Reflect: Excellence is not a Destination

"Excellence is not a destination. It is a standard of giving something your best shot, 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."

Seemingly trivial activities such as deadlifting a certain amount of weight or running a faster mile can be filled with meaning insofar as they align with your values. That’s because when you are working on an activity, the activity is also working on you. — The Way of Excellence​

Nobody Wanted This Olympic Hero—Yet He Never Stopped Showing Up

Connor Hellebuyck made 41 saves in the gold medal game for Team USA. Canada outshot the US by 14. Without Hellebuyck's extraordinary performance, the US gets blown out. It's as simple as that.
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A decade ago, not a single major junior league in North America thought Hellebuyck was worth drafting. The story of how he went from an undrafted afterthought to Olympic hero teaches you a whole lot about resilience.

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Hellebuyck came out of Walled Lake Northern High School in Commerce, Michigan. (Just down the road from where Brad grew up.) Northern wasn't a hockey factory. Hellebuyck wasn't some phenom who was a fixture on the travel team circuit. He was basically a better-than-average small school varsity goalie with a dream.
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He went undrafted by both the two main junior leagues that feed college and professional hockey. No one wanted him. His dream appeared to be dead. So, as an 18-year-old, he drove by himself for 12 hours from Michigan to Minnesota for an open tryout for low-level minor league hockey.
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At the tryout, he was noticed by one team, the Jackalopes: a hockey team in Odessa, Texas; the town known for two things: oil and the movie Friday Night Lights. It's a city where football is religion, and few know hockey even exists.

His former goalie coach Joe Clark remembered: "We had like eight goalies at tryouts, no one knew anything about him. Connor stood out. He made the team, and he was a no-brainer for us as a staff. But he really had no resume whatsoever before that."

Hellebuyck quickly showed he belonged, leading the league in total saves and winning both rookie of the year and goaltender of the year. It seemed like he'd finally gotten his breakthrough.

The only problem: hardly anyone noticed. U-Mass Lowell was the only school to offer Hellebuyck a spot. His first college start went so poorly that he got pulled and benched for over a month. Most people spiral in that moment. The evidence is beating them over the head that they just aren't going to make it. Their inner dialogue goes something like, "I'm not good enough, the stage is too big, I don't belong here."

Hellebuyck, however, called his old goal keeper coach, Joe Clark, and told him, "The game is not as fast as I just made it out to be."

Clark couldn't believe it! Hellebuyck had just been benched, and his takeaway wasn't that it was time to move on or insecurity. Rather, it was that he'd been over-prepared. He expected the game to be faster. It gave a clue into how he saw failure, and why he's so resilient.

We all have an inner story, a narrative that helps us make sense of our highs and lows. When something bad happens, we have a choice as to how we are going to integrate that experience into our story.
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​Story one: I got pulled because I'm not ready or good enough.
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​Story two: I got pulled because I was putting too much pressure on myself and expecting the game to be higher tempo than it was.
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It's easy to default to the former. Hellebuyck chose the latter.

"I was more ready, more prepared than I had given myself credit for."

By the end of the season, he'd backstopped U-Mass Lowell to its first Frozen Four in program history. In two seasons, he had a 38-12-2 record, a 946 save percentage, and 12 shutouts. He won the inaugural Mike Richter Award for being the best goalie in college hockey. All from a kid who couldn't get drafted by a junior league three years earlier.

Here's how Hellebuyck summed it up:

"All the hardships that I had to go through early in my career were lessons learned. That's all I use them for. I didn't let them knock me down. I just kind of created a version of myself where I was just going to continue to adapt."

His ultimate goal was now within reach. He was drafted in the 5th round, 130th overall by the Winnipeg Jets. He worked his way up from the minor leagues to becoming a starter in 2017. Over the next several years, it looked like he had finally arrived: he'd won three Vezina Trophies for being the best goalie in the NHL and even the Hart Trophy for the league MVP. According to most measures, he was the top regular-season goalie of his generation.

But the regular season is just that. Hellebuyck couldn't win when the lights shone brightest. In the 2023 playoffs, he gave up four goals in a series-deciding game against Las Vegas. In the 2024 playoffs, he went 1-4 against Colorado with an abysmal .864 save percentage. Last spring, he got pulled three times against St. Louis in the first round.
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​The Daily Faceoff, a popular hockey publication, explained: "You can be the best goalie of a generation, but no one cares if you aren't for the one split second that means everything."
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Once again, Hellebuyck showed that a big part of resilience is ignoring the narrative that others write and penning your own story.

In the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, Canada threw 41 shots at him, and he stopped all but one. The best player in the NHL, Connor McDavid, had a breakaway in the second period that Hellebuyck denied. Devon Toews had a wide-open rebound with Hellebuyck out of position, and yet he somehow got his stick on it. He proceeded to shut down a 5-on-3 power play against some of the strongest players in history.
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Hellebuyck played out of his mind. Or, as the hockey saying goes, he was standing on his head. "Those critics, they can keep writing. But they don't understand goaltending. They don't understand my game. I know what I'm putting forward. I know what I'm building. These are the moments that prove it — not that I need to."

We often get resilience wrong. We think you either have it or don't, or that the way to develop resilience is by simply toughing it out. But Hellebuyck's story gives us the nuance of actual resilience: It's a skill built through repeated encounters with failure—but only if you process those failures correctly.

Every stop in his career told him he wasn't enough. But at each stop, he chose the same interpretation: this is information, not my identity.

Most people let setbacks become self-definitions. Hellebuyck let them become data points. The failures were real, but he got to choose where to go next. The guy who processes failure as calibration points rather than catastrophes is the guy you want when 41 shots are coming at him in a gold medal game.

Following the win, Hellebuyck described his own story the way he always has: "I would probably say the underdog story. Constantly going and being an underdog and just making it work, persevering and getting through."

There are many theories on resilience, but they all come down to a few core factors: lean into community; allow yourself to feel sadness or frustration or disappointment while maintaining hope at the same time; be patient and persistent; establish routines; commit to showing up over and over again; and own your story.

-Steve and Brad

P.s., If you find our newsletter valuable, you'll love our new book, The Way of Excellence, which just became an instant New York Times bestseller. The first part of the book is a big swing at excellence: what it is, why we're drawn to it, and why it matters. The second part explores the core factors that give rise to excellence in oneself and others. It's currently $7 off. We don't control these price drops or how long they last, so ​get (or gift!) your copy now​.

Listen: Back to Work: Navigating Success, A.I., and the Unknown

"Succeed or fail, what actually makes your life satisfying and fulfilling is how you spend your hours and days." On today's episode of “excellence, actually”, we're reflecting on how we spent the days of February—and the lessons we took from them, including Brad's words above on what he learned from sending another book out into the world. Today, we get into...

• What Brad's chaotic book launch taught him about achievement, fulfillment, responding not reacting, and putting into practice other lessons we discuss regularly.
• A debate about A.I.: how Steve uses it to help him do his work, why Brad hasn't touched it, and whether it can ever produce something truly great.
• A simple yet practical framework for anyone with a big project or who knows where they want to go but keeps getting stuck.

— Clay​

Discover: More Good Stuff

• If you're still on the fence about whether or not to get our new book, The Way of Excellence, this interview for Range Widely gives great insight into what the book is all about.
• How to find success the autotelic way.

Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter. We hope you found it valuable.

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