We live in the land of hacks, quick fixes, and silver bullets. There’s nothing wrong with wanting simple solutions—I do as much as anyone—but too often we get stuck at a superficial layer. Maybe your performance improves, but you still feel exhausted, if not apathetic. Or perhaps you have grand expectations for what happens when you succeed, only to be disappointed time and time again.
For a recent series of talks, I was prompted with the following:
People are sick of surface-level advice, bouncing from fad to fad, and trying to keep up with the velocity of the internet. What are the biggest, most important, most practical ideas in your latest work—the stuff that is both timely and timeless? That is useful for the top performers in the world, but also for those simply trying to get the best out of themselves in day-to-day life.
What follows is my best attempt at an answer.
1. “There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is who you become in the process of going for it.”
It’s tempting to view outward achievement as the answer to all your problems. Yet even if you do accomplish your goal, it probably won’t change your life in the ways you expect. You stand on the podium for a few minutes. The day you get the big promotion lasts 24 hours. The high is real. But it is also brief.
Any lasting satisfaction, fulfillment, or happiness is created in the process of striving, not at the point of the result. It comes from the lessons you learn, the resistance you overcome, the relationships you forge, and how you carry them forward.
Find a way to shed the expectation of what happens when you arrive. The irony is that if you aren’t dead set on the joy that should come from success or achievement, you are more likely to find that joy along the way.
The top of the mountain is beautiful. The view is worth striving for, no doubt. But the top of the mountain is also narrow. All the life is on the sides.
2. “Caring is cool. You are not going to be the best at anything—including the best version of yourself—with an attitude of nonchalance. Try hard and give a damn.”
It’s harder than ever to put yourself out there—the forces of our digital panopticon leave you afraid to make your first move, afraid of public failure, of what it would mean if you tried and still came up short. So the default is to hold back. To not give things your all as a way to protect against the pain of potential, or perhaps even probable, failure.
Breaking out of this pattern takes courage, simple as that. It takes courage to trust you have the capacity to make yourself vulnerable and lay it on the line. To try hard. To give a damn. The fear doesn’t go away completely, but you get better at facing it.
Life may not get easier when you care deeply—in many ways, it gets harder—but it becomes much richer and more textured.
3. “Having fun is the greatest competitive advantage there is. Intensity and joy can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.”
I’ve had the privilege of working with many world-class competitors. Although they show the entire spectrum of human emotion when they compete, I’ve noticed the vast majority have a way of marrying intensity and joy. Not one or the other, but both at the same time. They have fun and want to win. They smile and grit their teeth. They respect those in the arena with them and compete fiercely.
There is no greater myth than that you must suffer for greatness. Yes, you need to work hard to attain your potential. But you can—I’d go as far as to say you must—learn to have fun in the process; otherwise all your hard work won’t be sustainable.
Not every moment is going to be wonderful. But the totality of the path ought to bring you joy. A great question to ask yourself: How could I make this more fun?
4. “Confidence comes from evidence.”
If you want to have resolute self-belief, then you need to give yourself reason to believe. There is no substitute—no mantra, no manifesting—for putting in the work.
Whether you are training for a marathon, writing a book, leading a team, or navigating a difficult season of life, the confidence you need is built through reps. Nothing is better for your confidence than reflecting on all the work you put—and that requires actually putting in all the work. It’s as simple and as hard as that.
Give yourself the evidence. Trust your training. Let it rip.
5. “The secret is there is no secret. It’s consistency over intensity. It’s progress over perfection. It’s fundamentals over fads. It’s doing this over and over again.”
Our culture is obsessed with bright and shiny objects and overnight breakthroughs, but the truth about excellence is that it’s inherently unsexy. The sooner you realize this, the better. Excellence is built on accumulating consistent work for weeks, months, and years. It’s built on returning to the fundamentals of your craft each and every day, surrounding yourself with the right people, and repeatedly showing up (more on this in a moment).
When others are running around looking for the next breakthrough or hack, stay on your path and stick to the fundamentals that are proven to work time and time again.
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.”
A myth persists that high performers are fueled by relentless, burning enthusiasm and inspiration every morning. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Even the best suffer boredom, feel off, and at times lack motivation. The real difference maker is that they get on the horse and give it a shot anyway.
“Don’t wait for the Muse,” writes Stephen King. “Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon. Or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up.”
If you want to be excellent at whatever you choose to do, you have to master the skill of getting started. Not waiting for inspiration to strike, but putting on one shoe and then the other and showing up.
Persistence of this sort is a skill, and like any other skill, it gets better with practice. Once this skill matures, very little can get in the way of doing the work.
7. “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 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. When you look at the highest-performing and most satisfied people and zoom in on one moment of their lives, they don’t look very balanced at all. But when you zoom out and look across the entirety of their lives, they actually start to appear quite balanced.
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.
8. “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. But these are all ways of protecting yourself from doing the thing. Only doing the thing is doing the thing.”
The human brain is a master at rationalizing; it convinces you that you are making progress when you are actually just insulating your ego from the vulnerability of failure. There are limits to how much you can prepare before it becomes a stand-in for avoiding the inevitable—putting yourself out there, getting your hands dirty, and actually trying. It’s great to dream, learn, and plan. But at some point, you’ve got to take the leap.
Remember: only doing the thing is doing the thing.
Each of these quotes comes directly from The Way of Excellence. If you found this post valuable, you’ll love the book. Order a copy today, and I’ll give you a 52-week course that helps you apply each of the essential mindsets, habits, and practices in the book. Get it here.
Brad, so much wisdom here, particularly the reminder that becoming our best is inseparable from the process of living.
I would add another dimension: we can become extraordinarily good at what we do while remaining remarkably unchanged in who we are. Competence can become its own refuge, and even the pursuit of excellence can protect an identity we’ve outgrown.
Having spent much of my life pursuing difficult summits, literal and otherwise, I’ve come to appreciate that the greatest development often happens when we examine the person doing the striving.
The measure of a life well lived may ultimately be found in how fully we’ve become ourselves, rather than how much we’ve accomplished along the way.
Love it. Reality. Down to earth. No BS. Thanks.