If we want to do well, we need to care. We need passion.

Yet, in a world that encourages us to define ourselves by our outcomes, we all too easily move from loving a pursuit to marrying it.

From wanting to do it, to needing to do it.

From "I failed at..." to "I am a failure."

A hyper-focus on the external causes our perspective to become overly narrow. We start protecting our sense of self and avoiding challenges, instead of daring to see what we can do.

It's good to want to win and succeed and hit the external mark; but it's not good—for us, or our performance—when that external mark completely consumes us.

(Read this on the Growth EQ website here.)

If there is one person who epitomizes a fierce competitive drive, it’s Michael Jordan. On the court he was relentless. He’d stare opponents down, take over games, and do whatever it took to win, even if that meant playing while sick. Off the court, it was more of the same. The actor and friend Will Smith once relayed, "If we're drinking water, Mike will be like, I'll race you."

Jordan is the poster child for the relentlessly competitive approach to performance and life. He won six championships, and is arguably the greatest basketball player of all-time. But his first championship didn’t come until seven years into his career. Before that, he was a bona fide star but couldn’t translate his dominance into playoff wins. It wasn’t until he joined forces with coach Phil Jackson that the rings started to flow.
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Jackson is known as a Zen Master for incorporating Eastern thought into coaching. In Western professional sports culture, an environment that emphasizes brashness and control, Jackson taught players about the downfalls of ego and attachment and how to let go. It's why Jackson asked one of his star players, Shaquille O’Neil, to read and write a book report on Siddhartha. Jackson felt Shaq was too materialistic and needed a dose of perspective on selflessness and what actually mattered.
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As Jackson wrote in his book, Eleven Rings, “After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority.”
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Jackson and Jordan balanced each other out.

It’s not that Jordan turned into a zen monk under Jackson’s tutelage, it’s just that he got enough of a pull in the direction of Zen and compassion, which allowed his competitive nature to flourish without destroying his team or himself. It's probably not a coincidence that another relentless competitor, Kobe Bryant, also won his championships under Jackson.

This sort of paradox doesn’t just apply to sports or with teams. It lies at the root of extraordinary performance in just about anything.

Look around at the advice given in many self-help books or by well-meaning influencers. They tell us that we need to be disciplined, motivated, give our all, set big goals, and chase our dreams. There’s a nugget of truth in the popular aphorisms. But they make a crucial mistake. They cut out the messiness and nuance that greatness demands. As Brad likes to say, fierce self-discipline requires fierce self-kindness. If you want to be a badass, you’ve got to learn to have your own back. If you want to be rugged, then you’ve got to be flexible.

Steve builds on this type of non-dual thinking in his new book Win the Inside Game, where he highlights how elite performance comes down to contrasts. Here are some of the most important ones:

Care And Don’t Care:

There’s no doubt about it, to perform at our best, we have to care. It’s often the first step in the process. As we progress from hobby to passion, we start training more and doing the little things we need to improve. We start setting goals, aiming to eke out a few more seconds off our half marathon best, or hit the crescendo with a bit more gusto. We move from running being something we do, to it being a part of who we are, shifting from “I like to run” to “I am a runner.” In that process, success becomes personal and important, often leading to a breakthrough.

But there’s a downside. If we care too much, we start attaching our identity to the thing. Every pitch, putt, or race feels like a test where our self-worth is on the line. We start performing out of a place of protection and fear. Losing starts to feel like an existential crisis.
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The secret is to let go, to not care, just enough. The right kind of caring is from the inside out. Caring deeply based on attachment to external validation or a specific result often leads to obsession and a win-at-all-costs mindset where we are controlled by our activity. Caring that comes from our internal values or focuses on the process leaves us with a similar intensity of passion but without the baggage. We choose to try to win instead of feeling like we need to.

Take it from Johnny Wilkinson, one of the greatest rugby players in history, “The idea of who you are gets in the way of everything. It’s the shirt versus the potential under it. You trap that potential with the idea you have of yourself.”

Stop trapping your potential. Take the jersey off. In the words of the great essayist T.S. Elliot, Teach Us to Care, And Teach Us Not to Care.

Try Hard And Relax:

Watch a world class runner at the end of a race. The gold medal may be within reach, but they’ve got the pressure of a competitor closing on them, the pain and discomfort are unbearable, their body and mind are screaming at them to tense up. And yet, somehow, they shift in the opposite direction: relaxation.
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Tension slows you down. Even though you need to squeeze every ounce of energy out of your body, trying harder backfires. This isn’t just true in sport. It’s true in life.

Our instinct is to try harder when the stakes are high. We double down in our work, trying to force our way through. But we can’t force our way to a breakthrough. Trying harder gets in the way of the 'aha' moments, where the insight comes from stepping away instead of leaning in. When researchers examined science and technology breakthroughs, they found they often occur when someone has worked hard, but then shifts to dabbling and exploring an unrelated problem.

As legendary sprint coach Tom Tellez once told Steve, "We have the wrong concept for effort. We think it means forcing, digging in, and trying harder. It doesn’t. It means trusting our body to do what we trained it to do. Effort should be subtle. Not loud.”

Set Big Goals, And Release from the Outcome:

Goals propel us. They narrow our focus and remind us of what matters. But at the same time, they can get in the way. That goal on your bulletin board shifts from being a motivator to being a reminder that you might fall short. Before you know it, your mind is in full-on protective mode, throwing every excuse or rationalization your way for why you should stop trying.
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For instance, in Steve’s running career, after coming close to breaking 4-minutes in the mile so many times, the goal started to become an impediment. Every race he entered, his mind would lock on the clock. And if he slipped up just a touch, coming by the first half-mile in 2:01 instead of 1:59, his mind would default to doom and gloom. “What’s the point? You’re too slow halfway.” And then, he’d shut down.
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World class marathoner Sara Hall has a better approach. She’s achieved success at the highest level, and sets big and ambitious goals. But she also knows when to throw the goal out the window. Before she set the American Record in the half-marathon, she decided to put that aim on the back burner. “I decided instead, the goal wasn’t a time but a feeling…Flying along, stride fluid, flanked by amazing women, loving finally getting a cold day.”

Hall explained after the race, “Sometimes you have to reframe your goal, because I never want to have a goal that’s stealing my peace, ripping me out of the present and keeping me from loving the people in my life well.”

In other races, Hall has thrown her watch away, tossing it into the crowd mid-race because the reminder of the outcome was getting in the way of being present and competing. She knew when to use outcomes and objectives and also when to throw them away, in this case quite literally.

Be Confident And Humble.

You need to give your brain evidence that you can handle the challenge at hand, that you’re prepared to face the demands. That’s true confidence. You know that you have a shot.

But without humility, confidence can transform into arrogance. And when arrogance dominates, you become blinded by your ego, which convinces you that you are better than you really are. You start preparing less. You think that you can fake your way through the situation. You stop exploring and learning, because you keep telling your brain that you have all the answers. Ultimately, you overestimate yourself and underestimate your opponent or situation.

A little doubt keeps us energized. Too much overwhelms us. It’s finding the middle way.

The simple motivational one-liners sound nice, but true performance is messy. If we want to live and perform to our potential, then we need to deal with nuance and paradoxical truths. It’s key to unlocking our best performance, and our best selves.

-- Steve and Brad

• Is all-in the way to reach the top? Steve wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal arguing that our obsession is getting in the way of us performing up to our potential.
• Cal Newport wrote a must-read piece (truly) on what the current internet gets wrong, and how it could be better. Be on the lookout in the coming weeks for us (along with Cal) to make an exciting announcement bringing this one step closer to reality. (Read/Subscribe)
• ​5 Key insights on getting the most out of yourself, including: our environment tells us who we should be and how to act, care deeply without it becoming all-consuming, belong instead of fit in.
• Want to win an Olympic medal? Build a house in your free time. A fascinating read from Dave Epstein: "(She) had a nearly unique ability to focus on her training to the exclusion of everything else. But (her sports psychologist) worried that she was a little too good at that. In the years before the Olympics, he told her to build a house."

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On this week's episode of FAREWELL, we pulled out some of our favorite all-time quotes we've collected over the years — the wisdom we come back to again and again. Here are a few that made the cut:

1. "The only Zen you find on mountaintops is the Zen you bring up there." — Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2. "What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.” — John L. Parker, Once a Runner

3. "Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it." — Mary Oliver, "Sometimes"

4. "  Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you're looking for some inspiration (or some good book recommendations), listen to the full list on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

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

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When outcomes are all that matter, when winning or losing is self-defining, we don't become a warrior. We retreat.

The paradox: to truly excel, we have to care deeply, but be able to let go.

The answer isn't to abandon ambition. It's to broaden it. It's about rediscovering the excitement, curiosity, and joy that often fueled us to take up the pursuit in the first place. Stop chasing metrics, start chasing moments.

This is the argument I make in Win the Inside Game.

Amazon just discounted it to 20% Off. Get your copy today!​
Also, read more about the book in the WSJ

To learn more and go deeper, check out our books:

• ​Win the Inside Game​
• ​Master of Change​
• ​Do Hard Things​
• ​The Practice of Groundedness​
• ​Peak Performance ​

For daily insights, ideas, and practices, be sure to follow us online:

Twitter: @Bstulberg and @Stevemagness​
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