transferable to art, business, medicine, writing, and more. Coogler didn’t leave football behind completely. The young film writer and director who was managing huge projects on tight timelines never stopped using the internal muscles he grew in sport, he just changed fields.

A common myth about excellence is that you have to be all-in on one thing forever. Sometimes that’s how it works. But not always. Many people sample widely and then commit deeply. First you find fit, then you worry about grit.

It’s not an argument for “balance” or being a jack of all trades. It’s an argument for realizing that we can be enigmas, that there is no single cookie-cutter mold. You can be an athlete and an artist. A soft parent and an intense businessperson. A musician and math nerd. A doctor who is also a tattoo artist.

We shouldn’t limit ourselves to a narrow identity. We contain multitudes. When one path closes, others open. Coogler is proof.

The identity house metaphor is one of many ideas I explore in my latest book, The Way of Excellence, an instant New York Times bestseller. It's about what it actually takes to pursue excellence over the long haul: the patience, the pivots, the process that rarely looks like a straight line. If you found this piece resonant, the book was written for you.

Following the release of my book at the end of January, I promised myself I would do everything possible to support its success. I came up with a list of self-imposed guidelines: post on social media and send 50 DMs every day; reply to threads on topics related to my own; pitch at least 3 large podcasts per week; write more frequent newsletters.

And somewhere along the way, I told myself, “If you have the time and energy to pick up and read someone else’s book, you should put it down and focus on an activity that might help sell your own. You can do this until April 01. It’s just two months. You owe it to yourself, and your book, to do everything you can to help it break through.”

I lasted until March 05.

I can’t tell you what exactly broke inside me that day. All I know is that I was becoming stupider. I knew my commitment to marketing the book carried an occupational hazard of internet brain. I didn’t realize how fast it would happen.

I was restless, impatient, and irritable. I couldn't sit still without checking my phone. I couldn't hold focus on a single task.

Internet brain is the result of spending too much time online. It manifests as an inability to focus for long periods of time; a strong desire to check something—social media, email, the news—especially 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.

If you, too, ever find yourself feeling this way, take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone. Internet brain is reaching epidemic proportions.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 71 studies found that greater short-form video consumption was associated with significantly lower performance on cognitive tasks, poorer attention, and weaker self-control. Other research shows that scrolling on TikTok for even just 10 minutes leads to a 39 percent decline in prospective memory (science-speak for remembering what you intended to do before scrolling). Larger observational studies show that 54% of adults now have literacy levels below those of a sixth grader. A 2025 study from the University of Florida found that reading for pleasure dropped by more than 40 percent over the last 20 years.

On March 05, I looked at my wife and said, “I will continue to push marketing and promotion, but I need to start reading books again. It’s just not worth the extra hour per day.”

She nodded, relieved. “I think that’s good for you.” (Her more elegant rendering of no shit).

The first day back was challenging. I struggled to make it through two pages without feeling distracted or a strong urge to check my phone. But I stuck with it, and by day three I was back in a reading groove.

I became immersed in a great book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, but the benefits extended far beyond. I felt calmer and more grounded across my entire life. I was less rushed, perhaps even a bit more empathetic, and certainly a better listener. I even started sleeping better. I can’t tell you precisely why, but reading books is a powerful antidote to internet brain, and to so much of what ails us right now.

Perhaps it's because a book asks something of you that almost nothing else in modern life does: it asks you to stay with one idea, in one place, for an extended period of time. It asks you to wrestle with complexity, pay attention to someone else’s thinking, and ultimately think for yourself. When you have a deep reading practice, you also get to regularly experience the joy of losing yourself in a story and the exhilaration of making a new connection or thinking an original thought, which makes the trends we are seeing right now all the more concerning.

Too much time on the internet, perhaps especially social media, is making us all profoundly dumber. Digital slop is destroying our attention spans. We are becoming addicted to the frenetic pace of the internet, to the scroll and swipe, like lab rats pushing a cocaine lever until they exhaust themselves and die.

Historically, the decline of societies is preceded by a decline in reading. It happened with the fall of Rome, which led to the Dark Ages. It happened with Nazism, too. This is precisely why authoritarian regimes banish and burn books. When people stop reading, they stop thinking critically. And when people stop thinking critically, bad things happen. A population that cannot think for itself, focus, or remember is a population that is easy to manipulate. One of the most important counter-culture things you can do right now is read a book.

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And yet, reading in today’s environment feels particularly tough. Novelty, stimulation, anxiety, and distraction are ubiquitous. It’s not enough to say, I am going to read more. You need a plan, a way of turning it into a habit or practice.

I put together some guidelines for myself. They helped me get my brain back. Hopefully, they help you too.

1. Read hard copy, if possible.

Research shows you comprehend and retain information best from physical books. There are two primary reasons for this:

1. You eliminate distractions and multi-tasking, which e-reading and audiobooks invite. As a result, focus improves.

2. The brain evolved for tactile experience. Physical pages create spatial landmarks for memory, which turns out to be quite important for retention.

2. Eliminate digital distractions.

Even if your phone is face down on silent or your laptop is closed, research shows the mere presence of these devices disrupts focus. Move your devices to a different room, or establish a dedicated reading spot and time as part of your routine.

At first, you may feel antsy, but eventually you’ll groove in.

3. Read actively.

The more you engage with a book, the better. If you are reading fiction, don’t hesitate to go back and re-read powerful paragraphs. If you are reading non-fiction, take notes. Mark up the margins. Highlight. Underline. Connect ideas.

This sort of active reading promotes further absorption in the material, a richer experience, and more creative insight.

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4. Use a notebook for passing thoughts.

Even if you are fully engaged in reading, random thoughts will pop into your mind. Emails to write, groceries to get, conversations to have, creative ideas for unrelated projects. Jot them down to offload your brain and keep going.

5. Read for at least 20 minutes.

It takes time to get into a groove. There is nothing wrong with reading in the nooks and crannies of your day, listening to an audiobook while walking your dog, or skimming pages until your eyes get heavy at night, but this is not the same as deep reading.

Do what you can to schedule it. Make it a regular practice.

6. Think of deep reading like a muscle to train.

The ability to pay attention and become absorbed in a book is built over time.

It may be hard at first (especially if it’s been a while), but it gets easier, just like building any other skill. If you’ve been way out of practice, give it a week or two.

Be patient. It’s worth it.

7. Read as much as you can.

Books are the best bargain there is. There is no better place to get a rich distillation of insights and wisdom.

I’ve helped 4-time Olympians move on from sport simply by recommending books. I’ve helped founders navigate rough waters the same way. From great leaders to entrepreneurs to athletes to creatives, the people we tend to deem wise and discerning all read.

***

I hope you’ve found this valuable and that it’s inspired you to start a deep reading practice in your own life. The most important thing is just to get started. You are never going to have the perfect conditions, so don’t wait for them.

P.s., If you’re looking for a place to begin, check out The Way of Excellence. It’s my best work, and highly accessible. The chapters are short, you can read one a day. And of course, if you’d like other recommendations, say more in the comments, and I’d be glad to help!

The Way of Excellence has been out in the world for a little over a month. In that time, I’ve received more than 1,000 messages and social media tags from readers—and clear patterns have emerged. The same ideas keep coming up, over and over, from people in wildly different walks of life.

Here are the eight themes resonating most—and what I think they tell us about what people are hungry for right now.

1. Caring is cool.

You are not going to be the best anything, including the best version of yourself, with an attitude of nonchalance. Step in the arena. Try hard. Give a damn.

There’s an all too common brand of malaise, nonchalance, and apathy people wear as armor to avoid fully stepping into the arena. It’s easier to sit on the sidelines, scoff, complain, make commentary, and point out the ways in which people are doing everything wrong than it is to actually try yourself.

Carl Jung wrote that “the world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own un-lived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.”

There is no replacement for trying—for shedding the self-inflicted weight of being too cool. Trying hard, caring deeply, and giving your all to worthwhile projects is anything but cringe. It is cool to care and the world needs more of it. I’m glad people are waking up to this.

2. The ability to have fun while working hard is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. Joy and struggle can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

Somewhere along the way we decided you’re either the person who suffers for greatness or the person who has fun. That’s a false choice. The best performers I’ve ever studied carry both. They are focused, determined, a little bit crazy, at times obsessive, and live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring. That is all true. But the best performers in the world also experience deep joy in their crafts. What makes for greatness is being intense and joyful. It’s the joy that makes the ferocious dedication, drive, and intensity sustainable.

The real danger isn’t struggling too much or having too much fun. It’s feeling nothing at all. It’s floating through life on an algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere. The antidote is putting yourself out there. Picking up something hard; falling down and getting back up. A good life is not the absence of struggle. It’s finding something worth struggling for and doing it with a smile on your face more often than a frown.

3. There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is who you become in the process of going for it.

When people are interviewed at the end of their lives, they almost never reflect on awards won, promotions earned, or podiums topped. Rather, they predictably say what mattered most were the people with whom they spent time and the experiences they had while undertaken big projects—from winning an NBA championship to raising kids to publishing a book to completing medical residency.

The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides. The satisfaction, fulfillment, and love you are looking for is not going to come at the point of achievement. It is going to come in the process you take to get there. There is nothing wrong with wanting to reach the top of the mountain. (I sure as hell know I do.) But if you aren’t digging where your feet are and occasionally enjoying the view then you will not last very long.

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4. The secret is there is no secret: consistency over intensity; fundamentals over fads; progress over perfection; over and over again.

Humans are wired to crave shortcuts, hidden truths, and hacks. There is an entire industrial complex built to prey on this wiring: supplements, diets, technologies, optimizers, influencers, and all manner of trends and bright and shiny objects.

The unsexy reality is that 99 percent of it is bullshit. If you want to learn or grow or achieve or find the rare satisfaction that is a byproduct of gaining competence, then you’ve got to do the work. There is no way around it.

Everyone longs for the transcendent moments, but they only occur if you’ve committed to the boring and tedious and sometimes downright mundane fundamentals first. Sometimes for months. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades. You’ve got to learn to find the basics interesting and be endlessly curious about your craft (and about yourself).

5. You don’t always need to feel good to get going; sometimes you need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good.

Motivation and inspiration are just like any other emotions: they come and they go, and often on their accord. Don’t let yourself become a slave to them. Rather, become known for your consistency.

On the evening of June 14, 2025, the golfer JJ Spaun’s three-year-old daughter became violently nauseous. Spaun was up all night, including a trip to the only open drug store in town to pick up medicine. If he was wearing a recovery tracker, his score would have been 0. He described the night as “chaos.” The next morning, he played a near perfect round of golf and won the US Open.

Show up. Get Started. Give yourself a chance. You can always shut things down if need be.

6. Build an Identity House with More than One Room

Caring deeply about something means beginning to identify with it. You start saying, I am an artist or I am a chef or I am an athlete or I am a musician or I am a doctor or I am a writer. It goes from being something you do to being part of who you are. This is to be expected. It is a sign of full engagement and intensifying care, a wonderful feeling. But it isn’t without risk.

That’s because when an activity becomes the entirety of who you are and something goes wrong, it upends your sense of self. Just knowing this could happen creates a source of unnecessary tension.

I’ve come to think about identity like a house: If you live in a house that only has one room, and it floods, then you have to move out of the house. It is a disorienting experience. But if you live in a house with multiple rooms, and one room floods, you can seek refuge in the other rooms while you repair the damage. The goal is to build an identity house with at least a few rooms, because you never know when one is going to flood and you’ll need to find strength and stability in the others.

You don’t need to spend equal time and energy in each room. (You won’t.) You just need to have more than one.

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7. It’s shocking the number of bizarre things people do to “optimize” their health, longevity, and performance; and yet they don't exercise regularly, sleep 7 hours, eat fruits and veggies, build community, or ever relax.

A common trap high performers fall into is over-optimizing everything and cutting corners around the necessities. They obsess over the 0.1% but not the 99.9%. No supplement will cover up a bad diet; no stimulant will reduce the long term effects of overwork; no number of social media followers will be as fulfilling as meaningful struggle and relationships.

It’s normal to plateau and seek out solutions in hopes of realizing progress again. But progress will never come at the expense of the basics. Don’t major in the minors. Keep the main things the main things.

8. Excellence is not a destination; it is a process of becoming: The real reward isn’t just a bigger deadlift, a faster mile, or a sturdier table; the real reward is that you become a better version of yourself.

Committing to a craft teaches you about doing hard things, facing discomfort, overcoming setbacks, and the power of community, perseverance, and persistence. These qualities extend to all of life.

The word character comes from the Greek charassein, meaning to engrave or stamp upon. When we throw ourselves into worthwhile projects and pursuits, we engrave or stamp upon ourselves the type of person we are growing into.

No matter where you start or what you’re trying to do, you will benefit from trying, and failing, and trying again anyway. This, at root, is how growth works.

Growth in a craft. And growth as a person too.

If any of these resonated, the full book goes much deeper. I promise you’ll find it valuable. Get The Way of Excellence here.

Following her extraordinary gold medal performance, figure skater Alysa Liu’s first words: “That‘s what I’m f---king talking about. That was so much fun.”

In a recent interview, she also said: “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.”

Over the past week, the internet exploded with memes celebrating Liu’s success and the path she took to achieve it. Some latched onto the spirit of her first quote, with an emphasis on fun-maxxing. Others focused on her second quote, and the concept of struggle-maxxing.

We love simple, binary narratives: “it’s all about fun” or “no pain no gain.” But the truth is that it’s a bit more complicated; it’s not one or the other. It’s both.

Alysa Liu worked hard, struggled, and sacrificed. She endured monster training sessions. She put in thousands of hours. She fell on ice more times than you could imagine. Anyone who tells you her path to gold was all fun and games is not a serious person. But what changed between the first ten years of her career (age 6 to 16) and the last two (age 18-20) is that she began to find joy in the hard work. It’s not that every day was fun, but the totality of the journey was.

In the first stage of her career, Liu had no autonomy. Her entire career, if not her entire life, was dictated by others. She was told when to skate, how to skate, what music to select, what to wear, what she could (and couldn’t) eat, and on and on and on. “The rink was my home for far too long, and I didn’t have a choice,” she said. The cost was a loss of joy, leading her to quit the sport in 2022.

Two years later, Liu was on a ski trip and found herself having a blast. “I went skiing, and your legs are tired, you’re out of breath, you’re cold, and the cold wind keeps hitting you, and you’re gliding down the mountain, and that’s a lot like skating,” she says. "I love this feeling," Liu remembered.

It occurred to her that perhaps she could reconnect with that feeling on the ice.

So she laced up the skates again, but this time on her own terms. She chose the music. She selected the costumes. She dyed her hair. She worked collaboratively with her coaches to design the training. She still worked harder than most people can even imagine. The struggle was real. Only now she was also having fun.

It’s not just Liu, and it’s not just sport.

I interviewed over 100 top performers across diverse fields, from sport to business to medicine to music to the creative arts, for my new book The Way of Excellence. What I found in all of them was a combination of fierce intensity and deep joy—a willingness to work hard, struggle, and sacrifice; and also to have a whole lot of fun.

People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, fueled by anger and resentment. It’s the David Goggins’ approach to greatness. But the truth is that if you’re not having fun, you are not going to last long at whatever it is you do, and you certainly won’t get the best out of yourself. Not every day has to be great, but you’ve got to learn to find joy in the totality of the journey. There’s this foolish misconception that you either have to be full of struggle and intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. Time and time again in my reporting I found that joy and struggle can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

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Over two decades of research on passion comes to a similar conclusion: Passion that is driven by rote obsession and diminished autonomy leads to depression, anxiety, declining performance, and burnout. Passion that is driven by joy, curiosity, agency, and interest leads to peak performance, longevity, and fulfillment.

The best performers in the world are focused, determined, a little bit crazy, and often live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring. That is all true. But the best performers in the world also experience deep joy in their crafts. What makes for greatness is being intense, willing to struggle, and joyful. It’s the joy that makes the ferocious dedication, drive, struggle, and intensity sustainable.

I can’t stress it enough: it’s not fun-maxxing or struggle-maxxing; it’s fun-maxxing and struggle-maxxing. Having fun while working hard is the greatest competitive advantage there is.

Finding Aliveness in a Numbed Out World

The combination of struggle and joy feels like a particularly vital lesson for our current moment. A great risk of the modern world is that we numb ourselves to death, going wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along an algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere. Technology lets us date, order food, shop, scroll, and work all from the same small screen. You are always one click away from making a decision or reversing it. You never have to put yourself out there. You can build a whole life around consumption without much, if any, production. It’s an emotionally flattened passivity that kills struggle and joy. Which is to say it kills aliveness.

One reason Alysa Liu’s story became such a cultural phenomenon is that in her, we all saw the best possible versions of ourselves. We saw the unabashed joy and fun. But we also realized all the hard work, struggle, and effort that went into it. That combination is a big part of what makes for a good life.

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In 2022, a team of neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal showed that when we apply effort to challenging tasks, it boosts activity in brain regions that respond to rewards. They looked under the hood and found the neural networks underlying the contentment and satisfaction we feel after a hard day’s work on something we care about. But here’s the catch: The neural activity associated with reward, along with the accompanying real-life feelings of accomplishment, was significantly greater in participants who viewed their effort as worthwhile. The more you believe your hard work is rewarding and satisfying, the more rewarding and satisfying you’ll find it.

It’s an important point. Suffering for the sake of suffering is foolish. What makes for a good life is meaningful struggle. The goal is to seek worthwhile challenges that help you grow into the person you want to become. Train for a marathon. Learn an instrument. Join a choir. Make art. Coach a team. Read 50 books in a year. Put yourself out there. Challenge yourself. Do cool shit.

In the myth of Sisyphus, the gods condemn the protagonist to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down each and every time, for all of eternity. There are countless interpretations of the story. The one I’ve come to adopt is that we are all Sisyphus. We are all pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall—again and again and again.

A good life is about finding fulfillment in the struggle. It’s about expressing our unique talents and gifts and creating joy, community, and meaning in the process. It’s about exerting ourselves with a smile on our face more often than a frown.

This post was adapted from my new book, The Way of Excellence. If you found it valuable, you’ll love the book.

The 2026 Winter Olympics have been extraordinary. The Games presented an incredible showcase of talent, effort, and the human spirit. A big part of the reason they hit so hard is that in an increasingly numbed-out world, we’re starving for mastery, mattering, and aliveness.

I’ve spent the last twenty days closely watching and writing about the Games—from Mikaela Shiffrin, Federica Brignone, and Alyssa Liu’s incredible comeback, to Ilia Malinin’s devastating misstep, to the dominance of Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo and Norway more broadly.

Though I’m in the business of long-form writing, many people have asked me to summarize the key lessons and distill them into bite-sized chunks of wisdom: What have been the best stories? Why do the Games make me feel so alive? How can I take the inspiration I am feeling and build on it? What do the Games have to teach all of us about greatness?

What follows are 15 lessons on excellence that the Olympics keep teaching us, and how we can benefit from them in our own lives.

1. Show up. Show up. Show up. If you repeatedly put yourself in a position to win, you increase your surface area for luck, and eventually the chips fall your way. We cannot control when the universe will gift us the latticework of variables that will bring out our best. All we can do is keep showing up and putting ourselves in a position to receive it.

2. Surround Yourself Wisely. Nobody reaches the top alone. Nobody. The people you surround yourself with shape you. Choose wisely.

3. Mental toughness isn’t the absence of nerves or robotic stoicism; it’s feeling what you’re feeling and doing it anyway. Even the best experience anxiety. It doesn’t make you less than. It makes you human. The goal isn’t to eliminate these feelings. It’s to get better at accepting them and taking them along for the ride.

4. Outcomes do matter (especially at the highest level), but the way you get the best outcomes is by fully embracing the process. As the five-time Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Humphries told me, “the bigger the goal, the smaller the steps.”

5. When you care deeply, you get the best out of yourself. But you also make yourself vulnerable. It requires courage and guts. It’s worth it. The things you care about risk breaking your heart, but they also fill your life with texture, meaning, and deep satisfaction. “I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you have the courage to dare greatly,” said Lindsey Vonn after her crash. “Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”

6. Be yourself and go all the way. It’s good to learn from other people, but don’t mimic them. Embrace your authenticity. Don’t fight against yourself. Know who you are and use it to your advantage.

7. Having fun is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. You can be serious, give something your all, and have fun at the same time. “That’s what I’m f***ing talking about. That was so much fun,” were the first words figure skater Alysa Liu uttered after her comeback gold medal performance. Intensity and joy can coexist.

8. Competing means wanting to win, but it also means rising up together. The best rivals are those we respect deeply. They make us better.

9. You don’t need to like failure, but you’ve got to accept it’s an inevitable part of pushing your limits. “I blew it,” said Ilia Malinin after his devastating misstep in Figure Skating. Sometimes it’s that simple. Failure sucks. Learn from it what you can. And then keep going.

10. Work and craft can be a central part of your identity, but you perform your best when it’s not the only thing in your life. When you fuse your entire sense of self to a single thing it makes you fragile. Build your identity house with more than one room.

11. Good things take time. Most breakthroughs follow plateaus. So much of success simply comes down to staying in the game. This isn’t to say you don’t make adjustments along the way (you do). But you’ve got to commit to a long time horizon. Not days; not weeks; not months. But years and decades.

12. Dig where your feet are. Pressure, expectations, and past experiences are real, but the more you can drop into the moment, the better you perform. “I came here for the skiing,” said Mikaela Shiffrin. “To take away the noise and just be simple.” You can’t help but carry a whole lot with you as you approach the starting gate (both literal and metaphorical). Once the gun goes off, you just need to focus on running the race you are in.

13. The best way to gain confidence is by giving yourself evidence. Put in the reps. Trust your training. "I gave everything, I had no regrets... I trusted my plan, I trusted the work that I put in with my team and just went for it," remarked Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo after winning his fifth gold at the 2026 Games.

14. Take on big challenges and do hard things. It is immensely fulfilling and satisfying. It makes you feel alive.

15. You’re only on the podium for a minute. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides. Set big goals. But then make sure you climb in the right way.

I hope you found this list resonant. Please share it with your favorites, and let me know if I’ve missed anything.

If you found it valuable and want to go deeper, check out my new book, The Way of Excellence, where I explore all these themes and more in great detail. Get a copy here.

American alpine skiier Mikaela Shiffrin's path hasn’t been easy. She’s endured otherworldly pressure, loss, grief, breakdowns, injuries, and failures. But she kept going. She kept being herself. Now she’s back on top of the mountain—an embodiment of excellence in every way:

Shiffrin won her first gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games at the age of 18. From then on, she was a perennial favorite to win nearly every alpine ski event. She performed well in 2018, taking home another gold (and silver).

In 2022, she was favored to win at least three golds. She didn’t come home with a single medal of any color. It was a devastating result.

Shiffrin’s father, Jeffrey, to whom she was extremely close, died unexpectedly following an accident at his home in 2020. Of course this affected her skiing, but it was about so much more. In a poignant 2022 piece on her experience of grief for The Player’s Tribune, Shiffrin wrote:

"It's like you have an injury in your soul.
There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think, What's the point?"

Shiffrin continued to dominate World Cup races. In 2023, she broke the record for the most wins with 87. But then, at the end of 2024, during a crash, she suffered a severe puncture wound to her abdomen. The injury required surgery, hospitalization, and a long road to recovery—and not just physically.

Shiffrin shared how she experienced PTSD from the crash, which caused her to hesitate, slow down, and feel gut-wrenching anxiety before races.

But she kept going.

She surrounded herself with good people.
She did therapy for her body and mind.
She was vulnerable and courageous.

In 2025, she passed 100 World Cup wins. It’s an extraordinary number that easily makes her the best alpine skier of all time. And yet, and yet...

The disappointment of the 2022 Olympic Games still loomed.

The 2026 Olympic Games

Heading into the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games, Shiffrin carried all of this. The expectations. The grief. The anxiety. The injury. The success. The failure. The ever-scrutinizing public eye. It is truly impossible to understand what that kind of pressure is like.

It is not a normal human experience. Especially with today’s 24-7 news coverage, social media, and opinions from armchair experts who have been no where near stepping into the arena.

The start of the 2026 Games went South for Shiffrin. In the team combined race, where she and her partner were among the favorites, they finished fourth after Shiffrin's subpar slalom. She then finished 11th in the women’s giant slalom.

Instead of becoming angry, resentful, or spiraling, Shiffrin celebrated her teammates.

"I'm gonna call it sweetbitter rather than bittersweet, because we got to watch our teammates get a medal, which is incredible," she said.

Days later, on the start line of the individual slalom race, Shiffrin took a deep breath.

As I was watching, I thought to myself that inhale and exhale contained within it so much texture, so many challenges, so much pressure, so much life—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Shiffrin went out the gate and dominated her first run. And then, on her second run, she did it again. A gold medal performance.

Incredible. Extraordinary.
A moment for the ages.

Mikaela and I first connected when she shared something I wrote a few years back:

“There is no greater trap than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is who you become in the process of going for it.”

That quote became the centerpiece of "The Way of Excellence."

I know Mikaela is proud of the medal. But I bet even more so, she’s proud of who she’s become, and is still becoming. Mikaela Shiffrin embodies excellence. Excellence does not mean control. It does not mean perfection. It means the ability to meet the moment with presence, flexibility, and a next-play mindset.

It’s staying in the game. It’s giving your all. It’s beginning again. It’s responding instead of reacting. It’s stepping into the arena. It’s caring deeply. It’s laying it on the line.

It’s doing all this while staying grounded. While keeping your head up. While showing up as best you can. While running the race in front of you.

Parts of this post were excerpted from my new book, The Way of Excellence. It’s a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love the book, and it’s currently $7 off on Amazon. Get your copy now: Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble.

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Earlier this week, a post about how AI is going to change everything—take our jobs, make traditional education irrelevant, and transform every facet of our lives—went viral. The post, which to be honest, I found pretty compelling, built toward a straightforward conclusion: if you aren’t already, you better start incorporating AI into just about everything you do, lest you’ll be left behind.

The author of the post, Matt Shumer, is CEO of an AI company. He certainly has an incentive to make his case. Not to mention, scarcity and fear have long been potent marketing tactics. But it’s not just Shumer.

Countless people who work in tech are sounding the alarm about the impending impact of AI. World-class software developers are saying AI can do nearly all of their work, and not just faster but better. In a recent earnings call, the music streamer Spotify said “it’s best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI.”

I have no reason to doubt any of these people. But it’s worth noting that much of the AI is changing everything chorus is coming from three specific camps:

1. Software developers, who work in what researchers call kind environments, meaning the variables are known and unchanging, and the work is repeatable and often relies upon binary logic. Chess is a kind environment. Surgery is not.

2. People who do process heavy work, such as filling out spreadsheets, translating reports to powerpoint, and so on.

3. Growth marketers, whose jobs are often contingent on quantity (reach as many people as possible) and not quality (produce extraordinary work).

I’m not here to argue that AI won’t be disruptive.

It seems there will be a lesser need for software developers. Countless bullshit jobs will be automated. (The late anthropologist David Graeber reasoned that at least 40 percent of jobs are bullshit.) The internet is already full of average content produced by AI bots (and people who have come to resemble AI bots). This will only get worse, and perhaps on an exponential scale, since the cost of producing content is only $20 per month (the fee for a starter Chat-GPT or Claude account). I find it hard to imagine AI will ever produce great writing, but I’m sure the generation before me found the internet hard to imagine too.

All of this is to say AI will have a profound impact on much of life for much of the population. But something AI won’t do is generate fulfillment.

And we desperately need fulfillment.

An Impending Epidemic of Emptiness

One of the most reader-highlighted passages in my new book, The Way of Excellence, goes like this: “The main reason I write and lift weights is because a technology company can’t design a robot that can make me feel what I feel when I write and lift weights. Maybe the robot can write more elegantly or lift more weight. But it can’t make me feel the aliveness of a great idea. It can’t make me feel the rhythm of a great sentence. It can’t make me feel the heavy-ass weight starting to move. This feeling is what makes us human. Find it in your own life. Protect it. Cherish it.”

The biggest disruption from AI that nobody is talking about is the emptiness and longing that accompanies an increasingly automated life. The feeling you gain from exerting effort on something you find meaningful will become increasingly rare, and increasingly important. It’s true for writing, making music, training in the gym, running marathons, building tables, painting, gardening, and forging human relationships.

Feelings of connectedness and intimacy—be it with a craft, another person, or oneself—come not from results but from the process, from the messiness and struggle of doing the work.

Imagine that with artificial intelligence you could click a few buttons and, within seconds, “compose” an award-winning- caliber piece of music. Would this bring you fulfillment? It’s doubtful. Even the best outcomes are meaningless if we don’t go through the process of creating them. It is precisely because we’ve got to master the difficult, face setbacks, and overcome challenges that makes the pursuit of excellence so powerful and satisfying.

If you can use AI to make parts of your life easier then by all means go for it. But you need to be careful that AI does not become the centerpiece of your work, your leisure, and your relationships.

While I agree with Matt Shumer that AI will be highly disruptive, my conclusion is largely the opposite. I’m not stressing about becoming an AI power-user; rather, I’m doubling down on aspiring toward genuine, human excellence.

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Meaningful Effort

If you build a life around meaningful effort on things that make you feel alive, and if your work can help others discover those same feelings, then you are setting yourself up for success in a world that is seeping with AI.

There’s a chance the AI tools are not nearly as good as everyone says. If that’s the case, we’re in a big bubble, and that’s that. And if the tools are as good as everyone says—then it won’t be long before everyone is using them. If everyone is using them, then the world will coalesce around an average that is determined by the latest model of Chat GPT or Claude. It means there will always be room to be different, to do better than average work and to live a better than average life.

It follows that the real competitive advantage in a world of AI is to be decidedly human; to create human art, to play human sports, to build human relationships. While everyone else is content to pump bits and bytes into machines, aspiring toward human excellence will not only set you apart, but also yield aliveness and depth instead of numbness and longing.

P.s., The Way of Excellence is an instant New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller. If you enjoyed this post you’ll love it. Get a copy here.