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The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World

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The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World

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We are at our best when we are: Working without distraction on something that matters to us. Creating and contributing to the world. Engaging deeply with others. Sufficiently challenged. Using our unique skills. In a state of relaxed productivity. Giving something our all. In the presence of beauty. We feel: Joy and inspiration. Ready and attuned. Invigorated. Electric. Nourished and at peace. Deeply satisfied. Profound awe. Fully alive. At home in the world. This is what excellence is all about.

Excellence is less a destination and more an energizing process of growth and becoming—an ongoing path that yields our best performances and, every bit as important, our best selves.

When we lose the ability to pursue what matters to us with integrity, we lose a sense of who we are.

involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals. Excellence combines mastery and mattering. Mastery means developing skill and making progress in activities you deem worthwhile.

Mattering is a sense that what you are doing has significance, that your contributions and progress are meaningful. Decades of research show mastery and mattering are key to a life well lived, or what psychologists call life satisfaction.

Excellence An ongoing process of growth and becoming that imbues life with meaning and vigor. It emerges from involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals. Excellence combines mastery and mattering. It is not something that is out of reach but rather it is your birthright, a core part of your nature. Here’s why this matters: When you orient around excellence, you end up getting the best out of yourself on the things that matter to you most.

Excellence is also about creating a better world. It is the generative force that leads to scientific breakthroughs, inspiring athletic feats, beautiful creations, and meaningful relationships. When you strive for excellence, you contribute to this universal dance in your own unique way.

Excellence is not perfectionism. Perfectionism is trying to do everything flawlessly. It is a trap that leads to stress and burnout. Excellence means picking and choosing what matters most, giving those pursuits your all, and letting others go. Excellence also realizes that every masterpiece begins as a rough draft, that every story of enduring progress contains highs and lows.

Obsession results in burning bright, then burning out. Excellence is about consistency over time to create extraordinary work, and an extraordinary life.

Excellence is the opposite of mechanical. It is distinctly human, alive, and full of feeling.

Excellence may include moments of flow, but it encompasses so much more—attributes such as caring, discipline, patience, prioritization, ritual, routine, rest, renewal, resilience, and gumption.

Real excellence is quiet, confident, consistent, respectful of the craft, and interested in the process of self-discovery.

In most activities, you’ve got to make things happen before you can let them happen. And even then, nobody holds on to peak experiences forever. You cycle in and out of them.

The first phase is unconscious incompetence, which is what you experience when you are new to something. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing. At this stage, the focus ought to be on humility and learning the basics. You have to get your bearings before you can make real progress. The second phase is conscious incompetence, when you are making mistakes but you are aware that you are making mistakes. During this phase, deliberate thinking and effortful trying help you to move forward. The third phase is conscious competence, when you are doing your activity correctly but not without labor. You rely upon effortful thinking to process moment-by-moment feedback. Gadgets, wearable devices, and data tracking may prove useful, confirming that you are on the right track and alerting you when you are not. You are trying hard and finally getting it right, which is a wonderful feeling. Yet it is also at this point that many people get stuck. That’s because in order to progress to the final phase of development, you must release from thinking and trying altogether. The fourth and final phase is unconscious competence, which requires shedding the effortful trying that got you this far. Here is where you ditch the GPS watch, the heart rate monitor, the instruction manual, and the pressure you put on yourself to succeed. The various tools that helped you along the way now become barriers between yourself and the direct experience of whatever it is you are doing.

“Skill is not an act or action, it is an interaction—between a person, their activity, and their environment.”

Research shows that the best way to learn something is to feel what it’s like to do it incorrectly and correctly. You feel the perfect golf swing, swim stroke, running stride, or tennis serve. You feel the keys on the piano or the strings on the guitar. You feel the crowd’s response to a speech or presentation. You feel when the painting or song is just right.

A hallmark of excellence is feeling your way into a rhythm.

Generally speaking, once we reach a certain level of proficiency, if we spend too much time intellectualizing, our performance and experience deteriorates. We perform best when we feel our way forward, experiencing an intimate and involved absorption with our activity. It’s an advanced version of sensing and responding, bestowed upon us from bacteria and refined over millennia of evolution.

without emotional assignments of value, we become incapable of making real-world decisions.

We are at our best when we get into the zone, function in lockstep with our surroundings, and feel our way toward excellence. These deeply satisfying experiences fill our lives with meaning. When we lose our ability to feel, we struggle mightily. Either way, our feelings are indispensable to our success. They guide us toward what biology calls homeostatic upregulation and what I call excellence.

The main reason I write and lift weights is because a technology company can’t design a robot that can make me feel what I feel when I write and lift weights. Maybe the robot can write more elegantly or lift more weight. But it can’t make me feel the aliveness of a great idea. It can’t make me feel the rhythm of a great sentence. It can’t make me feel the heavy weight starting to move. This feeling is what makes us human. Find it in your own life. Protect it. Cherish it.

As indispensable as our feelings are to excellence, sometimes they are misguided. For instance, an activity or pursuit may feel wonderful in the moment but yield deleterious consequences later on. This is where our psychology and thinking minds come into play.

Our ability to think, and therefore feel, our way into the future is a big part of what separates us from other species.

Thinking allows us to simulate1 how an experience might feel. In doing so, we can appreciate its potential benefits and harms without putting ourselves at risk.

If you can think ahead, which in turn enables you to feel ahead, you give yourself a better chance of making the right decision in the moment. When it comes to the pursuit of excellence, we are often faced with the comfort, pleasure, or ease of short-term decisions that contradict our values and long-term goals. Anyone who has been tempted by staying in a warm and cozy bed instead of going for that brisk morning run knows this firsthand.

The key is to think beyond your immediate feelings and check them against your desires for the future. Psychologists use the term episodic future thinking, or EFT, to describe the ability to imagine different futures and what they’ll feel like.

Decades of research on human motivation, satisfaction, and fulfillment demonstrate that we thrive over the long haul when three core needs are met: (1) autonomy, or the ability to have some control over how we spend our time and energy; (2) competence, or a path toward concrete improvement in our chosen pursuits; and (3) belonging, or a sense of connection5 to something beyond ourselves—be it another person, community, lineage, or tradition.

Our values represent our guiding principles, the attributes and qualities that matter to us most. A few examples include truth, presence, health, community, spirituality, relationships, intellect, creativity, quality, craft, authenticity, and wisdom.

If you don’t define your own version of success, someone else will define it for you.

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

“The ultimate goal is to learn about myself and use the experiences of competition to better myself not only as an athlete but as a person.”

When we throw ourselves into worthwhile projects and pursuits, we engrave or stamp upon ourselves the type of person we are growing into.

Does the way we spend our time and energy make us happy? Are there things we can do to become even happier?

A better alternative to obsessing over happiness is focusing on developing skills in worthwhile pursuits while opening your emotional aperture to a range of feelings along the way.

When you undertake demanding work or experience an acute challenge, your body produces inflammatory proteins and the hormone cortisol. These molecules serve as messengers to the rest of your system, in essence proclaiming, This is a significant stimulus that will require a significant response. As a result, the body marshals the appropriate resources and directs them to the area under stress. If the dose of stress isn’t too great, you build back stronger and become more resilient. This represents a healthy stress response. If, however, the amount of stress is too large or lasts too long, then the body fails to adapt and the result is deterioration. Selye called this the exhaustion stage. Today, many refer to it as being under chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, or burnout.

Stress plus rest equals growth. Too much stress, not enough rest and the result is injury, illness, fatigue, and burnout. Too much rest, not enough stress and the result is complacency or stagnation. Progress and growth in nearly every domain relies upon finding the right amount of stress and following it with the right amount of rest.

stress is mediated by meaning.

working hard on something you find meaningful, even if it is stressful at times, rewires your brain in ways that lead to satisfaction and fulfillment. The more you believe your hard work is rewarding and satisfying, the more rewarding and satisfying you’ll find it.

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

We should do what we can to surround ourselves with objects that invite our desired thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and eliminate those that do not. It may sound simplistic, but it makes a sizeable impact on the quality of our time and energy.

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

When you value an activity, when you care deeply about it and give it your all, the space between you and whatever it is you are doing collapses, and Quality is high. When you don’t value what you are doing, when you are distracted or going through the motions, there is a separateness between you and whatever it is you are doing, and Quality is low.

Quality is a driving force in personal and cultural evolution. It imbues our lives with meaning and significance. You sense it in the greatness of others, and you sense it when you’re at your best. It’s at the center of what scientists call homeostatic upregulation and what I call excellence.

Excellence is not about perfectionism or obsessing over small details in every aspect of your life. It’s about knowing your values and using your innate capabilities to pursue them. This, the Greeks believed, was central to a good life.

Ancient Greece and Warring States China are considered two of the most innovative and energetic philosophical epochs. In both traditions, the good life was not about attaining pleasure or avoiding pain. It was about striving for excellence: involved engagement in worthwhile pursuits that support your values and goals.

Leo Tolstoy argued that “goodness is the eternal, the highest aim of life. However we may understand goodness, our life is nothing more but a striving towards the good… . Goodness is really the fundamental6 metaphysical perception which forms the essence of our consciousness: a perception not defined by reason.” For Tolstoy, this deeply felt goodness is the connective tissue between an artist, their work, and everyone else who has an emotional experience receiving that work. The contemporary American philosopher Susan Wolf argues that an integral part of a meaningful life is “when one is actively (and lovingly) engaged in projects that give rise to a particularly rewarding type of subjective experience7—it is, if you will, a high-quality pleasure.” Quality, goodness, urteilskraft, conatus, arete, wu-wei, and de are concepts that span time, geography, and philosophical traditions. Yet they all point toward excellence as a virtue, as an essential part of our nature, something we know deep down inside. Only recently has excellence fallen out of favor, the consequences of which are dire. A Solution for Longing and Loneliness During the process of writing this book, I had the experience of getting lost in thought while filling up my car at the gas station on an otherwise tumultuous day. It was a welcome moment of peace. Until, seemingly out of nowhere, I was interrupted by a celebrity, appearing on a high-definition screen on the pump, telling me that when I’m stressed I just need to repeat to myself, “Everything is figureoutable.” That experience is emblematic of today’s world, which cares not about our values, goals, or ability to think and live deeply but rather page views, screen time, and monetization. We are fed information—real, fake, somewhere in between—at such a dizzying pace it crowds out the time and space we need to think for ourselves. Perhaps you are sitting down to work on something important to you, and your phone buzzes just as you are hitting stride. Or maybe you are sinking into a groove while listening to music, only to be interrupted by an advertisement for a mattress company. Individually, these intrusions are minor and harmless. But taken together, they have an overwhelmingly negative effect: They get between

That experience is emblematic of today’s world, which cares not about our values, goals, or ability to think and live deeply but rather page views, screen time, and monetization. We are fed information—real, fake, somewhere in between—at such a dizzying pace it crowds out the time and space we need to think for ourselves.

The greatest risk of modern overload is that we give up on excellence, Quality, and agency altogether. Instead, we go wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along an algorithmic conveyor belt. The only thing that separates us from this dystopia is ourselves.

Excellence is impossible if we cannot distinguish between what is superfluous and significant, between what is trivial and meaningful. But if we can draw those distinctions and act on them, the rewards are great.

We don’t grieve and we don’t rest, we just choose the lie that feels the best.

excellence requires intimacy.

the purpose of striving for excellence to begin with: to create quality experiences for ourselves and for those who are touched by our work and our lives.

“The only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession,”10 Jerry Seinfeld once said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I know a lot of rich people. So do you. They don’t feel good, as you think they should and would. They’re miserable. Because, if they don’t master a skill, life is unfulfilling.”

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

“despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” many jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”11 Ask certain white-collar professionals what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need at least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinions of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors. But ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next marathon, on their next deadlift, or in their art studio, and the answer becomes much simpler. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on,”12 writes Crawford. Psychologists call this an autotelic experience. It represents the fulfillment and satisfaction that arise from doing a job well for its own sake—something that is only possible when there is a clear standard for what doing a job well means.

Slow Down. “The more you hurry the longer things take,”

“The place to improve the world13 is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then to work outward from there,” writes Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value.”

Perhaps excellence, Quality, and love are all one and the same.

Either way, when we pursue excellence, we transcend our small selves—the parts of us that worry, doubt, and fear—and enter into something larger, a dance with the universe. We experience the opposite of existential loneliness: We feel whole and settled, at home in ourselves and at home in the world.

You can possess all the knowledge and talent in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t care. Caring drives everything, regardless of what it is you do.

Passion emerges over years, not seconds. It’s rarely like lightning striking. More often it’s like laying bricks for a house.

Try a range of pursuits. Give it some time, but don’t be scared to quit until you discover something where there is fit—an alignment with your values and natural abilities, a curiosity and potential for growth. Once you’ve determined fit, then the focus shifts to grit. Remember that passion and staying power are not automatic; you develop them by persevering through ups and downs. If you over-index on grit before fit, you risk sticking with something for too long when quitting would have benefited you. If, however, you prematurely quit once you have fit—if you are always searching for perfection or telling yourself there must be something better around the corner—you’ll never stick with anything long enough to excel.

How do you know when you’ve found the right seeds? You feel a pull to keep showing up. You may not get better every day, but there is a general sense of growth and progress. You may not love every moment, but there is an emerging satisfaction. Like a seed ready to sprout, you accumulate energy asking to be channeled. These are all signals to keep going. These are all signs of caring.

this tendency. Hence all the nonchalance and too-cool-to-care attitudes. The biggest

The biggest barrier to caring is fear. Fear of failure. Fear of heartbreak. Fear of loss.

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 healers care deeply. The best parents care deeply. You are not going to be the best anything with an attitude of nonchalance—including the best version of yourself.

You come to appreciate that 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, and care deeply. You come to appreciate that the things you care about are the things that break your heart are the things that give rise to excellence and fill your life with meaning and joy.

It’s good to be all in, you just don’t want to be all in all the time.

If you want to be really good at something, you have to be willing to fail. Being willing to fail is easier when you have a strong sense of self. Having a strong sense of self requires not fusing completely with a single activity or dimension.

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines. To think about the thing. Research the thing. Talk about the thing. Perhaps even dream about the thing. But these are all just ways of protecting yourself from actually doing the thing. Another trap is doing the thing but not really doing the thing.

Courage doesn’t entail the absence of fear or doubt. It entails taking fear and doubt along for the ride and doing what we are meant to do no less.

The things you care about are the things that break your heart are the things that give rise to excellence and fill your life with meaning and joy.

Goals are like mountaintops. They are important insofar as they provide definition and direction for our journeys. They serve as targets, offering a wellspring of motivation. They keep us focused and prevent us from aimlessly wandering. Yet nearly all of our growth, development, and meaning occur not at the point of accomplishing a goal but during its pursuit.

There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is how you are transformed in the process of going for it. When you select what goals to pursue, you are selecting what kind of person you want to become.

Whenever we are contemplating a goal, the first thing we ought to consider is how it might impact our values. Will the goal allow us to practice our values? Will it hinder them? What trade-offs will the goal require we make? If we have no goals for the moment, we can consider what new ones might support the furtherance of our values.

When you work on a big goal that aligns with your values, you are working on not only the goal but also yourself.

The best goals push us ever so slightly outside of our comfort zones. Too much of a challenge, and the result is anxiety. Too little of a challenge, and the result is boredom. What we want is for the challenge to match the outer edge of our skills. As our skills increase over time, we can ramp up the challenges. Think of it as a vector for growth. A simple yet reliable way to enter this vector is to reflect upon where you are and where you want to be. Then ask yourself, What is the next logical step? The answer ought to provide a good starting point for homing in on an appropriate goal.

A SMART goal essentially says, I want to reach the peak of that particular mountain, which offers a suitable challenge and which I chose to climb for good reason, by the end of the year.

When you set a big and meaningful goal, you must be wary of two traps. The first is that you trick yourself into believing that just because you set a goal, something within you has changed. You tell everyone about your goal and think about it all the time. This brings excitement, but it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything of consequence. Cheap thrills come from talking and thinking about a goal. Lasting satisfaction comes from working toward it. Be careful not to confuse the two. The second trap is that you become so fixated on achieving your goal that you rush the process, making poor decisions along the way.

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

A process-over-outcomes mindset is essential for excellence. Here’s how it works: Set a goal. Figure out the discrete steps to achieving that goal that are within your control. Mostly forget about the goal and focus on executing the steps instead. Judge yourself based on the level of presence and effort you are exerting in each moment. If you catch yourself obsessing about the goal, use that as a cue to ask yourself what you could be doing right now to help you move forward. Sometimes the answer may be nothing at all. In that case, rest. Whether you succeed or fail, learn from the outcome, refine your process if necessary, and move forward.

Specific, measurable, and time-bound goals are most powerful when you are relatively new to an activity. However, as you make progress, the best goals tend to be broader and more open-ended.

After crossing certain performance thresholds, it becomes harder to improve. The next incremental gain is always more challenging than the last, and progress is less predictable. The deeper we go in our respective crafts, the less we require the rigidity and accountability of strict and specific goals. Instead, we benefit from the freedom to refine and adapt.

The people who achieve big and audacious goals are rarely obsessed with achieving big and audacious goals. They are focused on the path, on the process. They weather ups and downs. They recognize meaningful progress does not come from intensity or heroic efforts on any given day but from consistency and discipline over months and years. They understand it is important to pick the right peaks but even more important to climb the right way.

Fulfillment, happiness, and satisfaction are not attributes you gain from achieving a goal; they are states that arise in the process of going for one.

If you develop a mindset If I just do this, or just accomplish that, THEN I’ll arrive, you are in for a rude awakening. We never arrive. The goalpost is always ten yards down the field. The human brain did not evolve to be satisfied. It evolved to strive. Psychologists call it the arrival fallacy.5 “We live under the illusion—well, the false hope—that once we make it, then we’ll be happy,”

The ultimate way to embrace a process-over-outcomes mindset is to stop worrying about being the best and instead focus on being the best at getting better. Being the best is a flash in time. You get there or you don’t. Either way, it comes and then it goes. But being the best at getting better—that’s a commitment to mastery that lasts a lifetime.

Better is also about becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser.

So yes, set meaningful goals and pursue them with everything you have. Doing so is core to excellence. But keep in mind that the real reward isn’t just what happens when you reach the top of the mountain. It’s who you become on the sides. Chapter Summary •Goals serve as targets and offer a wellspring of motivation. •It is important that your goals align with your values. •The best goals push you ever so slightly outside of your comfort zone. •SMART goals are great—until they become too narrow or constraining. •We never arrive; expecting to is a trap that leads to perpetual disappointment and emptiness. •Growth, development, and meaning occur not at the point of accomplishing a goal but during its pursuit. •Adopt a process-over-outcomes mindset. •Be the best at getting better—and remember that better means stronger, kinder, and wiser, too. 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.

The way to build anything worthwhile is gradually, not erratically.

Performative greatness is obsessed with heroic days. Actual greatness concerns itself with heroic decades. The goal is not for any single outing to be extreme but for the totality of effort over years to be extreme. Excellence does not come from intensity. It comes from consistency.

compounding: Small investments made regularly over time build upon themselves and grow into something big. Compounding doesn’t just apply to excellence in investing. It applies to excellence in anything.

Staying consistent often requires demonstrating a bit of restraint today so that you can pick up where you left off tomorrow. Regression to the mean describes the short-term tendency of a dynamic system to return to its average state. After a string of superb days, we tend to drift back toward our baseline performance. After a string of bad days, our performance tends to improve. Regression to the mean says that we should not worry so much about outlier efforts and instead focus on becoming a better average over time, prioritizing progress over perfection.

Excellence demands a shift in attitude. We need to worry less about swinging for home runs and more about repeatedly putting the ball in play. We must defy the urge to kill ourselves so we can have a few notable days and instead think about creating a notable body of work. Become known for your consistency.

It is easy to focus when you are motivated, at your best, and everything is clicking. It is harder to focus when you are feeling off and as if you are moving against the current. But what you do on your not-so-great days may be most critical of all. Nothing brings down an average like a zero—it’s basic math. So you want to avoid zeros whenever you can. Herein lies an idea called raising the floor, which entails making your bad days just a little better.

Raising the floor means shifting our expectations to account for what we’ve got to give in the moment and then doing our best to give it—remembering that even the smallest efforts are deposits in the bank, and they all drive compounding in the future.

Short-circuiting the negative effects of missteps and bad days relies on a mindset shift that prioritizes consistency over intensity. When we embrace this mindset, we acknowledge that not every rep or every day is going to be great, and that’s okay. We become less concerned with each moment’s or each day’s measurable performance and more concerned with the effort we gave. We realize that if we can eke out even a bit of good work on a bad day, then we’re making progress. Even if we can’t eke out any good work, but we don’t let a bad day devastate us and ruin our week—then that, too, is making progress.

Each and every one of us will face setbacks, unforced errors, and moments when our emotions flare and our plans fall apart. What matters most is how we respond—again and again and again. It’s called having a next-play mentality, and it’s a central feature of consistency. A next-play mentality says that when things are going great, you should ride the momentum, but at the same time not get complacent or stuck in the prior moment. When things are falling apart—when you make an error, when you find yourself losing—learn from what happened if you can, but then forget about it and move forward. Throughout it all, keep showing up as best you can.

It’s reminiscent of a popular Zen koan: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

Focus less on any single result and more on the trend line.

Instead of relying solely on visible progress for motivation, you’ve got to find joy in the work itself and the community in which you do it. You may not always see progress to indicate a good day, but you gain a feel for it. Were you focused? Did you give what you had to give on the day? Did you work hard but not overshoot the target? Can you come back tomorrow ready to go? This internal gauge becomes the most vital of all.

What is winning at consistency? It is showing up. It is getting started. It is giving what you’ve got to give on the day. It is playing the board in front of you. It is coming back tomorrow. It is doing this over and over again.

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

If you want to be really good, to master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you need to say no to many others.”

Excellence requires reimagining how you think about balance, if not discarding the term altogether.

By trying to be balanced, we end up driving ourselves crazy. For most people, it is better to do a few things well, with full attention and care, than it is to spread yourself thin and do a bunch of things with average attention, energy, and results.

Being a mature adult means acknowledging that trade-offs exist and being willing to make them. It is a wonderful feeling when you give yourself permission to devote your time and energy to what matters most—even, and perhaps especially, if that means de-emphasizing other pursuits or maybe even leaving them behind altogether. The key is that you don’t go about it mindlessly.

Excellence requires sacrifice and incredibly hard work. But it also requires taking care of ourselves.

Excellence is not about trying to achieve some sort of illusory balance. Instead, it’s about pursuing our interests wholeheartedly while maintaining the ability to see ourselves clearly and make adjustments if necessary.

In this context, balance means you never go all in. Obsession means you recklessly go all in. Prioritization means you go all in but not on autopilot and not in a way that ruins your physical, emotional, or relational health.

People love bright and shiny objects, but the truth is that the way you improve in anything is by eliminating distractions, prioritizing the fundamentals, and executing them with ruthless consistency.

It’s true that the best performers check all the boxes, but they also make sure that all the boxes are worth checking in the first place. You’ve got to ensure you aren’t worrying too much about the last 0.1 percent and not enough about the first 99.9. It’s a good practice for our lives as a whole, too.

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

Algorithmic mass distraction: the experience of being served up an interruption engineered to capture your attention for a short period of time, before being served up the next interruption engineered to capture your attention for a short period of time, ad infinitum. Focus: concentrated and enduring effort pointed toward a specific aim. There is an ongoing battle between algorithmic mass distraction and focus. Excellence requires winning it.

But our brains are not computers. Effective multitasking is really nothing more than effective delusional thinking.

Excellence, and the deep satisfaction it brings, requires the ability to sustain focus. And the ability to sustain focus is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in today’s world.

The most effective strategy for deep focus is identifying and removing distractions. Full stop. It may not be easy, but it sure is simple.

You may not find a perfect solution, but you can continually ask yourself, What is coming between me and intimacy with what I’m doing, and how can I best remove those barriers and distractions?

Research from across diverse fields demonstrates that the ideal window for attentive engagement11 ranges from about fifty minutes to two hours. Anything less and you don’t give yourself enough time to get into a rhythm. Anything more and fatigue sets in.

Focus is like a muscle: Use it or lose it; even if you were once strong, regaining your fitness takes time and effort. But with patience and repetition, it comes back.

Schedule deep-focus blocks on your calendar, lest they all too easily get lost in the commotion of life. They are a meeting with yourself and your most important work, which ought to make them the most important meeting there is.

The quality of your attention shapes the quality of your life.

discipline is: You are going to do the things you need to do, regardless of how you feel about them . .

Your emotions can change on a dime and often not for any good reason. It takes self-reflection to sit with emotions and ask whether or not they are reflecting truth or something else—before acting on them. But many people believe that just because they feel something, it must be the same thing as truth.

But I still do all those things consistently. Why? Because I know that if I don’t do them, I will not achieve my goals. So I do them regardless of my feelings. I’m not saying to not have feelings. I’m not saying to not pay attention to them. I’m simply saying that sometimes you need to disconnect your immediate feelings from the things you know you need to do in order to reach your goals and build a great life.”

We think we need to feel good to get going, but often the opposite is true: We need to get going to give ourselves a chance at feeling good. This is where discipline comes into play—a commitment to consistently showing up requires it.

When we try to force ourselves3 to feel differently, we’re liable to get even more stuck in our current state. What we can control, however, is our behavior—that is, our actions. And if we take action, we can change our mood and mind. Action can create motivation.

In moments when motivation is lacking, our self-talk can be as simple as I’m feeling a bit flat right now, but that’s okay. Let’s try to nudge into action and see what happens as a result.

The challenge is mustering enough energy to get going on the things that matter to us, even when we don’t feel like it. It can help to think of the initial oomph as activation energy.

Discipline bridges the gap between motivation and action, making the former less necessary for the latter. When you have discipline, you don’t need to feel a certain way to show up and get started. You just do. Discipline is not a chest-thumping, performative act of toughness. It is being the kind of person who shows up for what matters and does what you need to do. The irony is that when you do hard things that you don’t feel like doing in the short run, you usually end up feeling better in the long run.

When you cultivate discipline, you are placing a constraint on whether or not to get started. You don’t have to think about getting started. You don’t have to feel a certain way to get started. You just get started.

Another type of discipline that is crucial to excellence is the discipline not to prejudge performance. There are days when I feel great and highly motivated to write, yet when I sit at my computer, nothing comes of it. There are days when I feel dreary and apathetic, but once I get going, I produce some of my strongest work. I’ve learned that it’s hard to predict which direction a writing session will go, so the best bet is always to get started and give myself a chance.

While these two philosophies—self-discipline and self-kindness—are often pitted against each other, the truth is they go hand in hand. If we are always beating ourselves up, we will not last. But if we never push ourselves, we won’t ever attain our full potential. Even the most excellent people endure doubts, intrusive thoughts, and periods of pain and apathy. The work is accepting these thoughts and feelings and showing up as best we can nonetheless. Sometimes the kindest thing is also the hardest—and what seems hard in the moment is the key to creating a better future. Combining self-discipline and self-kindness is a profound mindset shift that is essential to sustaining excellence. It’s the difference between self-talk that sounds like …

Showing up is hard. Setting constraints is hard. Delaying gratification is hard. All of which is to say that maintaining discipline is hard. It is important to remember that you can do hard things. But it is also important to remember that doing hard things becomes just a bit easier—and far more enduring—if you can learn to have your own back and be your own friend. Fierce self-discipline benefits from fierce self-kindness. These qualities are not opposites, they are complements. If you want to be an extraordinary badass, you’ve got to be kind to yourself, too.

Discipline is not a chest-thumping performative act of toughness. It is being the kind of person who shows up and does what you need to do.

Consistent progress requires periods of rest and renewal. It’s when our bodies rebuild and repair; when our minds become more creative, replenish willpower, and regain emotional control. We’d be wise to think of rest and renewal not as something we do at the expense of our primary activity but rather as an integral part of our commitment to sustaining excellence.

There is no free pass to excellence; we need to show up regularly, challenge ourselves, and push our limits in order to improve.

Stress plus rest equals growth.

Too much focus on rest and renewal has the ironic effect of creating exhaustion. If you are stressing about recovery metrics, then it is wise to consider ditching them. Once rest begins to feel like work, it is no longer rest.

As we previously discussed, activities such as walking, swimming, yoga, easy running, and hiking require just enough coordination to occupy the parts of our brain responsible for effortful thinking, allowing us to more easily zone out and mind-wander, both of which are associated with creativity and insight. Research shows as little as six minutes can produce benefits.

The modern science is interesting, but it shouldn’t be surprising. For the vast majority of our species’ history, we worked hard during the day and then unwound around the fire in the company of our tribe at night. We relax and rejuvenate when hanging out with friends, colleagues, and teammates because it is what we evolved to do.

There, scientists found that when we immerse ourselves in natural settings, we experience significant positive changes in various biomarkers related to stress. Spending time in nature reduces cortisol levels, diminishes fight-or-flight nerve activity, decreases blood pressure, lowers heart rate, and restores our attentional capacity.15 If you work or live in a bustling area, even just gazing out the window at greenspace or walking a few laps around an urban park can go a long way to help.

First and foremost: No form of rest is as powerful as sleep. During sleep, our bodies repair and grow; and our minds retain, consolidate, and connect all the information that we were exposed to throughout the day. Naps of between ten and thirty minutes may provide a boost in energy and creativity, but nothing can replace sleeping seven to nine hours every night.*

It can be helpful to think about sleep using three essential rules: 1.Do everything you can to prioritize sleeping seven to nine hours. 2.Do not freak out if for some reason you can’t sleep seven to nine hours. 3.Do not let rule 2 become an ongoing excuse for rule 1.

Remember, stress plus rest equals growth. If you want to push hard, you’ve got to recover, too.

It’s hard to step away from work you care about and identify with, but rest and renewal are crucial to progress.

The late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh described faith as “the confidence a farmer has1 in his way of growing crops. It is not blind. It is not some belief in a set of ideas or dogmas.”

The more reps we put in, the more faith we gain in our respective endeavors, and in ourselves. It is not blind or delusional faith. It is faith based on a concrete body of evidence, which is a powerful way to think about confidence.

Arrogant people are loud. They need to convince everyone, including themselves, that they are up to the task—the reason being they aren’t sure if they actually are. Underneath arrogance you’ll almost always find insecurity. Confident people are quiet. They know they’ve got what it takes. There is no need to waste anyone’s time or energy, including their own, hemming and hawing. Underneath confidence you’ll almost always find evidence.

The ability to remain calm amid challenges is a core element of what psychologists call self-efficacy: an evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up, working through challenges, and excelling in uncertain or highly charged circumstances.

Shoot the thousand daily jump shots. Practice your instrument every evening. Apprentice under the best chef in town. Study the greats in your field. Keep putting yourself out there, gradually increasing the challenges you undertake. Pay close attention when the going gets tough. By working through current challenges, you are developing self-efficacy for future ones.

If you are feeling unsure—be it on the start line of a marathon, the first page of an exam, or day one of launching a new business—the best thing you can do is pause to reflect on the evidence you’ve amassed. If you’ve put in the proper training, you can have the faith to trust it.

A good editor, coach, manager, mentor, or leader won’t call you up to bat until you are ready. It does not mean the at-bat will be comfortable, nor does it guarantee success. But you can own your seat nonetheless, stepping into the arena, taking your doubts along for the ride, and relying on evidence to remind yourself you belong.

Do you have what you need to own your seat? If so, own it. If not, what evidence do you need before you can? These are good questions to ask yourself, too.

When we have confidence, it means we’ve done the work to gain it. Doing the work to gain it is hard. And doing hard things makes us humble. It teaches us that we can push limits, but also that we have limits to begin with. Humility doesn’t just lead to charisma. It is also leads to growth. Once we think we know everything, we cease to keep knowing. Once we think we are the best, we cease to keep getting better. But there is always more to know, always room to improve. Knowledge and skill are continually evolving and advancing. If we want to evolve and advance with them, we must maintain an open mind. This is easier to do when we have confidence. Someone who is insecure perceives everything that challenges them or their views as a threat. Someone who is confident welcomes challenges, knowing at least some will make them better.

When we earn confidence, we also gain humility. We learn to own our seat while being open to growth and development.

Confidence comes from evidence. Trust your training.

Bruce Lee once said that “patience is not passive, it is concentrated strength.”

There is no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. Patience is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. It neutralizes our inclination to hurry and overemphasize acute results, and it lends itself to strength, stability, and lasting progress. I’ve yet to meet someone who has achieved excellence and who describes their process as being rushed.

to make a meaningful difference in just about anything of consequence, the work you put in needs to persist long enough to break through inevitable barriers and plateaus. What seems like a static period may not be a static period at all; you may just not yet be seeing the effects of your efforts.

Excellence is a long and windy road that is full of ups, downs, and everything in between, including periods of boredom.

“To take the master’s journey,” writes the Aikido master George Leonard, “you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so—and this is the inexorable fact of the journey—you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau,7 to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.”

as you age, your contributions and insights may shift toward wisdom and mentorship. These qualities are as vital as anything, and the world desperately needs more of both.

Pop culture says progress should be fast, predictable, and easy. The truth is that progress is often slow, nonlinear, and more challenging than you think. The actual secret to greatness: Pick your thing. Pick a good system for your thing. Surround yourself with people who support you doing your thing. Do your thing for a decade (or more).

The master, wrote the Taoist philosopher Lao-tzu, “accomplishes the great task11 by a series of small acts.”

Breaking goals down into their component parts and then focusing on those parts is essential to patience, and therefore it is essential to excellence.

But if we can stay with the discomfort of waiting, if we can just hold on and avoid making reckless decisions and big mistakes, then we improve our odds of accomplishing something extraordinary. Stick to the process. Focus on the work itself. You can’t control what may or may not be down the road. All you can control is your effort right now.

Gukesh may only win that match against Carlsen one out of one hundred times, which is why it’s so important to show up for the other ninety-nine.

the more we produce, the better we become.

The relationship between quantity and quality can be explained by two primary causes: The first traces itself back to luck; if we keep showing up and producing, we improve the odds that eventually everything comes together. The second is that the longer we do something—the more reps we put in, the more we experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t—the more we improve.

Iowa State football coach Matt Campbell, “If you fall in love with the process, then eventually the process loves you back. But see, here’s what’s crazy about that. You don’t know when it is going to love you back. All you have to do is be prepared for your opportunity when it’s ready to love you back.”

Most things that are worthwhile take time. As they say in baseball: Be patient, it’s a nine-inning game.

Excellence is a long-term endeavor, and some innings are better than others. In numerous situations, both personal and professional, we convince ourselves the current inning is the only one there is and ever will be. But if we zoom out, we realize so many of the meaningful projects in our lives are nine-inning games. The perceived immediacy of whatever it is we are dealing with relaxes, and we grow to realize the fundamental value of patience and persistence. Excellence is not about being a champion of one inning. It’s about playing all nine as best we can.

Routines provide structure to our days, offer a sense of predictability in an inherently unpredictable world, help us to activate when we are feeling low, and keep us grounded when we are bursting with energy. They automate decisions so we don’t burn willpower and prime our minds and bodies to perform. Routines support focus, consistency, discipline, patience, confidence, and many other factors of excellence.

We cannot develop optimal routines by mimicking what other people do. While it’s true that certain behaviors are close to universally effective—such as exercise, social connection, and sleep—even then, there is no single best time, place, or way to engage in each. It is only through astute self-awareness and experimentation that we discover what works best for us.

developed an evidence-based questionnaire4 to help people determine their chronotype. Answering the following three questions gives you a good idea of where on the lark-owl spectrum you fall: 1.“If you were entirely free to set up your evening, with no commitments in the morning, what time would you go to sleep?” 2.“You have to do two hours of physically hard work. When would you do this work if you were entirely free to plan your day?” 3.“You have to take a two-hour test, which you know will be mentally exhausting. When would you choose to take the test if you were free to choose?”

Instead of thinking about managing your time, think about managing your energy.

Developing a few anchors fosters stability, predictability, and strength in a world of chaos, complexity, and infinite choices.

You want your adherence to routines to be rugged and flexible. If you are not rugged, you’ll get pulled this way and that by the whims of life, and it will be near impossible to show up at your best consistently. But if you are not flexible, if you try to rigidly stick to your routines in all circumstances and at all costs, you’ll build up tension and stress until one day you break. 1.The first rule of routines is to develop them and do everything you can to uphold them. 2.The second rule of routines is to release from them when life demands it. 3.The third rule of routines is not to let rule 2 become a chronic excuse for rule 1.

It’s the seemingly small day-to-day routines that set the foundation for greatness. Everyone loves to talk about the latter, but you don’t get there without the former.

Gumption is a forward inertia, a sense of progress and possibility, a strong yet measured enthusiasm. As you’ll see in the coming pages gumption is not an innate trait; with the right mindset and actions, nearly anyone can develop it. When you have gumption you perceive obstacles as challenges rather than threats; you problem-solve and bring your creativity to bear. Gumption doesn’t come to the fore in the absence of obstacles; rather, it’s a feeling that no obstacle can stop you.1

Gumption emerges out of a commitment to caring, consistency, focus, discipline, patience, and all the other factors we’ve discussed so far. When we’re filled with gumption, we have a general sense of where we’re going and how we’ll get there, but we also pick up on real-time cues, making micro-adjustments along the way. It’s when skill, attentiveness, and energy overlap; when we enter into an intimate and engaging dance with our pursuit, be it training for a marathon, molding pottery, or running a restaurant. We sense what is happening around us and respond at the height of our powers. We gain a feel for what we’re doing. We settle into a groove.

The point is that when you find yourself in a rut, stacking up a few victories, no matter how small or basic, goes a long way to help.

Some of the most creative breakthroughs occur5 when an idea that works well in one domain gets grafted to another and revitalizes it.”

A good ego-check partner is someone who knows you and your work well, commits to telling you the truth, and maintains a watchful eye for ego bloat.

A human ego will expand to fill the space it’s given. As such, our egos require constraints. Since a growing ego is incapable of constraining itself, it’s crucial to surround ourselves with people who can help.

Another common gumption trap is rigidity. The things that work, work great—until they get in the way. We must be able to release even from our strengths when necessary.

The ability to push ourselves to the limit and beyond is a superpower—until what we really need is a break. Unrelenting self-discipline can take us to the top of our game. But without caution, it can also lead us down a steep slope of isolation, resentment, and burnout. Routines are key to excellence, but at some point, the universe asks us to release from them. Strength without flexibility leads to rigidity. Flexibility without strength leads to instability. The superhero idiom that our greatest powers become our gravest weaknesses contains more than a kernel of truth.

Gumption is not about the absence of obstacles. It’s a feeling that no obstacle can stop you.

Discomfort is a natural by-product of pushing our limits—which is to say discomfort is a natural by-product of growth.

Brave new world shifts me from a tense, closed state of fear into a more playful and open state of curiosity. I become less scared about what could happen and more interested to find out. I feel and perform better as a consequence. Herein lies the power of curiosity, a formidable antidote to fear that makes even the most challenging moments more satisfying. Curiosity is also integral to growth.

Our hardwiring for curiosity doesn’t suddenly disappear when we reach a certain age. What happens is that our focus shifts to achieving specific outcomes, avoiding failure, and safeguarding our egos. Rather than perceiving challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, we view them as potential threats. Our fear of failure overrides the joy of exploration. We do everything possible to prioritize comfort and stability without realizing we’re inhibiting our growth. We become nervous and scared instead of excited and curious.

The SEEKING pathway facilitates planning and problem-solving. It underlies our ability to exert agency and consciously move toward challenges instead of being overtaken by fear, descending into helplessness, or impulsively running away. The PLAY pathway is linked to exploration, discovery, and adventure. When we embrace a mindset of curiosity, we activate the SEEKING and PLAY pathways.

Curiosity is what neuroscientists call a reward-based behavior.6 It feels good, motivates us to keep going, and builds upon itself. When we adopt curiosity as a default attitude toward challenges, we put ourselves in a better position to meet the moment and grow.

Curiosity is intimately linked to growth. There’s a curiosity to figure out what you are capable of. A curiosity to better know your craft. A curiosity to better know yourself. All are part and parcel of excellence.

Where some people become bored and disinterested, others are curious and fascinated.

The participant-self is playing the finite game, which is time bound and may include success or failure, winning or losing, a great day or a terrible day. The ethnographer-self is grounded in the infinite game, which knows no end. The only goal is to continue playing, learning, and growing. Excellence is an infinite game. The goal is the path and the path is the goal. So much of success simply comes down to staying on it.

The difference was that the non-elites viewed stress as something to avoid, ignore, or try to dampen. They felt stress would hurt their performance. The elites, on the other hand, got curious about what they were feeling in their bodies and interpreted their sensations as neutral, if not aiding their performance. What the non-elites immediately perceived as fear, the elites saw as their bodies preparing to rise to the occasion. As a result, the sensations didn’t bother the elites10 nearly as much. They channeled their heightened arousal into explosiveness in the pool. Additional research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that instead of trying to calm ourselves before consequential events, such as public speaking, it’s better to “reappraise pre-performance anxiety as excitement.” When we attempt to suppress pre-event nerves, we are inherently telling ourselves that something is wrong. Not only does this make the situation worse, but it also requires energy to fight the feeling of anxiety, energy that could be better spent on the task at hand. Rather than trying to push away what we are feeling, we’re better off remaining curious and labeling our nerves as excitement. Doing so shifts us from a threat mindset11 (stressed and apprehensive) to an opportunity mindset (interested and ready to go). Instead of thinking I feel off, something must be wrong, try thinking, This is my nervous system rising to the occasion; or I am feeling this way because I care about what I am doing; or Once I get started, my training will take over and I’ll be fine.

Excellence is an infinite game: The goal is the path, and the path is the goal. Whether you play basketball or cello, repair cars or build tables, write books or coach teams, your craft can be a vessel for self-discovery.

Failure sucks. It is also inevitable. Keep going.

What doesn’t kill us usually makes us stronger, but only with time.

Remember, the things you care about break your heart. But you’ve got to trust the love of the pursuit is big enough to hold the hurt of failure.

Succeed or fail, the journey is almost always better when you have the right climbing partners. If you travel alone, you risk becoming isolated, resentful, and burning out. If you travel with others, you’re likely to find joy, meaning, and purpose.

The word compete comes from the Latin roots com, which means “together,” and petere, which means to “seek,” “rise up,” or “strive.” In its most genuine form, even competition is about rising together.

The real competitive advantage is a supportive community2 where everyone is dedicated to growth and lifting each other up. This sort of culture makes doing the hard thing a little easier, whether the hard thing is a specific task, maintaining an optimistic outlook during a string of setbacks, or grinding through a tedious stretch of work.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it,” he writes. “What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”3 Mastery and mattering are core psychological needs.

When we think about progress and performance, we tend to emphasize the individual. But that’s only half the story. Working to build a better self almost always means working to build a better community around it.

If, however, we make it a priority to stay connected to a community of practice, what we’ll get during setbacks is a pat on the back and some much-needed love. That’s because everyone has undergone the same challenges. They know how hard it is. They get it. This shared understanding is priceless. It’s why countless studies find that a central factor of resilience is social support. We can rack up all the wins in the world, but if we don’t have people to share them with, it’s not long before the whole pursuit begins to feel empty.

When we look back on our existence, we are less likely to focus on the gold medal, promotion to regional vice president, bestseller, or any other outward achievement than we are to cherish the bonds and relationships we forged along the way.

We are all mirrors reflecting onto one another. The people with whom we surround ourselves shape us.

If you are always angry, you won’t have much fun. And if you don’t have much fun, you probably won’t last long in whatever it is you do.

Joy, on the other hand, is a clean and renewable source of energy.

Psychologists distinguish between two types of passion: harmonious and obsessive. With harmonious passion, you are absorbed in an activity because you love how the activity makes you feel. A harmoniously passionate artist creates because she finds joy in the craft. With obsessive passion, you get hooked on an activity because of external rewards and recognition. An obsessively passionate artist creates because she wants to boast about prestigious gallery shows and other accolades.

Sustaining greatness requires the drive to keep pushing, but it also requires releasing from our tunnel vision on what lies ahead and learning to slow down and find joy where we are. It is not either-or. We need both of these qualities.

Do the work, let the outcome take care of itself, and find joy in the process. Research shows that an excessive focus on outcomes4 pushes us toward insecure striving (which makes people more susceptible to stress and anxiety), whereas those who find joy in the process perform from a place of security and freedom (and as a result, do better).

What makes for greatness is being intense and joyful. It’s the joy that makes the ferocious dedication, drive, and intensity sustainable.

Excellence knows no end, but there are milestones along the way:

“A life is no longer structured by sections, completions, thresholds, and transitions,” writes Han. “Instead, there is a rush from one present to the next, an aging without growing old.”

It’s wise to have at least one milestone per year. If you step back and evaluate your most important pursuits, you could probably pick it out right now. It’s also wise to separate internal milestones from external ones, at least whenever possible. The day you complete a project is every bit as important as the day it is published, released, or judged by others. The decisive achievement with excellence is that we got to where we are. But in order to reap the journey’s full rewards, it’s vital to pause and reflect along the way. What went well? What didn’t go well? What am I proud of? What would I do differently next time? What relics or artifacts from this stage of the journey can I keep to remember all I’ve learned and become? When we don’t take time to pause and reflect, when we rush from one accomplishment to the next, we surrender gravity in both senses of the word: something that holds us to the path and something that enriches it with weight and significance.

When we commemorate specific moments on our path, we make our experiences concrete and give them opportunities to soak in. They become a part of who we are.

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

By marking milestones and moments of completion, the broader journey, the one that never ends, becomes that much more satisfying.

Experience plus reflection equals growth.

Excellence is not perfection or winning at all costs. It is a process of becoming the best performer—and person—you can be. When you pursue goals that challenge you, put forth an honest effort, and endure highs, lows, and everything in between, you gain self-respect that nobody can take away.

What does it look like for you to care deeply, to live with inner and outer quality? To set the right goals and keep the main things the main things? To cultivate focus, discipline, and gumption? To own your seat? To stay consistent, patient, and build community? To pour yourself into the big projects of your life while prioritizing rest and renewal, so that your efforts aren’t mere flickers in time but sustainable and long-lasting? How can you push forward with intensity while holding on to joy and fulfillment?

Excellence is core to who we are. When we reclaim excellence, we reclaim our humanity. —Brad

Appendix 1: Guide to Application As an ongoing reference, here are the key ideas and practices that fall under each factor of excellence. Think of it as a comprehensive guide, a menu of options to inform a practice that, over time, you’ll make your own. Excellence means involved engagement in worthwhile pursuits that support your values and goals. It combines mastery and mattering. Care •Passion doesn’t strike like lightning; it develops over time. •First comes fit, then comes grit. •When you care about something deeply, you make yourself vulnerable; it is the cost of stepping into the arena, of having skin in the game. •If you try to protect yourself by coasting or phoning it in, you miss out on the fullness and texture of life. •Work to build an identity house that has more than one room. •It takes courage to care. Goals •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. •The best goals align with your values and push you ever so slightly outside of your comfort zone. •SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) work great for beginners, but as we become more advanced, we may benefit from goals that are broader and open-ended. •Adopt a process-over-outcomes mindset: Set a goal, break it down into its incremental steps, and then focus on nailing those steps. •Be the best at getting better—and remember that better isn’t just about objective performance but also about becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser. Trade-Offs •Drop the weight of balance; it’s an illusion. •You can’t do it all; figure out what matters and prioritize as best you can. •Think about having different seasons of life for different pursuits. •Too often we think a great feat was accomplished despite the approach being basic and uncomplicated, when in fact it was accomplished because the approach was basic and uncomplicated. •Whenever possible, strive for simplicity: focus on the 99.9 percent and not the 0.1. •Keep the main things the main things—in craft and life. Focus •We are at our best when devoting full attention to one task at a time, creating a sense of intimacy with whatever it is we are doing. •Use deep-focus blocks for important activities. •Digital devices fragment our attention even when they are turned off, face down, and not our own. As such, it is wise to remove them altogether. Out of sight is out of mind. •The ideal window for attentive engagement ranges from about fifty minutes to two hours, followed by five-to-thirty-minute breaks. •Focus is like a muscle: We need to train it. Consistency •Excellence does not come from intensity; it comes from consistency. •Raise the floor: What you do on your bad days is every bit as important as what you do on your good days—don’t freak out. Adjust your plan, give what you’ve got to give, and then move on. Don’t let a bad day spiral into a bad week. •When your North Star is…