Reflect: Stop Searching for Perfection

There is no single best diet.

There is no single best workout plan.

There is no single best routine for productivity.

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Anyone who says otherwise is usually trying to sell you something.
Don't take them seriously.

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Ninety percent of plans and programs for most things are marketing snake oil. Ten percent can be effective. Find something amongst the latter ten percent that works for you and stay consistent. That's the name of the game for nearly everything. Fundamentals over fads. Over and over again.

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Sometimes The Hardest Part Isn’t Getting There—It’s Staying There

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If you aren’t a track and field fan, you may have missed the most impressive high school performance in the history of sport. It sounds like hyperbole, but in this case, there’s no other way to describe it.
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At the USA championships, Cooper Lutkenhaus, a 16-year-old sophomore, ran 1:42.27 for 800 meters. How good is that? It’s over 4 seconds faster than the previous American high school record, which itself was so fast that it had stood since 1996. It’s the 18th fastest time in history among all ages, and until a year ago, it would have broken the outright American Record.
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There’s also the fact that Lutkenhaus took on one of the most impressive fields of American pros and finished 2nd, just a tenth of a second behind the winner, who happened to be a World Champion at the event. The runners he beat included two other world champions, ranked among the top five in the world.
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Again, in case you forgot, we’re talking about a sophomore in high school, in a sport where peak performances don’t occur until much later. There have been otherworldly high school athletes before—Lebron, Tiger, Phelps, Ledecky, Wembanayna—and yet this performance stands out.
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But we’re not here to debate who is the high school GOAT. We want to cover what comes next.
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How do you nurture talent? How do you handle pressure? This isn’t just for the young; it’s a guide for all ages to navigating the inevitable rough spots that follow breakthrough performances.
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We’ll draw not only on our research, reporting, and writing, but also on our firsthand experience. One of us (Steve) was a former high school prodigy who didn’t live up to the hype. The other (Brad) worked at McKinsey and then the White House straight out of school, before burning out.
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Since those early days, we wrote our first major book together at a young age and it took off, only to be followed by a book that didn’t sell nearly as many copies. Yet we figured out how to stay steady, and we've had multiple successes since. We are imperfect (at best), but we care deeply about figuring out what it takes to achieve sustainable progress.
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1. Improvement won’t be linear.​
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When you’re a novice or early in your career, you get fooled. Improvement comes easily, and it follows a predictable pattern: work harder, see immediate payoff. Energy comes easily, as concrete progress is one of the foremost keys to intrinsic motivation. But as you develop further, that formula breaks down.
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Progress becomes messier. Instead of the straight line, it starts to look like a toddler's drawings: squiggly, sometimes backwards, other times all over the place. Motivation wanes; you stop seeing a clear path forward; and before you know it, frustration builds and you’re left asking: Why isn’t my hard work paying off anymore?​
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You’ve got to realign your expectations with reality: at some point, progress will slow down and eventually stall. In those moments, you need not panic. Trust the process. A big part of that includes viewing progress more accurately and acknowledging its nonlinear nature and complexity.
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2. Expand Your Definition of Success.

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As we just mentioned, progress is rocket fuel for motivation. If you see a path forward, you’ll persist. If you don’t, the drive to move forward becomes much more diminished. Perhaps this is shown most clearly in rodent experiments—when mice are in a maze with a path forward, they are stoked to figure it out. If mice are in a maze with no path forward, they panic and then shut down. In many ways, humans aren’t too different.
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If your definition of progress or success is too narrow (e.g., "Did I win?" "Did I run a PR?" "Did I get the promotion?"), you’re setting yourself up for fragility. But if you expand your definition of progress, you stoke your motivational flame and increase your persistence. You can finish third, but recognize that you improved your tactics in the race. You can sell fewer books, but see that your skill in writing has expanded greatly.
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Switching from judging progress solely based on outcomes to a more nuanced view of performance allows you to stay in the game and keep the motivation flowing. It’s about prioritizing mastery over any single result.
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3. Build a support system that removes pressure, not piles it on.

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When psychologist Ellen Winner studied prodigies, she found that those who had parents and teachers who supported but didn’t overwhelm them were able to translate their precocity into later success. Sadly, too often we get support systems that try to live vicariously through us, seeing it as their own shot at fulfilling the dreams they never achieved.
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This amplifies pressure for the phenom, making it seem like the only thing that matters is whether you run faster or score more points.
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A good support system does the opposite.
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It takes the load off. It provides an outlet and perspective. It’s there to help you zoom out when the world zooms makes you want to zoom in. It reminds you of who you really are, beyond how fast you run or how many deals you win.
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4. Don’t foreclose your identity.

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When you’re good at what you do, especially if it’s clear early in life, the world will try to turn that into your entire identity. You become “the runner”, or “the musician”, or “the whizz kid.”
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A singular identity is a fragile one. People who sustain great performance over long periods have outlets that provide a temporary respite from their main pursuit as well as a sense of meaning to hold onto when their main pursuit goes awry.

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A broader identity makes you tougher and more robust when your main pursuit punches you in the mouth. You’re much more resilient when one result can’t define you. Psychology researchers call this developing self-complexity, and it’s key to being rugged and flexible and enduring over the long haul.

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When your identity starts to narrow on a single activity, it’s important to broaden it. If you want to be great at what you do, then you have to be all-in. But you can’t be all-in, all the time. You need to have other outlets, other parts of life that bring you meaning.
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5. When things get hard, resist the urge to double down.

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The most common mistake people make when they hit a rough patch is to double down on the work: train harder, become more obsessed, try to force your way to a breakthrough.

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But this kind of forcing almost always backfires. It brings tension and a feeling that you have to get to the next performance step in order to validate yourself and your pursuit. The truth is that the opposite approach is often what leads to the breakthrough you are so desperately seeking.

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Take a break, gain some perspective, and spend quality time with friends and family. Do what you can to release the pressure, loosen the grip just a touch, and good things tend to happen.

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This is much easier said than done. When every cell is urging you to double down, that’s often a telltale sign you need to back off. Everyone messes this up and then learns the hard way (an injury, illness, period of burnout, or performance decline). But if you’re at least aware of this paradox, hopefully you won’t falter too many times (or too seriously).
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6. Remember why you enjoy the pursuit in the first place.

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Here’s how the story usually goes: you pursue a sport, activity, or job because it sparked curiosity and interest. It’s not because you thought it would make you a lot of money or bring you fame. But once you get good, everyone and everything starts to convince you that the rewards, accolades, and achievements is what it’s all about. You see the dollar signs, the large increase in followers, the fame, the status.
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We’re human. We can’t escape our attraction to shiny objects. But too often we lose the very attributes that helped us become great in the first place: our interest, joy, and curiosity get put on the back burner. You see this all the time in sport as athletes transition from amateur to more serious levels. You also see this when someone’s hobby becomes a job (it happened to both of us with writing).

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You need to counterbalance this pull. Remind yourself of the reason you fell in love with the pursuit in the first place. Maybe it’s ripping your favorite workout instead of the “optimal” one. Or taking time out of your workday to “play” with a project. It’s about shifting from a mindset of I need to exploit this for productivity to I get to explore this because I’m curious. It’s also vital to surround yourself with the right people—this does much to help make even the hard and tedious work more fun.
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7. Go on a quest.

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As we’ve written before, when researchers looked at Olympic medal-winning swimmers, they found that they moved from a performance to a quest approach to their sport. It’s not that winning didn’t matter. It’s that they started to see their sport as a quest for fulfilling their potential, as a venue to understand and figure out who they were.
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This simple shift allowed them to stay in the sport longer. It recalibrated their motivational systems away from trying to prove themselves to the world and toward the never-ending path of mastery for mastery’s sake.

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When you pursue mastery for mastery’s sake, you can thwart, even if only a little, the roller coaster of highs and lows and stay committed to long-term progress and discovery.
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8. Enjoy the ride.​
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You never know when it will end. You never know what will be your best performance until well after it’s over.
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It may be cliché advice, but too often when we are in the midst of our pursuit, we don’t stop to enjoy the ride. We’re hyper-focused on the next workout, the next sale, the next iteration. Don’t take the fact that you get to pursue something at a decently high level for granted.
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After all, it’s that journey that makes us feel alive. You only spend a minute on the podium. But you spend 99.9999 percent of your time and energy in the pursuit of getting there.
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Take a moment to pause and appreciate that you get to go on a quest to see how good you can be—and damn, is that an exhilarating experience.

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-Steve and Brad

Listen: Build Better Work Habits, Manage Anxiety, & Quit Leaking Energy

Since we launched “excellence, actually” (Apple/Spotify), we've gotten a bunch of questions from listeners and members of The Growth Equation Academy. So today we're answering four of your most pressing questions.

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(1) Where is the line between productive preparation and preparation that is done purely to curb anxiety about an upcoming event?

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(2) How should we transition between important tasks or deep work periods without leaking energy or focus?

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(3) How can we turn down an overactive mind-body threat or alarm system?

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(4) What role does the efficiency of A.I. have in our pursuits of excellence?

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So far, we’ve spent episodes going deep on individual topics, but today we shift into coach mode, with rapid-fire answers on the most effective, time-tested strategies and practices we've found to deal with each of these issues.

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-- Clay

Discover: More Good Stuff

• One of the Most Underrated Life Skills: Performing Well When You Don't Feel Your Best. A brief and inspiring case-study from a surgeon Brad coaches.
• An illuminating deep dive on the different types of perfectionism—and ways to move beyond their often painful grip.
• "OCD, sometimes called the doubting disease, is a checking disease too. “Well, let me check once more, just in case.” It’s a content creator trying to get into our fear-based algorithms—those that evolved to deal with actual tigers. It will exaggerate, distort, and use all sorts of tricks to make you watch its content. But every time you take the clickbait, you feed and strengthen the algorithm."
• Are you a beginner runner? Steve just released a video breakdown of how to train if you are a novice.
• Also, check out Cal Newport's breakdown of the hype surrounding A.I., where he takes a grounded approach to current developments in his piece for The New Yorker, "What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?​
• Seven principles that are typically viewed as opposites but that actually complement each other on the path to excellence.

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

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To go deeper, check out our books!

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P.S., if someone forwarded this email to you, you can sign up to get our weekly email here.

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