On a recent flight from Charlotte, NC, to Traverse City, MI, I counted three people reading. I was one of the three. To be fair, a handful were watching sports and movies. But more than anything, I saw people buried in their phones.

Around the same time as my flight, an Atlantic cover story, “The Age of Reading is Over,” went viral for highlighting some terrifying trends.

51% of adults read 0 books a year. Only 16% read daily.

Reading has declined by 43% over the last 20 years. The decline cuts across age, gender, and race. 54% of adults now have literacy levels below those of a sixth grader.

You can observe the decline not just on planes and trains, but at pools and in doctors’ office waiting rooms. You used to see people reading books and magazines. Now, just about everyone is swiping down on short-form video. Here are findings from three recent studies on that medium:

1. A study from earlier this year uncovered that people who regularly watched short-form video (e.g., TikTok and Reels) underwent changes in the neural networks responsible for attention and impulse control. In particular, the braking mechanism of the brain, which would otherwise help someone decide to stop watching and put the phone away, deteriorated.

2. Another study, aptly titled “The Cognitive Costs of Brain Rot,” found that the fractured attention, cognitive overload, and mental exhaustion that are part and parcel of heavy social media use contribute to burnout, depression, and anxiety.

3. A 2025 meta-analysis—a review of 27 studies that included 98,000 people—found that consuming short-form video leads to a significant decline in cognitive function, attention, and self-control. “Repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may lead to habituation, wherein users become desensitized to slower, more cognitively demanding tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning,” conclude the authors.

The research shows what so many of us have experienced firsthand. When you get sucked into scrolling, it’s hard to stop, you feel like crap, and your ability to maintain attention and any sort of depth diminishes, if not flames out altogether. It’s bad for the individual mind, and for the collective one. No wonder it seems like all the serious people have gradually disappeared.

The synthetic slop revolution is doing to our brains what the industrial revolution did to our bodies. Consuming too many highly processed foods led to metabolic dysfunction and a diminished desire for more nutritious, whole foods that actually make you feel good. Consuming too much highly processed content is leading to neurological and emotional dysfunction and a diminished desire for deeper and more fulfilling material, such as books.

Life is too short to surrender your brain to an endless deluge of stupid, soulless, mind-numbing crap. It’s addictive in all the worst ways. We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where each and every one of us is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love.

Short-form video, and social media more broadly, are not going away. But you need to be thoughtful about how you consume it and set constraints for yourself. Occasionally, I eat highly processed foods. I’m still healthy and fit, but I’d never make highly processed foods the centerpiece of my diet. The same is true for highly processed content.

The best thing you can do to reclaim your ability to think deeply is also one of the simplest: read a book. Reading a book is like consuming healthy foods and going to the gym all at once, but for your brain.

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When you read a book, you consume unprocessed information in context—you can think of context like fiber; it slows digestion and is the first thing stripped away in highly processed short-form video crap—while at the same time exerting focus. You may be uncomfortable at first, especially if you’re out of practice, but reading is a muscle you can rebuild. Eventually, it becomes enjoyable—you reach a point where you’d rather read a book than scroll because of how you feel after, because of how it nourishes your brain (and soul) instead of burning it out.

Reading 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 regularly get to experience the joy of losing yourself in a story and the exhilaration of making a new connection or thinking an original thought.

Though the state of reading may seem grim, there is some light in the dark. The decline isn't evenly distributed, rather, it's a story of concentration. A YouGov survey from the end of 2025 found that 19% of Americans accounted for 82% of all books read that year, and the top 4%—those reading 50 or more books—consumed 46% of the total. You could interpret this data in two ways: the first is that reading is becoming an elite activity for a very small subset of the population. The second is that there is a strong, passionate base of readers holding the line—and what’s needed is an indiscriminate recruiting policy to expand the number.

Book snobs may take issue, but let’s be real, at this point it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or nonfiction, a classic or a recent release. We just need to get people back to reading, period. Start with a book you'd actually want to read. Set aside even just 20 minutes a day. Place your phone in another room. Prioritize consistency. It’s good to think of yourself as a reader, but merely holding a book as a status symbol doesn’t do any good. You actually have to read. Reading can—you could even argue reading must—be at the heart of any humanist resistance to technologically driven brain rot.

Whether you’re a voracious reader who is out of practice or someone who hasn’t read many books before, now is the time to get as serious about reading books and your cognitive health as you are about your body and your physical health.

Refuse to doomscroll. Read a book. Reject AI slop. Read a book. F*ck the machine. Read a book. Save your brain. Be the counterculture. Read a book.

One of the best parts of coaching Little League baseball is helping kids learn to strike out. Now, it’s not like I root for them to fail. But at some point, a strikeout is inevitable, even for the most skilled players on the team. Striking out is so powerful for the same reason it’s so hard: it is an utterly public failure.

Your teammates, your opponents, your parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles—they are all watching. There is no place to hide on a baseball diamond.

In my years of coaching, I’ve found the primary reason kids fear batting is not because they are worried about getting hit by a pitch, but because they are worried about striking out. My job is simple: first, normalize striking out—even the best players in the world do it, and often!—and then, help kids process and come down from the failure.

A common trajectory for most goes something like this:

• Tons of nerves before batting.

• A strikeout followed by an ocean of tears.

• Another strikeout followed by tears, but fewer.

• Rinse and repeat until striking out eventually becomes a minor frustration, no longer something to fear but merely a part of the game.

For each kid, without fail, once their fear of striking out diminishes, they have more fun, take bigger swings, and play better baseball. They are no longer tight and playing not to lose. They are free and playing to win. The same kids who were terrified just a few weeks prior begin to let go. They drop their shoulders, and their knees relax in the batter’s box. Sometimes they even lick their lips. It’s a beautiful thing.

***

Striking out is not only something that happens to kids. Adults strike out too. Your date doesn’t call back. Your team misses its target. Nobody downloads your podcast. Your book flops. You miss the lift. You run slower than you’d hoped. Your business fails. Your relationship fails.

And, just like kids—or perhaps even more—adults become so paralyzed by their fear of failure that they, too, take at-bats tentatively, if at all.

Fear of failure kills dreams. Fear of failure shrinks lives.

***

It’s never been easy to fail, but I suspect it’s harder than ever, in no small part because every time you open your computer you are subjected to a never-ending torrent of wild success. His podcast just crossed 100,000,000 downloads. Her Substack now has 20,000 subscribers. His bench press is bigger than ever. Her husband is like the Dalai Lama, only with an eight-pack. Her business crushed. He’s on the forty under forty list. And on, and on, and on. Never mind that the vast majority of success porn is fabricated and created by miserable people, but it has the opposite effect of my Little League coaching: it makes failure seem like an abnormal disease to avoid at all costs.

This is bullshit.

For my latest book, I spoke with hundreds of world-class performers: athletes, artists, chefs, entrepreneurs, musicians, writers, surgeons, coaches. Not a single one avoided failure. Not one!! What I was told again and again and again is some version of If I didn’t have the guts to fail, I would never be where I am today.

Failure is inevitable. For the nine-year-old on my baseball team. For Shohei Ohtani. For you. If you want to get the best out of yourself—if you want to have big at-bats and take big swings, in baseball and in life—you need the courage to face the possibility, in some cases, even the probability, of failure. The following steps can help.

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1. Accept the Hurt

You care. You gave your all. You failed.
Of course it’s going to hurt.

This doesn’t mean you are broken or weak. It means you are a flesh and blood human. The pain of failure is the cost of stepping into the arena and living a rich and textured life. When you sit on the sidelines or hold yourself back, you gain short-term safety and comfort, but you sacrifice a shot at your dreams. It’s a terrible trade.

Risking failure may break your heart, but it also fills your life with meaning and joy. You’ll never know what you’re capable of until you try, and if you try—and have the guts to truly test your limits—then at some point you are going to fail. This is just how it goes. It’s the math of the universe. But the math of the universe also says that at some point, you’ll probably succeed too.

I was terrified to submit my first book proposal. I feared getting rejected. I feared what it would do for my then shaky confidence as a writer. So I held onto it for months. I kept revising it. I’d change a sentence one way, then back, and then back again until I’d retraced the same circle dozens of times.

I finally got sick of this cycle and said to hell with it: what’s the worst that can happen? I quickly found out. I got rejected by 27 publishers. It sucked. It was painful. It was discouraging. But the 28th publisher, a little-known house called Rodale (which no longer exists), gave me a book deal. Five books later, and I’ve sold more than 600,000 copies, and my books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

None of this would have happened had I not accepted failure.

The moment you accept failure is the moment you stop being paralyzed by it. It’s just like the kids on my baseball team: striking out becomes not that big of a deal when you realize you aren’t going to melt or die.

2. Abide by the 48-Hour Rule

Following a failure, give yourself 48 hours to feel bad, and then get back to the work itself.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found the neural networks involved in taking on challenges and problem solving (what he called the SEEKING system) compete for resources with the neural networks involved in fear, rage, and grief (what he called the RAGE, FEAR, and GRIEF systems). In other words, it’s a zero-sum game in the brain. It’s nearly impossible to feel terrible when you’re actively working toward progress.

After something I write flops, there is no better medicine than getting started on the next piece. I loathe doing it every time—feeling sorry for myself is much easier than writing—but I must report that it works every time.

All the high-performing people I interviewed for The Way of Excellence told me the same. Following failure, you want to feel your feelings, but not let them linger. It’s back to the practice facility, back to the studio, or back to the boardroom.

You fail.
You accept it.
You process it.
You learn from it.

And then you get back to work.

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3. Build a Robust Sense of Identity

You are more than a result. You are not your failures.

The stories you tell yourself about yourself shape your outlook, attitude, and behavior. Rather than telling yourself the story If I fail, that means I am a failure…

Tell yourself…

…I am a person who has the guts to step into the arena and lay it on the line. I am someone who is amassing experience that will shape my character.

(The latter also happens to be the more accurate story.)

Stop identifying with results and start identifying with the courage to fully embrace the process of living. The biggest failure becomes not having tried at all.

4. Adopt an Infinite Game Mindset

Before his tragic death, Kobe Bryant was asked, “Do you love to win or hate to lose?”

“I’m neither,” he responded. “I play to figure things out. I play to learn something.”

When you fixate on winning, losing, or some other external outcome, it takes you out of the present moment. It makes it impossible to get into a flow state. It makes you fragile. But when you adopt a mindset of curiosity and growth, it relieves pressure and helps you stay anchored.

Kobe Bryant was known for his killer instinct (Mamba Mentality), and yet even he realized the difference between the finite game and the infinite game.

The finite game is time-bound. There are winners and losers. You succeed or fail. The infinite game knows no end. The only goal is to keep playing, learning, and growing.

Anyone who has ever attained their potential knows that you’ve got to play the infinite game. When you embrace an infinite game mindset, failure becomes less scary because it is not an ultimate end. Failure still sucks and hurts (see above), but it’s also something you can learn from as you keep playing.

Of course you want to win as many finite games as you can. But damn if it isn’t helpful to regularly zoom out and remind yourself that the most important game is the infinite one—and that by staying in the infinite game, you increase the odds that you’ll win at least a few finite ones along the way.

5. Become a Humble Badass

Showing up, putting yourself out there, and stepping into the arena is not for the faint of heart. It hardens and softens you at the same time. With each challenge you undertake, you become tougher and more confident. But you also become kinder. You gain respect and compassion for others in the arena because you know how hard making yourself vulnerable to failure can be.

***

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines. To think about the thing. Research the thing. Listen to podcasts about the thing. Talk about the thing. Dream about the thing. But these are all ways of protecting yourself from actually doing the thing.

Only doing the thing is doing the thing.

Another trap is doing the thing but not really doing the thing.

It’s the person who has the website and clothes and haircut and notebook and pen and typewriter and all the other accessories they think a writer ought to have, but what they don’t have is the guts to put themselves out there and write.

They fear failure and rejection, or that their work won’t be read widely. Spending all this time on the act of being a writer is what someone does when they are scared of being a writer.

Writing is an example I know well, but the pattern is universal. You see it in sports, cooking, music, photography, craftwork, and so on. You even see it in parenting. There is no shortage of elaborate ways to feign caring. Underneath each resides fear of failure.

And herein lies the best part about overcoming your fear of failure: you can begin doing all kinds of things in the world and maybe—hell, if you do something for long enough, even probably—succeed. So step up to the plate, drop your shoulders, and take some big swings. Everyone worth a damn strikes out. It’s how the game goes.

The “RAFA” documentary speaks to something in all of us: it’s riveting when you have the guts to step into the arena, risk failure, and give something your all, even if you know you’re going to leave it behind.

Rafael Nadal loved to win, but what he really loved was the feeling of pushing against meaningful struggle.

He loved the grind.
He loved the process.
He loved exploring his limits.

“Victory lasts only so long; it’s momentary,” says Nadal. “What has always motivated me is the desire to keep fighting, because satisfaction comes from difficulty.”

I watched the RAFA documentary with my 8-year-old son and there were so many incredible lessons not just about playing good tennis but about living a good life.

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If you find something in your life that allows you to push against and overcome difficulty, yes, it can make life harder, but it also makes life so much richer.

You have to risk something. You have to be willing to get your heart broken. You have to surround yourself with a support system.

When you pour your all into something—a sport, a craft, a relationship, a team—it becomes a part of who you are. The sadness you experience when you leave it behind is the price you pay for having the experience.

There’s an old saying: Athletes die twice—once when they die and once when they retire. But it’s not just for athletes, it’s for anyone who loves their craft. It’s for parents whose kids will eventually move out of the house. It’s for couples who likely won’t die at the exact same time.

Passion comes from the Latin root passio, which means “to suffer.”

To be passionate is to find something that brings you great joy, but also that you are willing to suffer for. The suffering isn’t so much in doing the thing (which should be fun) but in how you make yourself vulnerable.

It’s safer to stay on the sidelines.

To talk about the thing. To think about the thing. To dream about the thing.

But none of those come close to doing the thing. And it’s doing the thing that enlarges your life and fills it with meaning and texture.

Even if it’s hard.
Even if you may fail.
Even if it’s not forever.

So I created one.

If you want to take your game to the next level, whatever your game may be, this program is for you.

Purchase a copy of The Way of Excellence (hardcover or audio) and unlock instant access to A Year of Excellence 52-Week Program and the Becoming Excellent Workbook. Taken together, this program gives you everything you need, and I promise it will help. It’s a $90 value for the price of a single book!

I’m limiting it to 5000 people, and there are only 1,000 spots left, so act quickly!

Learn more and get yours today:

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Who’s this for?

People who are serious about getting better and want to attain peak performance in the pursuits they care about most. If you’re exhausted and overwhelmed by fads, sick of shallow advice, and want tools that actually work, this is for you.

How’s this course different?

My goal is simple: give you the tools you need to improve your performance in an easy-to-access, succinct, evidence-based program. Each week, you’ll gain a core insight along with concrete ways to apply it in your own life. You’ll learn mindsets, habits, and practices that are crucial for success in any field. Consistency over intensity. Fundamentals over fads. Progress over perfection. Over and over again.

What’s included?

• 52 weekly independent reflections and tools, each with practical applications

• In-depth exercises for the most crucial mindsets and habits

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Only 1000 spots left! Learn more and get yours today:

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Syllabus:

​Thanks so much for continuing to engage in the work. I hope you love the program.

-- Brad

One of the biggest lies of modern life is that in order to be happy you need to be “balanced.” It’s sold to us by the self-help industrial complex—whose purveyors, it’s worth noting, are never remotely balanced themselves.

Driven people should treat life in seasons instead of trying to balance everything every single day.

Living in seasons means a few years where you focus substantially on your craft. A few years where you commit to a physical challenge. A window when family takes priority by a mile. Then maybe another window where you go all-in on work again. A year or two for a big creative project. And so on.

Great outcomes in any area of life require making tradeoffs. It’s okay to deprioritize travel because of work. It’s okay to work less because of family. It’s okay not to be everything always.

Living in seasons makes life richer and more exhilarating. You get to experiment and learn and grow and know different parts of yourself.

The times in my own life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the least balanced. Falling in love. Writing a book. Trekking in the Himalayas. Training to set a personal record in the deadlift. Caring for an infant.

During these bouts of full-on living I was completely consumed by what I was doing. Trying to be balanced—devoting equal proportions of time and energy to other areas of my life—would have diluted the formative experiences. It would have made my life less complete.

Have you ever met someone who is super interesting and also perfectly balanced?

(I didn’t think so.)

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This isn’t permission to completely neglect important parts of your life. But it is permission to drop the weight of balance, to let yourself go all in on the things that matter to you in different seasons of your life.

How do you go all in without blowing up your entire life?

I like to think about having minimum effective doses for each of the important parts of my identity: family, craft, fitness, and friends. This means when I’m focused predominantly on one of those things, I still make sure to spend enough time and energy on the others so as not to leave them completely behind.

Family time goes down during a book launch, but it never goes to zero. Work suffered massively when my kids were infants, but I did enough to stay sharp. When I’m going after a fitness goal and training hard, I don’t have as much energy for anything else. This is just how it goes, and I’m okay with it. If I tried to be great at everything always, I’d be leaving so much on the table and fighting against my own nature.

In all my years researching and writing on excellence, craft, and performance, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: When you look at the highest performing and most satisfied people and zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don’t look very balanced. They are almost always going full steam on one, or maybe two, things. But when you zoom out and look across their entire life, they actually start to appear quite balanced. Their balance is sequential, not simultaneous.

The big shift is acknowledging that, actually, you can’t have it all. Part of being a mature adult is making tradeoffs.

Stop thinking about balance as optimizing sleep, family, work, fitness, friends, creativity, and so on every single day. Start thinking about balance in terms of years, or even decades. Think about having different seasons of life for giving your all to different things.

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

The things that work, work great—until they get in the way. So much of life is not this or that but this and that. It’s called non-dual thinking. It describes when two truths can exist at once. Here are some of the most important examples.

Intensity and Joy

There’s a misconception that you need to suffer for greatness. But having fun is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. You can work hard with a smile on your face. Intensity and joy can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

Confidence and Humility

Confidence comes from giving yourself the evidence that you belong. It allows you to trust your training, own your seat, and let it rip. Confidence also leads to humility, because in the process of amassing evidence, you confront your limits over and over again. There’s always more to learn, always room to grow.

Process and Outcome

Anyone who says results don’t matter is selling you a lie. Results absolutely matter. It’s normal to want to succeed. However, it’s also true that all the internal satisfaction and fulfillment comes in the pursuit, not the attainment of a goal. The top of the mountain matters—but it’s narrow, and all the life is on the sides.

Self-Discipline and Self-Kindness

Doing hard things is hard. It takes guts to put yourself out there and step into the arena. You need discipline. You also need to be able to get back up after you fall, which is inevitable for all of us. It’s easier when you have your own back.

Hard Work and Rest

Hustle culture is shallow, gimmicky, and obsessed with performative grinding. It burns bright and then burns out. Genuine high performers work extremely hard but they also make time to rest and recover. They understand that lasting growth emerges from a cycle of stress and rest, experience and reflection.

Head and Heart

There are massive benefits to logical thinking. Feeling aren’t facts. The ability to step back, evaluate situations rationally, and respond not react are crucial skills. There are also massive benefits to developing intuition and feeling your way forward. After all, the states we long for most—flow, joy, love—are feelings. In Eastern philosophy there is a Sanskrit word citta which translates to “heart-mind,” or the unification of logic and emotion. leads to our wisest actions and our richest lives.

Consistency and Adaptability

Your ability to be relentlessly consistent over the long-haul depends upon your ability to be adaptable day-to-day. This doesn’t mean go wherever the current takes you. But it does mean that you can’t be rigid. Strength without flexibility is rigidity. Flexibility without strength is instability.

Success and Failure

Not a single person in the history of the universe who has accomplished anything great has avoided failure. Failure sucks. Failure hurts. Failure is inevitable. You don’t have to like it, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there and risk it. If you want to succeed you need the guts to fail.

Caring Deeply and Non-Attachment

A full and textured life requires caring deeply, stepping into the arena, and giving it your all. But it also requires embracing a next-play mentality. Whatever happened is in the past. Move on. Play the game in front of you. Care deeply... and be willing to let go.

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When LeBron James announced he’ll be returning to play basketball next year with the Philadelphia 76ers, he talked about love.

“I thought I was done when the season ended. I wasn't ready to announce it, and I knew I needed some time to really decide, but I was pretty sure I played my last game. I was honest at that last press conference when I said I needed to look at myself and deicide if I still love this game,” he wrote.

James said that he’s not returning for the money, as evidenced by his reduced salary. He’s also not returning for the limelight—the guy is already more famous than anyone in the world, save maybe Taylor Swift, Lionel Messi, or Cristiano Ronaldo.

“What am I really playing for at this point?” James asked rhetorically.

“I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work. I still want to grind. I still want to compete, and I still want to have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.”

He put it plainly: “I still truly love this game, and I have more to give”

Love The Process And The Process Loves You Back

Earlier this year, another larger-than-life figure in the basketball world, someone I’ve gotten to know a bit and whom I admire greatly, was also contemplating retirement. When Steve Kerr decided to return as coach of the Golden State Warriors, he did for the same reason as James. He didn’t want to give up on the feeling of pouring his all into the game and trying to win a championship.

“A great basketball team stands on a shared feeling more than strategy or scouting. The team lives as long as the feeling lives and when it's gone, not only is it impossible to recapture, it's hard to even remember,” wrote Wright Thompson in an incredible piece on Kerr’s decision for ESPN. “They weren't chasing titles, only the feeling of saddling up one last time together, wanting most of all to feel justified when the ride is done.”

In that same piece, the word love occurs twenty-five times.

But then again, what is excellence if not caring deeply and paying attention and repeated practice and overcoming failure and staying curious and steadfast dedication and feeling the highs and lows and showing up again and again—which is to say it’s a lot like love.

People usually think about intimacy as being in a relationship with another person. But you can also develop intimacy with an activity or craft. It’s a sense of familiarity, respect, and attentiveness that helps you feel connected to what you’re doing, and to yourself. It’s being in the pocket of a deadlift, song, or painting; total immersion in developing an idea or refining a skill; losing yourself in the slipstream of a team trying to win a championship.

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A Lesson for Us All

James’ returning to basketball is going to require grind and sacrifice. But that’s the point. The reason you feel love for the process is not in spite of what you put into it but because of what you put into it. It’s true in basketball and it’s true for essentially everything else in life.

It’s an important realization, especially now. People are increasingly content to outsource their work, leisure, and even romantic lives to artificial intelligence. It might make life easier, more comfortable, more convenient, and more efficient. But it doesn’t make life better. If anything, it makes life worse because it alienates you from the very feelings that you crave most, feelings like intimacy and love.

It’s not just James and Kerr. It’s all of us.

When you work hard at something, when you throw your all into a process, that process becomes an expression of your very essence. Musicians, coaches, teachers, physicians, leaders, writers, parents, and of course athletes all know this to be true.

The reason I write is because AI can’t make me feel what it’s like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy-ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words. There are tools that can lift more weight. More efficiently. More easily. But that’s not the point. The point is the experience, the feeling of being alive; the feeling intimacy and, on a good day, when the gym community is at my back, maybe even something like love.

These feelings are, at root, what make us human. They separate us from machines. Build your life around them. Protect them. Cherish them.

I distinctly remember being a kid on my dad’s 40th birthday and thinking how old that is. Well, here I am. The good news is that it doesn’t feel so old. As people say, age is just a number. (My sense is the older you get, the more you like saying that, and the truer it becomes.)

Anyways, I put together some reflections and lessons I’ve learned so far. I am going to do my best to imperfectly hold myself to these over the next decade. Hopefully you find a few valuable as well.

1. The best way to stay sane in a batshit crazy world is to find the people and activities you love and give them your all.

2. People think you need to feel good to get going, but often it’s the opposite: you need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good. This is especially important if you are in a tough season of life. Just. Get. Started. It’s how you give yourself a chance.

3. When you are facing doubt, fear, or insecurity, a good litmus test is to ask yourself: will making this decision shrink my life or enlarge it?

4. The worst way to be happy is by trying to be happy all the time. When I am deep into a book project, at week nine of a challenging twelve-week training cycle in the gym, or coaching my son’s basketball team, I wouldn’t say I am happy. Yet there are few things I’d rather be doing and few feelings I’d rather have. These pursuits give my life texture. What I am is fulfilled.

5. There are going to be periods of darkness. Nobody escapes life unscathed. Stay patient with yourself. Keep showing up. Don’t be scared to ask for help.

6. We live in a world characterized by persistent, fleeting distractions. Be sure to carve out space for things that are concrete and timeless: good books, good music, good art, good friends.

7. Doing the hard thing today usually makes tomorrow a bit easier—the workout, the difficult conversation, the outline you’ve been putting off. If you are able, just get it done. You’ll rest easier at night.

8. The person you marry is the most important decision you make. My wife is my editor, confidant, lover, parent of my children, and most importantly, my absolute best friend in the world. It doesn’t mean things are always easy, but my goodness, I can’t imagine life without her.

9. Don’t gamble away your self-worth in an existential casino—likes, shares, followers, comments; sometimes this stuff matters professionally, but it doesn’t mean shit for who you really are.

10. Life hardens and softens you at the same time. You need loads of self-discipline and loads of self-kindness. The latter makes the former sustainable.

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11. Build an identity house that has more than one room. If you live in a house that only has one room—for example: athlete, parent, writer, or physician—and that one room floods, you have to move out of the house. But if you live in a house with multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage. It’s important to have more than one room, because you never know when you’ll need to find strength and stability in the others.

12. It’s almost always better to be kind than clever.

13. You are not going to be the best anything with an attitude of nonchalance. It’s a cop-out, a way to avoid making yourself vulnerable to failure. But if you never give anything your all, then you sacrifice so much of what makes life worth living. Try hard and give a damn.

14. No feeling is final. In the moment it seems that way, but your brain plays tricks on you. Impermanence is a fact of life. Unfortunately, this is true for the good times. Fortunately, this is true for the bad times too.

15. Eat your fruits and vegetables. When you forget, simply begin again.

16. Competence is so important. It doesn’t matter what the thing is—basketball, guitar, watercolor, public speaking, writing, running—what matters is that you develop skill and strive for progress at something. Competence is good for your soul.

17. Think about jobs in terms of three factors: lifestyle, intellectual or physical stimulation, and money. Almost no job will give you all three, but a good job gives you two.

18. There is no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. We see the finished product but overlook the months, years, and at times decades of work that went into it. Don’t compare your first draft to someone else’s final draft.

19. Being a parent is the most exhausting joy that there is.

20. You cannot have it all, no matter how much you try. Anyone who tells you that you can have it all is lying. Life is about tradeoffs.

21. There is no better value than reading a good book, something that is becoming increasingly rare these days. Schedule time to read. Read on planes. Read on the beach. Read on trains. Be the counterculture.

22. Do not feel guilty about resting. If you are a driven, type-A pusher, sometimes going easy is harder than going hard. But if you never go easy, eventually you run yourself into the ground.

23. Consistency is more important than intensity. The little behaviors you do over and over compound to create something big. Be the person who shows up—at work, in community, in relationships. Become known for your consistency.

24. You are a product of your environment. So much of how you show up is contingent on what is around you. A good life requires creating micro-ecosystems that support your values amid a macro-ecosystem (junk food, junk content) that often works against them.

25. If you want to focus deeply, then you need to remove your phone. Not face down on the table. Not “silenced” in your pocket. But somewhere else altogether. During family dinners, the phone is on another floor. During blocks of writing or reading it’s in another room. This habit will do more for your quality of life than willpower ever will.

26. The things that work, work—until they get in the way. This is true for tools, trackers, and even mindsets and routines. Use it while it’s working, but don’t be scared to let go once it’s no longer serving you.

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27. That you must suffer for greatness is a dangerous lie. Having fun is the best competitive advantage there is. Joy and intensity can coexist.

28. The secret is there is no secret. If anyone tells you they’ve got the secret, that’s a good sign to run in the opposite direction.

29. It’s important to stay abreast of what is happening in the world, but when you start treating news like entertainment or an action television show, consider directing your time and energy elsewhere.

30. People don’t think about you nearly as much as you think people think about you because they are too busy worrying about what people are thinking about them.

31. Depression hates a moving target. Just because you stay busy or exercise doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t experience depression, but it’s the best prevention there is.

32. Ten of the most underrated words: I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that.

33. There is no greater illusion than thinking the achievement of some goal will change your inner life. What will change your inner life is the person you become along the way. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides.

34. All big successes require at least some good luck, which, by definition, you cannot control. But you can increase your surface area for getting lucky. You do this by working hard and staying in the game.

35. Complicated routines are overrated. It’s better to have a few things you do each day, a few things you do each week, and a few things you do each month. Avoid majoring in the minors when what you should be doing is keeping the main things the main things.

36. Sleep when you are tired.

37. You are not the stuff inside your head. You are the awareness that decides what to do with the stuff inside your head. The ability to choose which thoughts to pursue and which to leave behind is key to everything. You don’t have to believe everything you think.

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

39. Stop trying to be perfect. It’s such a f*cking drain. That’s not permission to drop your standards altogether. It means being realistic. It means remembering you are a human, not a robot. It means being decent, giving what you’ve got, and showing up as best you can.

40. Do good work. Love good people. Don’t be an asshole.
That about sums it up.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and want to go deeper on my work, you’ll love my latest book.

When asked about his creative process, director of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan said, “I treat every film I do like the last I’ll ever make—and one day I will be right… So every time I want to put everything into the project at hand. I’m never thinking, ‘Well, I’ll save this for the next one.’ I don’t ever want to think like that. I want each movie to be everything.”

Everyone is talking about The Odyssey. I think that’s because in an era of automation, shortcuts, and slop we crave hard-won care and competence.

Nolan has achieved everything a filmmaker could dream. He won an Oscar for Best Director in 2024. His movies have grossed more than 6 billion dollars. And yet, he still returns to each project with a desire to further his craft and make something awesome. Three decades into his career, at age 55, he’s outdone even himself.

The Odyssey was shot differently than any feature film before. It’s the first movie to be filmed entirely with IMAX cameras. The cameras had to be reloaded with film every three minutes. Nolan avoided using green screens, even though it would have made filming easier. Crews faced nasty weather and rugged terrain during the 91-day shoot across Greece, Iceland, Morocco, Italy, and Scotland. All told, the movie required two million feet of footage.

When asked by Jon Stewart how he managed to finish shooting the film 9 days early, Nolan said, “By day 91 we couldn't have taken another step. So we finished (at) the right time. We were done. Everybody was done. I mean people were just exhausted.”

Nolan obsesses over quality and craft. It explains why so many are gravitating toward the film, and why it’s opening to enormous anticipation. Amid the shallows, deep effort and craftsmanship stand out. It feels this way even more than it did five years ago. People are sick of an ephemeral stream of junk content. People are sick of half-assed, highly-automated effort. People are sick of half-assed, highly-automated lives. The Odyssey flies in the face of all this.

The story itself encapsulates what the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls “The Hero’s Journey.” Someone goes out on a quest, faces trials and tribulations, and returns home a better and stronger person. I think, at root, we all crave this too.

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It’s not just that the movie he made is emblematic of the hero’s journey, but Nolan’s own career too. He’s on a quest to be the best at his craft that he can possibly be. He doesn’t let an opportunity to learn go to waste. Nolan has said that even his early corporate-video work—throwing up lights to shoot in-house interviews with executives—was teaching him his craft.

Thirty years later, no one was forcing him to do months of relentless prep for The Odyssey. No one forced him to tour remote villages or to make every effect as practical as possible. Nolan did it because he takes responsibility for his craft. He values the art. He values his audience. He values himself.

Therein lies an incredible lesson: when you give something your all you take responsibility for it. You face the very real chance of failure and accept the outcome, whatever it may be. “I can't blame the studio or anything like that—if the film doesn't work, it's my fault. If I fail, I fail on my own terms.” Nolan says of his work.

The Odyssey resonates because both the end result and the process that created it speak to something in all of us: we are starved for depth; we yearn to go on quests; we desire competence; we want to throw ourselves into big, scary, challenges that shape our character; we long to spend our finite time putting our all into things that matter.

Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly been frustrated by the moral failures and out-of-touch actions of politicians, major business executives, and other conventionally “successful” knowledge workers. Certainly not all, but many of these people have repeatedly let us down, among them: Elon Musk, Senate candidate Graham Platner, and, of course, President Donald Trump.

After one recent letdown, searching for some solace, I texted an old, wise, and longtime mentor of mine. This was the crux of that conversation:

Me: I can’t believe there are so many egotistical jerks. Why do all these people just completely lose touch? What is it about money or power or status that turns you into an asshole? Is it unavoidable?

Mike: I am getting more weight equipment.

We didn’t talk much further on the topic, because we didn’t need to. I immediately knew, and later confirmed, exactly what Mike was saying: lifting weights helps keep you from becoming an egotistical jerk. It keeps you down to earth.

Weight lifting, of course, is just one of many activities in the real world that can help keep you from losing touch with reality. Cycling, swimming, gardening, hiking, climbing, and sculpting are just a few other examples.

In researching and reporting my new book, I came across a common theme among peak performers who are also grounded: they regularly do real and difficult things, and as a result, they regularly practice humility and gain deep, lasting fulfillment.

When the barbell drops, it drops. When you want to run under three hours for the marathon but go 3:04, the result is right in your face. It is hard to get out of touch with the world—or to become full of yourself—when you are working hard on something concrete, when your successes are earned, and your failures cannot be rationalized by corporate mumbo jumbo or social media hot takes. Doing real things in the world provides gravity, both literally and figuratively.

Confidence Through Mastery

Throwing yourself into real activities not only helps keep you grounded, but it is also good for your brain, body, and spirit. Pursuing mastery, a kind of gradual progress where tangible results can be traced back to oneself, increases self-reliance and self-confidence. Decades of research on self-determination theory demonstrate that mastery is a core input to mental health, overall well-being, and life satisfaction.

Doing real things also affords you the experience of living in a smaller and simpler world, if only for a few hours. Compared to the complex, frantic, frenetic, and interconnected digital environment that occupies so much of a knowledge worker’s life these days, a squat workout, mountain-bike ride, or trail run are a lot more manageable. In these pursuits, you are the main factor that determines the outcome, and whatever obstacles you face are directly in front of you.

This is a lot closer to how our species evolved. It’s no wonder these sorts of activities, though often objectively harder than sitting at a desk, in many ways feel so much easier—and more aligned with oneself.

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Satisfaction Through Competence

In the past I’ve referenced the work of the philosopher Matthew Crawford, who writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge-economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”

Ask a white-collar professional 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 opinion of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors.

Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, or on their next deadlift, however, and the answer becomes much simpler.

“The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy,” writes Crawford, who in 2001 quit his job in academia to become a mechanic. “It seems to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He simply points: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

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Keeping Cool

One of my most humble coaching clients, Rob, is an executive at a large professional-services firm. I’ve been working with Rob for about six years now. He is supremely understated, at times to a fault. During corporate fire drills, when his colleagues are freaking out, he maintains calm and equanimity.

Rob is also a diehard woodworker.

This is not a coincidence. When you are building tables in your basement, you are going to get humbled over and over and over again. Tables either stand or they don’t. You can’t just use your power or money or relevance or fame or anger to make a shoddy table stand. Instead, you’ve got to keep your cool as you adjust the table and work toward a solution.

I’ve got clients who are ultra-runners and mountain climbers, and they are much the same.

Make no mistake, nothing I’ve written above is a cure-all. Some people do real things in the world and yet are still miserable, egotistical jerks. But it seems increasingly likely that one powerful way to stay in touch with reality, especially as you rise, is to stay in touch—quite literally—with reality.

Not by spending all day talking to a sycophantic AI bot, posting on X, attending Zoom calls, or joining fancy board meetings. Not by endlessly refreshing your bank account or stocks. But rather by doing actual, real, hard things in the world.

Y’all—A new Atlantic cover story, “The Age of Reading is Over,” is, for lack of better terms, terrifying.

51% of adults read 0 books a year. Only 16% read daily.

Reading has declined by 43% over the last 20 years. The decline cuts across age, gender, and race.

No wonder it seems like all the serious people have disappeared.

The synthetic slop revolution is doing to our brains what the industrial revolution did to our bodies.

Save your brain.
Read a book.
Be the counterculture.

Reading a book is like going to the gym, but for your brain. You may be uncomfortable at first, but focus is a muscle you can rebuild. It’s hard at first (especially if you’re out of practice), but it gets easier with reps, just like any other skill. Eventually, it becomes enjoyable. Be patient and stick with it. It’s worth it.

Whether your a voracious reader who is out of practice or someone who hasn’t read many books before, now is the time to get as serious about reading books and your cognitive health as you are about your body and your physical health.

Refuse to doomscroll.
Read a book.

Reject AI slop.
Read a book.

F*ck the machine.
Read a book.

— Brad

P.s., If you want to read more books and also protect your brain and essential humanness—your ability to think your own thoughts and feel alive—then I’ve got a book for you!! It’s highly accessible; you can read it in a few days; and it’s currently $7 dollars off for a summer promotion. Get your copy here. I’m so confident you’ll like it that if you don’t, I’ll Venmo you you’re money back.

Entrepreneur and investor Will Mandis recently wrote, “‘It takes hard work to achieve anything great is a dangerous lie.’ Great output comes from finding an activity that feels as natural as breathing or walking and great work becomes the very substance of your existence. If it feels like a grind you’ve found the wrong expression.”

His statement garnered a strong response. I suspect that’s because while what he wrote is decidedly wrong, its underlying spirit is mostly right, and a welcome push-back against the pseudo-excellence and hustle porn that is widespread on the internet.

First things first: in the vast majority of fields, you absolutely must work hard to achieve anything great. Contrary to Mandis’s opinion, this is not a “dangerous lie.”

The psychologist Anders K Ericsson spent his life studying talent acquisition and peak performance. His work led to the Malcolm Gladwell-popularized ‘10,000 hour-rule,’ which states that to be world-class, you need to practice for at least 10,000 hours.

Dig a little deeper into Ericsson’s work, however, and you’ll see the story is more complicated. It’s not the sheer volume of hours practiced that underlies one’s rise to greatness in fields like music, medicine, chess, and sport. Rather, it’s what you do in those hours. Ericsson found that great performers across domains engage in a particular type of training, what he called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is characterized by blocks of deeply-focused, hard work followed by periods of rest and recovery.

As Ericsson wrote in his original 1993 paper, “deliberate practice requires effort.”

Now just because you work hard doesn’t mean you’ll be great. You also need a baseline level of innate talent and the right environment. But barring rare circumstances—for instance, a genetically freakish athlete—hard work is always necessary.

My own decade-plus coaching, reporting, and writing on performance mirrors Ericsson’s findings. I’ve interviewed and worked with over 500 elite performers across domains. Every one of them has talent. And every one of them works very hard.

Hard Work is Not the Same as Suffering

David Senra, host of the popular Founders podcast, recently wrote that “excellence is the capacity to take pain.”

And yet, what others view as painful—going to bed and waking up early, clocking long hours, doing deep-focus work—elite performers often don’t mind, because they want to do it. Elite performers, at least those who are able to sustain their greatness over the long haul, come to enjoy working hard.

A problem with the kind of pseudo-excellence and performative greatness that plasters the internet (what Mandis calls “grindslop”—a term I adore) is that it portrays hard work as suffering and touts it like a badge of honor. Train until you puke. Pull consecutive all-nighters. Be fueled by anger and a desire to prove everyone wrong.

Hustle-culture grindslop makes you think that if you’re not miserable or bordering on burnout, you’re not working hard enough. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

One of the greatest competitive advantages is having fun. People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, who is fueled by anger and resentment. It’s the David Goggins approach to greatness. Sometimes you’ve got to flip that switch. 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. There’s this foolish misnomer that you either have to be full of intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. Joy and intensity can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

We’re seeing this play out right now on one of the biggest stages in all of sport. Norway’s star soccer striker Erling Haaland is fierce, strong, and intense. He is also a total goofball, known for his big smile and cracking jokes after matches. It’s clear to anyone watching this World Cup that Haaland is not suffering for greatness. He’s having loads of fun.

Greatness doesn’t mean everything will always be lovely, or that en route to attaining your potential is a whole lot of hand-holding and singing kumbaya. Sometimes there will be legitimate pain. But if everything is always painful, if the pain is the dominant quality of your experience, then you are doing it wrong.

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First Fit, then Grit

Early in my career, I leaned on hard work and gritmaxxing to pursue corporate consulting. I was miserable. When I transitioned to becoming a writer, it required an equal amount of hard work and grit (if not more), but I enjoyed it.

I was a pretty good consultant, but I never accomplished anything great. A decade into my professional writing career, I’ve got a New York Times bestselling book that is a favorite among countless athletes, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople. All told, my work has been read by millions.

Both corporate consulting and writing demanded loads of hard work. But only the latter, to quote Mandis, “feels as natural as breathing or walking and great work becomes the very substance of your existence.” (And even so, it is still very, very hard!) I’m a lot closer to greatness as a writer than I ever was as a consultant, and I have a lot more fun as a writer too.

A study published in the journal Nature evaluated the careers of artists, film directors, and scientists. It found their best work followed a pattern of exploration, during which they tried multiple things, followed by exploitation, when they found something that worked and doubled down.

In other words, before doubling down on grit, first you need fit—a good match between your innate talent, temperament, and what you are doing. Without fit, hard work is tedious and painful. When you have fit, hard work is meaningful, satisfying, and enjoyable. Is this pattern true for every second of the path? Of course not! But is it true on the whole? Absolutely.

The Actual Truth About Greatness

Herein lies a hidden cost of grindslop: it makes people think that suffering is simply the price you pay for trying to be great—so people toil away working suboptimally for years instead of changing their approach. The result is that they feel and perform worse.

It does take hard work to achieve anything great. (And lots of it at that.) Everyone craves the transcendent moments when you become one with what you’re doing, and you’re effortlessly at your best. But those moments only occur after years of hard work. And even then, they don’t last forever. Unconscious competence requires conscious competence.

Mandis’s mistake is that he falsely equates hard work and suffering. But hard work is not the same as suffering. The real “dangerous lie” that Mandis speaks of is that greatness requires the latter. If anything, too much suffering is a strong indicator that your efforts ought to be adjusted or pointed elsewhere.

Work hard. Have fun. Keep going.

The enhanced, optimized self has fully arrived. We have metrics for everything: sleep scores, heart rate variability, glucose, recovery, and readiness. We track not only our biomarkers but also our social and professional markers: subscribers, followers, shares, views, likes. Investors compare deals on PitchBook. Athletes compare run paces on Strava. Authors compare sales ranks on Amazon. Everything is quantified in real time. Everything revolves around the self—and how it stacks up.

Our inclination to track and compare is nothing new. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. Metrics give us a sense of control over things like our health, however illusory that control may be. We’re also the most social creatures in the planet’s history. We crave benchmarks and reference points. We exist as individuals—and derive meaning in our lives—only in relation to others.

What is new, however, is the all-encompassing, technologically enabled, 24-7 nature of everything we track.

Until recently, you received health metrics once a year at your annual physical. You understood your social circle based on the number of people who showed up at weddings, birthdays, and holiday parties. Professional success was measured on yearly lists. Athletes knew where they ranked based on a few events they peaked for every season. We still measured and compared, but there were long stretches of time between those measurements and comparisons. And in those long stretches of time, we could forget about ourselves and how we stacked up. That is no longer the case.

To be fair, people must believe there is at least some utility to all this tracking; otherwise they wouldn’t do it. For instance, when it comes to biomarkers, people often claim you catch maladies that might go unnoticed between annual physicals. While this can be the case, it’s also true that biometric tracking generates false positives and plenty of noise, leading to anxiety and even medical errors. Research indicates that, for many, monitoring one’s sleep can worsen sleep quality and quantity, due to the stress of tracking. Scientists call this orthosomnia, the ongoing quest for perfect sleep metrics that produces the very insomnia it’s meant to prevent. While people are finally beginning to consider the unintended consequences of optimization on our bodies, the broader and more serious cost, as we’ll see, is to our psyches and souls.

How The Self Gets in The Way

In 1990, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published the book Flow. In it, he describes experiences when we fully enter the zone and become immersed in what we are doing. You can enter a flow state in almost anything; common examples include playing sports, writing, creativity, conversation, making art, and sex. When you are in a flow state, the distance between you and your activity shrinks until you become one. You lose yourself in the moment. It’s an incredible feeling.

The initial question behind Csikszentmihalyi’s research was simple: What makes a life worth living? Across the tens of thousands of people he studied, the experience of flow was the top response. Csikszentmihalyi’s findings align with those of another giant in psychology, Abraham Maslow. Maslow used the term peak experience to capture transcendent moments of joy, awe, and deep fulfillment. He viewed these as profound states of optimal psychological health, “characterized by feelings of integration, egolessness, and deep connection to what you are doing.”

A hallmark of flow and peak experiences is that you transcend your ego—and all the self-evaluation, judgement, and thinking that comes with it—and become one with your activity. The inverse is also true: studies show that an excessive focus on the self is associated with choking, be it on the playing field, in the boardroom, or in the bedroom. Look more broadly across all of life, and research shows excessive self-focus is linked to unhappiness, anxiety, and depression.

Herein lies the great paradox of the enhanced, optimized self: it makes us less optimal people. We spend all of this time focusing on ourselves, and yet the states we long for—those that give rise to our greatest contributions and the experiences that make life worth living—all require the opposite. Our best performances (let alone our best lives) occur when we relax our grip on the self. Meanwhile, modern technologies and an obsession with optimization have tightened that grip more than ever.

Transcendence

Even the most extreme self-enhancer of all, longevity influencer Bryan Johnson, reports being most alive when he is taking massive doses of psychedelics or making love to his girlfriend. What both of these experiences have in common is that they obliterate the self he is otherwise so utterly focused on.

“I feel a lot more love, a lot more compassion immediately. Everything’s alive,” Johnson said 30 minutes into a Mushroom trip.

“We merge. Our brain signals collapse into synchrony, phase-locking. No longer are we distinct neural patterns, but one shared waveform,” Johnson writes of sex. “Rhythmic motion now resolves as music. Beads of sweat surface as we sway in concordance. Want washes over us, commanding all. Our egos are quiet as the frontal cortex dims; future, past, and death evaporate. Now is all that exists.”

Johnson is an extreme example (at root he’s a performance artist), but the tendency to get captured by metrics and optimization is very real and it affects us all, myself included. When I obsess over my Amazon sales rank, my writing deteriorates. When I wear a smartwatch, my athletic performance declines. When I obsessively track my steps, I lose the joy of taking them.

The center of attention in one’s life should not be on attaining certain metrics that supposedly represent self-optimization. Rather, it should be on losing oneself in meaningful projects, relationships, and pursuits. The latter is only attainable if you stop obsessing over the former.

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Loosening our grip on self-optimization comes with not only individual benefits, but also collective ones. At present, we are morphing into a society of narcissists, atrophying the ability to experience community and belonging. This trend is harmful to big things like democracy and civil society, but it begins by unfolding in the smallest of ways. For example, if everyone in the gym is focused on their watches, rings, and phones (and ruminating on whatever numbers are appearing on them), then what used to be a communal space filled with friendly interactions becomes a warehouse where we are alone together. It’s not good for anyone.

Stop Optimizing, Start Living

Sometimes I feel a mix of insecurity and existential anxiety. Are my books selling enough copies? Am I gaining followers? Did my deadlift lockout look okay? I relieve the anxiety by checking real-time metrics in each of these categories, but I rarely do anything differently as a result—certainly not on the seventh check that day. If anything, what I’m actually doing is stressing myself out and distracting myself from what is in front of me. If the numbers are good, I feel better, but only for a bit. If the numbers are bad, I feel worse. The dashboards and analysis may have a sheen of optimization, but nothing about this pattern is optimal. It’s like gambling on an existential slot machine.

My traps revolve around performance metrics in my two primary crafts: writing and training. For others, it’s health. But the solutions are the same. Either ditch the trackers altogether or design systems where you check them less frequently.

Throw away the ring or wrist-worn device (better yet, replace it with an analog watch that has a design you admire, one that pulls you into beauty and craft instead of away from it). Sign out of the real-time rankings portal. If you want to analyze the lift, film it monthly instead of daily. For each metric you track, ask yourself what benefits you are deriving and at what costs. Be brutally honest, and purge relentlessly. At first, these changes may lead to an increase in anxiety, but after a week or two, I almost guarantee you’ll feel better, and perform better too.

Being healthy, high-performing, and living a generally good life requires education and information, no doubt. But eventually, it’s wise to cut back on all the tracking and analyzing and be fully in the moment instead. Which is to say, stop optimizing and start living.

Norway is making a splash at the World Cup, with commanding victories over Iraq and Senegal. Perhaps it’s not surprising given Norway is home to two of the best players in the world: Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard. But when you consider that Norway’s population is just 5.6 million people, their success in soccer—and so many other sports—is astonishing.

Norway consistently wins the most medals at the Winter Olympics. In the most recent Games at Milano Cortina, Norway’s per capita medal rate was seventy-five times that of America’s. When I wrote about the medal gap earlier in the year, people were quick to say “it’s because Norway is a winter wonderland” or “they invest in sports nobody cares about.”

But this simply isn’t the case.

If either of those arguments were true, we’d expect Norway to be terrible at massively popular summer sports such as triathlon, cycling, and yes, the most popular sport of all, soccer. And yet, against all odds, Norway boasts world-beaters in all.

Now of course the country loves snow sports. And yes, it matters that Norway is a wealthy country and that the highest levels of Norwegian government invest in their Olympic pipeline. But it seems undeniable that a big part of Norway’s success is how they treat youth sports—and it’s the opposite of what we do in the United States.

Here’s what we can learn from Norway:

1. Scorekeeping

In the US: Youth sports tend to be hyper competitive even at early ages. Leagues almost always keep score.

In Norway: Scorekeeping isn’t even allowed until between the ages of 11 and 13.

Removing winners and losers keeps the focus on the process not outcomes. It keeps kids engaged longer because it minimizes pressure (and tears) and maximizes fun, learning, and growth. The goal isn’t to win a third grade championship. It’s to love sport and keep playing.

2. Trophies

In the US: If you give everyone a trophy, you’re feeding into a culture of snowflakes who will never gain a competitive edge.

In Norway: Whenever trophies are awarded, they are handed out to everyone.

If getting a trophy makes young kids feel good, we should give them trophies. Maybe they’ll come back and play again next year!! As for developing the next generation of snowflakes with no competitive edge—Norway’s athletes are tough as nails, and they keep winning. Give out trophies or not, but the argument that somehow giving everyone a trophy at young ages makes them weak as adults is utter nonsense.

3. Prioritizing Fun

In the US: Far too often, the goal is to win.

In Norway: The national philosophy is “joy of sport.”

Youth sports in the US are driven by adults, ego, and money. Youth sports in Norway are driven by fun. Only half of kids in the US participate in sports. The number one reason they drop out: because they aren’t having fun anymore. In Norway, 93% of kids participate in youth sports. Fun is the foremost goal.

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4. Playing Multiple Sports

In the US: There’s pressure to specialize early and play your best sport year round.

In Norway: Try as many sports as you can before specializing as late as college.

Norway encourages kids to try all types of sport. This reduces injury and burnout and increases all-around athleticism. It also helps promotes match quality, or finding the sport you are best suited for as your body develops, which is impossible if you commit to a single sport too early.

5. Affordability

In US: There is increasingly a pay-to-play model with high fees for leagues, equipment, and travel. This excludes many kids from playing.

In Norway: It’s a national priority to keep youth sports affordable and therefore accessible for all.

Kids aren’t priced out, which creates opportunities for everyone to participate (and develop into athletes), regardless of their parents’ income level.

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Norway’s sporting success isn’t just speculation or a nice story. A large body of research supports their approach:

• Studies show athletes who specialize later in life have a significantly higher chance of becoming elite.

• Soccer players whose motivation is primarily internal (versus external) have more than a 3x better chance of making it to an elite level.

• The number one predictor of whether or not kids stay in sport is are they having fun.

• Parents connect winning to having fun whereas kids say having fun is about being with their friends and learning.

We Could Learn a lot From Norway

I’m not writing this from an Ivory tower or with a removed Utopian view. I’ve got two young kids, and I coach them both. I understand the American system. I understand the urge to win because I feel it myself. I understand the feeling of not wanting your kid to fall behind. I am often the first coach to tell the eight-year-olds they need to do a better job focusing. I also understand how much fun it can be to go to a weekend tournament with a great group of kids and families. I’d much rather my kids be on a slightly too-competitive baseball team than in the basement on screens all day. I’d love for my kids to make high-school teams (if that’s what they desire), and I want to give them every opportunity to do so.

And yet, it’s undeniable that in the US, youth sports in the US has become a mess, with angry parents, outsized egos, and astronomical costs keeping kids from sticking with it long enough to see what they could become. Seventy percent of kids drop out of by age 13. This not only diminishes the pipeline of elite athletes, but it also creates a hindrance for healthy habits and all the character lessons kids can learn from sport.

In Norway, lifelong participation in sport is the norm. In order to compete on an international level with a country so small, you need to keep the talent pool as wide as possible for as long as possible. The goal isn’t to have the best 9-U team. It’s to develop the best athletes. Those are two very different things, and Norway has the medals to prove it.

The United Sates may never have the exact same model as Norway, but we can certainly move closer to it and adopt its spirit—keeping the emphasis on joy, intrinsic motivation, and developing a wide range of skills. Not only would we have more fun, build more character, and be healthier; but we’d win more too.

One of the best parts of writing a book is when it begins to take on a life of its own. The Way of Excellence has been out in the world for just under five months, and somehow, remarkably—thanks to all of you—it’s already sold more than 50,000 copies.

I’ve heard from countless readers across the world about how the book has impacted them. So I wanted to share 9 ideas that keep coming up again and again, using direct quotes from the book.

1. “Caring is cool. You are not going to be the best anything, including the best version of yourself, with an attitude of nonchalance.

The best athletes care deeply.
The best artists care deeply.
The best leaders care deeply.
The best coaches care deeply.
The best teachers care deeply.
The best doctors care deeply.
The best writers care deeply.
The best scientists care deeply.
The best parents care deeply.

Try hard and give a damn.”

2. “Having fun is the greatest competitive advantage there is. People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, who is fueled by anger and resentment. It’s the David Goggins’ approach to greatness.

Sometimes you’ve got to flip that switch. 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 misnomer that you either have to be full of intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. Joy and intensity, struggle and fun, can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.”

3. “There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your inner life. What will change your inner life is who you become in the process of going for it. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides.”

4. “People overrate intensity and underrate consistency. Anyone can crush themselves and have a heroic day, a heroic week, or maybe even a heroic month. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to generate a heroic body of work.”

5. Confidence comes from evidence. Self belief is incredibly important, but you need to give yourself reason to believe. Do the work. Trust your training. Own your seat.”

6. “One of the most important skills for excellent performance—and honestly, for an excellent life—is showing up even, and perhaps especially, when you don’t really want to. Everyone focuses on the good days. But the days when you aren’t feeling great may be even more important. Just get started and give yourself a chance.”

7. “Do not worry about being the best. Worry about being the best at getting better. The best is ephemeral; you either get it or you don’t, and then what? But being the best at getting better is a path of mastery that lasts a lifetime.”

8. “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 and ruin their brains with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity, touch grass, challenge themselves, create, contribute, and love. With what agency we have left, each and every one of us can fight to step off the algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere and take on meaningful challenges and big projects that make us feel alive.

9. “The secret is there is no secret. Consistency over intensity. Fundamentals over fads. Progress over perfection. Over and over again.”

Thanks for reading. Hopefully the brief piece spurred some good reflection.

If you found the above ideas resonant and want to go deeper, you’ll love the book. Get your copy today. I promise it will help. And please share this post with people in your community who would benefit. Onward!

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In the moments after the New York Knicks improbable NBA Championship, their star guard, Jalen Brunson, was asked how he took over in the clutch.

His response: “My confidence comes from my work ethic.”

“Never be afraid to fail,” Brunson said earlier in the day. “You put the confidence in everything you do when the lights are on because of everything you’ve done when no one’s watching.”

Everyone is sending me these quotes and asking if Brunson read The Way of Excellence. I have no idea, but he’s a perfect ambassador for the book. He embodies what I mean when I write that confidence comes from evidence, and that in order to gain evidence, you’ve got to be willing to fail.

We live in a world of affirmations, manifesting, and belief that often borders on fantasy. The most popular self-help podcast hosts suggest that if you just wake up, look in the mirror, think positive thoughts, and say you can do it—then, well, you can do it.

Unfortunately this is bullshit.

The way you gain confidence, be it on the basketball court, in creative pursuits, as a leader, in relationships, as a parent, is through experience, through evidence. It’s not to say that self-belief isn’t important. (It is.) But it’s only as powerful as the reasons you give yourself to believe it.

The catch is that evidence isn't free. You only get it by putting yourself in positions where you might fail. If you are pushing yourself and taking risks, then it is inevitable that sometimes you will come up short. The inverse is also true. If you are scared to fail, then you will never push yourself or take risks. The virtuous cycle is getting comfortable with failure, putting yourself out there, amassing evidence, and gaining confidence. The vicious cycle is being terrified of failure, playing it safe, staying on the sidelines, facing overwhelming doubt.

Every area of my life where I have some degree of confidence followed a ton of work and a ton of failure. My writing has been rejected more times than I can count. My first serious relationship ended in heartbreak. I’ve missed more PR attempts in the weight room than I’ve made. I was terrified of becoming a parent but we did it anyway. Gaining confidence wasn’t a matter of days, weeks, or months. It took years, even decades.

One of my friends is a renowned surgeon. “Ninety-five percent of the time in the OR [operating room] things go smoothly,” he once told me. “But the other five percent, when the unexpected happens and you have to control excessive bleeding, change your plan when an implant fails, or fix an injury that is more severe than anticipated. I live for that. It allows me to bring all my years of training and experience to meet the moment.”

His confidence is based on evidence and years of deliberate practice and experience.

“When we are in training with our mentors it is great to see the cases that are effortless and learn the steps of how things should be done, but the ones the trainee appreciates the most are the cases that don’t go well because then we see the masters at their best and in turn learn for ourselves how to deal with those complex situations in the future,” he continued. “The most valuable cases that I saw in my training were the ones that went sideways and the best surgeons remained calm and knew how to get out of trouble.”

The ability to face challenges is a core element of what psychologists call self-efficacy: an evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up and excelling in highly charged circumstances.

Decades of research show that individuals who score high on measures of self-efficacy are better able to work through the inevitable moments when they feel lost or stuck, be it in the operating room, on the playing field, when facing the blank page, 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. 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.

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There are no shortcuts, secrets, or laws of attraction. There is only putting in the reps. Shoot the 500 daily jump shots. Write the bad first draft. Study the greats. Change the diaper. Ask your crush out. Apprentice with a master. Reps. Reps. Reps. Confidence is really just doing the work and then having the faith to trust it.

Behind every game-winning jump shot, bestselling book, outstanding performance, comfortable relationship, or really anything good in life is a messy body of evidence. You don’t see it on social media, but it’s there. You’ve got to give yourself the permission and space to experiment, learn, fail, and ultimately grow.

In a 1987 interview for her popular daytime show Mavis on 4, Mavis Nicholson asked the poet and activist Maya Angelou how she arrived at her commanding confidence on stage. “I know theater. I write for it. I have studied it. I act for it now and again. So I know theater. And I am centered,” explained Angelou.

Earlier this year Sebastian Sawe became the first human ever to run under 2-hours in a sanctioned marathon. The morning after he broke the record, I received the following note from his coach: “confidence based on evidence has been a guiding principle in the days leading up to the race.” The reason Sawe was comfortable going out at a historic pace on race day is because he’d put in years of training that proved to him he had a shot.

Sawe’s approach is no different from Angelou’s is no different from Brunson’s. Their robust confidence comes from their robust evidence.

The same is true for all of us. The key to confidence is evidence. And the only way you gain evidence is by getting over your fear of failure and doing the work, over and over again.

The New York Knicks trailed the San Antonio Spurs by 27 points at halftime of Game 4 in the NBA Finals. The team, the crowd—perhaps every fan in the country—were shocked. The Knicks came out flat in one of the biggest games in franchise history. It didn’t help that they received questionable calls from the refs, or that the Spurs could not miss. The result: 76 to 49. A total blowout. No team has ever come back from such a deficit in NBA Finals history.

The Knicks had every reason to quit. They could have gone back to San Antonio with the series tied 2-2 and regrouped. But they simply refused. There were 24 minutes of basketball left to be played. And the Knicks never stopped playing.

At halftime, the team didn’t watch film. They realized as a group they could still compete, and perhaps the tides would turn.

As The Athletic reported, 25-year-old guard Miles McBride replayed the first half in his mind and realized that if you take out the wildly unlucky bounces, the Knicks only would have been down 14 points. “Fourteen,” he thought. “That is doable.

And so the Knicks committed to the game. And to each other.

Now you don’t erase a historic gap at once. That’s overwhelming and impossible. You need to chip away, possession by possession. The bigger the goal, the smaller the steps.

“You look at it when you’re down 29 as ‘OK, let’s get it to 20.’ There are three minutes left in the third quarter. We’re down 18, and you’re thinking, ‘Let’s get it to 10.’ In the fourth quarter, you’re like, this is winning time. Anything can happen,” Knicks wing Josh Hart said.

The Knicks chipped away. They closed the gap to 15 at the end of the third quarter. With 6 minutes left, Karl-Anthony Towns hit a desperation three-pointer, his first points in any fourth quarter of the series, to cut it to 9. With seconds remaining, the Knicks trailed 105 to 106. Jalen Brunson missed a 30-footer. OG Anunoby flew in from the weak side to tip it home with 1.2 seconds left to send New York to a 3-1 series lead and to the brink of their first championship since 1973.

Watching it was like nothing I'd seen before. Stunning. Electric. My jaw is still dropped.

“We’re a resilient group. We’ve been through a lot,” Anunoby said. “We’ve come back plenty of times when we’re behind. Just staying with it, weathering the storm, not being too down or angry or frustrated.”

An NBA playoff run is many things, but perhaps most of all, it’s a massive test of emotional regulation. You prepare. You practice. You visualize. And then stuff happens. The difference between those who collapse and those who rise is how they respond, especially when things don’t go their way. Here, what is true in basketball is true in life.

It’s easy when things are going your way. But then stuff happens. You’ll fall behind. You’ll catch bad breaks, bad calls, bad bounces. Most people check out when the odds are against them. But if you keep showing up, if you stay in the fight and stick to your process, you never know what can happen.

The Knicks never stopped playing hard. Not when they were down 29. Not when they were down 1. It’s an extraordinary testament to the team, and to the human spirit.

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In my new book, The Way of Excellence, I write about having a next play mentality: You can’t control what already happened. You can’t control the score. You can only control the next play. One stop at a time. One bucket at a time. One possession at a time. You show up and apply effort. Again. And again. And again. It’s how you erase a historic deficit in the NBA Finals. It’s also how you work through the biggest challenges in life.

“You’ve got to have some natural luck and some where you’re going to make your own luck, and that was probably the biggest message,” explained Knicks Coach Mike Brown following the game.

Sport is full of luck. (Life, too.) Sometimes it’s good. Other times it’s bad. By definition, you can’t control luck. But you can increase your surface area to get lucky. The only way to do this is by showing up and staying in the game, even, and perhaps especially, when you don’t really want to.

People often mistake excellence for control or perfection. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Excellence is messy because excellence is human. That’s also what makes it beautiful. It means caring deeply. It means refusing to quit on yourself when the situation looks hopeless. It means sticking with your process, even when nothing is falling. It means playing the game in front of you—not the game you wanted; not the game you hoped for; but the game that is happening right now. Because never know what can happen.

As the Knicks just showed us, sometimes it’s even magical.

I’ve been working my ass off to get The Way of Excellence out into the world because I believe in the book. It’s neat to see the hands it’s ending up in and the impact it’s beginning to have. I couldn’t do it without everyone who is reading and sharing, so thank you all for being a part of that.

1. America Has a Masculinity Crisis

The New York Times has a splashy new podcast and piece titled “America has a Masculinity Crisis.” Unfortunately, it’s full of jargon and hyper-intellectualized takes—and includes little, in plain terms, about the positive qualities of men.

This helps nobody.

Let’s start with the basics. On average, men have more testosterone than women. People think that testosterone is associated with aggression, but it’s actually most associated with a drive for status. There are two predominant routes to status: you can gain it through brute power or through competence and respect.

The grifters (i.e., insecure assholes) sell rote power as a quick and easy path to status for men. But bullying others and demeaning women (or worse) is no way to contribute to society, let alone live a fulfilling life. It leaves you empty.

Being a good man means pursuing status via competence and respect:

• Be useful

• Be a protector.

• Be honest.

• Be kind.

• Be strong.

• Respect women.

• Get good at something.

• Stay physically fit.

• Be a good husband, father, brother, and friend.

Many will say isn’t this just being a good person, irrespective of gender? The answer is yes! However, men and women may pursue these attributes differently, and that’s okay! When you pretend there are no differences between men and women, constantly choose to highlight the most terrible men, or frame chronically online streamers as the alternative, you are either utterly removed from many people’s reality or have no interest in actually addressing the problem and making it better.

Sometimes I feel like the people who write these think pieces on the left must live in such weird bubbles. Sure, there are real assholes with big platforms. But there are also plenty of good men. Come out to the Little League I coach in. Or my gym. Or the chess club. Or the public school. There are solid, normal men!

The answer isn’t to defect to the manosphere bullshit. That’s a junk-food version of masculinity. But the alternative cannot be “everything is men’s fault” or “let’s pretend women and men are biologically identical” either. Neither is true nor helpful.

It’s unfortunate that so many of the men who rise to prominence, especially in the most salient fields such as politics and media, are narcissistic sociopaths who lie and cheat. (It says a lot about what we value as a society, but that’s a longer piece for another day.) And yet there are also plenty of good men, especially at the local level. These ought to be the role models.

It’s not to say we should never point out what is wrong with certain parts of masculinity (we should), but we should also highlight men who are doing it right and positive ways of being and doing in the world.

2. A Hard Truth About Elite Performance

There is so much nonsense and bullshit out there—but if you actually want to work toward excellence at something, you need to be focused and committed and consistent. You need to nail the fundamentals and surround yourself with good people. You need to think in years, not days, and exit the hot-take, alpha bro (and sister) slop-stream in favor of studying serious people, working with serious coaches, and reading serious books. There’s never been a shortage of pseudo-excellence. The real thing will always be counterculture, offering a great opportunity for those willing to pursue it.

3. The Great Divide

Noah Kahan’s new album grows on me every time I listen to it—and I’ve listened to it at least 100 times. My two favorite songs are “Doors” and “Dan.” I think the latter is near perfect. The composition is next level, and the way he reps the lyric “most of the time” is such good writing. I can’t think of anyone who is into folk-pop and good singer-songwriter stuff who wouldn’t dig this album.

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

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Victor Wembanyama just led the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals. He embodies a central idea in my new book, The Way of Excellence: he is not scared to lay it on the line; he cares deeply; he makes himself vulnerable.

You could see it throughout the entire Western Conference Finals series. In the way he played. In the way he processed victories and defeats. In the way he spoke to the media. This is the same player that, earlier in the season, took flak for crying following a hard-fought game. His response: “Personally, I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”

So it was no surprise that following Saturday night’s game seven victory, Wemby had big feelings—an enormous joy combined with a sense of release. All of this heartfelt effort finally paying off.

I love it when there are clear examples of the ideas I write about. So I thought this would be a good chance to share a direct excerpt from the new book.

Caring is cool.

“You are not going to be the best anything—including the best version of yourself—with an attitude of nonchalance.

The best athletes care deeply.
The best artists care deeply.
The best leaders care deeply.
The best coaches care deeply.
The best teachers care deeply.
The best doctors care deeply.
The best writers care deeply.
The best scientists care deeply.
The best parents care deeply.

Caring deeply is the cost of admission to a big and textured life.

When you hold yourself back because you fear failure or looking uncool, you sacrifice growth and potential—and mastery and fulfillment and intimacy and love and all the other good stuff in life—for short-term safety and comfort.

It’s a trap. Get over it.

Fear, doubt, and insecurity are all part of human nature.

You can either go through the motions and be superficially cool (but actually boring). Or you can step into the arena, lay it on the line, care deeply, make yourself vulnerable, and fully live your one and only life.

The world doesn’t need more mediocrity or going through the motions. The world needs more people putting themselves out there and giving it their all. The world needs more people who have the guts to care.

Try hard and give a damn.”

Hopefully Wemby is an inspiration to you. He’s certainly a refreshing character to me. I can’t wait to watch him compete for an NBA championship.

And if you haven’t yet, get a copy of The Way of Excellence now. It’s a perfect time to read the book. It’s currently 23% off here.

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A popular podcaster recently said drinking a few glasses of wine “ruined the next three days of his life.”

He specified he “didn’t get drunk,” but “got worse sleep that night” and said that when he looked at his wrist-worn device it messed up his score and “dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol” and he podcasted worse as a result.

Y’all—this optimization stuff can make you super fragile.

Before I go any further, an important disclaimer: alcohol is not good for you, especially if you are someone who struggles to stop after a drink or two. If you have a substance-use disorder or family history of substance-use disorders then a few drinks can absolutely ruin your week (or worse). There is nothing wrong with choosing to abstain for any reason at all. And yes, of course, getting drunk can derail a day or two.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Rather, it’s the latest example in a long line of internet optimization culture: eat this way, sleep that way, wake at this time, do that single exercise, follow this guru, take that supplement... This content is more about the performance of being great than the actual pursuit of greatness itself. It can even lead to anxiety.

Here’s what’s at the root of optimization culture: 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. If anything it gets in the way. When you obsess over readiness scores and other data, you risk creating a fragility mindset. You start to believe that you must be and feel 100 percent to do great work. But this is nonsense. It’s not how life works.

I almost never drink, precisely because alcohol isn’t good for you and I don’t feel well after. I’m on the same page as the podcast host so far. Occasionally, however, I’ll have two drinks, maybe even three. It happens a couple times per year—weddings, anniversaries, other big celebrations. I enjoy myself at these outings but I don’t sleep as well afterwards. I often wake up the next morning with a dull headache and sloshy stomach.

But then, instead of tying my destiny to a black-box algorithm on a wrist-worn device, I make breakfast, walk the dog, and get on with my day. I don’t obsess over how I feel and convince myself that my dopamine and cortisol are out of whack (which, by the way, are biochemicals implicated in just about everything we do, including reading this post right now). I simply say oof, I’m not feeling so great and get going anyways. A few hours later I am fine. It certainly does not ruin three days.

It seems the massive and prolonged decline in performance is less about the glass of wine—or cheeseburger, or child waking you up in the middle of the night, or going a day without exercise, or any of the other vagaries of life—and more about the obsession with metrics and purity and the spiral that follows.

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.

When you need to control everything always, you lose the ability to perform well when you can’t. The best performers keep the main things the main things. But they aren’t optimizers. That shit burns you out. You need to know when to lock in and when to let go. You can’t be so delicate that any small change to your routine throws you for a massive loop.

One of my favorite stories is that of the golfer JJ Spaun. In the span of 8 years, 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 was up all night. He described the situation as “chaos.”

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

Human beings are not machines. Nobody cares if you have the highest sleep score or lowest biological age (which isn’t a real measure anyways). I never got less sleep than when I became a parent. My readiness score—if I had tracked it—would have been crap. But I still went to the gym, even though I didn’t feel like it. And I wrote a book that I’m incredibly proud of. It would have done me absolutely no good to pay attention and stress about arbitrary numbers from a watch or ring.

Living an excellent life is not about attaining a score on a screen or never having a glass of wine. It’s about showing up consistently over a long period of time, expecting the ups, downs, and messiness of life, and giving what you’ve got to give.

Control the controllables. But when you slip up or choose to enjoy yourself at the expense of being perfectly fine tuned always, don’t freak out. The irony is that the mindset of needing to be perfectly fine-tuned always is actually one of the greatest performance killers there is.

Don’t make yourself fragile.

Life isn’t meant to be optimized. It’s meant to be lived.

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