Reflect: Not Just About the Destination

Excellence is not just about the destination.

It's an internal standard of giving something your best shot, a process of becoming. The real reward isn't a bigger deadlift, a faster mile, a fancy promotion, or a sturdier table. The real reward is that you become a better version of yourself and experience the deep satisfaction and fulfillment that comes from giving something your all. -- The Way of Excellence

Go Touch Grass: A Real World Survival Guide

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Our vocabulary speaks to the problem. Brain Rot was the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year. But before that, we had terminally online, doomscrolling, zombie scrolling, NPC (Non-Playable Character), and internet brain, which we coined here at the Growth Equation nearly four years ago. All these terms are getting at the same issue: an online world that warps our reality and cognition, taking away agency and connection that grounds us in the real world.

We can see the same shift in our proposed solutions. In 2021, “go touch grass” exploded as a clever solution to our disembodied culture. The tech bros took it a step further with typical neuro-sciencyness, telling everyone we need a “dopamine fast.”

The world is changing at a pace that leaves few historical comparisons. And just by examining the words we’re using, we can see there’s clearly a problem and a desperate need for solutions.

We have core psychological needs for depth, embodied engagement, and genuine collective experiences. These are needs that a digital environment can neither provide nor substitute for. When we think otherwise, we are left longing for something more.

There's a whole lot of longing for something more these days. And it’s only going to accelerate as AI encroaches upon our work, as we increasingly become unable to discern whether a picture or video is real or not. The world is going to get weird.

This isn’t meant to be a doom and gloom post. It’s a call for better ways to navigate our new world, along with a hopeful message that the pendulum is going to swing back to reality. (And as you'll read below, in many ways, this is already happening.)

Here's a brief guide to navigating our changing, chaotic, and weird world.

Understanding Our Basic Needs

What do we need to thrive? There have been dozens of theories on our basic psychological needs. All with different nuances.

Self-Determination Theory tells us we need autonomy, competence, and belonging.

Maslow created his hierarchy with love, esteem, and self-actualization toward the top, all of which map well onto a need for belonging and meaning.

Seligman put forth the PERMA model in the 2010s: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement.

In his new book, Brad recently boiled it down to two components: we need mastery and mattering.

Every major psychological needs framework of the last 80 years has converged on the same conclusion. Depth makes us feel alive. We need competence built through effort; to belong to something real; and to be present and engaged. No theory has ever proposed that humans thrive through passive consumption of algorithmically delivered superficial and synthetic content.

We’re craving reality. And for good reason.

The Return of Reality…Together

At the turn of the 20^th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim wanted to understand what holds societies together. He studied Australian Aborigines and noted they had two modes of living: they were scattered in small groups, hunting, fishing, and surviving. And they also had massive events where everyone came together for large religious ceremonies. Durkheim found the group nature of it all to be the magic, writing, "The very fact of assembling is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are assembled, their proximity generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation."

He coined it “collective effervescence.” Durkheim saw that we have an irreducible need to periodically come together in physical space, move in unison, and share intense emotion. It’s through that process that we regenerate the bonds that hold our social world together. He warned that without it, those bonds dissolve.

Durkheim was writing about Aboriginal religion, but he just as well could have been describing Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, a Sunday long run, church or synagogue, the high school football game, a protest march, or the bonsai society's quarterly meeting.

There’s a reason that post-COVID (a period during which society’s collective moorings became increasingly untethered), we’ve seen a rise in many of the above. The NFL, NBA, MLS, and WNBA have all seen record attendance. Broadway saw its highest grosses in history during the 2024-2025 season. And though religious affiliation has been trending downward for the past few decades, church attendance is seeing a resurgence driven largely by Gen Z and millennials. Running clubs tripled in 2024, with club participation increasing by 59% according to Strava. A 2023 survey found that 92% of Americans would rather receive an experience over a physical gift.

Our actions are telling us we long for collective experience, and for good reason. Modern science has largely confirmed Durkheim’s hypothesis. When we do real things together in the real world, it not only makes us feel better, but it also connects us on a deeper level. Our heart rates and breathing sync up, emotions spread, and we even report trusting others more when we simply move in sync. Researchers have found that everything from collective marching to singing helps create connection on a visceral level. (It's worth noting that sometimes this underlying connection is used for evil, as in the case of Nazi military marches.)

The collective effervescence is real. It’s the glue that holds us together and makes us feel alive. It's true: we need to go touch grass, and preferably with others. When much of our modern world is pulling us towards isolation and being glued to the algorithm, being intentional about having collective experiences is a must.

Bring Back Doing

Crafts are making a comeback. We’ve seen a 26% increase in weaving, sewing, and quilting in recent years. Crochet surged 76% from 2020 to 2022. And nearly half of crocheters are between the ages of 25 and 35. It’s not grandma jumping on the craze. Why would these seemingly old-school hobbies be seeing such a resurgence?

Because we have that deep need for doing real things, where we struggle, but then see progress. It’s no different than the rise in endurance sports. It’s something that is real, that we can’t fake, that requires attention, focus, and effort. It’s mastery at its best… and often we can do these activities in groups.

You can’t skip steps when you’re making a quilt or training for a marathon. Well, you could, but it wouldn’t turn out very well.

The effort and struggle is the point. Yet we’re rapidly replacing it with ease.

Back before AI was a thing, researchers coined the "Google Effect," which found that when we expect to have future access to information (i.e., we can always Google it), we have lower recall rates for the information itself. It's as if our brain goes, "I know where we can find it, so what's the point of remembering it." We offload the memory to Google.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We use our extended environment to help us out, and in turn, we can reserve some brainpower for other things. It’s the same reason why we write our schedule on a calendar or make to-do lists. We’re offloading remembering all of our meetings, appointments, and future tasks, so we can focus on the work in front of us. The problem becomes when you can offload everything.

Recent research shows that AI has a similar “Google effect.” Except it’s not just affecting our memory but a wide swath of our cognition. The researcher Michael Gerlich found that the more we use AI tools, the worse our critical thinking scores get, precisely because of cognitive offloading. Other recent work used EEG to monitor the brain waves of students while writing essays and found that when students used ChatGPT to copy and paste with little editing, brain connectivity was much lower. Now, interestingly, if students thought hard and engaged with the essay before having AI help them out, they didn’t see the decline in brain connectivity.

One way to think of AI is that it's like Cliff Notes combined with a calculator combined with a plagiarism machine on steroids. Our brain is already primed for the path of least resistance, to conserve energy and minimize thinking. It’s why even the brightest high school students will look for a shortcut in the assignment. (Just ask your teacher friends…) But AI takes it a step further, eliminating thinking altogether. It would be like if, in the early internet days, for every class assignment, you just copied and pasted Wikipedia and got away with it. Would you have learned anything? Of course not.

As with the calendar or Google example, what we offload matters. It’s akin to training for an athletic event. If you stop using a muscle, it detrains. It doesn’t matter how strong or powerful that muscle once was or has the potential to be. If you haven’t pushed it lately, it’s going to atrophy.

For our brain, the deep focused work of wrestling with an issue or problem is the signal that says: keep this ability fine-tuned and ready to go. We can see a similar phenomenon in the classroom. In one study, researchers put students through two different teaching styles: one in which the teacher stepped in immediately when the student was struggling and helped them figure out the answer, and another in which they let them struggle for a while before offering guidance. The students who were helped immediately looked like they performed better initially, but when tested weeks later, it was the ones who were left alone to wrestle with the problem who actually learned something. As we wrote in Peak Performance nearly a decade ago, skills come from struggle.

The researchers called it productive failure. But it gets to the same point with using AI: if you want to learn and grow, you’ve got to wrestle with what you are doing. AI is like the teacher who has all the answers to any of your problems, who wants to step in and solve them for you instantly. It prevents the very thing that helps us grow, which, of course, is the effort and struggle.

We see a similar effect in reading. When we browse social media on our phone, we’re skimming. We literally read differently. Researchers found that instead of reading line by line, we scan the top, dart down the left side, maybe grab a phrase in the middle, then jump to the bottom. And because of that, as one leading researcher put it, “We simply do not have enough cerebral time to connect the information we read to all the more sophisticated, time-consuming processes that are necessary for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking, reflection and insight."

We’ve got a digital world optimizing us for ease and efficiency, when our brain needs difficulty, engagement, and even struggle to learn and grow.

So What? Bring Back Reality and Meaningful Friction

The digital world isn’t going away. AI is here, and it’s going to be able to do more than most can imagine. We can’t stop that. The cat is out of the bag. We can’t shove it back in.

But we can still decide what we offload. It can be tempting to treat AI like we did physical maps and just hand over our sense of direction to our phone’s maps. But that’d be a mistake. It’s tempting to think that group texts, “friends” on social media, and collective laughing at the same meme can replace real-world collective effervescence. It can’t. That need, and those feelings, are much deeper.

So, as the world gets weird, you get to decide how you navigate it. Choose wisely. An excellent life requires group experiences, connection, and meaningful struggle. Which is to say, you've got to protect sources of mastery and mattering.

A Few Specific Tips:

Using AI well:

If you’re going to use AI, which is inevitable at this point for many, use it as an editor, not a writer or producer. The point is to use AI as an assistant, not to have the machine do the main task, whatever that main task may be. Wrestle with the work first, then only after that let it come in to help you learn. But don't just copy and paste what it tells you. Figure out what you think works best.
If it feels easy all the time, you aren’t learning or growing. The point is to struggle. Not all the time, but in the important things.
Protect the deep, meaningful work. Be deliberate about what you’re offloading. As a writer, maybe you offload formatting of citations or copy-editing for typos and misspellings. But protect the main thing.
Define where AI can help. Play around with it. But create boundaries on where the human work is most important.
If you’re a teacher, set constraints that make sure students do the initial deep work. And test for those capacities. (Blue book exams are making a comeback, and this is precisely why.)

Do Real Things… Together

Prioritize real-world activities that challenge you in some way. Take up a craft or hobby. Join a running club. Something that has a tangible outcome or process behind it. And preferably something that you can do as part of a group.
Cultivate collective effervescence. If you’re religious, great, go participate in a church, synagogue, or mosque. If not, have your own version of church. It could be a choir, the Sunday long run, dance group, book club, improv group, and so on. Go to concerts, attend the local cross-country meet, or join a line dancing club. It doesn't matter what, just do real things with real people in the real world.
Read books. That’s it. They are great mental training for your brain.

Figure out what you don't want to offload. This includes people and activities. Protect it. Even, and perhaps especially, when it's hard.

-- Steve and Brad

Listen: How to Coach Anyone, Including Yourself

One thing that can't be replicated by A.I.? The relationship between coach and athlete. Last weekend, across the men's and women's college basketball tournaments, we saw countless examples of that dynamic play out on the sport's biggest stage. On today's episode of "excellence, actually," we use the viral moment between Maryland's coach Brenda Frese and star player Oluchi Okananwa as a jumping off point to talk about leading and motivating more broadly. What can all of us — coaches, teachers, parents — learn from the moment between Frese and Okananwa? How should we use and distribute validation? When does intensity help and when does it hurt? When might negative self-talk actually be a good tool to use? This episode is for everyone. Because whether you're coaching others or simply trying to better lead yourself, you've got to know how to light a fire without burning the house down.

— Clay

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