Steve Magness on Winning The Inside Game

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1:19Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:10Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I live on a dirt road. It's lovely. It's like going back in time and it's better on my knees for when I'm running or working out. But I have put thousands, maybe even approaching tens of thousands of miles on this road over the years. Walks, runs, bike rides, ATV. I guess I don't get credit for those, but I have put in my miles on this road. I was on it this morning with my son, stomping in puddles because it rained last night. I was running on it yesterday and my wife drove up the road while I was running on it and she rolled down the window and both the kids started laughing and pointing at me because I had mud and dirt all up and down my legs and back and they said it looked like I had a terrible accident on the run, you know, so I was bullied about it, but it was a good run.

3:12This is something I do every day, the walk and the run, the bike ride or whatever. Sometimes swimming. I'm going to go swimming tomorrow, hopefully, at the athletic club in LA where I'm in town to record a podcast. But for me, the physical practice is an important part of regulation. By that, I mean being not dysregulated. Seneca talks about how we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. He was saying that sports and exercise and physical practices are a way to win what my guest today would call the inside game, seizing command of oneself, the empire between the ears, as I sometimes call it.

3:51Steve Magnus is a world-renowned expert on performance. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. He's written for Sports Illustrated and Men's Health. He's been featured in The New Yorker, on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and ESPN. He's also a running coach. He was with Nike for a long time. He's worked with elite athletes in a bunch of different sports. He's also a whistleblower. We talk about that in the first episode I did with him. The inside game isn't just like, hey, how do I focus more? How do I concentrate more? But it's also in the pursuit of virtue we're talking about.

4:26How do you tune out the noise and focus on what's important? How also mentally and spiritually. How do you do what's right even when people criticize you for it? Sleep at night, right? These are all parts of winning that inside game, mastery of the self. And he has a new book called that, Win the Inside Game. And it's about why we underperform, how we get in our way, how we don't stand up for our values, how we choke under pressure. I guess we'd call that losing the inside game. Winning the inside game is stepping up when the stakes are high. Doing those hard right things, getting out of our own way, not overthinking things, concentrating, finding inspiration, motivation, connection, doing the things that good work comes from.

5:17Steve was on virtually for his book, Do Hard Things. I'll link to that episode in the show notes. It's well worth a listen. He's also co-written a book called The Passion Paradox and peak performance with my friend Brad Stolberg, who is awesome. Also been on the show before. You can follow Steve on social at Steve Magnus. He signed a bunch of copies of the new books while he was here. I think you're really gonna like this episode. And now I gotta figure out, my day kind of snuck away from me today. I got to do my walk in the morning, but I did not get to run. So I'm gonna try to squeeze one in after I record this thing.

5:54And then before I go pick my other son up from school, I want to win the inside game so I can deal with the traffic on the way home, deal with the stress of the day and the craziness of the world. I wish you victory in your inside game today. And I hope you check out this new book and grab it at The Painted Porch. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

6:18So what is this? Five books? How many have you done? That's a good question. I got to count. Five. Yeah. I'm trying to think. So I was doing this talk the other day and they were asking me like, why do I talk to the sports teams and military and business? They're like, what do they all have in common? And I think I said something close. I didn't say they're all trying to win the inside game, but that was more or less my answer, which is like, I think people would think they would all be focused on whatever the very specialized thing they do is, whether it's like building buildings or blowing them up or, you know, like winning.

6:55You think that they would spend all their time thinking about the technical task before them, but it's almost always mental performance side of things. Absolutely. I mean, that's what I found in my own career as an athlete and then helping elite athletes. I thought, oh, it's the technical stuff. Like this, the X's and O's is going to set us apart. Totally. The training for the athlete. Yes. But then you realize it's like, wait a minute. Yeah. No, it's this whole other side over here. I've got to learn this or else I'm going to be in trouble. Yeah. And it's weird at like what a basic level they're thinking about these things are.

7:35Do you know what I mean? They're just like, let's focus on what we can control. It's so simple, the stuff that they end up talking about, that you think it must be like this misdirection to like hide what obviously they're focused on behind closed doors. Because it seems like cliches, right? focus on the on the process control the controllables and you're like really yes is this the thing but like as you work with these individuals as you see behind the closed doors you're just like no this is the the secret almost it's just like too simple almost where like people want the like complicated complex thing but it's like no we've got to nail these basics and if we nail these basics, like everything else kind of takes care of itself.

8:21Yeah. Like if you hear Matthew Stafford or someone has a quarterback's coach, you're like, obviously they are talking about the technical side of like how you release the football, blah, blah, blah. And it's no, it's mostly that stuff. It's kind of weird. I think in my work with elite athletes. So what I learned quickly is that my job when I was coaching them was to keep them from doing dumb things. so like 90 of the coaching was like make sure they don't get in their own way yes or get in their own head yes exactly and i think what all these kind of cliches are are like keeping the main thing the main thing to use another cliche yes it's like what really matters what do we really need to focus on because it like keeps everything else you know that might get in their way that might cause them to overthink that might cause them to overthink and then they choke yeah is like those things no i gave a talk to the coaches uh of the los angeles rams and that's one of their things is keep the main thing the main thing you're like you're being paid tens of millions of dollars to keep the main thing the main thing you needed a reminder of that but apparently you do and i'm not making fun of it like oh they're at this this like basic level it's I'm saying the opposite.

9:40I'm saying that at the elite, it's like the horseshoe. At the elite level, they're being reminded of the same thing that a coach might be telling like an eighth grade basketball team. Absolutely. Yeah. That's what it is. I mean, I spent 10 years of my life working alongside Carl Lewis, who is like, you know, one of the greatest athletes in history. And the thing that I observed is he's literally giving the same advice that I remember like my high school sprint and track coach giving yes because he realizes that it's like what matters show up stay in your lane which means like keep the focus on you not everyone else you're competing against execute the things that were we you know practice you need to do this this and this and this and he's telling this to people who are among the fastest humans in the world and at first you're just like wait a minute like shouldn't there be some complicated thing and it's like no like performance we make it super complex but what really matters is a lot of people have the skills to execute it yeah or the talent to do it but they let the external get in the way they let you know the chase for achievements or the shiny object like distract them they let the comparison to that competitor, like get in their head.

11:02And all of these mental things are essentially to get you to focus on what actually matters and what helps you show up on game day or race day, or when it's time to perform. It is interesting when you look at the people who don't make it or have trouble, it's usually pretty like basic things that get them into trouble. It's like, oh, they were just out partying too much, or they were late, or they had a bad attitude. You know what I mean? Obviously, there's also injuries and whatever, but it's usually not that they technically could not do the thing. Yeah. Or they wouldn't have been in the ballpark literally and figuratively to begin with.

11:40So a couple of years ago when I was coaching college track, right, I collected all this data. And track is great because you can collect data like crazy because everything is measurable, right? And it's the same thing over and over again. It's not like a football game where there's an infinite number of possibilities. You can compare like against like in those sports. Exactly. And you have a clear outcome of did I get faster or not. Right. So I tracked all this data on everything. You know, everything the watches would give me, everything their training data would give me. And I said, OK, what was the best predictor of performance?

12:15Who showed up to practice consistently? That was it. Like over all the like mileage and zones and heart rates and HRV and all these things that you're like, oh, this is fancy. It's like, did you show up to practice more than other people? Chances are you were going to improve. And it sounds like so freaking basic. And when you tell people that, they're like, OK, yeah. But then you look at the research in academics. So my wife's a teacher. So I spent a lot of time talking to her about this stuff. And you look at one of the best predictors of academic success is like, did you show up to class like in college?

12:55Attendance. Attendance. And we're not saying you're going to attend and everything's going to be great, but it gives you the opportunity to learn and flourish just as it gives you the opportunity to, you know, be able to learn, grow, develop athletically. Yeah. Well, it's like it's necessary but not sufficient. But like if you're not showing up, you're not going to be good at all. Like it's interesting. I did this book with, you know who Paul Rabel is? He was saying that when he was in high school, I think, some D1 coach came in and said, like, who here wants a scholarship to play college lacrosse?

13:29And all the kids raised their hand. He's like, I'll tell you what you have to do. If you do this, I promise on my life you will get a college scholarship to play lacrosse. And he said, you have to do 100 shots a day. You have to just 100 shots a day every single day. And that seems so basic. And it is so basic. But you're just not going to do it. You know what I mean? Like you go, okay, I'll do it. And then you do it for a while and then you stop or you start to make excuses. But if you're the kind of person that actually commits and say, hey, I'm going to do this thing every single day, chances are you are also going to be doing all the other things that you need to do to be successful at that.

14:07Yeah, which gets that, again, if you look at predictors of performance, actually, there was a wonderful study that came out recently that looked at Olympic athletes versus those who fell a rung or two short. Yeah. Right? And what they found, it was long-term studies. So what they found is that when they were younger, if they had that intrinsic motivation, meaning like joy, the process, like showing up because I want to master this, right, versus I just want the scholarship. I want the accolade. The higher the intrinsic motivation, the higher the likelihood they made it to the highest level. And all that comes back to is those are the people who are going to show up.

14:44And in fact, you look at, again, research outside of sports. I talk about it in the book a little bit is psychologist Ellen Winner looked at prodigies and phenoms and like math, science, like kids who are doing crazy stuff at a young age. There's enormous high burnout in phenoms. Sure. Right. Because they have a lot of pressure. You think they're going to be great, et cetera. The ones who made it had what she called a rage to master, which was not a rage to win, not a rage to achieve, a rage to master. And that master came with high levels of intrinsic motivation. If instead they were in it for like the money, the accolades, the achievement, or if they had a parent or a teacher or a coach who was pushing that stuff, they didn't translate to the next level.

15:34Do you see a rage? Rage. That's an interesting word, though. Well, what it gets at is if you look at performers, sometimes we call them like obsessive, right? Where there's this like single-mindedness. And I had a bit of this as a runner, right? I was like, I'm going to run, forget everything else. Like, I just want to, you know, train harder, blah, blah, blah. Like, so what she's getting at is sometimes they have that. But what we know from the research in psychology on obsession or passion is that there's two variants. There's a passion that is obsessive, that is a little bit destructive, that comes from like this external, that almost comes from a place of like fear.

16:18And then there's what researchers call harmonious passion, which is you still have that drive. drive you're still like almost single-minded but it doesn't it the underlying fuel is a little bit different and we all have both sides but what's different is that like if you go too far in the obsessive side you're probably gonna head towards burnout or like just getting tired of the thing at some point well yeah i'm just thinking there's a difference between like and and i think by rage like burning would be a synonym there or drive would be a synonym there but but it's something more intense than just an interest.

16:55But yeah, the difference between a drive to mastery and a drive to, say, dominate or to be famous or to win even, it's very different because one is sort of about the thing and then the other is about what you get at the end of the thing. That's the difference. And again, there's all this psychology that ties in. So if we have that drive for the thing, it tells us, research tells us that it activates both of what we call an approach and an avoidance motivation. Meaning we're driven towards the thing, but we've got a little bit of like fear of like, what if I fall short? What if I'm not good enough?

17:37On the flip side, if we have that mastery approach, we don't get that avoidance. Because often what happens is like we're driven to see our progress in the thing. So it's not a threat if we fall a little bit short. We still made progress. We can still look back. And this is a successful endeavor. Yeah, Cheryl Strayed talked once about, to this young writer, she was saying that they were making the mistake of confusing writing and publishing. And if your rage is to be a writer, that's a good place to direct that energy. If your rage is to write versus your rage to be a writer, those are very different distinctions, right?

18:21So we're talking about the noun versus the verb. If you like doing the thing, having done the thing is a byproduct of it. If you like having done the thing or being recognized for doing the thing, you're going to, I think, often get obsessed with things that are outside your control. You're going to get distracted easily. You're going to look for shortcuts even. But if the goal is like, hey, I enjoy being in the middle of writing a book versus I enjoy the publicity tour for a book, those are very different states of mind and being. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the crux of performing. You have to care and care deeply.

19:01But if it intertwines too much, you start getting distracted by the shiny objects and your ego starts going like, oh, like I care about the publicity. I care about the, you know, the recognition, the fame, and that can get in our way. Yeah, yeah, it's true. If you're trying to be an athlete or a writer or an entrepreneur or whatever for the end state, that's a tricky proposition because either it's got to go really well, like you better get really lucky or you're going to have trouble. Like, I think that's it. You would think that millions of dollars, fame, et cetera, would be a sufficient motivation to get through the shit of whatever it takes to become a master at something, but it's actually not because it's so demoralizing that you get so lost in the day-to-dayness of it.

19:50If you don't actually like doing the thing, if you're not thinking about it when you're in the shower because that's what you think about in the shower, not because someone said you better be thinking about it in the shower, I don't think you're going to have the, yeah, you're not going have the motivation to go the distance and to get through the thing. Yeah. Unless of course you get incredibly lucky or you're just massively genetically gifted. Yeah. It's got it. I mean, the path has to be smooth sailing. Yes. I think it's the key there because, and I think everything that we know is that it rarely is.

20:24And we're going to get, you know, reality is going to smack us in the face and failure is going to hit us. And if the only thing we have underlying that is the potential millions we make, well, that logically might seem like, oh, this is a lot of money. This is life changing. This is going to do it. It doesn't. And we have decades of both research. And then if you look at whether it's historical or if you just look at examples, they also tell you that this is enough. Or if you talk to those professional teams that both of us have, they'll tell you that, Hey, we might be paying this person, you know,$5 million, but that's not enough to motivate them to like go home and read the playbook every day.

21:07I know. Isn't that crazy that at that level, it still comes down to like, are you willing to do the work or not? And a contract that's 50 or 100 times bigger isn't the swing vote there. You have to just like doing it. Yeah, it's so wild. And it goes so against kind of like our intuition. where we think, oh, like more money, you know, this will do it. But again, it's not how our brain is kind of wired. I don't know why, but it's just not how it won't give us a sufficient fuel.

21:47We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

22:24Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

23:05And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

23:48There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

24:26And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

24:53Well, it's funny because I'm in your book, which I thought was funny. We were talking about this very thing, which is like as a runner, people always ask me, am I running a marathon or am I training for a marathon? Like they think that you have to be doing it for some reason. And my answer is usually like, this is the marathon. Doing it for no reason is actually the harder challenge, doing it because you like doing it and because you said you were going to do it. And to me, that's the sort of metaphorical muscle that I'm building that I need in my other professional domains. Because on a book, you have so many more bad days than good days.

25:32Honestly, you're not measuring progress by any one day anyway. You know, I'm never like reading the finished audio book of a project and go, oh yeah, that was Tuesday, March 23rd. I know, you know, like that was so many days of work. And it was also years of prologue before that. And so if you can't get lost in the day-to-dayness of it because you like being in it, and that's your kind of default state. Like if you're the kind of person who's like looking forward to the off season, you're going to have trouble, I think. absolutely and you know it reminds me of some of the research that i wrote about in the book where it's like it backs up your you're running which is um you know they they looked at nobel prize winning scientists and compared them to those who were like a wrong or two below and that they found the nobel prize winning scientists almost all had some sort of like hobby or interest that they like pursued at a decently high level.

26:32Sometimes it's like acting or singing or, you know, exercise of some sort, but like they pursued it at a decent level, not to like run the marathon or become the professional singer. But I think for the same reason that you do running and the same reason that actually I do running now, I don't compete in anything, is it gives you that thing outside of your main pursuit that builds that mental muscle and also gives you like something else where you can have a sense of like progress or competency so that when you're making progress in the writing or it's just one of those yes those weeks where it's just like i'm beating my head against the wall you're still like i'm still doing something i found that with running is like i always close the loop you know like there's a day there's days where i'm starting a chapter, I'm starting a thing.

27:22And like, I don't know when it's going to come together. But literally, when I leave my house to go for a run, I magically end up back at my house. You know, like that always happens in one form or another. Even if I'm limping home or whatever, I end up, I finish it. So there's something too, I think in hobbies or physical practices, there is a nice sort of closed nature to them. Like you either win or you lose, you got a better time or not, you finished the set or not, you hit the PR or not that, you know, most other domains don't offer you. Yeah. And I think that's why it's one of the best things to build that mental muscle.

28:04Yeah. Cause it gives you that, again, that competency that, okay, no matter how it went, I finished the loop. I got the miles in. I got my swim in or what have you. And that boosts you up. And I think you're right. Like other things, they're more nebulous. Well, it's a finite game versus an infinite game. You know, like life is an infinite game and sports are by definition finite games, even though there's games within games. But it's like, yeah, you said you're going to run five miles. You either do it or you don't. You played a game of pickup basketball. You're playing to 21 or not. You're you went for the bike ride, whatever it is, right?

28:42Like even a cold plunge, you're like, I'm going to get in for two minutes. You either do it or you're not. It's measurable, quantifiable, and it's clarity. There's clarity. And in most other projects like building a business, building a brand, I don't even know, just like improving yourself. There's just a vagueness inherently, you know, and an infiniteness to it. And that can be really demoralizing. And so having these kind of false artificial constructs where you get clarity and progress and wins is like essential. Yeah. I mean, that's where confidence comes from, right? From like evidence and getting some wins.

29:19And the nice thing is like there's a degree of transferability to this stuff. Yeah. And there's a degree, even if you look at the research around like status or significance, is what it shows is that to a degree it's substitutable. Yes. Meaning if we're more complex of a person in our writing isn't quite going as well, but we're still showing up and getting our run or our exercise in or we're still showing up and doing whatever our hobby is interested is is that research tells us that like our brain kind of switches and says like, OK, we'll just say this over here. We'll still show up at it, but we're going to take a little of that, like feel good, self-competency, self-efficacy from this over here to keep you like motivated enough to get through the wrong in the thing that's not going well.

30:06You said confidence is connected to evidence. Do you think that's the distinction? Is the distinction between confidence and ego that one is based on something real? Like you earn confidence and ego you don't? I think, yeah, because again, if you look at it, we try and fake it. It generally backfires. Yeah. Because our brain is like smarter than we give it credit for. In some areas. In some instances. But the example I like to use is if you sign up for a marathon and you haven't done the work, you might on the starting line, you might be able to like, I got this. I got this. I'm good. You're hyping yourself up.

30:44But as soon as you get a couple miles into that, reality is going to smack you in the face. and all that like fake confidence didn't do anything. But instead, if you've like put in the work, you put in the miles, you've got that evidence and not the ego. What happens is you have appreciation for the thing. And then when you get to those tough miles, you have something to anchor yourself and go back on where it's like - I've done this before. Yeah, I've done this before. I've been in this situation. Here's how I navigate it. Yeah, I think that's an interesting, so it's like, how do you know you can do something if you've never done it before.

31:20Right. That to me, that's an inch like, like, how did I know I could do my first book? Or how does someone know they could start a company or, you know, run for public office that it's like, we know, okay, confidence is based on like having done things before. And then there are these tricky cases where you're like doing something you've never done before. What are you drawing on? Sometimes ego can be sort of a hack there because you're like, well, I'm the best. Everyone loves me. Of course. Like, or you, you totally underestimate how difficult something's going to be. So it protects you. So I think sometimes people think ego is beneficial because it sometimes gets people in rooms or situations that they have no business being in.

31:57But I like to think that when you're taking on something challenging, what you're able to draw on is analogous situations or sort of meta quality. So yes, you've never technically done this thing before, but you've done other hard things or you're like, I'm the kind of person who asks questions. I'm the kind of person who doesn't quit. You have sort of adjacent confidence that allows you to be confident, but not certain that you can do. Ego is like, of course I can. And confidence says like, I think I could pull that off. It's the fine line. Yes. And the way I like to think of it is like our brain is predictive.

32:35So when we set up those predictions, what is it going to draw on? It can draw on either you've been there before or maybe you haven't but you've built up this repertoire of you know i've done hard things before i've been in maybe not the exact situations but i've been in similar anxiety inducing situations so for instance when i started speaking for the first time yeah what do i pull on i'd never spoke in front of thousands of people but what do i pull on is like hey i've run in front of thousands of people sure yeah and even though it's not like me speaking it's still being in a you know you're in the limelight yeah right people are looking at you you're on national tv or whatever have you it's like still the pressure is similar enough so your brain goes okay like not exactly but we've made it through this yeah so i'm gonna pull on this and use that and i think that's where that confidence piece comes from is it's like evidence doesn't always have to be direct but if you can give yourself enough like you've got the circumstantial evidence exactly it's like enough close enough stuff then your brain can pull on that and be like okay we've been in similar situations we'll take this on as a challenge instead of like maybe retreating and taking this as a threat yeah to me confidence has an awareness of strength and weakness absolutely where ego is like i'm great at everything i'm the best they love me everywhere so then yeah you're about to be on national television and you don't prepare because you're good at all these other things.

34:06Of course, you're going to be good at this. And then you step into this new medium, which has its own rules and its own logic and its own challenges. And then you're like, oh shit. Right. And that's when you get humbled really quickly. But confidence says, hey, this is a tough thing I'm about to do. Here's the strengths that I'm bringing to the table. And then here's all the things I don't know. And so I'm going to talk to a publicist. I'm going to call someone who's done this before. I'm going to watch footage of other people. So if you have only the awareness of what you're good at, you stay as you are.

34:41If you couple that awareness with a sense of your deficiencies or weaknesses, then you get to work on those things. And then you not only sort of step up into the challenge, but you become better for having wrestled with that challenge. Absolutely. If you're not aware of your weaknesses, then they come as surprises. And then what happens? Reality smacks you in the face when it hits you. And then you go from, you know, I got this to your brains and freak out panic mode. I mean, that's exactly. I have a good friend who's in a special forces, who was a former athlete of mine who I coached. And he told me, well, going through, you know, the training is like, you know, you'd have, you'd have these people who you could just see they acted so confident and had this ego of like, I'm the man, I'm going to figure out anything.

35:27And then you had this other set of group was like hey i'm really prepared in this area but you know here are my weaknesses here are the areas i'm nervous about yes and he said inevitably when they drop you off in the woods in the middle of nowhere and you got to do all this crazy shit he said it's the people who were aware of their weaknesses who came out on the other side interesting because they knew and they didn't freak out they didn't go from like you know okay this is hard to panic I don't know what to do mode because they knew, hey, if this comes up, I'm going to have to like use everything I got to navigate it.

36:02Well, the other person who just had the ego there, when it came up, it was like a surprise. It's almost like their brain goes like, hey, wait a minute. This one's supposed to be hard. You were supposed to take care of everything. Going from certainty to uncertainty is very rattling. But if you're starting with some uncertainty, you're like, I don't know how it's going to go, but I'm ready for whatever it throws at me. versus like, this is going to be easy. Yeah, that's it. I talk about this in the discipline book, I think. Floyd Patterson loses one of his title fights and he said, in retrospect, I knew I was going to lose because I stepped in the ring and I didn't have any nerves.

36:38Like he was just like, I'm the heavyweight champion. Who is this person to challenge me? And to me, I've always thought that that's actually what the story of David and Goliath is supposed to illustrate. It's not little versus big. It's overconfident versus sort of courageous. You know, like David doesn't know that he can win. He just thinks maybe he can, you know? And that's very different than Goliath who thinks I'm invincible. I think our biology backs it up. Yeah. Because if you look at that in exercise psychology, sports psychology, we call it like arousal. meaning if we have no arousal no nerves yeah that's our brain essentially like being like why don't we need to the extra juice why do we need to be prepared you got this yeah you don't need that stuff yeah if we have too much it's like our brain goes into like hey flee play dead like you know faint whatever it is you can't handle anything if we're in that sweet spot where it's like hey i'm prepared for this but it's still gonna be difficult i'm still gonna have to bring my A game, you generally get that middle zone of arousal, which, you know, again, biology tells us is a little bit more adrenaline, a little bit more testosterone, a little bit of cortisol, but that prepares us for the action versus if we have none of that, no adrenaline, we're screwed.

38:03Or if we have too much cortisol and none of the other stuff, we're screwed as well. Yeah. And it's kind of like, you're not supposed to get to a place where you eliminate the nerves or the feelings or the worry or the stress. you're supposed to get to a place where you can manage it, where you're comfortable with it. You can turn down the volume on it. But if it's not there, that's not a good sign either. Yeah, absolutely. I had a good friend who told me that they knew it was time to retire from sport when they'd show up for the games and feel nothing. Right. Because they knew they weren't going to perform at their best.

38:39Yeah. And they knew that for whatever reason, like they tried a bunch of things, but the sport wasn't giving them that edge where it's like, OK, I need to be in that spot. And I can't get myself in that spot. Yeah, there's a kid that works for me. His name is Billy Oppenheimer. He's doing his first book. And I was like, when are you going to send me this book? You know, I want to look at it. And he was like, well, I asked for an extension. He's like, I'm not not quite happy with where it is. And I said, why do you think that you ever will be? You know, like, do you think anyone is ever happy with it?

39:09And so there's this tension between like, oh, it's good enough. That's not obviously a good attitude. But there is, if you haven't done the thing before, maybe you think that the other people don't have nerves or that it comes out fully formed or totally comfortable for everyone else. And it doesn't. You hear stories about performers that are throwing up before they go on 40 years into it. I was like, I'm not happy with it the day it comes out. So the idea that you, in the first draft sort of submission phase, are going to have any semblance of happiness or confidence in where this is, that's a product of complete inexperience and ignorance of the process.

39:54You just don't know where you are in the process. And I think to some degree, this is where our modern world sets us up for that. Yeah. because we get set with these like false ideas of comparisons because if you've never gone through that process before yeah what are you doing you're comparing your first draft first off to everybody else's final and no offense but if you looked at my first drafts like some of them are trash you're also comparing it to shit you see on social media that's not real right yeah exactly and i think this false comparison is such a big deal whether we're talking about performance or writing or life as well is like we need to almost peel back the layers and say and this is where i think it helps so much to have people like yourself mentoring billy or like someone else someone who so you can try you can't it's hard to trust a process you haven't been through so you got to have someone who has been through the process many times that you trust more than yourself i mean this is the whole point of coaches and athletics right and i think in the rest of our lives sometimes we discount that sure because like we think okay no i'm just gonna do this and everything will be all right and we what we don't know we don't know so when we get in that moment and we say hey i'm not happy with this well of course you're not like you're never going to be yes and if you've been through it before you know that there you're going to go through these ups and downs of writing where some days you're going to be like hey this is this is pretty good and other days you're going to be like this makes no freaking sense you it's actually it's so it just for people listening like not only are you not happy when it comes out you're not happy with it after it comes out and it does well i just had this weird experience of doing the 10-year anniversary of obstacle and i had to like redo it and even after i redid it and was reading i was like what is this shit you know like like this is a book that's come out it's been weeks on the bestsellers it's sold millions of copies.

41:52On some level, it's objectively good enough for people. And instead of becoming more satisfied with it as time has gone on, I'm actually less satisfied because that is an element of progress, which is that you should be less pleased with what you were capable of earlier. So you don't even get the retroactive sort of security of like, that was pretty great for 25 or 24, like, because you can't even conceive of that anymore. You're actually holding where you were then to the standards you have now. So you just, you're never good with it. Yeah. This is why comparison is so detrimental because I do the same thing.

42:37And whenever I have to go back and read like an early book or early draft of something, I'm just like, oh my gosh, like, I don't want to talk about this. Like, you know, this, this, this and this like that was really poor writing or bad example or something and you just go over and you're like i could have done this this and this one but that's just part of the process yes seneca's line and he was probably the most famous playwright of his time and philosopher he says when i think of some of the things i've said i envy the mute and you're just like i i didn't just do that and think it was good i published it in print what the fuck was i thinking you know And you're just mortified.

43:19Like it is an excruciating privilege to get to go back and look at something you've done that's done well, because even then you're just like, what is this? Because and by the way, if you're not having that, you're either egotistical, delusional or complacent. You know what I mean? Because you should have got you. You should be capable of more now than you were then. Yeah. And I think what you're getting at is, it's like the central tension of performing, which is if you don't have that, it's the ego or complacency. And that's a bad thing. Like you're not going to learn and grow as a performer.

43:57Right. If you have so much of that, that it's paralyzing where you say, okay, I'm never going to write anything again because, you know, this isn't good enough. I can't hold myself to the standard or what have you. Like that's paralyzing as well. Yeah, you talked about Harper Lee in the book. Yeah. Those tragic cases of someone who did something so good the first go around, or even if it's not so good, that it was so popular the first go around that you get in your own head and then you become incapable of doing the thing that you were quite easily able to do not that long ago. Yeah, that's a fascinating example.

44:29And again, the research backs this up. There was a study I talked about on One Hit Wonders, and they looked at writing, in this case, cookbooks that did really freaking well. and the better that like first author cookbook did yeah like the less likely they were ever to publish anything else and when they looked at it why it was that that identity piece yeah it's like how can i measure up to this like how can i hold myself to this standard like i can't do it and what happens in that case is it's the same on the athletic field is you move that first book where you don't have those expectations, right?

45:04You often are free to perform. Yeah. And then once you have all those expectations on you, for some people, it just like makes it, it is a pure fear threat. If I put this out and it doesn't measure up, it's not that like I failed at writing this book or the sequel or whatever. It is literally, I am a failure as a person. And that paralyzing thought prevents people from getting back in the arena. Yeah, there's a kind of a Goldilocks space where you want to be just, you don't want it to flop. And you also don't want it to be like a chart topping world dominating success. You want like, you don't want to strike out in your first at bat, whatever you're doing.

45:46And you also don't want to hit like a walk off grand slam. You want just like a solid single or maybe a double, just enough that they don't pull you from the game, but that you're not in your own head about how you follow that up. I'm doing the thing now. I can do it. That's what you want. Yeah, it's the expectation effect. And again, if you look at in sports, like the heart of choking in sports is we don't choke in practice. Right? Right. Yeah, the yips, they can do it at home very easily. At home, literally, and I've seen this. You take people with the yips, you put them on the mound where no one's watching, and it's like, you know, 95 mile an hour fastball straight down the middle.

46:31You put them in the game. It's like, it looks like, you know, a junior high baseball player throwing. And it's because of that expectation coming from like everybody else, external pressure that hits on us. For whatever reason, public expectation hits us harder than like other kinds of pressure often.

47:05I've been thinking about this recently. What do you think the difference between self-awareness is and self-consciousness? Because self-consciousness strikes me as the enemy of almost all kinds of elite performance, creativity, etc. When you're in your own head of like, how are they, you know, that's the enemy. And yet also like a lack of self-awareness is the downfall of so many people. I think it's a curiosity versus a threat. Okay. So curiosity is self-awareness where you're exploring. You're like, okay, what internally does this feel like? What's the experience like? When it's that self-conscious, it's that threat where you're sitting there being like, does this feel right?

47:47Is this how it's supposed to be? And you can see this again. Athletes, if you look at elite athletes, is they're better at reading their internal signals? So, you know, understanding whether a feeling of pain in the muscle is pain, that means injury, or it just means fatigue or, you know, I'm working harder. They can distinguish that stuff really well. but it gets to that self-conscious versus self-awareness that can easily translate where you start being like too conscious of it, of especially if you started to have poor performance where you start saying, Oh, that signals that I'm about to slow down and I'm not even at halfway.

48:29Even if it doesn't, you start getting the wrong message because like it's almost tapped into this threat mode. So it's, it's a very fine line, I think. Well, the irony of self-consciousness is that it's actually not so much about you as it is about what other people think of you. And so if you're like, well, like imposter syndrome is self-consciousness, right? You're not actually thinking so much about, am I a fraud? You're thinking, do other people think that I am a fraud? Of course, they're not thinking about you at all. This is just all in your head. But yeah, self-awareness is more an introspective understanding of the self.

49:08Why do I do this? what does this mean what is this like versus self-consciousness which is like if i do this are they going to laugh at me is this pretentious you know or whatever like you're but it's about how what you're going to do is going to be received or is being received or you're thinking about what you're doing as you're doing it like you're in the audience watching you as a spectator instead of being in your body which was probably more of what self-awareness is trying to do for you absolutely i think that's a perfect way to explain it and again tie it back to choking when the world's greatest sports psychologist told me he said essentially i've got the quote in the book but i'll butcher it slightly but he's essentially the essence is you feel the pressure cortisol stress go up you get self-conscious you start overthinking yeah and then it's over yeah and i think it's what i mean is like that self-consciousness is like you go from like oh i feel a little bit different.

50:06And instead of being curious about what that means, you start thinking like, oh, everybody's going to know. Everybody's going to know I don't have it. And I'm going to be embarrassed because I'm supposed to do this, this and this. And now I'm going to be back here doing this X, Y and Z. And that causes your brain to start going on like this ruminating, catastrophizing cycle. Yeah. We're like, this is a big game. This is so important. This is my only chance versus the what I have to do here is X. And if you look at it, that translates to your actions, because what happens as an expert performer, you've taken stuff that used to be conscious.

50:44Yeah. Right. When you learned how to throw a ball, someone probably taught you, you know, you've got to do this mechanics, you know, you've got to do the mechanics. Once you come to expert, you're not thinking this is what my elbow does. And this is where my release you've got it ingrained. But what research tells us is that once we get that pressure, that expectations, that self-consciousness, it's almost like we revert to being a beginner and we start going segment by segment. And what happens is that formally smooth process now doesn't work. And it's the same in other things. I mean, it's the same in writing.

51:18What happens when you try and force yourself to do it? It backfires. Yeah, or you're trying to sound a certain way or impress a certain group of people or not piss off a certain group of people. You just, what you're not doing is spending that mental energy on the thing, just sort of going where it needs to go. It's the paradox of effort where we know we have to try and trying is good. But if we try in the wrong way, meaning we tense up, I like to think of a sprinter because it's the perfect example, is if you watch Usain Bolt run, he's obviously trying, right? He's putting an enormous amount of force into the ground with his legs.

52:04But if you watch his upper body or his face, like his face as relaxed as possible. It's like bouncing up and down because he's trying where he needs to. But in the places that create tension that don't contribute to the actual activity, he's trying to be as relaxed as possible. Yeah. Golf is sort of, I think, the sport that illustrates this the most, where the harder you try at golf, the shittier you are at golf. That's it. That's why I'm shitty at golf. Yeah. You're like, if you try to hit the ball hard, you suck. If you try to hit the ball a certain way, you suck. If you try to look at where it's going, you suck.

52:39There's something about just kind of being present and in it that you're supposed to do. But then that sounds so dumb. You know, it's just like, just don't try to hit it hard. You know, like that's what Tiger Woods is thinking. And that's also what someone who's never hit a golf ball before is supposed to be thinking. But at some level, it comes full circle in that way. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's how it comes back to, again, how we get in our way is the same things. And also, though, it's like, OK, if you've done the work, like you've lifted the weights, you've hit all the balls, then you don't need to try to hit it hard because you are you hitting it is hard.

53:18You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's like if you're a good writer, trying to write good is putting a hat on a hat, as they say. But just trying to write, if you have a good vocabulary, you have a good basis, you have a good voice, you have all the ingredients. You just have to do it. You don't need to be also thinking, am I doing it well? Am I doing it the way that certain people want me to do it? That's where you get in trouble. Yeah, you start trying to write like someone else, right? You say, oh, this is a really good writer over here. I'm going to try and force myself to be like them. And what happens is it doesn't come out well because it's not you and it's not everything that you've trained to do, right?

54:00And the same in sport, when you start forcing it, what are you doing? Is you're trying to do something that is not fundamentally you in what you've trained to do. I had one other thing I wanted to ask you about because I thought it was really interesting. You're talking about Norway as being a sports powerhouse, but you said that Norway doesn't basically have any youth sports culture the way we have it here. Like they're not tracking score. Like it's just chill for kids. So that seems like not how it's supposed to go. So walk me through that. Absolutely. So if you look at the U.S. culture, what it is, is it's all achievement focused.

54:38and then like elite focus meaning how do we find the talent like specialize them early put them in the best put them in the best everything so that they come out on top norway is the opposite is i think there's no keeping score before a certain age yeah everybody gets a trophy regardless of winning or losing there's no national competitions until i think it's over 13 or 14 okay meaning Everything's like local rec league for fun, right? No travel teams, none of that stuff. Their motto is fun for all, okay? They are enormously successful at the elite level. And we're talking winter sports, obviously, but also, you know, summer sports as well.

55:23They have a number of athletes who are the best in the world. And you would think, you'd think like, well, how does that youth model support elite development? yeah but what it does and it comes back to the things we talked about earlier is that model it supports intrinsic motivation meaning you're developing a love for the sport as a whole it keeps more people in it so one of the things right so you're not quitting at nine the u.s model is horrible i forget the exact stat but it's something like of everybody who plays youth sport 70 plus percent of them have quit by the age of like 12 yeah because the parents have sucked the fun out of it.

56:01They've been made to think that they don't have what it takes. So why keep doing it? And one of the things that we know from talent ID is that how you did at 10 does not translate or predict how you're going to do at 20. Sometimes it does when you're a prodigy, but if you're not a prodigy, it hasn't even been your signs of being good at it, not even begun to emerge, especially for young boys, because they haven't even hit like full puberty, which Which differs for everything. Right, right, right. Sure. So when we look at those models, what we see is the U.S. model is like a survive model. Yeah.

56:34And we still do well. But that's mainly because we have a lot of people who play sports in a huge population. And we emphasize it. So, like, the people who survive are still going to be pretty good. Norway has a tiny population. So they have to, like, maximize, you know. During COVID, they talked about invisible graveyards, which is a concept I think about all the time. just like things that didn't make it, people that didn't make it, ideas that didn't make it. And so, yeah, to think about all the, we're not thinking about all the late bloomers. And by late bloomers, we mean like your freshman year of high school, but all those people that burned out before they even got started.

57:09Or because all sports and all sport wasn't created equal, they thought they didn't like sports, but really they just didn't have the freedom to find the sport that they did like. Yeah. Because they thought they hate sports generally, but actually they hate tennis and they were really meant to do X, Y, or Z. So creating that sort of safer place where you can experiment and develop your sense of yourself as a person who likes and has fun doing athletic activities. There's just, yeah, we're not thinking about all the athletes that we prevented from being athletes. Absolutely. And if you look at the data at who actually makes it across elite sports, whether professional, soccer, football, Olympics, etc.

57:54Is for the most part, it shows that those two finally make it. There are exceptions. But for the most part, during their youth, they specialized later. They explored more. They had more what we call like non-organized play. Yeah. Meaning you go play in the sandlot or you get your friends together and play in the street versus those who, again, came a couple rungs short but didn't make the professionals tended to specialize earlier, have more structured time, etc. And I think it comes back to that same thing that we're just talking about is we need to develop the ingredients. And then also, if you develop those ingredients, intrinsic motivation, joy, exploration, so you can find your sport that you like, then it translates over.

58:39And I would argue that, and I kind of do in the book, but the same thing applies to other things. Sure. If we narrow too quickly, then we don't see the possibilities, right? No, this is why I think David Epstein's book, Range, is a parenting book in disguise. Absolutely. It's funny, though. Did you watch the Netflix documentary about tennis? I forget what it's called. But what I was so struck by, and I think it's a general, how much or many tennis players seem to hate tennis. And that struck me as unique amongst the sports. but it's also one of the sports that you specialize in earliest and you can be world class at a very young age.

59:17Like it's Tom Brady at 40 isn't playing against 16 year olds, but in tennis that happens. Right. And so that watching that, I was like, oh, how sad is it that these people found the thing they were meant to do? and then it's almost like some kind of curse right where it's like i'm gonna let you be world class at this and make lots of money but you will hate every fucking second of it even at the pinnacle you will not like the idea of you having fun doing this is anathema to how it seems most people are playing tennis yeah i think tennis is one of those exceptions it's like gymnastics and with women right yes like younger have to specialize early because of you know physiology etc we're starting to see that change a little bit, but it's, I feel bad in that case for tennis.

1:00:07It's like, as you said, this is the thing that you have this enormous gift at, but if it makes you miserable, like what's the trade-off? Like for me, if I hated writing, there would be no way that I would be a writer because like, gotta have that expansive quality to it. Or maybe you would because it's still what you're getting paid to do, but you would be leaving so much on the table because you could have done it better you would have done it more you'd be looking for excuses like i think michael phelps is a great example of this where you have obviously once in a generational talent but clearly leave something towards the end on the table he manages to come back which i think is very impressive and a testament to sort of the inner work that he did but like yeah what would michael phelps who liked swimming have looked like there in that core because he would have there's obviously things he was trying to get out of because he hated it yeah and how do we not do that to ourselves yeah and to our kids yeah and i think that's the key is it's like when we look at these things we're not saying hey don't try and achieve like forget about winning like obviously outcomes matter whether it's life and sport like outcomes matter we you and i have to sell some books or else we're not gonna be able to write sure right but at the same time what we're saying is like we don't have to live in this this path to go down this world where it's like outcome is all that matters and then we hate the thing that we're doing there is still a possibility and there's tons of examples of people have reached the highest height and enjoyed the process of like exploring that sport or pursuit or endeavor and generally what you see is that those people are the ones who not only reach a pretty high peak but sustain it they stay in the league for a long time maybe even after the league they they give back they start coaching they start helping people because they enjoy they like the sounds of the sneakers on the court and the smell of the whatever they they actually like the thing as opposed to thing being some way to fill an enormous hole in their soul and i actually think that's another really dangerous lesson we we we learned from these sort of generational talents who are miserable is that we think it was the the you know POW tactics that Tiger Woods's father did on him that made him great when it wasn't you know like Michael Jordan deciding that he was gonna that Michael Jordan telling himself that he got cut from his high school basketball team and it was because he was angry and driven and managed to, no, you grew a bunch between, that's why you made it the next year.

1:02:47Like there was nothing else really happened. It was that. So sometimes these people tell themselves very wicked stories or they rationalize because they were betrayed or abused by a parental figure or a coach. And they go, that's why I was successful. And it was like, it was actually genetics or it was actually a really great coach that It was some positive force and they've decided to credit the negative force. It's like Steve Jobs was a genius who was also an asshole. He wasn't. Right. You know what I mean? The asshole part was subsidized by the genius part, not the other way around. And that's such an important point and almost a damaging thing to society because what happens is we highlight the asshole, the tortured part.

1:03:31Yeah. And people think like, oh, I have to do this. And often what we don't do is we don't point to all these other people over here. It's like, hey, no, like this person's like a decent dude. No, it's a very and it's a very risky strategy for your kids. Right. Because it's like if you're like, OK, I'm going to turn my kid into a monster for the low probability that they will become a professional athlete. But like the abuse that I'm doing is 100 percent going to have consequences. consequences, right? So it's like, it might be worth it in one sense, but if it doesn't work out, they're definitely going to be an asshole, definitely have skewed priorities, definitely have internalized a bunch of things.

1:04:17That's really risky, right? You would much rather go, hey, I'm going to do this stuff. It's going to make my kid well-adjusted, happy, interested in all this stuff. And maybe they'll be successful, right? Because if they're not successful, they still have all these positive things. So two things I've noticed as, you know, a young parent now, but lots of my friends are parents is the former professional athlete friends that I have who are parents are the chillest people on the sideline. And I asked one, I asked one who was like an NCAA champion athlete and then ran professionally. And she goes, I've seen the journey.

1:04:56It's got to be up to them. Like, I'll support them. But like, whether they go through the ups and downs, I can't make it like it's up to them. So like, I can make their journey miserable or they can go on it and see if they want to go in on itself. And I'm like, this is this is it. And another thing this reminds me of is there's actually not on kids, but there's data on this is a couple of years ago. some researchers looked at coaches in the NBA and they categorized them into like essentially how like abusive they were right if they were like the old school Bobby Knight type and then they tracked when a player played for them for a year what happened to their performance for the rest of the career and what they called their aggressiveness which they looked at like things like technical fouls yeah and the title of the study was called scarred for the rest of my career because what they found is if you spent time with this like asshole of a coach yeah you started the rest of your career performance dipped a little bit and you started up bad habits yeah yeah you kind of thought this is the way this is how i have to do it so i'm going to be more aggressive.

1:06:10So I have more technical fouls. I have these bad habits because like I was coached out of fear and it impacts us. And if that happens to guys who are already in the freaking NBA, what do you think it's happening? So like, you know, little Johnny or Susie running around the soccer, you know, pitch or what have you. No, that's amazing. You want to go check out some books? Yeah, let's do it. All right.

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