excellence, actually
By Steve Magness, Brad Stulberg, & Clay Skipper
<strong>"excellence, actually" </strong>is a podcast from The Growth Equation, hosted by Steve Magness, Brad Stulberg, and Clay Skipper. Drawing on their years of working and corresponding with Olympians, coaches, executives, world-class physicians, and other elite-level achievers in their coaching practice and professional careers, they give you the mental and physical tools, practices, habits, and frameworks used by the best in the world in the pursuit of excellence. Each episode will give you concrete ideas and tips to use in your life immediately to help you become more meaningfully engaged in the pursuits that support your goals and your values. This is not the performative nonsense that is peddled online by grifters and influencers, but the evidence-based systems that work for the best in the world. This is excellence, actually. (This podcast used to appear under the name <em>FAREWELL</em>.)<p> Hosted on Acast. See <a href="https://acast.com/privacy" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.</p>
43 episodes
All Episodes
Managing Long-Term Consistency Through Systems Instead of Intensity
Consistency is a system, not a streak. Instead of relying on high intensity efforts that lead to burnout, choose sustainable, low effort alternatives. This builds the durability you need to achieve long term excellence rather than short lived, unsustainable bursts of activity.
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Building Resilience Through Identity Diversification and Minimum Viable Routines
True resilience during disruption comes from moving away from a performance-based identity toward a stable internal foundation. When you maintain a minimum viable routine, you keep your sense of agency and avoid the burnout that comes from rigid, all-or-nothing thinking.
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How Private Equity Exploits Parental Anxiety in Youth Sports
The 40 billion dollar youth sports industry profits from parental anxiety. It traps families in a high-stakes cycle that values short-term trophies more than long-term development. Learn how to help your child enjoy the game again.
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Mastering Internal States to Achieve Performance Through Mindfulness
Top performance comes from mastering the gap between a stimulus and your response, rather than trying to force a specific outcome. You must learn to quiet your internal critics and develop the mindfulness needed to execute tasks when under extreme pressure.
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Evaluating Health Interventions Using a Three-Legged Evidence Heuristic
Choosing immediate performance gains over long-term safety turns your body into a high-risk experiment. Protect your health by using this three-part guide to distinguish between genuine medical breakthroughs and dangerous, unproven shortcuts.
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Developing Autonomy Through Adaptive Coaching and Long-Term Influence
True coaching focuses on changing how a person sees themselves instead of just handing them a rigid training plan. Master coaches build lasting performance by encouraging autonomy and making themselves unnecessary, which helps athletes succeed on their own when under pressure.
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How Durability and Systemic Design Drive Elite Performance
High performance comes from long-term consistency rather than short bursts of intensity. It also requires using joy strategically to handle pressure. Avoid the trap of playing not to lose, as this mindset systematically undermines your ability to win.
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Leveraging Anxiety as a Tool for Elite Performance
Anxiety is a natural part of doing work that matters, not a defect you need to fix. When you suppress your stress response, you often dull the very conscientiousness that drives your success. Learn to channel that energy rather than trying to eliminate it.
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Systemic Control Builds Long--Term Endurance and Performance
Elite endurance comes from stacking small, unglamorous layers of consistent work instead of chasing heroic efforts. By mastering your internal control perimeter, you can build long-term durability and sustain peak performance.
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Replacing Performative Balance With Value--Aligned Prioritization
Trying to find balance is a psychological trap that wastes your energy and limits your potential. If you want to achieve mastery, stop chasing a performative sense of equilibrium. Instead, focus on radical prioritization based on your values and accept the need to make deliberate, long-term trade-offs.
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Building Resilience Through Non-Instrumental Activities and Objective Feedback
True performance means moving past the trap of constant optimization. When you balance your personal life, your craft, and your community through pursuits that have no instrumental goal, you build the resilience you need to thrive when external validation and metrics inevitably fail.
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Mastering High-Stakes Performance Through Process-Driven Micro-Execution
To perform well under pressure, stop obsessing over the final result and adopt a "next play" mentality. Focus on immediate, evidence-based wins to avoid the paralysis that comes from looking at large-scale deficits. This approach helps you build sustainable momentum.
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Anchoring Creative Longevity in Intrinsic Curiosity and Systems
Long-term creative success depends on a reliable system for handling failure instead of trying to optimize your own biology. When you base your identity on intrinsic curiosity, you avoid the paralyzing filters that come with expertise and shield your work from the ups and downs of the market.
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Emotional Investment Builds Antifragility Through Real Work
True excellence isn't about perfect metrics or biohacks--it's built through emotional courage and daily commitment. Those who embrace discomfort, show up when it's hard, and care deeply outperform the brittle achievers of *schmexcellence*--not because they're optimized, but because they've learned to thrive in the mess.
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Jim Ryun's Mastery: Ownership, Discomfort, and Vision
Embrace ownership and strategic discomfort to unlock extraordinary potential, transforming challenges into a blueprint for lasting mastery and competitive advantage.
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Mastering Un-Excellent Days for Sustained Performance
Master the art of extracting value from un-excellent days. Learn how to prevent a single off-day from derailing your week, month, or career by building resilience and compounding small wins.
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Distinguishing Between Biological Hurt and Physical Harm
Pain is often a prediction your brain makes rather than a direct report of physical damage. Learning to distinguish between feeling hurt and actual physical harm helps you avoid unnecessary cycles of alarm and can speed up your recovery.
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How Constraints Forge Excellence and Drive Innovation
Discover how deliberate limitations, not endless options, unlock creativity and productivity. Learn to transform constraints into powerful engines of focus and achievement.
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Sub-2-Hour Marathon: Convergence of Technology, Nutrition, and Mindset
Human limits are often self-imposed. Discover how technology, nutrition, and belief converge to shatter perceived ceilings and achieve the impossible.
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Cognitive Decline: How Digital Convenience Erodes Thinking
The digital age is eroding our capacity for deep thought and original creation. Learn how to build mental resilience against cognitive decline and gain a durable advantage.
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Elite Running's Blueprint: Embrace Discomfort for Sustainable Performance
Elite running reveals that true mastery comes not from avoiding discomfort, but from strategically embracing it. Learn how to build resilience and achieve sustainable peak performance by understanding this counterintuitive approach.
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Small Actions Consistently Drive Sustainable Personal Change
Lasting change builds not from heroic acts, but from consistently showing up with low-resistance actions. Discover how small efforts forge profound transformation and dismantle inadequacy.
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Psychology of Performance: Chasing vs. Protecting Leads
Playing not to lose paralyzes performance. Discover how to embrace discomfort and maintain a relentless "promote" mindset to win every moment, whether chasing a deficit or protecting a lead.
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The Paradox of Performance: Fusing Support with Intense Challenge
Unlock peak performance by mastering the paradox of unwavering support coupled with intense, precise challenge. This approach fosters resilience and achievement beyond simple encouragement or criticism.
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Harnessing Inner Critic for Peak Performance Via "Good Enough Parent"
Master peak performance by harnessing your inner critic and embracing discomfort, not eliminating it. Learn to let innate capabilities surface under pressure for lasting gains.
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Mastering Momentum: Sustained Effort Over Peak Achievement
Mastery isn't about peak moments, but consistent process. Learn to cap celebration or despair and immediately return to the craft to build unstoppable momentum.
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Beautiful Suffering: Agency and Intrinsic Motivation Unlock Joy in Challenge
Find joy in challenges by cultivating agency and understanding intrinsic motivation. This "beautiful suffering" transforms struggle into a sustainable competitive advantage, fostering resilience and genuine passion.
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Navigating Fleeting Success and AI's Creative Dawn
Success is a fleeting moment, but fulfillment lies in the daily climb. AI democratizes creation, but human direction is key to unlocking its true power.
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Olympic Crucible: Courage, Compromise, and Psychological Pitfalls
Discover how the relentless pursuit of victory can corrupt ethics and how true excellence demands more than just winning. Learn to navigate pressure and uphold values for sustainable success.
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Lilah Fear's Elite Performance: Leveraging Discomfort for Peak Resilience
Leverage discomfort and collaboration to build resilience. Elite performers strategically use pressure and feedback, transforming rivals into motivators for peak performance, even in challenging conditions.
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Lilah Fear: Pressure as Catalyst for Peak Performance
Transform pressure into your greatest asset. Learn how embracing vulnerability, fostering connection, and detaching from outcomes unlocks peak performance and sustained excellence.
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The "Win at All Costs" Mentality Erodes Health Industry Integrity
The relentless pursuit of success can erode ethics, leading to rationalized deception. Prioritize integrity to build enduring value and gain a strategic advantage in a world seeking authenticity.
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Embodied Intelligence: Thinking With the Body for Peak Performance
Unlock peak performance by thinking *with* your body, not just *about* it. Discover how elite performers tap into intuitive wisdom for effortless excellence.
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Embracing Vulnerability and Gumption for Sustained Excellence
True excellence means embracing vulnerability and deep caring, not perfection. Cultivate gumption through focused work and deliberate refueling for sustained effort and self-transformation.
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Prioritize Function Over Form For Resilient Performance
Routines should prioritize function over form, enabling peak performance by cultivating a desired mental and physical state, not just rigid adherence. Adaptability is key when disruptions occur.
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Value-Driven Goals and Environmental Design for Sustainable Habit Change
Shift from outcome-driven resolutions to value-driven habits. Design your environment to pull you toward desired behaviors, embrace small actions, and accept that managing procrastination is more effective than eliminating it.
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Cultivating Excellence Through Engaged Effort and Process
Excellence is engaged commitment to worthwhile pursuits, not perfection. Build sustainable success through antifragility, discipline, and focusing on process over outcomes.
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Curiosity, Joy, and Experience Drive Ultrarunning Performance and Fulfillment
Embrace curiosity and joy to discover capabilities beyond perceived limits, transforming challenges into opportunities for growth and sustainable, extraordinary performance.
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Reframing Pain and Embracing Control for Audacious Goals
Reframe pain as connection, embrace discomfort, and focus on controllable actions to overcome extreme challenges and achieve audacious goals.
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Embracing Suffering as a Practice for Mental Fortitude
Embrace suffering as a deliberate practice to cultivate mental toughness. By setting internal standards and reframing negative emotions as growth opportunities, you build resilience to navigate any challenge.
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Talent Development: Effort, Opportunity, and Growth Mindset Over Innate Ability
Talent is not just innate ability; it's a complex mix of effort, opportunity, and fit that unfolds over time. Focus on growth and effort, not just labels, to unlock true potential and fulfillment.
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Sustaining Drive: Fulfillment in Process, Not Just Outcome
Lasting fulfillment comes from the challenging process of meaningful work, not just achievement. Protect your focus by reframing tedious tasks and maintaining minimum effective habits.
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Mental Fitness: Resilience, Emotional Regulation, and Psychological Flexibility
Train your mental fitness like an athlete, building resilience, emotional regulation, and psychological flexibility to navigate life's challenges and optimize performance.
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