“Everyone wants to be the best. But very few people are willing to do what it actually takes…You have to fall in love with the boredom. You have to fall in love with the repetition. If you can find joy in the mundane work that no one else sees, the lights will eventually shine on you.”

NBA legend Kobe Bryant was explaining what it actually takes. And decades before he offered up embracing the boring as the key, a sociologist who spent years embedded with Olympic swimmers came to the exact same conclusion. Except he took it one step further.

In the 1980s, sociologist Daniel Chambliss went to the best swimming club in America and sat down and observed. He wanted to see the difference between the age-group, club, and elite swimmers who were training there.

As one of the coaches, Mark Schubert, put it when coaches and athletes would arrive at the club, “They all have to come to Mecca, and see what we do. They think we have some big secret.” Instead, within an hour they were bored. Looking at their watches. Waiting for the revelation that never came.

Chambliss noted that the top athletes’ approach to the sport was entirely different. As he wrote: “What others see as boring… they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic.” He concluded that “Excellence is mundane.” What the best of the best did was figure out how to do all the boring, repetitive work that made a difference for a long time. Or as one of the central figures in his study, Mary Meagher, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, said “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”

But he didn’t just stop at they get used to the boring stuff. The swimmers he observed took staring at a line for hours and made it interesting. They looked forward to the repetition, it became a kind of challenge to master. At a certain point the thing stops being boring.

It’s Not About Boredom. It’s Meaning.

How could you not get bored looking at a line or shooting the same shot a hundred times? It seems unthinkable. Of course it’s boring. How could it not be? Well, science explains it.

That’s because we fundamentally misunderstand boredom. In 2012, researchers ran a series of studies to figure out what made boredom boredom. They came away with two main contributors to boredom: feeling unchallenged and judging the situation and your actions to be meaningless.

We all just assume that what makes something boring is the repetitiveness. But that’s not what the research says at all. It’s about doing an activity that feels pointless and doesn’t lead anywhere.

This is the same experience every high school cross country coach faces. When a young runner starts out, of course running a ton of loops around a park or on the track is boring. It sucks. But you don’t say, “okay, let’s make it fun and quit running and instead play games every practice.” Because what every coach knows is if they can get that kid to stick around, eventually they’ll get hooked. The workouts start to have meaning. The summer miles have a purpose. It might start small with helping you improve your performance, but over time it grows into a part of you. You find yourself out on those runs, and start to weirdly look forward to the swirl of fatigue.

And that’s precisely what research shows. While we tend to think of effort as something hard and unpleasant, work by Michael Inzlicht and colleagues found that effort can become rewarding in its own right. They called it the effort paradox, “Not only can the same outcomes be more rewarding if we apply more (not less) effort, sometimes we select options precisely because they require effort.”

The discipline and grind folks on social media try to convince us that it’s all about tolerating discomfort or making sure your discipline can withstand the suffering, but that’s not what actual people in the arena experience at all. Effort becomes the reward itself. It stops being a cost.

It’s why just about every elite performer I’ve worked with doesn’t see the hard work as a “sacrifice.” They fall in love with and enjoy the process, even the boring and really freaking hard parts. It’s what Bryant told us. Fellow basketball superstar Steph Curry has talked about it, “It always became just a joy of finding ways to get better. Every day I was just exploring, trying stuff...I was always curious about how can I get better the next session?”

And it’s precisely what Chambliss found with the Olympic swimmers: “It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

To paraphrase Shrek, what seems boring at first is an illusion. It’s because you haven’t put in the work to peel back the layers of the onion and see that the mundane is actually quite interesting.

From Boring to Fascinating.

There’s a story in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the main character is teaching a student how to write an essay and she’s stuck. She is eager to do well but just can’t figure it out. So the teacher tells her to narrow down the topic, to make it about the town they’re in, and then when that doesn’t work, the street they’re on, and then finally: "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

She came back the next class with a 5,000-word essay. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street, and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop."

Pirsig’s point was that the brick was always interesting. She just hadn’t really seen it, spent time observing it. Rarely do we take the time to investigate something and see it fully and clearly.

Even a brick can be fascinating if we give it our full attention. Interest is about being engaged with the world. Whatever we give attention gains in value.

In 2006, two researchers gave us a model for how interests develop. They found that interest has four phases: triggered situational → maintained situational → emerging individual → well-developed individual interest.

We often treat our passions as something we have or we don’t. Either it initially grabs our attention and we fall in love with it or we don’t and move on. But that’s not how passion works. It develops with time and care. Which is precisely what the interest model gets at: we need to spend time seeing if the thing catches fire. As their model shows, the later stages need more stored knowledge, value, and self-generated curiosity. In other words, we’ve got to have the foundation and see that this thing matters to us, before we start to see it as a passion.

That’s the whole point. No one thinks that running endless laps around a track is interesting the first time they do it. Nope, it’s boring. Mind numbingly so. But the more time you do it, the more layers you pull back. You start to see the nuance of performance. You start to feel and slice and dice apart the variations of effort or discomfort that you’re experiencing. While from the outside it might seem like every rep is the same, you learn to experience that every run or repeat brings something interesting and a bit different.

We need to spend enough time staring at the brick to see that it really does have value. Most of us never get to that stage because we dismiss it from the get-go. “How in the world could that be interesting?” And if we go look at that brick long enough, we frame it as a test of suffering.

So what?

Excellence is boring. But in the most interesting way possible. It’s staying with that run, swim, or sentence long enough so that you appreciate its nuance. You stay with it like a craftsman making his 10,000th piece of the same pottery, realizing that while it may be the same cup to others, each one presents its own challenge and tells a different story.

It sounds absurd. How can staring at a black line, doing 40x400m repeats, working on the same paragraph over and over, not be boring? But the answer to that question is the key to excellence in just about anything.

It’s the answer that John L. Parker conveyed to us 50 years ago in his cult classic Once a Runner, that was based on his time training with Olympians like Frank Shorter:

“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.”

Kobe said fall in love with the boredom. The people who get there stopped calling it boring a long time ago. The trial of miles was fascinating to them. Even if it didn’t look like it from the outside.

-Steve Magness

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

When parents lose their minds in youth sports, we often ascribe it to the parent living vicariously through their kid, trying to gain status through their child’s performance or to relive their glory days. While that’s certainly a driver, it is not the only one. What if another big reason youth sports has become such a circus for adults is because so many adults are numbed out in their daily lives, and their kid’s baseball game is one of the last places they feel fully invested and alive?

What follows is an extreme illustration, but I think it contains more than a kernel of truth.

Many of us are stuck in jobs we don’t love while being told that the only place we can achieve or obtain status is through our careers. We work hard, chasing the external items—a bigger house, a fancier car, a nicer suit—that are supposed to fulfill us, but always leave us wanting. To recover from a long day at work full of meetings, distractions, and manufactured stress, we head home and veg out on screens. We absorb momentary hits of dopamine as we scroll, hoping it will quell our anxiety or existential distress. At worst, we move from one shallow and distracted form of leisure to the next, as if we are floating through our lives like characters in the movie WALL-E.

The Western world’s health crisis shows we’re moving our bodies less than ever before. We’ve engineered effortful physical activity out of our lives. At the same time, the epidemic of loneliness shows we are disconnected from others. We’ve streamlined the connection to a point where it’s no longer genuine. We have a pseudo-connection instead of the real thing. In short, we live in a world that is increasingly numbed out, void of opportunities for presence, connection, and aliveness.

So, for that brief moment in the stands at the baseball diamond or rec center, watching our nine-year-old play sports makes us feel something. We let go of our device, give our full attention to what is unfolding in front of us, experience actual adrenaline, and remember what it’s like to feel alive. This doesn’t just apply to youth sports. Former professional athletes experience something similar when they retire. They’ve spent a lifetime under the spotlight, in a career full of objective results, intense feelings, and emotions. And then it ends. The high is gone. Despite making tens of millions of dollars, many ex-professional athletes suffer from anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, or gambling addictions. These are all predictable responses to a shift from peak-aliveness to a less invigorating existence.

You also see this with how many former professional athletes get into coaching or commentating. It’s not often about status—many of these former players coach in the high school ranks or announce at division three games. And former pros rarely need the money, but as I experience from my journey of being a D-1 athlete to coaching, the closest you get to that feeling of lacing up the spikes yourself is to coach someone else to do it. Coaching makes you feel alive.

In a world that numbs us out and pushes us towards distraction and avoidance, sports are a place to still feel something. We’re forced to be in the present, to reckon with the stakes of having a concrete outcome in an activity we care about, to experience pain, fatigue, and discomfort, and be rewarded with the satisfaction of overcoming them. We used to have these experiences more frequently in our daily lives. We didn’t have phones and devices to distract us. We were active participants. Now, we’re passive participants. Many watch sports instead of playing them, and most of us only half-watch, as we are scrolling on another screen while the game is being played. We observe others baking, gardening, or reading on TikTok instead of doing these things ourselves. Too often, our jobs lack tangible end products through which we can evidently see our contributions.

In an ​analysis​ of how young adults spend their time compared to 2010, researchers found that time spent in nearly every activity we rate as being meaningful has declined. Meanwhile, we’ve seen an increase in time spent doing activities that are low in meaningfulness, such as video games and social media. Additionally, activities we do alone have increased, while those we do with others have declined.

One of the downsides of our digitally dominated world is that it is harder for us to feel significant and truly connected. As the media researcher Sherry Turkle puts it, we are “alone together.”

The antidote is to do real things, in the real world, and with real people.

The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

But we’ve engineered a world where it’s hard to take Campbell’s advice. The same reason parents lose their minds on the sidelines in youth sports is the reason so many people seem to enjoy screaming at others on social media. For a brief moment, ‘owning’ or trolling someone on the internet makes you feel something deeply, even if it brings about negative emotions; the ability to elicit emotion is a powerful tool to harbor.

It also explains why everyone on social media is jumping into cold plunges. It’s not really to help boost metabolism, activate brown fat, or whatever other pseudo-scientific explanation is given. It’s because it makes people who are chronically addicted to the internet or living a life highlighted by despondency, feel something again! And there is merit to that. But ideally, we develop sources of aliveness that are richer, more textured, and more meaningful than sitting in cold water. Here are five principles to help:

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1. More active doing, less passive consuming. (Preferably with friends.)

We need more playing sports instead of consuming them. We need more hobbies and crafts instead of watching others do them on YouTube. And when you do watch events like sports, documentaries, or dramas, try to leave the second screen behind so you can be more present for what is in front of you.

2. Train for something. Embrace discomfort.

There’s nothing like training physically to remind you that you’re alive. You either lift the weight or you don’t. You experience fatigue and must navigate it. You’re inundated with a cacophony of inner sensations and feelings that rarely greet you in the modern world.

Often, we seek out the path of least resistance. That’s a one way ticket to the numbness we described. When we tell our brain to prioritize avoidance as a strategy over and over, eventually it gets the picture.

Choosing hard things is what trains our inner alarm to handle the load. This could be by taking up a sport, or a challenging craft, or just doing the small things that you’ve been avoiding, like that difficult conversation. Anything that sends the signal that you can handle and engage with discomfort.

3. Create something real. Be a craftsperson.

Build something. Take up woodworking, gardening, or stained glass. We used to have hobbies that resulted in the creation of something concrete, where you can see the end result and understand the progress that was made along the way. Building and creating grounds us in the real world. It’s why training for a marathon or deadlift isn’t too dissimilar from building a table or tending a garden.

4. Learn to listen to your inner state

A part of the numbness comes from ignoring or turning off our interoception, or the ability to read our inner signals. It’s the runner who never learned how to listen to their body because they always run with music or a podcast and over rely on their GPS watch.

We are masters at suppressing our inner world. Just look at what we’ve done with boredom. Instead of sitting with that experience, we grab for our phone at the first hint of the feeling.

Sit with your feelings. Whether it’s on a run, walk, or just sitting waiting for your food to arrive.

It’s the foundation for understanding what truly makes you feel engaged versus what provides a fleeting distraction.

5. Prioritize your basic psychological needs.

We need to find ways to attain significance, direction, and connection in the real world. Sometimes work does the job, but not always. In a world that has moved from local to global, it’s easy to get stuck in the comparison game, which will make you feel worthless and like you’re falling short, regardless of how great your life is. The antidote is to go in the other direction—to be aware globally, but to ensure you are also engaging locally. It’s better to be known in your community than it is to be a celebrity on the internet.

Try to make a difference. Not in the I’m going to change the world kind of way, but in how it’s been for nearly all of humankind. I’m going to make a difference for my family or local community. Giving back, helping others, realizing that the world doesn’t revolve around us is often the antidote to the numbness that stalks us.

– Steve Magness

Exercise is the number one thing you can do to improve your long-term physical and cognitive health. The physical benefits are well documented, but it also comes with an array of cognitive benefits as well. It improves focus, creativity, problem-solving, emotion regulation, stress tolerance.

If exercise could be turned into a drug, it would be a trillion dollar blockbuster.

Which begs the question: what is the best exercise routine to follow?

While maximizing performance in a specific sport requires complexity and nuance, when it comes to health, longevity, and performance outside of sport, the best way to exercise is actually pretty simple. This may come as a surprise if you spend time in the health and wellness social media or podcast world. Look around and you’ll see references to various protocols containing all sorts of acronyms (HIIT, SIIT, LT, VO2max). Some are better than others, but everywhere you look it seems like someone is giving you a complicated mess of a program: do this, do that…until that goes out of fashion and it’s time to do this again. And around and around you go.

If I wanted to complicate exercise, I certainly could. I can get into the weeds and talk complexity with the best of them. And there’s a time and place for that if we’re talking about going from a 4:01 miler to a 3:59. The edges of your performance requires nuance. If anyone wants to have an argument on fitness acronyms, I am here for it.

But at the end of the day, for the vast majority of folks, they don’t need a fancy protocol that feels cool to talk about. So if you care about health and longevity, and aren’t trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon or hit a 1500 pound powerlifting total, what actually matters?

Here’s my keep it simple principles of exercise for health, longevity, and all-around life performance:

1. Do something long and easy three or more days per week:

How long? Shoot for a minimum of 30 minutes, but if you can build that up to 60 minutes, great! Why 30 minutes? Anything is better than nothing, but if you look at a long history of research from mice to humans on aerobic adaptations, 30 minutes is where you start to get the biggest gains, and taking that up to 60 minutes continues to accrue substantial benefits. There are still benefits to going longer than 60 minutes, especially if you enjoy what you’re doing, but the returns diminish once you hit the hour mark.

What type of exercise? Whatever you enjoy and can stick to consistently. Running, cycling, ellipticaling, rucking, ski-erging, swimming. Pick something you like doing and do that.

How hard? This should be easy. You should be able to have a conversation, with just the slightest hint of needing to catch air. If you can’t maintain a conversation, you’re going too hard; slow down.

Also: don’t lose your mind trying to stay in “zone 2.” The truth is that zones are a mostly arbitrary dividing point and are meant to help researchers categorize training. They aren’t laws. If you are feeling good on a certain day, it’s fine to go a touch harder. If you feel like trash, there is nothing wrong with slowing down. The whole point of easy training is accumulate enough volume where you can do it again and again, for weeks and months on end.

Why three or more days per week? It’s a reasonable amount where you get most of the benefits for mental, physical, and cognitive health. If you enjoy it, do it more!

2. Strength train two days a week for 30 minutes or more:

What kind? Think compound movements that utilize lots of muscles. Squats, lunges, push ups, pull ups, wall sits, step ups, kettlebell swings. What you target depends on your goals. But for general health and overall life performance, you get nearly all of the benefits from compound movements.

If you are time crunched, you can work through a circuit where you alternate muscle groups with short breaks in between (e.g., squats to push ups to lunges to pull ups). As these circuits become easier, add some weight. You can use dumbbells, a weight vest (which can double for rucking), or a backpack filled with books. Get creative and think progressive overload (gradually adding stimulus as you improve).

Sets and reps? There are dozens of set and rep schemes out there. Some push more towards growing muscle size, others toward speed and power. But for general health, you don’t need to get lost in the details. The basic gist is that with whatever strength routine you use, you should have a few reps in the tank when you finish. You are looking for a moderate, doable challenge. If you’re older, throw in some balance and stability work in a brief warmup.

Sustainability beats perfection any day of the week.

3. One day per week, go (kind of) hard.

What does “hard” consist of? Usually harder sessions are done with interval training. But here’s the beauty…there is no magical interval training. You can do short and fast, longer and a bit slower, with long rest or short rest, jogging or standing. Every interval workout has a slightly different stimulus, but for health the most important thing is that you do something somewhat hard. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that there is a special interval training workout that is the best. That’s a lie. We have 120 years of training history that shows we can attain similar benefits with a variety of intervals. It’s all about how you manipulate the variables (intensity, duration, and recovery)

How hard? About a 7 or 8 out of 10. Or feel like you could do 1 or 2 more intervals. You aren’t lying down on the track, gasping for air, feeling like you are going to throw up. The reality is, if you were training for performance, you would only very rarely go to this place anyways. If you are training for health, you benefit most from going hard, but not so hard that you are completely spent.

Start simple and easy: The reality is this. The hard and higher intensity work is the icing on the cake. In fact, research and training history tells us that intense work gives us more benefit if it’s preceded by building an aerobic base. Why? That aerobic foundation allows you to handle, absorb, and bounce back from the intensity. Without it, you’re just surviving, and not adapting well. If you are a true beginner, spend a lot of time doing the easy work, and then slowly introduce some intensity. Start by adding in anywhere between 4 and 10 fifteen second pickups to an otherwise easy workout, taking as much rest as you want between each burst of effort. The purpose isn’t fatigue. It’s to get your body and mind used to going a bit faster. These are a great transition workout to intensity.

Vary it up: Go short and fast one week (e.g., 8 x 30 seconds quite hard with a super easy recovery); longer and slower the next (4 x 5 minutes with 3 minutes rest at a pace you could sustain for 45 minutes); and in between the next (e.g, 6 x 2 minutes with 2 minutes rest at a pace you could sustain for 20 minutes). Use hills, the track, the road, an assault bike, a treadmill, whatever. Varying things up changes the stimulus. It allows you to run up and down the gamut of intensities, which does a better job of making sure you are getting a wide variety of adaptations across muscle fiber types. This is advantageous versus sticking to the same supposed “optimal” interval training workout every week.

Why one day a week? If you are training for performance, say to run your best 10k, you’d do more volume and have two hard workouts a week. The increase in volume (and aerobic fitness that comes with it) allows you to handle and bounce back from more hard workouts. Even if you are training at an elite level, seldom would you have three hard workouts per week. So once a week is a good happy medium. It’s a level most people can handle, without overwhelming the system. If someone tells you to go hard three or more days per week, you shouldn’t listen to them. Yes, that’s a bit harsh, but it’s also the truth.

And… that’s it. If you want to train for health, the above will get you 95 percent of the way there. If you have more time, feel free to add more easy bouts of exercise, or occasionally do another hard workout. But if we’re talking about what it takes to get the vast majority of the benefits for living a longer and healthier life, the above makes the program. If you want to qualify for Boston or hit a big time deadlift PR, it’s going to take more focused and specific work. But that’s not what this post is about. Now, let’s briefly talk about a few other important concepts for building a consistent exercise habit.

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1. Stress + Rest = Growth. Don’t stack intensity!

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast that described a program for novices that went: tempo run, interval run, fartlek run in back to back to back days. For the uninitiated, that’s three hard or moderately hard workouts in a row. Don’t do that. Even if you are elite. It’s dumb. Listen, more than 60 years ago, legendary coach Bill Bowerman coined the Hard-Easy principle, which essentially says after you do a hard workout you need one (or more) easy days to balance things out. Follow that principle. Doing back to back hard workouts, especially for non-elites, is a recipe for disaster. Your favorite podcaster who tells you otherwise is either way outside of their expertise; has no idea what “hard” actually means; using steroids; or some combination of the three.

2. Don’t go there until you need to go there.

Progress gradually. Don’t jump from a 30-minute run to a 60-minute run. Don’t try 400m repeats in 90 seconds until you’ve successfully done them in 92 seconds. Gradual progression over the long haul is the name of the game.

3. Consistency over intensity. Don’t be an Instagram hero.

The most important piece of your exercise program is that you stick to it for a long time. Don’t try to be the workout hero who smashes a hard workout, but then takes a week off.

The easiest thing to do with exercise is create fatigue. But that’s not what you’re after. You are trying to gently embarrass the body so that it adapts. For the vast majority of folks, and especially those who aren’t trying to maximize performance, embarrassing the body doesn’t mean going anywhere near all-out, lying on the track, writhing in pain. That’s humiliating the body. And even in elite training, such efforts are incredibly rare.

Other ways to foster consistency:

• If you can, exercise with other people. It’s easier (and more fun) with others, so join a run club, local gym, or rucking group.

• Don’t overdo it. Don’t go “all out.” Don’t do dumb things. Injury is often the death knell to any consistent exercise program. You can’t avoid injuries altogether, but you can minimize them by following a smart, logical training plan.

• Make it simpler to move. Can you go for a run or walk near your home? Is there a nice park nearby? Is your gym on the drive home from work? Do you have a strength routine you can do in your hotel room when traveling? Make it easier to get something in, now matter where you are.

4. Think years, not days.

When legendary marathon runner Frank Shorter was asked about his training, he said (and we’re paraphrasing): two hard workouts, a long run, and as much mileage as you can handle. Repeat for years. The last part is the key. You want an exercise program that is sustainable.

5. If you want to move from health and longevity to something more performance based, get a coach!

There are a number of wonderful coaches out there in all sports. Find one that fits with your goals, and preferably someone with a history of coaching experience in that sport or activity.

-Steve

P.S. If you want to help me out with some research, fill out this survey on coaching and reaching your potential. It’s about the best practices and your experiences with either coaching or being coached, regardless of the domain.

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​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

Some of us on social media, others as our workplace or even AI monitors us. It’s now normal to be constantly judged, evaluated, and scored.

The obvious one is social media, where we create an image to get likes, shares, and follows. From youth sports to video games, concerts, parties, and just everyday life, so much of it is captured. Which means so much of it is performative.

But it’s not just kids or games, it’s in the very work that we do.

In the workplace, keyboard tracking, screen monitoring, and even AI-based camera systems have skyrocketed in the last few years. Industry estimates in 2022 suggested that 78% of companies used monitoring tools, with 45% tracking keystrokes. In some professions, workers have much of their day videoed and then broken down by AI. All in the name of performance and optimization.

How absurd has it gotten? Hospice chaplains are being tracked and given “productivity points.” It led one chaplain to ask: “Do I see the patients who earn the points or do I see the patients who really need to be seen?”

We live in a world where there’s always an observer, and we’re often scored.

George Orwell feared that the government would install cameras everywhere to track us. That’s happened to some degree. But more than that, we installed our own and called it content.

There’s a steep cost to always being on stage. One that hits not only our stress levels and performance, but also our ethics, our morality, and our ability to figure out who in the world we are.

The Front and the Backstage

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."

In his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman gave us the analogy of the theater for how we live our social lives. There’s a front stage, where we perform for an audience. It’s polished and narrow, shaped with that audience in mind. And there’s a backstage, where we drop the act, step out of character, recover, and prepare.

Goffman argued that we need the separation. The backstage isn’t where we hide. It’s where honesty and grounding become possible. It’s where we hear from our fellow performers and our coaches. Where we try, and sometimes fail at, different versions of the act.

I’d take it a step further: the backstage is where sanity and growth live.

The Costs

What do we give up by living on the fronstage? Well, for starters, we tend to actually perform worse. And feel stressed out while doing it. But more so, it shifts our ethics, behaviors, and even identity.

Performance

We’ve known for a long time that an audience enhances performance on simple, well-practiced tasks and impairs it on complex or still-being-learned ones. A meta-analysis of 241 studies confirmed the pattern. Being watched sharpens what’s already ingrained and degrades what you’re still figuring out.

The camera is an externalized self-consciousness machine. It pulls us out of the moment and gets us thinking about who’s watching and how we look doing it. It’s why an audience sits at the core of choking in sport. The stress pushes us to self-monitor, and the skill falls off a cliff.

It isn’t just physical or cognitive performance that goes. A series of studies found that surveillance alone, with no judgment attached afterward, lowered creativity in both children and adults. You don’t have to grade someone to shrink their thinking. Watching is enough.

In a 2012 study, researchers put this to the test inside the world’s second-largest phone factory. Over five months, assembly lines with a curtain hung between workers and observers were 10–15% more productive than lines in full view.

The reason why? When visible, workers performed the procedure exactly as written. When they weren't being watched, they used the tricks they'd picked up to speed the process along. Accountability never went anywhere — output was still measured the entire time. What the curtain removed was the audience.

In other words, surveillance had been producing better theater, not better work.

Ethics, morality, and learning

The pitch for surveillance is that it keeps people honest. The data says the opposite. A recent study found that monitored employees were more likely to cheat on tests, steal equipment, and deliberately slow down than unmonitored ones.

And the reason gets at why it’s so corrosive. Surveillance reduced people’s sense of agency. They’d turned over control, which let them outsource their responsibility along with it. The person watching is responsible now. If they don’t catch me taking this, that’s on them.

Pair that with Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and you can see how bad this gets. Edmondson originally found that better hospital teams seemed to make more errors. Except there was a twist. They weren’t making more. They were admitting more instead of hiding them.

The admitting is what matters. Better teams feel safe enough to own the mistake, which is what lets the team learn. When we hide mistakes, we never get to the learning part. Every error a camera catches is an error that stops being volunteered.

Identity

It isn’t just that we have no time to rest and recover backstage. It’s that we have nowhere to develop a sense of self.

Identity is a sense-making expedition. We dabble, explore, take wrong turns, and backtrack, all to figure out what we like, what we value, and where we belong. Traditionally most of that happens backstage, with small tests of stepping out front to try something before retreating behind the curtain to make sense of it and decide whether it’s the right stage at all. And backstage, the guidance comes from parents, friends, and coaches, people more likely to have our best interests at heart.

Now we hand that power to whoever is watching. It’s the audience capture phenomenon, where the performer gradually becomes whatever the audience rewards. We outsource our sense of self to the applause, the likes, the comments. Or, at work, we follow whatever the algorithm or the productivity score rewards, instead of what actually works or what the human being sitting in front of us needs.

And it’s not only who we’re becoming that takes the hit. The self collapses into a single character.

We lose the nuance and messiness that makes us who we are. Normally we have a number of different selves, all equally authentic. We bring a different part of us to being a mother, colleague, friend, and so forth. To put it simply, we’re a different self at church than when we watch the football game with our friends after. And that’s normal.

Remove the wall and we flatten into the safest possible version. When researchers studied how people behaved on social media, they found people gravitating toward a lowest-common-denominator performance. They called it context collapse. We self-censor toward an imagined audience that lacks all complexity. And we lose the context switching that used to tell us who to be and how to act.

Stress and burnout

We’ve already run the pilot study for the always-on-stage life: Twitch streamers. People financially incentivized to live in front of a camera. Fame and money are the prize, and they come with a bill.

In a 2023 study, 53% described pressure to remain “always on” and to present a cheerful front. One went further, describing the pressure “to not be a human being and just be an entertainer.” Other streamers describe it as “broadcasting as a character.”

Your sense of self gets captured and controlled. And even if you’re aware of it, it’s hard to step back because increasingly your value and financial status is dependent on performing. It’s why researchers report streamers feeling terrified of vacations or taking time off because someone else will be streaming, and they might lose relevance, views, and subscribers.

Which is part of why a 2024 study of full-time livestreamers found over 30% met the diagnostic threshold for burnout, and 67% reported high stress.

Streamers are the extreme case. They perform nonstop, carry their end of a parasocial relationship that depends on them showing up as a specific character, get scored in real time on how well they play the role, and watch their financial stability track that score. Detaching becomes nearly impossible when identity, community, and income are all tied to the same performance.

Most of us aren’t Twitch streamers. But increasingly, professions look more like that than like the artist working away in a studio, presenting only when the work is ready. And I don’t think we’ve reckoned with what shrinking the backstage costs us.

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But what about sports teams?

The analogy usually used to justify all this is the sports team. Teams watch their game and practice tape, replaying it to sharpen technique. That’s all true. But the comparison misses several things.

First, teams perform in front of others, so preparing for an audience is part of the job.And that comes with a performance cost. It’s why Shaq was actually a decent free throw shooter in practice but awful during games. Or even why a good three point shooter will make something like 85-95% uncontested shots in practice. Of course, performing can raise your game too. But performing on stage comes with a performance cost that is seldom thought about

Second, teams don’t record everything. They record a finite amount of deliberate practice and track some numbers in the weight room. What can be tracked is often negotiated in a collective bargaining agreement. There are deliberate breaks and stretches of downtime that take them off the stage entirely. An athlete knows the drill will be filmed. They don’t expect every step, decision, and coffee break to be logged.

Third, sports have a nearly endless supply of talent lining up. Everyone wants to make the team, and at the top they’re paid millions to be there. That isn’t most professions. Burn out your best people and the drop-off is severe. Sports teams are also forced to think seriously about breaks, downtime, and recovery. Something knowledge work is abysmal at.

And it only works with a good coach, one who’s built enough trust that critique lands as help rather than threat. A coach who empowers instead of stripping agency.

So the sports analogy teaches a more useful lesson than “use game tape everywhere.” The arena is bounded. Practice is closed. The film session ends. And the coach has to earn the trust that turns critique into learning. Observation works when it’s deliberate, transparent, and paired with an environment built for growth.

The Dark Version

In 1961, Goffman took a dark step towards what we see today with his book Asylums. He defined asylums as places where all spheres of life happen in one place, under one authority, on a schedule, under constant observation. He wasn’t thinking about living in a world with constant cameras, but the prisons, asylums, and similarly controlled institutions that were present in his time.

He went so far as to say that the end result of living in a place where there is no backstage to take the costume off is the "mortification of the self." The only institutions humans ever built without a backstage were the ones designed to break people.

Modern surveillance isn’t an asylum. But Goffman’s underlying point holds. When one authority reaches into every sphere, the separate roles and private spaces collapse into each other. We need places where we can detach, recover, experiment and fail without the audience watching. We need boundaries, to reestablish the barrier between the front and backstage.

We know this in our own lives. We all felt it when work went virtual and the commute became a walk upstairs to the spare bedroom. We feel it with a phone that keeps work on call around the clock. Without separation between work and life, burnout creeps in.

It’s even more pressing when it comes to the front and backstage of our self. We need different rooms for our identity, spaces to dabble and potentially fail, context that helps us develop various parts of ourself, and a place where we can let our guard down and recharge.

When we’re always being watched, when we’re always in character, we miss out on the very substance that builds a complex, well-functioning human being. We default to the lowest common dominator, instead of learning and growing.

And when everything around says we don’t measure up, don’t belong, and are constantly judged, our brain acts accordingly. We live in survival mode, and fear takes over. Brains in permanent judgment and survival mode don’t explore, don’t create, don’t tell the truth about errors, and slowly swap the craft for the performance of the craft. The surveillance of everything sticks us in a shallow, protective state.

This isn’t a treatise about never observing performance or never tracking anything. Instead, it’s a call to put more thought and care into what we’re doing. We need boundaries and agency. Instead, we’ve slow walked our way into an environment that destroys each.

-Steve

The state of reading is depressing.

Consider the following:

• Less than 50% of US adults read a book of any kind in 2022.

• Share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day: 28% (2004) → 16% (2023).

• The share of 13-year-olds who “rarely or never” read for fun: 8% in 1984 → 31% in 2023.

• Only 35% of 2024 high-school seniors were “proficient” at analyzing complex themes.

These all came from a recent piece in The Atlantic on the end of reading by Rose Horowitch. And if you want to feel even more depressed, consider this line from Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers: “(Reading) is becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”

There’s no sugarcoating it. If you’re a lover of reading, it’s grim out there. It’s easy to turn articles like this into high-brow think pieces lamenting the decline of something we care a lot about. But I’d like to do something a bit different and more hopeful.

You see, I wasn’t a reader growing up. I resisted every attempt, choosing to read the CliffsNotes, watch the movie, or even read the children’s picture-book version of any book I was assigned in school. In my high school days, I’m pretty sure Huck Finn was the only assigned book I finished.

But somehow, I turned into a reader and writer. And on the other side, my wife was an avid reader who spent a number of years as an elementary school teacher and then literacy specialist. So between the two of us, we’ve got both sides covered.

Instead of lamenting why so few people read books or longform pieces anymore, let’s cover what to do about it. First, the problem.

Where We Went Wrong

This is our obesity epidemic moment. In short, over the past 40 years, we flooded the market with candy and processed foods, while at the same time eliminating green spaces, parks, and bike- or pedestrian-friendly areas. We reduced recess and PE time, made sports pay-to-play, and stuck kids in front of screens and phones to make sure they didn’t move. In sum, we made comfort easy, and rigged the environment against eating real food or moving much at all.

We did the same with reading. We rigged the environment, changed how we teach it, and we stripped out the choice and joy.

We don’t do anything deeply anymore. We live in a world of skimming that resembles knowledge the same way our franken-foods resemble the real variety.

TikTok, Instagram, Twitter — all of them teach us to skim, looking for some shiny object to catch our eye before moving on to the next thing. Researching used to mean going deep on a topic. Then it became googling for a quick answer. Now AI teaches us to go after the gist. All to create the illusion of knowing.

In a recent article, Amherst professor Austin Sarat detailed how the students he teaches at an elite university can no longer finish a book. “Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut.”

He’s not fighting the tide alone: surveys of high school English teachers show they now assign an average of 2.81 full books a year, down from four a decade and a half ago. Some students reach graduation having read only excerpts.

It’s the end result of a society that values superficial convenience over slow, hard-earned depth.

And that has consequences. According to attention researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, our average sustained attention on a screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds. We’ve essentially detrained our brains. It’s like telling someone who hasn’t exercised in 20 years to start by running 3 miles every day. When a short walk makes you out of breath, telling someone to run is a death march.

If you can only focus for less than a minute, there’s little hope of reading a book. Your brain does what it’s trained to do: look around and find something better. And that something better is often a video on your phone designed to keep you scrolling.

We can see the impact of phones in the data. When surveys look at the frequency of reading and the reported enjoyment of it, both fall off a cliff at the average age a kid gets their first smartphone (10–11ish).

And while it’s easy to get pessimistic and blame the phones and the kids, that would be doing them a disservice. As Sarat found when he started a course called “Why Read?”: “What struck me wasn’t students’ lack of interest — it was how unevenly prepared they were even to attempt something long and difficult.”

This is at a school that costs $75,000 a year and is ranked the #2 National Liberal Arts School in the country. If kids there can’t read, what hope is there for the rest of us?

To take the obesity analogy further, it’s not just our attention spans and phones. It’s that many kids and adults weren’t given the foundation to read well.

For roughly two decades, most US schools taught reading through balanced literacy. We stopped teaching phonics and instead focused on cueing and guessing. It’s akin to what my toddler does when she says “let me read this!” and then guesses what’s happening based on the pictures. That’s fine for a 2-year-old. Not so much for an elementary schooler trying to read the words. The result was a decline in early literacy, especially for those who needed the education the most.

We gave a whole generation of students a poor foundation. If you don’t have that foundational skill, why would you read for fun, or dare to take on longer books? It’s simply not possible to fall in love with reading early if you can’t read.

But even for our quality readers, there was another shift in schools that harmed enjoyment: the big push toward standardized testing. Middle and high school grades moved away from books and toward excerpts and short texts focused on comprehension. Why read an entire book when all the tests were going to be short passages? This was one of the ultimate teach-to-the-test moments.

In short, we spent 20 years teaching kids to guess at words instead of decode them, then tested them on fragments instead of books. Two ways to make reading feel like a chore and a failure at the same time.

We can see the impact in a 2023 Scholastic survey: the percent of frequent readers (5+ days/week) drops from 46% at ages 6–8 → 32% at 9–11 → 21% at 12–14 → 15% at 15–17. In the same survey, reading enjoyment falls from 70% (ages 6–8) to 46% (ages 12–17). And when they looked at what makes someone a lover of reading, the kids who picked their own books were far more likely to become frequent readers.

It’s not rocket science, yet we got it wrong, and the last few generations of readers have been screwed. Look what they were up against:

1. The rise of phones and tech commanding all attention, with little oversight.

2. Education policies that didn’t help literacy, and moved away from reading actual books.

We gave them an environment rich in highly processed foods (phones, social media) and then rigged the environment against them (lower literacy, worse education, little choice or actual books). If your stated goal was to kill reading books, I’m not sure you could develop a better plan.

Of course, it’s not just kids and young adults. Adults have been captured by their environment as well. We’ve traded the bedtime read for the bedtime scroll. And our attention spans have atrophied just as much, if not more. Reading has been crowded out by shiny objects — and even for those who desire to learn, by things that create the illusion of depth.

We’re inundated with CliffsNotes on steroids: short summaries of books, texts, and complex subjects. We ask AI for a synopsis whenever we’re stuck, then act like we know something. And we’ve largely replaced reading with longform podcasts and YouTube videos. Which — as someone who makes both — have value. But what they lack is the proactive discernment that reading teaches. Listening is more passive; we tune in and out, and seldom pause to question the argument.

Reading, on the other hand, demands engagement. And it’s that engagement that produces so many of the benefits.

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How Reading Helps

Reading is exercise for our brain. It’s the single most concentrated workout there is for attention.

Briefly, a few key insights from the research:

• It rewires our brain. In a study out of Emory, having people read a novel over nine nights produced heightened brain connectivity in both language and sensorimotor areas that persisted for five days after they finished.

• It builds knowledge and vocabulary. Our conversations and even TV shows contain roughly half the rare words a book does. It’s why first-grade reading ability predicts print exposure all the way out to 11th grade. Every book you read is scaffolding for the next one.

• Fiction is “a flight simulator for social life,” in psychologist Keith Oatley’s phrase. A 2018 meta-analysis found that fiction reading causally improves social cognition.

• It protects the brain. Book readers had a ~23-month survival advantage and ~20% lower mortality over 12 years vs. non-readers, and a mentally active reading life is linked to less cognitive impairment late in life — cognitive reserve.

• It improves listening and comprehension before kids can even read. In one study, preschoolers from heavy home-reading environments showed greater activation in narrative-comprehension regions while just listening to stories.

Those benefits compound. Every book provides background knowledge that makes the next book richer, your comprehension quicker, and staying focused easier. It’s the only workout where the equipment upgrades itself.

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So what do we do about it?

1. The phones, phones, phones…

Let’s start with the obvious. We need to repair and retrain our attention, and that starts with minimizing the thing destroying it: our phones. Consider what happened when researchers removed or limited them:

• After just 72 hours of phone restriction, brain scans showed craving circuits quieting — even while people said they felt no different.

• A two-week digital detox improved sustained attention by an amount equivalent to reversing 10 years of age-related cognitive decline.

• Partial removal helps! Only a fraction of people in one study fully unplugged, yet 91% still improved on attention, mood, or wellbeing.

How do we do it? Rig your environment. Just as you have to make it easy to get out the door to exercise, or hard to binge on junk food, you’ve got to do the same with reading.

• Limit phone time and add friction to the things that sap attention. Get a Brick to shut off your apps; take social media off your phone entirely. Put your Kindle or audiobook app front and center.

• Charge your phone in another room, not next to your bed. Create spaces meant for reading, not scrolling.

• Block off deep reading time with no other distractions. Same time each day, preferably the same place.

• If you read on a device, buy an e-reader that doesn’t do anything else.

• Make it active. Bring a pen or highlighter. Underline, argue in the margins, take notes.

2. Kill the elitism. Stop gatekeeping.

We do best when we choose exercise we enjoy. It’s the same with books, especially when starting out. It’s about establishing the habit, then letting the habit lead you into other genres.

Goosebumps, Harry Potter, manga, fiction, self-help, romance… I do not care. Read what you enjoy. Comic books get a bad rap, but research shows they aren’t dumbed down: one analysis found comics contained as many rare words as a sample of adult books (53.5 vs. 52.7 rare words per 1,000).

Too often we play gatekeeper, insisting someone love some prestige classic, when the point is to get people reading anything!

What unlocked my love of reading was a teacher letting me read Once a Runner for a book report — which led to more running books, and eventually, when I was ready, far beyond. The same goes for format. Hardcover, e-book, even audiobook: who cares. Just get people reading.

While we’re at it: you don’t have to finish. As a notoriously slow reader, I used to trudge through books and lose enthusiasm — and the pull of the book got too weak to compete with distraction. Now I do a few things to keep the pull strong:

• Embrace quitting. I give a book 50 pages, and if it’s not holding my attention, I have permission to quit. Quitting isn’t failure. It’s how you protect the habit.

• Cycle through multiple books. I usually have 2 or 3 going. You don’t watch the same show every evening — sometimes you’re in the mood for history, sometimes fiction. Rotate.

Too often we let perfect be the enemy of good, and we become that dude at the gym critiquing the person trying the stair climber for the first time. We run that person off instead of inviting them into a new world.

The proof is in the pudding: one of the few rapidly growing segments in publishing is romantasy. Millions of twenty-somethings got dragged back to books by dragon-romance novels. That’s not a decline in standards. That’s an on-ramp.

3. Start early. Make reading fun, not a chore.

Read to your kids. It matters for a number of reasons.

First, kids mirror what adults actually do, not what they say. If you say reading is great but you’re endlessly scrolling, guess what little Johnny or Suzy picks up? Model reading as a priority — bedtime reading with them, and letting them see you read around the house.

Second, it creates a bonding experience. Reading becomes less of a chore and more of something everyone looks forward to.

According to survey data from HarperCollins, Gen Z parents are more likely than previous generations to see reading as a “subject to learn” instead of a fun activity, and only 40% of parents of kids 13 and under agree that “reading books to my child is fun for me.” Which is probably why the share of children aged 0–4 who are read to daily or nearly daily has dropped from 64% in 2012 to 41% today.

When we treat something like work, it sucks the fun out of it. Just ask anyone who’s made their hobby their job. It can be done, but the moment we shift from “choose to” to “have to,” joy, fun, and intrinsic motivation plummet.

Reading shouldn’t be homework. If you see going for a run as punishment to endure, you’re never going to last. Whether it’s kids or adults, you’ve got to enjoy the thing.

One tip for parents — the bedtime loophole: if normal bedtime is 8:00, they can stay up until 8:30 if they’re reading. Reading becomes the privilege, not the chore.

4. Rig the environment.

When I was talking to NBA champion Shane Battier about kids and youth sports, he said, “If you want your kids to play sports, just put balls all around the house and things they can throw them into.” He said it somewhat in jest, but his point was spot on. Our environment invites action. It’s true in sport and in reading.

If you want kids to read, have books everywhere. It’s what my wife did as a teacher — comfortable reading nooks as the go-to spot in her classroom, surrounded by hundreds of books organized by level and topic. It’s what she did in our home with our two young girls: piles of books in the living room, in each bedroom, in the playroom. And we rotate them.

The research backs her up. In a study across 31 societies, growing up in a home with 500+ books predicted 2.4 extra years of education in the US, with lasting effects on adult literacy and numeracy. Researchers call it the home library effect. Books lying around aren’t clutter. They’re infrastructure.

It’s the same for adults. Stephen King takes a book with him everywhere so he defaults to reading in the in-between moments. The modern version might be a Kindle app on a phone with no social media. Or better yet, a book on your nightstand and one on the couch. You want books calling out to your brain: pick me up.

5. Do it with friends.

Run clubs exploded after the pandemic, when people were desperate to get outside and connect with real people doing real things. In the book world, book clubs are quietly having the same moment, for the same reasons.

In 2024, book-club events grew 31% on Eventbrite, and silent book clubs — where you meet up to read whatever you want, together — more than doubled. Silent Book Club now counts some 2,000 chapters in 61 countries.

Book clubs are running clubs for attention. And for good reason: it’s easier to build a habit when others are depending on you. It holds you accountable — and there’s a good conversation with a friend waiting at the end of the road.

6. Train it like Couch to 5K.

Our attention spans are in the dumpster. Our capacity for deep, complex thought is being outsourced to AI, social media, and whatever other brain rot is out there.

You don’t get fit by attempting a marathon off no training. That’s a recipe for injury and burnout. You start where you are and progressively overload. Don’t jump straight to Infinite Jest or Ulysses. Start with 10 minutes a day on a short book, a novella, or an old favorite. Think of it as easy miles: a familiar route you enjoy, at a comfortable pace. As fitness builds, gradually challenge yourself and find out what kinds of workouts you like.

Concentration is a muscle. Deep reading rebuilds attention — but like running, the hardest part is getting out the door. Once you’re in a groove, you won’t turn back.

While this might seem overly depressing, like we’re staring into the abyss of another epidemic that we can’t escape from, I was the kid reading the picture-book version of A Tale of Two Cities. Proudly gloating that I somehow got an A on the test for a book I didn’t read. Now, I read voraciously and have written five books.

Nobody is born a reader. Readers are made. They’re aided along by a teacher who hands you the right book, a parent on the couch with a paperback, and a house where books vastly outnumber screens.

Our attention muscle has been detrained. We rigged the world against it. It’s time to rig it back. The obesity epidemic taught us that willpower loses to environment every time. Fine. Then build an environment where the good thing is the easy thing.

We’ve got a choice. Is deep reading (and thinking) something we value? Or are we going to go the way of comfort, like we have in so many other aspects of life.

-Steve

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

On the evening of May 16, 2015, two men stood three thousand feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley about to jump off. Dean Potter was forty-three, the most famous climber of his generation. Graham Hunt was twenty-nine, his protégé and, increasingly, his rival. Just after 7:30, they stepped off in wingsuits, aiming for a V-shaped notch in a rocky ridgeline. Potter’s girlfriend stood nearby where they jumped with a camera. Hunt’s girlfriend waited at the landing zone.

Fifteen seconds into the flight, Hunt hit a side wall of the notch. Potter cleared it and crashed into the rocks beyond. Both lost their lives. In the Dark Wizard, the documentary series about Potter’s life, Dean’s sister Elizabeth tried to explain who her brother was. What she said has been rattling around in my head ever since:

“My brother would say the key to happiness is following beauty and not the urge to be the best. Was he able to always do that? No. Right up to the end, that was something he really battled. But in his most centered moments, he knew it was about listening to your heart and following that.”

Beauty versus the urge to be the best. That’s the central tension of so much of performance. For Potter, this inner argument unfolded in a world where judgment had immediate consequences and a single mistake could be fatal. For the rest of us, the consequences usually accumulate more slowly: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or the gradual loss of the love that brought us to the work.

It’s the inner battle between love of the thing, the artistic side, of feeling alive or in flow while you’re flying down the track or letting that creative spark take over. And it’s also the competitive instinct. The desire to win, to be the best, to make a name for yourself.

Too often, we treat these as competing forces that are opposites. I get the inclination, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s far messier. It’s more that we need these working in harmony.

How do we make sure competition brings out the best in us? That’s the trick all performers, from athletes to artists to entrepreneurs, are trying to master.

Before the Scoreboard

Long before we understand ranking, we understand absorption. We all start with the desire for joy and expression. Those feelings are what drive us initially. Just go look at a toddler roaming around trying to figure out a simple puzzle or to explore their new environment. There’s no comparison going on. In fact, they’re largely oblivious to everyone else, including the other toddler in the same room. The feelings that come with mastery of a task are what push our earliest pursuits.

Over time, we develop an awareness of others. First, to the friendly audience of mom and dad watching. And over time, to our sibling or friend doing the same activity. That urge to win, to be better, surfaces in all of us. We become deeply aware of how we stack up. And that can fuel us to pushing our performance to a new level, or getting us to throw in the towel because it’s not worth the effort.

We all have the competitive fire, but for some of us the scoreboard is always on and we’re staring at it. We’re the person who competes like crazy even against their kids at Monopoly. For others, it’s hidden, only coming out when needed in a chosen pursuit.

Almost every one of us starts out pursuing the thing as an interest that develops into love or joy of the craft. At some point, we start competing with others. First, maybe just in more abstract comparison, but over time potentially head to head.

It’s how we manage that jump that determines whether we’re stuck proving our worth, or letting the work reveal and shape who we are.

When Love Becomes Obligation

In the pleasant Montreal summer, psychologist Robert Vallerand went to a few different cycling events and had folks fill out a questionnaire on their passion for the sport. They were all regular cyclists, putting in about 10 hours a week of training. Then he waited…

In February, when the average temperature was hanging out at 8 degrees Fahrenheit with about 80 inches of snow having accumulated, he reached back out to find out who was still cycling outside in the hazardous conditions. Only 30% were, and it was those who scored dramatically higher in what he called obsessive passion back in August.

Vallerand found that there are two kinds of passion. They both come with the same intensity and drive, it’s just what fuels them underneath. Obsessive passion comes from “I have to do this to remain who I am.” It’s an almost compulsion that has a bit of fear or insecurity underlying it. Harmonious passion is driven by love of the thing. It’s “I choose to do this” because it aligns with my values and interests. You’re able to step away when needed. It doesn’t control you.

The only thing that predicted who’d ride through the ice was whether the passion controlled the person. As he wrote, “It is as if the person said: ‘I know it’s not good for me, but I can’t help myself, I just have to continue doing this activity.’”

His paradigm holds beyond just cyclists training in the ice. Later research on dancers found that those with more harmonious passion tended to have fewer prolonged injuries, while those with more obsessive passion tended to have chronic injuries. Why? The harmonious folks would seek out information and help. They were willing to take off a few days if it meant long-term health. Those with more obsessive passion, refused to even partially scale back training and admitted that personal pride was what prevented them from getting treatment

It’s not that we are either obsessive or harmonious. We have both. It’s whether one dominates the other, whether the compulsion drowns out the desire.

The difference is not intensity. It is ownership and identity. Harmonious passion says, “This is part of who I am.” Obsessive passion says, “Without this, I do not know who I am.”

For Potter, following beauty was the language of choice: the experience called to him. The urge to remain the best carried a different demand. It made the next accomplishment responsible for protecting his identity, reputation, and place in the world.

That’s what the obsessive variety does. It nudges us towards defending our spot. That’s the essence of the variety of competition that pits us against others. As researchers found in studying elite swimmers across a season, the lesson was: intensity wasn’t the problem. The quality of the motivation underneath it was.

Competing isn’t the issue here. The intensity of the passion isn’t it either. It’s tying our worth and value to defending our place that is. When mistakes, failure, or results threaten our status, self-worth, and sense of where we belong, that’s when bad things happen.

The danger occurs when the next feat, the next result becomes a verdict on whether you are still who you think you are. We’ve got to be in charge of our definition of success. That’s what Potter’s beauty versus competition is all about. One defines ‘success’ as the act itself, the feeling of aliveness that comes with it. The other, exports that definition. It hands it to someone or something else.

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Defining Success and The Arena

The battle is in writing your definition of success, and then holding true to it.

In psychology, this is represented in the idea of task vs. ego orientation. When we take a task approach to a craft, we’re asking: Am I learning, improving, solving, or expressing? It’s about the act itself. When we take an ego orientation, we’re asking: Did I establish my superiority? It’s about status and rank.

A group of researchers out of the University of Birmingham randomly assigned students to play table soccer under a few framings. One group got the “Table Soccer Challenge”: learn three skills at your own pace, get rewarded for self-improvement. Another got the “Table Soccer Competition”: a top-ten leaderboard mounted next to the table, scores to be posted on the school’s website, and instructions to outperform the expert in the training videos. While the third was a control. Then they had reviewers who were blind to the condition watch everyone on hidden cameras to see what they did.

The competition group racked up roughly double the antisocial acts of the others. They broke the rules nearly twice as often, taunting doubled, and displays of anger tripled. And when players later got the chance to gift bonus goals to their opponent, with real stakes attached (raffle tickets for a £50 cash draw), the challenge/mastery group gave away more. The researchers didn’t find worse people. They built them.

Researchers found that the more years people spent in a heavily win-focused sports environment, the more ego orientation they had and the lower moral functioning. Similarly, other work found that ego orientation was tied to a higher likelihood of doping in sport. We don’t need research to tell us this. Just look at the Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Lance Armstrongs of the world. When remaining on top becomes responsible for protecting the self, cheating becomes easier to rationalize. The question shifts from “Is this right?” to “What do I have to do to remain who everyone believes I am?”

We all have that pull towards measuring up and winning. But if we let it run amok, the competitive fuel that can help raise our game, turns against us. I know this drift because I lived it as a runner. What began as the simple satisfaction of moving fast gradually became a referendum on who I was. Racing moved from exploration to a judgement on who I was as a person. The more I needed running to prove something, the harder it became to run freely.

It might seem like competition and artistry or mastery are opposites, but they’re not. It’s only when competition gets pushed in the wrong direction, with a crappy definition of success underlying it. Competition directed toward discovery can become part of the art.

Competition is not merely something the artist must survive. At its best, it is a creative constraint. An opponent helps reveal possibilities we could not see alone. A race against others, gives you the extra juice to convince your brain to push a little deeper into the depths of fatigue so you can explore just a bit longer. Another writer, scientist, musician, or entrepreneur can help us to sharpen and refine our ideas. In this form, the competitor is not someone standing between us and the work. They become part of the work.

We can see it in the original meaning of compete, which stood for “striving together.” A modern twist on this might be, do we see our fellow competitors as either a:

1. Threat: Their success diminishes me.

2. Teacher: Their presence reveals more of me.

The question is never simply how competitive we are. It is what we are competing against, and what the competition is for.

Psychologists measuring competitiveness found that hypercompetitiveness and personal-development competitiveness are statistically independent traits. You can be intensely competitive without being hypercompetitive”

We can see this in the research on the impact of rivalries. Rivalries genuinely raise our game. Runners literally run faster against a rival than against a stranger. But the same research found rivalry’s dark side: it makes the stakes feel personal, tying our self-worth to the outcome. And once self-worth is on the line, we drift toward doing “whatever it takes.” We transform into “win at all costs.” It’s the same signature as obsessive passion: the outcome stops being something you want and becomes something you are.

Once again, it comes back to what’s underlying our competitiveness, our basic drive and motivation.

Just to be clear, following beauty is not a safety protocol. Pure motives do not make dangerous activities safe, just as competitive motives do not make tragedy inevitable. The argument here is about what these motives do to judgment, identity, and our relationship with the work—not about reducing Potter’s death to a tidy psychological explanation.

Risk Not Winning

After spending his younger years working at Los Alamos on the Atomic Bomb, Richard Feynman was afraid he’d never live up to expectations. He was burned out, working at Cornell when he decided, “I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.” Shortly after, he watched a cafeteria plate that was thrown wobble around and he worked out the rotation math for fun. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

When we’re competitors, the hardest thing in the world can be to let go, to stop striving towards productivity or one-upping those around you. But often, the thing that allows us to break through is returning to our roots: play, joy, fun.

We all started out as explorers. Again, just go spend some time with toddlers or elementary school kids. But over time, as productivity and winning took center fold, we often lost a little of that magic.

It’s the same thing skateboarding legend Tony Hawk noticed when he was relentlessly practicing for another big trick. He kept falling short, and was becoming miserable doing it. His skateboarding friend Rodney Mullen gave him the advice that would set him free: “risk not winning.” He followed it, letting go just enough, so that when he returned he landed the first 900 in competition. He did not escape or flee from competition. He changed his relationship to it. Once winning stopped being compulsory, he became free to create again.

Warren Buffett called this the difference between an inner and outer scorecard: Are you measuring the work against your own values and standards, or against what other people think of you? And coach John Wooden built his entire system around the same principle: winning mattered, but the final score was not a complete measure of whether you had succeeded.

They knew the tension of the striver. They weren’t saying winning isn’t important or that striving or competing was bad. They were literally in the arena, competing. But they realized the messiness of it all. That if they didn’t create their own inner scorecard, define success, and make sure they held on to the joy and mastery that got them hooked in the first place, the ugly head of winning at all costs or obsessive passion would rear its head. And that would fundamentally alter what they fell in love with in the first place. You need to let go, just enough.

That’s the nuance of competition. It’s the messiness of striving. It’s far easier to keep the fairytale version in our head, that if we just build hard-nosed “competitors” everyone will be great. That’s not how it works. That fuel can burn you.

Mastery isn’t the absence of the urge to be the best. It’s the daily act of returning the urge to the service of the craft. It’s having something to ground you in the joy of the process. And that’s often what the best coaches do. They realize that everything in the world is already pulling us towards competing and comparing. And that it’s near impossible to resist that urge, without help and support.

For Potter, the argument unfolded in a world where mistakes could be fatal. For most of us, the consequences are slower: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or losing the love that brought us to the work.

We’re all fighting that battle. It’s not a tug of war between art and competition. Harmony is not a permanent achievement. Even the most centered person does not solve the conflict once. It’s keeping that joy front and center, so that it makes the competition less about defining who you are to others, and more about exploring who you are for yourself.

The scoreboard can tell us where we stand. It cannot tell us why we began. For that, we have to keep returning to beauty.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

This weekend, a 2,800-year-old poem had the biggest opening of Christopher Nolan's career. Bigger than Batman, Oppenheimer, you name it. A quarter of a billion dollars, worldwide, for a story your high school English teacher assigned you. One reason, is that while it might seem like an adventure story. It’s really about the traps inside our own head and how to get past them.

At its heart, The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving maps of pressure, fear, temptation, homesickness, trauma, identity, leadership, and recovery. It’s resonated for millennia because it gets at the human condition, and our own struggles so well.

At its very base is goal conflict. A drive to get home, to see his family, while everything is pulling us in competing directions. Sometimes, it’s shiny objects and temptations, other times its items that pull at our own ego.

It might just be one of the clearest demonstrations of what real toughness is all about. It’s not some macho fearlessness. It’s the ability to keep making the right choice while fear, grief, fatigue, desire, shame, uncertainty, and ego are all trying to hijack you. It’s taking wise action amidst the chaos.

So with that said, let’s take a look at what the Odyssey can teach us about navigating a messy world.

1. Uncertainty is at the root of stress and anxiety

Odysseus is known as a brilliant cunning man. But throughout his ordeal, he’s acting on incomplete information. Half the time he doesn’t know where he is, what god is angry at him, whether his family waited for him, or if home even exists anymore. And he often finds himself in situations with no clear comparison or way out. It’s the basic psychology of stress: an always looming threat, with lots of uncertainty, and much of it beyond your control.

It’s the constant battle of hope. The moment that you let the uncertainty shadow everything else, and throw up your hands because it seems like nothing you do matters, you default to hopelessness. And trying becomes impossible.

You’ve got to get comfortable acting despite incomplete information. You’ve got to learn how to take the leap, despite not knowing whether you still have a shot at your goal or not. You’ve got to hold on to hope, even if the situation seems dire.

It’s exactly what Viktor Frankl communicated in his work on surviving the Holocaust. It’s holding on to the smallest bit of meaning and sense of control.

2. It’s the Numbing That You Have to Watch Out For.

When Odysseus men eat the lotus, they get stuck in a state of pleasant contentment. They forget all about the mission or their desire to go home. It’s so bad that Odysseus has to drag his crying men back to the ships and tie them up. That’s how strong the pull is.

It’s not hard to see the parallels to modern life. There’s the addiction angle, but I think for most of us it’s more that modern life has a tendency to numb us out. We scroll endlessly, get trapped in cycles of watching TikTok videos for hours instead of meaningful pursuits. The feed asks us to care about everything, so we end up caring about nothing. It’s not just our phones, it’s that we design a life of comfort so that we don’t feel anything anymore.

We don’t get the struggle of doing hard things, or of pursuing meaningful relationships, because much of our modern life is designed around avoiding anything with even the littlest friction.

Too often, we think we want ease and comfort, but what we really need is things to make us feel alive. Pursuits that challenge us, relationships that force us to grow. At the heart of living a good life, is keeping the pulls towards avoidance at bay with a strong enough desire.

It’s what Odysseus had. Even when he went astray, that pull or even ache towards home, is what guided him. It’s what kept him alive.

3. You Can’t Willpower Your Way Through Everything

Everyone knows the story of the Sirens. Odysseus had his men tied him to the mast of the ship so he could hear the songs, while his men put wax in their ears and were told to ignore his commands and not to untie him no matter what.

It’s a simple but profound lesson. We can’t grit or willpower our way through everything. Even the great heroes can’t. This is the original anti social media influencer hustle and discipline content. It’s telling us that at some point those things will fail, and you better have something else.

It’s not saying those things aren’t valuable. It’s just that you need to know their limitations. You need to understand when environmental design beats discipline. Or when you need good people around you to prevent you from doing something stupid.

4. Ego Can Sabotage Everything

In one of the more famous stories, the cyclops Polyphemus traps Odysseus and his men in a cave. Odysseus tells the cyclops that his name is “nobody.” After they stab the cyclops in his eye, the monster screams out to other cyclops and when they ask what’s happening, he says “Nobody is attacking me.” So they leave him alone. This cunning move ultimately allows Odysseus to escape.

But then, on their ships sailing away, Odysseus can’t resist taunting the cyclops to make sure that he knows who it was who beat him. The cyclops then prays to his father, the sea god Poseidon, to curse him with a long journey back home.

That’s the reason why Odysseus journey takes 10 long years.

This is the clearest lesson in the book. You can win the battle, you can be the most intelligent and masterful. But a tiny slip of your ego, destroys it all. Ego is the engine of self-sabotage. When we prioritize status-seeking over all else, it erodes our judgement and ability to think clearly under stress. It’s really freaking hard to turn off that status and comparison engine.

If you don’t do the work to keep your ego just in check, it’s going to come back to bite you.

Odysseus shows us the way. Being nobody saved his life. But the need to be somebody, cost him a decade of misery.

5. We all need a Mentor

The word “mentor” comes from the Odyssey. It’s as simple as that.

Mentor is an old friend that Odysseus leave in charge of his son, Telemachus, to help guide him from being a timid boy to a capable man. The goddess Athena repeatedly tooks disguises (most famously Mentor's) to guide Telemachus.. But what’s interesting is that she doesn’t just guarantee him victories or rescue him. She does what we now think a mentor does, support and nudge him towards action. She instructs him to speak, to travel, to seek news of his father, to enter adult spaces, and to take responsibility for his house.

It’s the origin story of good guidance and coaching. Treat people as capable, show them the way, but don’t pave the path for them. A good coach or mentors helps move them towards independence, not dependence. They lend belief long enough for the athlete, student, or young leader to build their own.

6. Define Success Well

Achilles was known as the greatest warrior of his time. He was seen almost like a human god. In the Iliad, Achilles tells us of the choice he had to make as a child, “If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love... my glory dies, but the life that’s left me will be long.”

He chose glory over a quiet long life. In the hero culture, it seems like he made the right decision. When Odysseus meets the hero in the underworld, he lavishes him with praise, but Achilles quickly corrects Odysseus, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

The man who got what so many craved, an immortal name with poems that echoed for eternity, said it wasn’t worth it. He’d swap all of it for an ordinary Tuesday.

The external is always tempting. The awards, accolades, status, and notoriety seem like they are the ultimate prize. Even now, we sacrifice so much for it. But in Homer’s epics the hero of the Iliad who wanted to be remembered meets the man who just wants to return home intact, and the former is saying love is more important than glory.

7. The Return is the Hard Part

At the heart of the epic is a simple lesson. The war took a decade. It’s what nearly everyone would say is the hardest part. It’s an actual war after all. But Homer’s poem was trying to tell us that it’s the journey back home that is often just as difficult.

Whether it’s the research on modern soldiers struggles and PTSD, athletes and their rate of depression after hanging up their jersey, or the difficulty for folks after retiring. It’s not that you finish the hard thing, and then it’s all joy, bliss, and contentment.

The hard thing changes who you are. You saw it when Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca. He doesn’t just show up as a triumphant king. It’s the same island, but it is no longer the world he left. He’s got to wrestle with how he and the world he once remembered changed.

It’s what every athlete comes to realize.

Andre Agassi: “Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Olympic medalist Molly Seidel: “Winning it and realizing it didn’t change me as a person... it didn’t fix anything in my life… Defining yourself by those accomplishments will destroy you ultimately.”

Phelps called it the weight of gold. And at it’s heart, it’s what Homer’s epic is all about. It’s right there in the poem. Odysseus returns to Ithaca about halfway through it. The entire second half is about what happens when he finally reaches his goal. He has to find himself, and his place again.

Getting home and being home are different problems. Which is exactly the retired athlete’s discovery: the plane lands, the medal’s on the shelf, and the harder half hasn’t started.

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What is toughness? What’s it mean to endure, to be resilient? Homer gives us an answer in the first line of the poem, andra polytropon. Which translates to “the man of many turns.”

Living life, pursuing goals, performing is messy. Odysseus himself is a flawed human being. But that line gets at what is at the heart of performing in just about anything: flexibility and adaptability. It’s what all great competitors possess. The challenges that you face are vast and varied. And no solution or tactic works all the time. It’s flexibility, having a big toolbox of coping strategies, which separates those who can figure things out versus those who get stuck.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

But with the World Cup we got an interesting case study to help quantify how each impacted performance just by following England’s journey. I covered altitude and heat before each of their matches, but it’s worth a deep dive retrospective to see what actually occurred.

England played their first 4 games either indoors or in temperate climates, before then playing Mexico at Mexico City (7,200 feet altitude) and Norway outdoors in Miami (120 minutes in hot and humid conditions). Before playing Argentina a few days later at an indoor stadium.

This provides a nice baseline of normality for their play before we can take a look at what altitude, humidity, and fatigue do to their players. I used FIFA’s in depth statistics to look at total distance run, high speed running distance, sprint distance, and number of sprints completed.

Notes: To standardize because Norway went 120min versus other games 90, I calculated meters per minute to help give us a better comparison. Zone 4= anything above 20km/hr. Zone 5 = anything above 25km/hr.

The Impact of Altitude:

What’s clear to see is that during the group stage, there were some slightly different metrics based on style and tactics of the game, but it’s all in the same bandwidth. Then, we get to Mexico City and altitude…

Total distance covered dropped slightly, but what really fell off a cliff is the higher intensity runs. Zone 4 and 5 declined by between 39 and 48%. A huge drop off compared to what they were doing before. Yes, tactics shift and playing in a low block tends to decrease this, which they were doing for part of Mexico, but you can tell the altitude drop off because it’s much lower than when England defended for 30+min against Argentina.

So the altitude hit was real and significant…

One question is how big was it compared to Mexico, who should have been better adapted after training and competing up there. Well, I ran the numbers here too:

You can see that Mexico has a slight to significant advantage in every category. If we looked at every other game that Mexico played at their home stadium, the numbers are even higher for them. Showing that they consistently had much higher high speed running metrics at altitude.

The bottom line on altitude: It did exactly what I outlined before hand: it significantly impacted high speed running, both in distance covered and number of sprints. And tended to have a greater effect on England than Mexico. Which makes sense because one side was acclimatized and the other wasn’t.

Could England have done anything about this? Small tweaks might have helped, as I outlined before the match. But the truth is with such short times between games and this not being the primary target, it’s hard to employ strategies like longer term acclimatizing that would have helped.

Mexico’s home field advantage is real and significant. It forces teams to change how they play.

What About the Heat?

After surviving the altitude, England headed to Miami to play Norway in a 120 minute match that took place with upper 80 degree Fahrenheit weather with high humidity. In other words, miserable conditions.

What impact did the heat have? It mirrored altitude really well. We can see it in the decline of high-intensity running for England (meters/min).

And we can see across every variable we tracked. On average, heat comes in pretty dang close to the same decline (when compared to the baseline 4 games before we hit round of 16 and round of 8).

Heat sucks… Now, there is a caveat here. The Norway game went 120 minutes. So even though it’s normalized for per minute, we can’t discount that the last 30+min were in a more fatigued state so high intensity or sprint running could have been dragged down a bit. That’s a fair critique. I don’t have data split by half, just the totals. But regardless of that, the drop was significant and remarkably similar to altitude.

But who handled it better? When we looked at altitude, the adapted Mexico team had a clear advantage. With heat, we’ve got two European teams who spent time training in the heat and preparing for it. Who fared better?

First, let’s look at Norway’s baseline and drop data:

As you can see, a pretty steep drop in high intensity and sprint running. In particular, it’s interesting to see the impact of a warm but not quite as hot and humid game against Brazil.

When we compare them versus England, we get a relatively similar drop off. Norway seemed to hold up a little bit better with high intensity running and their sprinting was about the same.

So who was better prepared? It’s impossible to say from this data. They both saw a big dropoff, though Norway may have handled it ever so slightly better. Though, officially, I’d call it a toss-up.

What about Fatigue?

And the final question…did playing in hot and humid conditions for 120min, then having one less day to recovery cause undue fatigue against Argentina?

This is the hardest question to answer because there’s no available data source to truly answer it. So we have to get a little creative. For England, if we compare players who only played a part of the Norway match to those who played nearly the whole time, and then looked at their high speed decline against Argentina versus their baseline data. It’s not perfect. But in theory, if fatigue was the culprit, those who played significantly less would have held up better.

That wasn’t the case. Although it’s a small sample size, you can see that those players who played less than 50 minutes against Norway versus those who played nearly the entire game had about the same percent drop in high intensity running against Argentine. Gordon was the only exception.

So what?

Heat, humidity, and altitude all have significant impacts on soccer play. In particular high intensity running significantly declined in each. This is exactly what we’d expect to happen, but nevertheless, it’s cool to see the data lines up with theory and research. If you aren’t preparing for altitude or heat when playing 90+ minutes of soccer, you are at a significant disadvantage.

-Steve

Josh Kerr just did him one better. In March of this year he announced Project 222, an attempt to break one of the hardest and most hallowed in sports, El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 mile world record. Something that had stood for 27 years.

Kerr called his shot: “It’s time for that record to have a real go at it, and I’m going to be that guy to do it.”

Today, July 18th, Kerr backed it up. Running 3:42.66 to bring the record back to the UK, to join legends like Bannister, Ibottson, Coe, Ovett, and Cram.

And the way he did it was impressive. Just look at his splits: 55.22 (400m), 1:51.06 (800m), 2:46.45 (1200m), and 3:27.6 (1,500m).

He had two rabbits that got him to 1,000 meters, but then had to make a long push home. And let me tell you, pushing for a lap and a half while you are riding the razors edge is HARD. During that push, his 100m split only varied between 13.67 and 13.88. Just incredibly consistent.

It was one of the most impressive performances I’ve seen. And Kerr has one of the most impressive mental games you could imagine.

Kerr’s M.O in his career has been confidence. It’s sometimes interpreted as cocky, but what it really is is a deep conviction that’s founded in the work. He and his coach, Danny Mackey, are methodical in preparation, and always keeping the main thing the main thing.

It’s one of the reasons why Kerr always shows up at the big meets. He’s got a history of coming through at championships when the lights are brightest. It’s so hard to do, and yet Mackey and Kerr almost always get it right.

Part of that comes from how they approach training and performance. They know what matters most: consistency.

“I don’t do crazy workouts or crazy mileage. I just don’t miss days. Consistency is my biggest weapon. I’ll break any athlete down with how consistent I’m going to be training wise and just getting the work done.”

They realize that the whole game is compounding. It’s not having one killer workout here or there. It’s putting together a body of work that prepares him. Too often at this level, we turn workouts into proving grounds, to show what we’re capable of. It’s easy to fall into that trap, both as an athlete and coach. Often, it’s the doubt and insecurity that pushes us to prove ourselves, especially in the era of strava and comparison.

“The way that I get fast is stacking. I’m stacking years, I’m stacking days, I’m stacking months.” It’s about winning the workouts. As Kerr said, “If you show up and put in the same level of effort regardless of how you feel, you’re winning every day.”

Putting in the work is step one. The second and just as important is: trusting and letting go.

Kerr uses the analogy of the work filling the cup: “If you can stand on a start line with a filled cup, you’re ready to go to war.” Then it’s time to release and show what you’ve done. You can see it in his pre-race talk. Yes, he’s after the record, but he’s chasing that feeling:

“That’s what I’m chasing with this record — full flow — like I’ve done every single thing I can. I’m now giving my body and my mind over to this experience. That’s living for me.”

On the starting line, trying harder is the enemy. If we overthink, try to force actions that are ingrained, we get in our own way. You turn down our impulse to overthink by trusting what's underneath. And that only works if you've built something to trust

It’s why famous sprint coach Bud Winter coined the term “Relax and win.” And jazz maestro Charlie Parker once said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice, practice, practice. And then when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

Kerr certainly let it wail. His similar philosophy could be seen in what he said before the race: his body was capable of the mark, so his job was “to have my mind be available to let my body do its job.”You spend years grabbing control. Then, in the moment that matters most, the skill is letting go of it. As Kerr alluded to, it’s not turning your brain off completely, it’s getting out of the way so you can focus on the task at hand and let you do what you’ve trained to do.

Kerr has some of the best insights and quotes on mental performance. But more so, what I’m thrilled about is that you can trust this record. I’ve known his coach Danny Mackey for almost two decades. He was right there with me in the hardest time of my life as a whistleblower. He put his career in jeopardy by stepping forward in the same situation. He loves the sport and respects it.

So celebrate this one. An absolutely amazing performance.

He called his shot. And got it done in the hardest event in track and field. Astonishing.

-Steve

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There’s not much worse than having that hope and excitement ripped away.

I’m not here to give you a tactical breakdown. That’s not my expertise. But what I can do is help evaluate the psychology of it all. And once we do, there’s some profound implications that reach far beyond the soccer pitch.

First, let’s look at some data to describe what happened.

During the first half, possession was well-balanced with England at 44% and Argentina 56%. After Gordon scored at the 55th minute, the possession changed drastically. From then until Argentina’s equalizer, it looked like this: England 12%, Argentina 88%.

That is an absurd shift. To put it in further perspective, one analysis found that during the 18 minutes preceding the equalizing goal, England had exactly 2 accurate passes, both from their goalie to their defender. That’s it.

They went into prevent and protect mode. In American football, we’d call this a prevent defense. Where the goal shifts from trying to score to protecting the lead. It has a strategic reason. It’s generally harder to score goals against a low-block, and we’ve seen it ‘work’ in this world cup. But that strategy comes with a high psychological cost, especially when it’s implemented in the middle of the game, versus a deliberate approach from the beginning (as Paragauy did, for example).

That psychological cost, could be summed up by American football coach and broadcasting legend John Madden’s words, “The only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.”

Or if you’d prefer the football version of this, just listen to manager Cesc Fàbregas:

“Imagine you’re winning 1-0 and in the last 10 minutes you put on a defender instead of a striker. You put on a line of 5 because, from the outside, you see that they’re attacking a lot. I don’t like it. In their heads, the players interpret the change as DEFENSIVE and, automatically, their mentality changes. ‘The coach wants us to defend’, they think. And so you attract pressure, you give them the ball and you invite them to attack you more and be more dangerous. One day it may happen that you finish the match on the counterattack, but 80% or 90% of the time it HARMS YOU. A penalty, a free kick or a rebound inside the box can be serious.”

Prevent defense sometimes works. It’s not as do or die as Madden suggested. But the psychological shift underlying it is real. And if you aren’t prepared for it, it can do exactly what Fàbregas hypothesized: push you to avoiding, playing not to lose, instead of approaching and playing to win.

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Do we approach or avoid?

When an animal encounters an opponent, they default to a stress response that either pushes them to attack, to take on the prey and be the aggressor. Or alternatively to avoid or escape the predator. A lot of this depends on a simple calculus: do I have a shot, am I the dominant aggressor or not?

In humans, we might not be trying to kill or survive, but the same underlying psychology and biology applies. When we think we have the capabilities to handle the demands of the situation, we tend to have a challenge response. More testosterone and adrenaline, less cortisol. That helps nudge us towards having approach motivation, where we are the aggressor. If we assess the situation in a different manner, thinking that we don’t quite have the skills to meet the demands, we have a threat response. Way more cortisol that pushes us towards protection and avoidance. We flee or try to minimize the damage instead of pursue. In essence, are we driven to play to win, where we want to take on the challenge before us? Or are we trying to survive via playing not to lose?"

It’s a kind of inner calculus we run based on the situation, our capabilities, AND the goal of the situation. Psychologist E. Tory Higgins developed a similar model that outlined we have two motivational systems for goal pursuit:

• Promotion focus: We focus on the gains, growth, or aspirations. It’s a hopeful future we see a shot to “succeed.” It’s tied to who you’d IDEALLY like to be. We’re more aggressive, taking calculated risks because the goal is worth it.

• Prevention focus: We focus on safety and security. It’s tied to running strategies that are based on being vigilant and protective. We transform into the lookout, watching for threats, avoiding errors, and prioritizing not messing up. It’s tied to who you feel you OUGHT to be.

Whether we call it challenge vs. threat, promotion vs. prevention, or approach vs. avoid; all of them get at the same thing. One leans us towards playing a bit more aggressive, taking control, and focusing on what you can do to win. The other shifts us to risk avoidance, playing it safe, and preventing big mistakes.

Which way we go depends on where the evidence pushes us. That evidence includes not only our assessment, but the signals we’re picking up around us. What our coach, teammates, captains, fans, history, and more are telling us. Have we been in this spot before and rose to the occasion or fallen flat? And in the case of England, the heavy weight of raucous fanbase and a history of falling short…means the deck is already stacked against them.

They are the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox before they finally broke the ‘curse,’ carrying the burden of generations before them, that nudges them towards protection because they’ve grown up with the stories of just falling short. So their brain logically screams “PROTECT!” It’s one of the hardest things to overcome.

That’s the exact shift England made. They moved from create the next chance to don’t make the mistake. And we saw it reflected in their play. Let’s break down how shifting to a prevent mode impacts our psychology, performance, and what we can do about it.

Even one of their defenders, Marc Guehi, diagnosed the problem afterward, “We should have carried on pushing. It kind of felt like we scored and then the mentality was go back, defend.”

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1. Don’t look over your shoulder. Run to the line.

In running, every athletes hears these same instructions, from high school to pro. When you’re leading a race, there’s this temptation to look behind. It’s the classic photo of Roger Bannister versus John Landy, where just coming off the final turn, Landy takes a glance over his shoulder, and Bannister comes flying by.

The reason this advice is given is straightforward. It puts you in defensive mode, focused on what you might lose. You stop executing your task, locked-in on the finish line and driving towards it. And instead shift your focus to what others are doing. Even for just a moment, it can throw you off, taking you away from the task at hand.

What you attend to gains value; what gains value directs action. If you’re focused on someone else, you’re giving them power. It’s not too different from when a golfer sees the water trap, can’t stop thinking about it, and ends up hitting it there. When it comes to attention, we want to keep on things that shorten the path to the right action. If all we’re thinking about is our opponent, then we turn reactive instead of proactive.

And perhaps more importantly, it gives the chaser hope. The moment your opponent sees you glancing back, they interpret it as “they’ve got doubt. They’re worried about me.” And the chaser suddenly receives a signal of hope, and gets a boost of energy.

Just listen to what the Argentina manager said after the game,“The opponent hesitates a bit, we smell blood, and we go for it. That's the feeling I'm left with.”

The runner who looks over their shoulder does two things at once. They take their eyes off the finish and tells the chaser “I’m scared.” Both help the chaser.

2. Stay in control. Don’t cede it.

Control is like an ignition switch, turning on our ability to navigate difficult situations. When we have agency, it gives us hope and tells our brain that we can take actions that matter and make a difference. When we drop into protective mode, we give away control. And research from sport to life to animals, shows that when we cede control, we increase stress levels, and are more likely to drop into ‘why try’ or ‘what’s the point’ mode. After all, if we’re just stuck reacting to others instead of controlling the game, what can we really do about it.

When we feel like a situation is outside of our control, effort plummets. We lose hope, which is the engine of effort. Hope is your brain’s calculation with four inputs: whether the goal matters, whether your actions can change anything, whether there’s a workable route, and whether the signal is clear enough to act on. As they drop, effort collapses.

A prevent defense frame quietly takes away those inputs. It says “there are no real paths besides protecting,” and that “your job isn’t to make things happen.” It shifts us out of goal pursuit mode, where we are prey with something to chase. And instead tells us there’s nothing worth chasing, so conserve energy.

As I outlined in Do Hard Things, our brain treats passivity as the default under stress. Having a sense of control is what shuts that collapse off.

3. Presence vs. Dragged to the future

When we’re stuck in prevent mode, we get dragged to thinking about the future instead of playing in the moment. We’re begging the clock to speed up, with half our attention on whether we’re inching closer to the line. It’s akin to the runner staring at their watch as you make progress 0.01 miles at a time towards the finish line. When you do that, it drives you nuts, and you stop doing the things that help you keep the next bit on pace.

It’s why every piece of advice during the crucial moments of a game are to ‘stay in the moment.’ Stress and pressure drag us towards worrying about or ruminating about what’s to come. We start worrying about and picking up cues that have nothing to do with our execution and instead amplify the potential threat. It’s why the attentional control theory tells us anxiety shifts our attention from task-relevant to threat-relevant cues. Presence is the antidote, allowing us to put the right action front and center.

You can’t fully play the moment and count it down at the same time. England spent the last 30 minutes watching the clock.

4.Sending and Receiving the Signal

Fabregas said, “In their heads, the players interpret the change as defensive and, automatically, their mentality changes.” In the arena, we’re inundated with signals that push and pull us towards challenge vs. threat, or approach vs. avoid. It’s what makes it so freaking hard to manage.

The coach is the one who sets the emotional thermostat. They are the person who everyone looks to. It’s why psychologists at the University of Amsterdam found that whatever emotional state coaches expressed predicted their players’ emotional state and subsequent performance. If a coach was angry, players grew more frustrated, made more errors, and were more likely to tank. When the coach loses it, every person in the room picks up the same message: something’s wrong.

It’s the same when we get the signal, through body language and communication as well as actions (e.g., our tactical or sub choices) on what emotion and behavior to inhabit. In many ways, it’s no different than a toddler who looks to mom and dad on how to handle a difficult or stressful situation. If mom is freaking out, kid will shy away.

It’s not all on the coach, players transmit signals too. But the point is that our emotions and behaviors are contagious. If everything around us is screaming to be risk averse, don’t make mistakes, then even subconsciously we will adopt that posture.

5. Run your race. Play your game.

In running, we have another saying, “run your race.” You don’t want to get caught up running someone elses, letting them dictate your pacing or moves. You want to stay in control and execute your race. Yes, their tactics and moves may influence yours. But the point is to be in charge.

Ultimately, you seldom win when you start playing someone elses game. You lose agency and confidence. You cede ownership and get lost reacting.

The teams who play defensive well find a way to stay in promotion mode. Sure, they may be in a low block, but they are using it as a way to look for opportunities to punch and counter. They see it as their opportunity to find their spaces to promote. It’s not a hanging on for dear life, but an active strategy that they take ownership over. They dare you to play their game so they can exploit it.

Look, being in the arena, competing at the highest level is tough. This isnt’ a critique on England’s players or even their manager. That’s not my business. What I hope you got out of this is to understand the psychology behind performance.

It’s a tricky tight rope to walk. And subtle shifts can influence our behavior, motivation, and biology.

It’s not as simple as say as promotion good, prevention bad. The point is does it fit the performance and performer. Think back to your animal cousins, a dog going up against a bear should prevent. It’s the same here.

When researchers put soccer players through a penalty kick situation, performance improved when the framing matched the player’s natural orientation. A promotion-type player kicking under a “score!” frame did better. A prevention-type player kicking under a “don’t miss” frame did better. When framing and personality were mismatched, performance dropped. It’s that the fit between the instruction and the person is what boosts performance.

You’ve got to know your team and the opponent. In running terms, do they love to front run or stalk from behind. In soccer teams, do we have a scrappy aggressive defender nation like Paraguay, or are we about possession, control, and the beautiful game of football. Every team and individual has an identity. And too often, when we shift out of the one that’s brought success, and we open up the space to allow our opponents to occupy one they thrive under….well, we let the shark smell blood. And we left ourselves few options or tools on how to handle it. Threat is the rational response.

-Steve

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“I see so many kids that are so anxious to do the wrong thing because the coach or the parent is yelling at them throughout the game that it drives me crazy.”

That’s Landon Donovan, arguably the greatest American men’s soccer player ever, describing exactly how we create fear of failure. And another legend and science backs him up.

The late Kobe Bryant once pulled a parent aside at his daughter’s basketball practice who was yelling from the sideline, and told them,“Don’t say anything. There’s a conversation happening inside her head. She’s pumping herself up. An outside voice interrupts her process. Let her figure it out herself.”

We look to others to understand how we’re performing and what’s important. You don’t need research to tell you this, you just need to be a parent. When your child was a toddler, they tried to build a block tower or take apart something, and when they succeeded or struggled, they’d inevitably turn to mom or dad for encouragement or approval. Give a smile, a clap, or what have you and your child tries again and again. Look angry or frustrated and the kid throws in the towel. Research tells us that toddlers often switch their emotion to match their parent, and will decide to persist or quit based on mom’s facial expression.

We still do the same thing as kids and even through our teenage years, for both parents and coaches. Adults send signals. They tell us whether it’s worth it or not to persist, and more so what they value in watching us perform. If we’re always screaming on the sideline or on the flip side giving the cold shoulder after a mistake, then it sends a clear message that my support is contingent on how well you perform.

That takes our attention away from the game, and pushes it toward thinking about the reaction we might get from mom, dad, or coach if we mess up. We’re learning to seek approval, and fear messing up. Every touch becomes a test with an audience. You’re literally training them not to be present and focused, but to worry about the reaction.

And that’s exactly what leads to fear of failure, choking, and under performance.

We wonder why kids play tight. We’re standing right there, teaching them to.

Away from the sporting fields, psychologist Andrew Elliot tracked fear of failure across generations and found it passes from parent to child. He coined the mechanism as love withdrawal. When a kid senses that mistakes cost them warmth, approval, or attention, failure transforms into a threat to the relationship. The yelling gets interpreted as a signal about what your love depends on.

While love withdrawal might seem dramatic, research in sports backs it up. We tend to use the phrase “parental conditional regard, when affection is given or withheld based on performance. In studying youth sports, one of the largest drivers of fear of failure is parents and coaches. When researchers dug into why they identified the three parental practices that build fear of failure: punitive behavior, controlling behavior, and high expectations. In other research, when kids perceive parents as valuing winning over learning, fear of failure rises.

Kobe Bryant saw the same thing. His dad told him: “Whether you score 0 or 60, I love you.” Kobe said that it gave him“the confidence to say, ‘Okay, it’s okay to fail because you’re going to be loved no matter what.’... I’ve seen too many parents do the exact opposite and it terrifies children. Children become paralyzed by their own fear because they don’t have that security blanket of love and comfort.”

Too often, we think that if we’re a hard-ass on our kids it’ll build competitiveness or toughness. It’s a common trope, but research backs up Bryant. We need a baseline of love and support to play free.

Care + Expectations Beats Authoritarean

In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind pioneered how we understand parenting. Through research and observation, she discovered that parenting styles can be classified based on two factors: responsiveness and demandingness. If a parent was low in demandingness and high in responsiveness, they were too soft, a permissive parent who would let their child get away with just about anything. If a parent was high in demandingness and low in responsiveness, they were too hard, an authoritarian who relied on harsh discipline, with little attention to the child's needs.

Across research, the hard-ass authoritarean style failed. It led to more behavior problems, lower rates of resilience and persistence. It even failed in the one place you might expect it to pan out, when kids went into military service. And it makes sense, we all knew the over-controlling parent who gave no autonomy. Their kid was often the one who figured out how to sneak out and break the rules. They rebelled.

The magic came in the middle, with high support and expectations. That’s what Baumrind found in parenting and what other researchers found in sport. We need standards but also support. Or as self-determination theory tells us, we’re most motivated when we have autonomy, competency, and belonging.

That’s what is missing when we have a a parent losing it on the sidelines based on performance. Parents mistake it for tough love. When in reality it just creates fragility. Great performance is built on having a stable support group that allows you to fail and not internalize it. That support is precisely what allows for good and sometimes tough coaching.

As a lifelong coach, it’s the genuine care and respect that allows you to drill down into how to get better because it doesn’t activate a threat response whenever any constructive criticism arises.

Creating Space to Perform

Landon Donovan experienced the impact of the pressure and expectations first hand. He showed up at the 2006 World Cup as the face of American soccer after a brilliant run at the previous edition: “It was the only time in my career where I played tentatively, hesitant, not aggressive. I was a little bit in my own head and sort of more worried about the outcome instead of just performing at a high level.”

We’re all susceptible, even the best. But if you’ve ingrained that pattern from a young age, it becomes harder and harder to kick it.

Donovan went on, “I was so wrapped up in my identity as a soccer player that I had to succeed. And when I didn’t succeed, my whole world fell apart.”

When failure attacks your identity, it’s hard to perform in just about anything. Like so many other stars, he had to get help to understand “that they weren’t so tied together that failure would destroy me.” So many legends have had to learn the same thing, like Bill Russell who said about basketball, “That’s what I do, that’s not what I am.”

It’s simple to say, but hard to do. But if your a kid who has parents who make it clear that their love is dependent on performance, what do you think you learn to do? Your sport becomes your identity.

Let Them Learn and Fail

Failure is our greatest teacher. But we can either ingrain a mindset that allows us to handle it and grow from it. Or one that makes us scared of it. It always stings, but the difference is whether it becomes temporary pain or a scar that just won’t go away.

Sport is about learning this complicated dance. It’s about taking risks, seeing what we’re capable of, making mistakes…all in an environment where consequences are in the grand scheme of things temporary and mild. It’s not life or death.

If we allow kids to experience this wonderful arena, they learn a lot. Which is the point Kobe was making. Put them in the arena, but don’t get in their way. When kids never get to assess risk on their own, never get to feel the small triumph of doing something hard alone, the brain learns one lesson: everything is risky.

We default to protection or “why try” mode when the pressure is on and we’re thinking about what the sideline might say.

So there you have it, two great competitors in two different sports, arrived at the same instruction for parents:

Kobe: “Don’t say anything. Let her figure it out herself.”

Donovan: “Just shut up on the sideline and let their kid play.”

And the research backs them up.

The sideline is the first arena where kids learn what mistakes cost. Do you want love and identity to be on the line? If so, you’re building fragility. Or do you give them the space to figure it out?

Sometimes, silence is the best gift.

-Steve

Before taking on Brazil, Erling Haaland told his teammates: “No matter what happens just smile and enjoy it. Just live in the moment because we did everything we can... just enjoy playing football.”

Then he scored twice and Norway knocked out a 5-time World Cup champion...

Haaland is having a blast. He’s known as the “smiling assassin,” joking around with teammates and opponents before unleashing. Just days before the biggest game of his life, a World Cup quarterfinal against England, Haaland was spotted golfing in Florida. Some fans were annoyed. Shouldn’t the joint-top scorer at the World Cup be locked in?

They’re missing the point... Haaland is one of the most dedicated athletes on the planet. He calls himself a 24/7 athlete, with 10 hours of sleep a night, blue-light glasses to help out, saunas, ice baths, you name it. The man treats recovery like a profession. The golf and the jokes sit on top of one of the most disciplined operations in sport. And that’s the point... dedication and fun work in concert. They not only co-exist they feed off one another.

Our image of elite performers is often one of stoic seriousness. We mistake being serious for being dedicated. They are not the same thing. And confusing them has consequences.

How The Best Actually Are Fueled:

I conducted a survey of 2,000+ performers, including Olympic medalists, pro athletes from every major sport, actors, and more. I asked them a series of questions:

1. When did they perform best and what prevents them from doing so?

Performing out of a place of joy, fun, and curiosity beat stoic, serious, gritting it out 11 to 1. When I asked what advice these world-class performers would give their younger self? “Enjoy it, have fun, don’t take it so seriously” dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious. When asked why they compete, joy/fun was the number one response by far.

The preventors? Expectations, overly concerned with outcomes, letting others or themselves down, and feeling like they “had to” instead of wanting to. They performed up to their potential when they felt secure in who they are and what they’re doing, when their motivation was from joy, instead of fear. They felt free to perform. As Josh, an athlete turned entrepreneur, reported, “When I was where I wanted to be, pursuing what I wanted to pursue out of joy. When I wasn’t worried about if I would succeed, rather I was seeing what was possible and simply learning and adjusting if I fell short. That’s where the magic is.”

It’s not the first time I’ve run into this answer. As I outlined in my recent book, in 2023 I sat down with three superstars to discuss how to achieve peak performance. Chris Cassidy is in a group that only includes three people in history. He started his career as a Navy SEAL, before becoming a NASA astronaut and spending a collective 378 days in space. Roberta Groner was an average college runner who took a decade away from sports to work and have children. Upon her return to competition, as a full-time nurse and mom, she placed sixth at the World Championships in the marathon. She accomplished that at 41, an age often considered past our athletic prime. Olav Aleksander Bu is a science whizz who revolutionized training in the endurance world. When we sat down to chat at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, I was sure the conversation would head toward how to use science to innovate. After all, we were at the mecca of data analytics in sports.

After an hour-long discussion, we ended up elsewhere. “It’s about love,” stated the physiology guru Bu. “The human element is key.” Cassidy echoed his comments, discussing the impact of teamwork, connection, and purpose. Groner outlined that her key for going from a mediocre to world-class was “finding joy.” It sounds nebulous and unmeasurable, but here were three people who had pushed the bounds of what is possible at the highest level, all conveying the same message. They all put in tremendous work; they wanted to be great, but they found the balance to not let their striving get in the way. The late Kobe Bryant echoed the same sentiment when asked what quality all the greats share: “It’s love... And it’s a pure love. It’s not the fame. It’s not the money.... it’s not even the championships.”

It’s why when I asked in my survey, what advice the world-class performers would give their younger self? "Enjoy it, have fun, don't take it so seriously" dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious.

The Passion to Perform

Psychologist Robert Vallerand found this out decades ago. He found that nearly all performers have passion. But there are two kinds. Obsessive passion: your self-worth is on the line, you NEED to win. Harmonious passion: you love it, it fits your life, mastery. Both could lead to elite performance, but obsessive tended to lead to burnout and a growing fear of failure.

In an aptly titled study, “A meta-analysis of the dark side of the American dream,” psychologists Emma Bradshaw, Richard Ryan, and colleagues reviewed over 100 studies with 70,000 participants. They found that when individuals’ extrinsic aspirations dominated their intrinsic ones, it was “universally detrimental” to their well-being. It’s not that we need to have solely intrinsic motives. It’s the balance that matters. When we tip too far to the external, we languish instead of thrive. When winning is all that matters, it might work in the short term, but over the long haul, we increasingly play out of a place of fear. And perform worse.

Joy isn’t soft. It’s rocket fuel.

Want proof that it runs the other way, too? In 2018, Kate Courtney won the mountain bike world championships, the first American to do so in seventeen years. As Courtney told me in an interview, “My superpower is being able to grind.” But what often makes us great can transform into our worst enemy. Heading into the 2020 Olympics as one of the favorites, her cycling performance fell apart. She finished fifteenth.

Worn out and disappointed, Courtney didn’t do what most athletes do in those moments, double down and work harder; she went the other direction. To rebuild her motivation and to have a better relationship with a sport she loved, she went toward joy and mastery. “When you have a more well-rounded life, it doesn’t take away, it doesn’t distract you as an athlete. It makes you stronger and better.”

Courtney found her joy in training and competing again. She moved from being ranked twenty third in the world in 2021 to eighth in the summer of 2023. Joy wasn’t a consolation prize. It was the intervention.

Joy is an expansive emotion. It frees us up, we get to explore our potential and play to win. Just look at a toddler... You know the best way to get them out of losing-it tantrum mode? Curiosity. If you get them curious about something, a funny noise, flickering light, etc., the tantrum fades. Curiosity is the antidote to fear and losing it. It opens us up to explore. That’s the basis of fun.

It’s why you see Eliud Kipchoge smiling at mile 23 of the marathon. Or Steph Curry smiling on the free throw line... They understand that while for some, bearing down may work, for far too many it pushes us into do-or-die mode. And despite what you hear on social media, very few perform well there. It’s a mistake I saw all the time as a coach: the tight, grim athlete who trained perfectly and raced terribly.

Contrary to what’s often proclaimed, holding the game lightly doesn’t make you fragile. Learning how to lose better doesn’t mean we aren’t passionate or don’t care. It allows us to perform at our best. From a place of love and striving to get better, instead of fear, shutting down, and a lingering negative emotional hit.

Far too often, we think that if they are laughing around, joking, smiling, it means they aren’t serious, that they don’t care. That’s BS. Fun is the fuel. It’s what allows us to be locked-in without tension. It’s the nuance that sprint coach Bud Winter noticed decades ago: to sprint your fastest, you have to give maximum effort while relaxed. It’s the same here. To be dedicated, to get locked-in, we have to have fun doing it. It’s what puts us in seeking mode, hunting for goals with teammates we care about, because that’s what we know and love to do.

This is the shift I wrote a whole book about: moving from fear-based avoidance to joy-based pursuit. It’s about fulfilling your potential in a world that continually signals that you aren’t good enough—not because success is what defines our self-worth but because we find joy in the pursuits.

The Norwegian secret hiding in plain sight

Haaland is the product of a system built on this exact idea.

Norway doesn’t allow for official scorekeeping until the age of 13. They dissuade early national travel teams in favor of local leagues. You can’t even post the results of youth games online without being fined. As Tore Ovrebo, Norway’s director of elite sport, put it, “We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports is that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.” Their youth sporting model can be summed up with their chosen slogan: “Joy of Sport for All.”

Keep that feeling throughout their whole career. Watch Norway row an imaginary Viking boat at midfield after knocking out Brazil, and tell me it didn’t work. Or just look at Usain Bolt or Alysia Liu and see that when we’re having fun, the performance just flows.

Fun is the best performance enhancer there is. Dedication and joy can co-exist. In fact, they feed off each other. We knew this as kids. Somehow we got sold a story that seriousness was the solution, taking all the joy out of the pursuit in the name of a result. That may work in the short-term, but over the long haul it degrades the very thing that makes us special: that joyful passion for a pursuit we once loved.

Or just listen to my 3 year old... when she saw Haaland, she asked “Is that Elsa’s brother?”

That might be the best theory for his superpowers we get...

-Steve

Bonus: How England and Norway Should Deal with the Heat of Miami

How do England and Norway handle the heat and humidity of playing in Miami? I got you covered. Here’s what I’d do if I was advising either team.

Here’s my view as an exercise physiologist who has spent a lifetime in Houston, TX...

Playing soccer in that heat will decrease performance by a lot. It’s currently supposed to be around 90 degrees with high humidity in Miami for game time.

In one study on the Champions league, when a game was played above 21 deg C/70 F, when compared to cold conditions, high speed running dropped by 12% and sprinting dropped by ~11%.

In data tracking the 2014 world cup, in the hottest games, high intensity running was about 8% less, and the total number of sprints declined by 10%.

At the 2025 Fifa club world cup, for every 1°C rise in air Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, players covered 0.18 m/min less at high speed and 0.34 m/min less at moderate speed.

In other words, it impacts players performance, especially ability to make high speed runs, significantly. Add in the humidity, and I’d expect an even further decline.

How does heat and humidity impact performance?

It’ll increase fatigue, and make cramping and dehydration way more prevalent.

We used to think you just go close to a critical core body temp and then you fatigue a lot or get catastrophic damage. Modern models tell us that our brain anticipates it, and helps influence fatigue by increase perception of effort to try to slow us down. So our fatigue occurs well before we reach critical moments.

From the early moments, we’ll pace and slow down from normal conditions. Think of it as our brain doing a rough estimate of the slope of the increase and trying to slow us down to decrease the rise.

All the while, less blood flow is going to our muscles, and more is diverted to our skin to help dissipate heat. So your heart is doing double duty — feeding the muscles and cooling the skin — which is a big driver of the strain.

The humidity makes it much harder and worse. Why? Because the mechanism we use to help cool us off, sweating and evaporating that sweat, doesn’t work. It’s too humid. So even at the same heat, the effort will feel much much harder.

What do you do about it if you’re England or Norway?

1. Acclimatization

All teams have been training in the US in hot conditions, and most have employed some strategy to get used to it. That’s good.

Ideally you need about 2 weeks of training in hot conditions to get all the changes that help (increased plasma volume, shifts in sweat rate, etc.) So this should help.

But you never truly adjust all the way. Performance still suffers compared to cool conditions. It still feels miserable and hard…and like death. I’ve been training nearly my entire life in Houston…and the summers still suck… They just suck a little less than if you’re adjusted.

2. Pre-Cooling

During their warm-ups, athletes should wear an ice vest to help keep body temp down. You don’t want to start at an already really elevated body temp to start the game. Ice vests are something that are very common in distance runners competing in hot environments.

Other strategies that work are ice baths pre-performance and the cooling glove.

It might sound crazy to jump in an ice bath pre-performance, but it’s one of the strategies that elite marathoners used in preparing for the world champs marathon in Qatar.

The cooling glove is something that I used 15 years ago with athletes competing at US champs in Sacramento. It was developed at Stanford and it works by cooling your palm, which has a network of blood vessels that essentially work as radiators to help manage temperatures. You stick your hand in this glove with chilled water circulated through it. Blood flowing through the palm’s AVAs gets cooled by conduction, returns to the heart, and lowers core temperature far more efficiently.

One of the keys here is if you make the hand too cold, it backfires. The blood vessels clamp down, and blood flow gets restricted. It’s why you need the glove and not just tons of ice. And you typically use this at the end of your warm up for a short bit.

In research, these pre-cooling strategies significantly improve performance and time to exhaustion across a number of studies. It boosts 5k performance by about 1 to 1.5%.

I used some of these with an athlete who got 6th at the World Champ marathon in Qatar. They are necessary.

3. Cooling During It

Think of it like this, if we can slow that rise in temperature OR make ourselves feel a little better during it (which some research shows we use perception of effort as kind of the collective prediction governor.)

It’s why you’ll see runners during a hot marathon wearing a hat with ice in it, or that’s been soaked and frozen. It’s why you’ll see them dump cold water on their head and face, or even drape an ice cold towel around their neck at an aid station.

This is where hydration breaks come into play.

Cold towels, dumping water on face, and even taking ice slushies will help. There’s research that shows consuming an ice slushy helps with temperature control and performance in runners.

The hydration breaks should be thought of as cooling breaks. Half-time is an even bigger chance to cool down.

It’s a constant battle. Which is why most of the research and practical experience says use multiple methods to try to fight the heat.

4. Hydration

You’re going to lose a lot of water and electrolytes sweating like crazy during the match. At some point, dehydration can impact performance, though contrary to older thinking we don’t need to replace every drop of fluid that we sweat out. And contrary to conventional wisdom, electrolytes are not the primary cause of cramping.

But fluid intake and even electrolytes are still important because they help defend against the drop in plasma volume and blunt the rise in perceived effort. Adding in sugar will help with hydration and combat some fatigue. Consuming some caffeine during half-time will help with the increased perception of effort during the later half of the match.

5. Pacing and Subs

If you get too fired up and try to play like normal, you will be screwed. That’s the equivalent of the marathoner who doesn’t adjust their pacing due to the heat. That means starting a little more strategically, and using the subs at the right time with those players who are going over the edge. Because once you get close to that edge in heat, performance can suffer quickly. Use your subs strategically...and keep those subs cool!

SO there you go. It will impact everyone. And it’ll make the last part of the match feel tough. Your legs will feel sluggish and non-responsive, effort will be through the roof, and your brain will try to convince you that you’re miserable and to slow down, walk, and don’t make that run at full speed.

How the teams manage could be a key in a tight game. I didn’t see Norway use cooling vests during warm-up the last hot game, so we’ll see who does what and if they follow the best practices or go for it on their own.

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

Twitter/X: ​@Stevemagness​​​

YouTube: ​Steve Magness

Do Hard (Meaningful) Things

We need to do hard things. In a world that lets us shortcut almost everything—from taking performance-enhancing drugs to outsourcing our writing to AI—there’s something magical, and much needed, about the thing that forces you out of your comfort zone. It makes us feel something in a world where we increasingly numb and distract our way out of our own internal experience. Doing hard things reminds us we’re alive.

As the person who literally ​wrote the book ​on the subject, I love watching the idea take hold. But like almost anything, we can miss the mark. And somewhere along the way, “Do Hard Things” reached its performative meme stage. We turned doing hard things into posting hard things.

Look around social media and you’ll see people glorifying their time in an ice bath, puking on the side of the track after a workout, or flashing a 4 a.m. watch to prove the morning grind is real. None of these things are inherently bad. Many can be genuinely useful. But in turning a helpful idea into a meme, we dropped the most important word in it. The point was never to do hard things. It was to do hard, meaningful things.

Think back to gym class, or junior high football. Chances are you had a coach who decided that running bleachers, laps, or “suicides” would toughen you up. Maybe you kept going until you puked or could barely stand. The coach walked away certain he’d built you into something tougher. You walked away having learned that exercise was punishment, and that the only reason to keep going was to satisfy the man with the whistle.

You didn’t get tougher. You got better at surviving while someone controlled and judged you. And those are not the same thing. Real toughness is about decision-making. It’s navigating discomfort and learning to choose the wise action for the situation in front of you. Survival teaches none of that. Worse, the moment you remove the thing driving it (e.g., the controlling coach) the motivation to keep going collapses. It’s the same pattern ​researchers​ find with authoritarian, controlling teachers: the kids look productive while being watched, then their effort falls off a cliff the second the teacher leaves the room.

In many ways, we’ve simply swapped the junior high coach for the social media audience. We take the ice bath to feed the feed, and we tell ourselves the exact same story the coach did: this is making me tougher. But the whole point of doing something hard was to reconnect you with your body, not to perform it for everyone else.

When we choose something difficult—when we actually have agency in it—a few things happen. First, it forces us into feelings we usually avoid. We have to sit with the anxiety, the stress, the pain, the discomfort, instead of ignoring it, pushing it away, or gritting through it. Those feelings kick off an internal battle, an angel and a devil on each shoulder, one pushing you to keep going and one hunting for the exit.

And part of that battle comes down to why. If the reason is big enough and means enough, we tend to stay. Sure, fear can keep you moving. But all fear teaches you is how to survive a threat, which turns out to be useful for almost nothing else. You run the laps to avoid the coach’s punishment. You write the book because you believe it might change a life. You run the marathon because it carries a meaning only you understand. Same discomfort. Completely different reason. And the reason is the whole thing.

Those meaningful hard things rarely change your life in the moment you finish them. What they change is harder to see. The act of committing—to write, to run, to learn—becomes a venue for discovering who you are. You don’t just feel alive. You shift your sense of what you’re capable of, and you grow into someone who can handle the next hard thing.

Can an ice bath or a training program do that? Maybe. But there has to be something underneath it more than this kind of sucks and now I get to post about it. Performative hard can move the needle a little. It just rarely delivers the growth that choosing a worthy goal does.

Everyone’s worthy goal looks different. But it almost certainly doesn’t look like running bleachers as punishment. It looks like a just-manageable challenge, in something you actually chose, that carries a meaning deeper than the post.

Do hard things. Just make sure they’re yours.aut

-- Steve

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Reflect: Responding Instead of Reacting is a Skill You Can Develop.

“True toughness is about expansion, instead of constriction... Not to push against the experience, but to create space between the stimulus and response so that we can better navigate what’s going on. It’s the child who learns that the frustration from making a mistake doesn’t require a tantrum. The husband who can sit with his frustration, instead of lashing out at his loved ones. The athlete who can separate the jittery sensations of nervousness from the emotional response of anxiety or dread. How we respond is malleable.”

—​Do Hard Things​

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

Twitter/X: ​@Stevemagness​​​

YouTube: ​Steve Magness​

What went wrong? I’m not a soccer expert so we’ll leave tactics to someone else, but what I’d love to focus on is the mental side.

First, what gave folks hope is that the US manager Pochettino seemed to give this team a shot in the arm of confidence and creativity. The opening match against Paraguay showed an attacking team that could solve a team’s defense and break it down. That continued against Australia and Bosnia. Sure, those weren’t top 15 teams, but it was a Paraguay squad that only lost 1-0 to France thanks to a PK, and an Australian team that only lost to Egypt in a penalty shootout.

The Americans were playing free. They were the spunky home team underdogs. Pochettino’s refrains were “Why not us?” and “We want to touch the moon.” They had an Argentinean coach who blasted country music in his office and embraced American culture. And you were met with stories of Europeans traveling around the US, surprised by American culture. It’s the power of the underdog, the power of having fun and playing free. And as we’ll see, research backs it up.

But then it all changed. Balogun goes off with a shaky red card. There was no way to appeal (which, as an aside, any legitimate pro sport should have a clear appeal process for suspensions. It’s part of good governance). But Donald Trump couldn’t resist being center stage. He called FIFA president Gianni Infantino personally to ask for a review, and FIFA did what FIFA does: they suspended the ban, fined Balogun $40,000, and let him play. It was the first time since 1962 that a red card at a World Cup didn’t produce a suspension. UEFA released a statement declaring that “when the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake.” Belgium’s coach compared the decision to an April Fool’s joke.

And the narrative flips. The US goes from good vibes to villains. Belgium is incensed and uses it to create a narrative that Belgium isn’t just playing for their country, but as their coach framed it “the integrity of football.” Now, the experienced squad has a purpose greater than themselves.

The US went from playing with nothing to lose and everything to gain, to now being put on the defensive. And it showed.

From the first touch, you saw a team that was hesitant and avoidant. Gone was the aggression that capitalized on their athleticism. In its place was a situation where on one goal, three Americans stood around watching a ball come down from the air, hesitating, inwardly hoping and thinking that one of the others would get it, when a Belgian player swooped in and took care of business.

Pochettino described the potential issue weeks ago: “Your strategy can be brilliant. But if you don’t have the energy, the commitment, the trust, the confidence... it’s impossible to play well.”

For the Americans, it looked impossible.

Even Pochettino couldn’t explain it afterward: “We need to assess that game and see why we didn’t approach that game in the same way [we did] the rest of the World Cup... it wasn’t the way we normally play.” Listen to the language. It was our approach…

The Psychology of Playing Free or Tight

How we frame the competition sets the stage. It primes our brain to either approach or avoid, to protect or attack, to play out of fear or fun.

When we’re underdogs, research shows we give more effort, have higher levels of commitment, take more calculated risks, and have a reduced fear of failure. The reason is simple: the framing shifts our brain’s inner calculus on risks versus rewards. As underdogs, expectations are relatively low, while the payoff is huge. It’s like playing with house money. You can bet big, and if you fall relatively short, it’s not a huge deal.

On the other end, when we’re heavy favorites, we tend to adopt a protective stance. We’re already on top of the mountain, high in status. The only place to go is to meet expectations or lose our spot. That pushes us toward protection. We can even see this at the individual level. In an analysis of world-class soccer players, psychologist Geir Jordet found that players who had won major individual awards converted fewer penalties after winning them. And they showed more avoidance behaviors: rushing their preparation, turning away from the keeper, hurrying the walk. Status raises the price of failure. A miss is no longer a bad kick, it’s an assault on our identity.

Of course, this American team had expectations. But this framing isn’t determined by some concrete evidence. It’s shaped by the story you tell yourself and how you’re interpreting information. It’s why we’ve seen heavy favorites in the Super Bowl or NBA Finals who talk about how “no one expected us to do this... everyone discounted us... the media said we couldn’t do it.” Coaches and teams strategically use information to create the right team-wide framework. Sometimes using bulletin board material of quotes from the other team to do so.

We can see this in our biology. When we see a game as a challenge, we tend to have more testosterone and adrenaline as part of our stress response. When we see the game as a threat, when our status is on the line, we have more cortisol and less testosterone. Our biology impacts our psychology, and when in threat mode, we start hesitating and avoiding.

Before Paraguay, Australia, and Bosnia, it was clear we were in a challenge state. For Belgium, threat it was.

Now, once again, it’s not as simple as favorites bad psychology, underdogs good. It’s all about whether your frame supports your psychology. Psychologists Philip Gable and Eddie Harmon-Jones found that when it comes to emotions, it’s not whether they feel good or bad that shifts how they impact performance. It’s whether that emotion pushes you toward or away from action. High-approach states (desire, even anger) narrow attention onto the goal. Avoidance states (anxiety) scatter it, and pleasant-but-low-drive states (amusement) broaden it. For three weeks the US played on desire that pulled toward action. Against Belgium they played on anxiety that pulled toward hesitation.

Does the framing push you to see the situation as a challenge? Does it activate approach motivation instead of avoidance? The bad boys Detroit Pistons embraced the villain role. They took it on to amplify their effort and aggression. Paraguay embraced it after the US dismantled them, shifting their strategy to be the antithesis of the “beautiful game” the Europeans dream about. And it got them all the way to a 1-0 loss against the #1 seed France.

But there’s a difference between choosing the black hat and having it slapped on your head. This US team was set up for fun, for spunky dreamers trying to show the world. They were after vibes and joy. When we talk about approach vs. avoidance strategies, it’s not that one is inherently better or worse. It’s that your frame needs to match your style of play and psychology.

And then... that frame got thrown into turmoil thanks to politics the players had no say in. As Pochettino said, “you need to connect with the energy to express your talent.”

That connection was lost against Belgium. They won the appeal but lost the frame.

Losing the Fun

We can see the same approach to fun in Norway, who just advanced to play England in the quarterfinals. Instead of country music, they had a Viking row and beating drums after their wins. Their star player, Haaland, said “Everyone just needs to enjoy themselves... Just enjoy it. Embrace it and enjoy the moment.” And as they won, he deliberately downplayed the moment, going so far as declaring that the next teams they faced were the favorites. Before facing France in the group stage he said, “Honestly I don’t care too much [about the France game]. They [France] are probably going to win against us, they’re probably going to win the whole tournament.” And then after knocking out Brazil: “No matter what happens next, nobody can ever take this feeling, these tears, or this piece of history away from us.”

He’s keeping the underdog mystique alive. He’s keeping the stakes low and the game enjoyable, putting the onus on the more established teams to show up. Bank the win, release the future. There’s nothing left to protect, so there’s nothing to play tight over.

The US had a bit of this magic. But then it all went away. And it wasn’t their fault. Balogun handled the controversy like a champ, shaking the hand of the referee who gave him the red card and never complaining. Even after the Belgium lost, he went out to seek out the Belgium coach. He didn’t ask for this controversy, it was thrust upon them.

This isn’t to say the politics made the US lose. Great teams have to show up and play no matter what. And Belgium was clearly better that day. But what it shows is how fragile a frame can be, and how fast it can flip.

It’s fragile, but as Pochettino pointed out, the key to unlocking our potential. It’s why the best coaches get paid the big bucks. It’s an art more than a science. But getting your team in the right psychological state, with the right framing, and more so in a long tournament, keeping us there is vital.

When the story flips on you, and it will, you don't get to keep the old psychology by default. You've got to sit down and write the next chapter on purpose. Before someone else writes it for you.

-Steve

England is going to have to face Mexico on their home field, with screaming fans, and performing at over 7,000 feet altitude… That is no easy task. It might be the greatest home field advantage in sport. What do you do? Finally, a world cup soccer question squarely in my area of expertise.

First, the impact at 7k feet is real and significant. You can see it in the soccer data, total distance covered and high speed running drop significantly. 3-9% for the former, 10-15% for later. The higher the altitude, the bigger the effect. The less acclimated, the bigger the effect.

At 7k feet VO2max would drop about 10-13%. We saw this in track performances at the 1968 Olympics. And performance drops about 5-6% depending on race distance. Jim Ryun ran lights out in the 1500, but ended up second to Kenya’s Keino because he was better at altitude.

So what do we do?

1. Acclimate...if you had more time this would be the key. You train at altitude, maybe even use altitude tents, etc. But it takes time...

About a 3 week acclimatization cuts the VO2max/performance drop in half as your physiology adapts. One study on track athletes showed it took 19 days to fully acclimate.

England doesn’t have that time.

2. Arrival time

The research points to two different approaches: compete as soon as possible (within ~24 hours) after arrival. Why? You compete before poor sleep and plasma-volume loss sets in.

Generally, plasma shifts starts right after arrival but reach the level that impairs endurance capacity by about 24 hours and increase from there before leveling off.

Or you arrive 5+ days before and hope to acclimate. While it varies for each individual, generally 1-3 days after arrival, performance sucks as your body is adapting to the drastic change.

But...fly in/out is also risky as it involves travel, sleep disturbance, etc. close to the match.

So in their situation, it’s all about tradeoffs. Altitude is a massive stressor. Everything from blood to respiration is put under stress to adapt. So you’ve got this dip before adaptation.

You can lessen that dip being acclimated. But who knows what England did.

Honestly, depending on travel, if allowed I would have flown straight from the last game to altitude. Buy yourself as close to 4+ ays as possible. And if possible maybe even somewhere like 5k feet within driving distance. No idea on planning, but if I didn’t acclimate. That’s what I’d likely do. I’d avoid the coming in 2 days before. Worst tradeoff.

The bad news for England fans…reports say they are choosing to fly in Friday afternoon for a Sunday evening game (mostly due to FIFA rules)…What’s that mean? Do the math. 2 days on the dot…Not what I would have chosen.

So what do you do now?

1. Hydration and plasma volume.

Altitude drives respiratory water loss and diuresis, and plasma volume decreases acutely. Hydration strategies can blunt this. Folks have even tried manipulating high sodium intake to help sh9ift plasma volume

2. Fuel with carbohydrate.

We generally will burn more carbs at higher altitude. Make sure you are fueled up. AND use fueling strategies mid-game more like an elite endurance athlete. Something like maurten’s gels would work well.

3. Bicarb it up.

Altitude is going to harm aerobic abilities. All those sprints and high speed running will build up more fatigue. The new sodicum bicarbonate is a must here. I’d load up if I were England. Plus, altitude tends to lower blood bicarb. Also,, it tends to help more for folks who aren’t fully acclimated.

4. Protect sleep.

Disrupted sleep is a major part of it. So do everything you can to help get a good nights sleep. Limits screen time, blue light blockers, all the stuff. One high performance director of another sport told me about having athletes sleep with oxygen to minimize sleep disturbance, which in the short term is a great idea.

5. Tactics and pacing.

You’ve got to adjust. Mexico will be adapted. You won’t. Learning how to pace better and time your runs will be key. If you try to do the same thing as always, you will be screwed.

6. Beet Root juice.

It can boost endurance performance. Works better on non-elite endurance athletes. Which would honestly be a lot of these soccer guys. And altitude can impair the natural turning of nitrite into nitric oxide, so theoretically beet root juice would help even more at altitude. Though, you’d hoped to test it, or else you could be peeing red stuff that might scare folks, ha.

7. Caffeine.

Not altitude specific, but boosts endurance performance. A well timed dose to peak in the 2nd half would be helpful.

8. Heat adaptation.

Where England may have benefited from playing in the US is that heat adaptation (and its boost in plasma volume) can help with altitude. So even if they aren’t altitude adapted, the heat wave in the US may have helped them.

There you go. The science of altitude adaptation for performing. Hopefully, England is prepared! And if not, maybe they see this post and start downing the bicarb, maurten, beet root, and caffeine.

England, Tuchel, if you’re listening…I got you covered. :)

-Steve

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For the higher-ranked German squad, they weren’t supposed to be in this situation. They were supposed to comfortably handle a Paraguay team that, a week earlier, had been outplayed by the U.S. But here they were, staving off elimination. Still, you’d think a side from a historic footballing nation, filled with players from the top leagues in Europe, would handle the pressure. Yet, in deciding who would take that sixth kick, the cracks showed.

With it all tied up, no one wanted the sixth kick. According to reports, players “hesitated and dodged.” Germany’s manager asked one player twice whether he’d step up; he declined. The man who finally stepped forward had never taken a penalty in his professional career. And he missed. Germany lost. Knocked out by a squad everyone had written off a week before.

These were stars, men who play for some of the biggest clubs in the world. Yet when the moment came, they shied away. They didn’t want the spotlight, or the pressure.

This piece isn’t about calling out those players. It’s about what their hesitation shows us about pressure: that even the best of the best, people who have trained their whole lives for the moment, can crumble. And more importantly, what we can do about it, so that when the lights are brightest, we step forward with confidence.

The Science of Pressure

Stress is messy. Even the best of the best can be pulled toward avoidance. In fact, too often, it’s the default. Psychologist Geir Jordet has spent his career studying the ultimate pressure platform — penalty kicks — and his work helps explain what happened to Germany, and what happens to the rest of us.

Our brain hates uncertainty. One way it tries to reduce that is to “just get it over with,” or to avoid experiencing the situation at all. The more pressure that’s felt — whether from history or internal expectations — the more we’re nudged toward avoidance.

In his work, Jordet found that kicks where a miss means you instantly lose produce far more avoidance behavior. Players look away, their eyes dart around, they speed up the run-up “to get it over with.” And they miss at a much higher rate: about 92% are converted when scoring wins it, but just 62% when missing loses it. Similarly, players from teams with a history of shootout failure perform worse, rushing the shot and looking away from the keeper far more often. This holds even when the player taking the kick had no part in those past struggles. And he found that higher-”status” players performed worse. The public expectation increases the weight the player feels.

Penalty kicks are the ultimate display of how pressure distorts us. It takes a typically confident, competent maestro of the sport and reduces him to someone who sends the ball sailing over the bar, looking more like a U8 player than a professional.

How does this happen?

Stress causes us to narrow. It’s a system that evolved to help us survive situations where our life might be at risk. Do we fight, flee, or freeze to handle the snake in the bushes or the bear in the distance? It’s designed to nudge us, and sometimes force us, toward a response.

But stress isn’t a single response. It’s multifaceted. We can see this at the hormonal level: the mixture of adrenaline, cortisol, and testosterone shifts depending on the context and our reaction. The way I like to think of it is that stress is our body’s best guess at how to prepare for the moment. Sometimes that guess tells us we can’t handle the situation, and our best tactic is avoidance — or even preparing for injury (our immune system ramps up when we sense damage is imminent). Other times, the guess is to take the situation on: a jolt of energy, the fear subsiding just long enough for us to press forward.

Which way we go depends on our brain’s inner calculus. That best guess varies based on:

• Past experiences in similar situations

• Our appraisal of the demands we face and our ability to handle them

• How we define success and failure

• Our interpretation of the feelings, emotions, and mood we’re experiencing right now

• Our level of support

• Our identity — whether it’s fully on the line, or secure even in a loss

All of that information shapes the bet our brain makes on how to handle the moment. And if the stakes are high enough, it’s really hard to overcome the pull toward avoidance. The fear of failure — of embarrassing ourselves, of letting down our country — is incredibly powerful. Because it’s not just a win or a loss on the line. It’s our identity, what we’ll be known for the rest of our lives. That burden is heavy, even when it’s your job.

When the weight of the world is on you, it pushes you toward protection. And one of the simplest ways to protect yourself is to say, “Not me.” Which is why many of the German players chose avoidance. Decades ago Kahneman and Tversky showed that the failure you chose stings more than the failure that merely happened to you. While work by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron found the pull toward inaction grows even stronger when you know you'll have to stand there and watch the result. So in the moment, letting someone else take the kick feels safer, because missing one you chose to take is one of the most painful types of failure.

It’s the protective ego at work. The instant failure and embarrassment show up as real possibilities, our ego starts looking for an out. “Not me” makes rational sense to a protective brain. It’s the same instinct as the student who doesn’t study so he has his excuse ready before the test is even handed out. We’d rather protect the story of who we could have been than risk finding out who we are in that moment.

Which is why it's worth pausing on Jonathan Tah, the man who stepped forward. He had never taken a penalty in his career. He had, in a way, the least reason to volunteer and the most reason to hide. And he was the only one willing to walk into the arena knowing he might fail in front of the whole world. That is a rare thing. Even at the highest level.

So how do we deal with this? It isn’t easy.

In psychology we call this approach versus avoidance motivation, prevention versus promotion, or experiencing a situation as a challenge versus a threat. In challenge or approach mode, we interpret the pressure more favorably, which means a bit more testosterone and adrenaline and less cortisol. But it’s not as simple as telling yourself “these nerves mean I’m excited, not stressed.” Reappraisal works for manageable stress. When you can’t BS your brain, when it really is the world watching, you need something deeper.

1. Accept Reality. Don’t Deny It.

It’s about stacking as much information as you can on the side that nudges you toward approaching. That starts with acknowledging the reality you face. Denying it just feeds avoidance. Instead, accept that this is a big moment and the consequences are real. An accurate appraisal of the demands is paramount.

2. Stack the Evidence

When stress hits, we latch onto everything that could go wrong. We have a negativity bias. You’ve got to counter it with actual evidence. Have you done the work before? Have you been in similar spots? Build a way to remind yourself that you’ve trained for this, performed under pressure, and can meet the moment. You’re stacking evidence on the side of your capabilities.

3. Maintain a Sense of Control

When the situation feels out of control — like we have no agency — we default to panic. So grab onto the simplest things you can control. It’s why athletes have routines. The repetitive act of taking a deep breath, slapping your wrists, whatever it is, sends the signal: I’ve been here and done this before. Build a ritual for when you can’t control the outcome. High uncertainty and low control is exactly when the negative voice takes over. Anchor on the behavior you can run.

4. You Aren’t Alone

In research on penalty kicks, teams that celebrated their teammates performed better — and the next kicker from the opposing team was more likely to miss. We’re social creatures. Pressure tries to convince us we’re alone on the savannah, which once meant we were probably going to die. Reminders that you aren’t in this alone, that others have your back, win or lose, take the edge off the stress.

5. Respond Instead of React

Our instinct under pressure is to rush and close the loop. We want to react. As Jordet’s research showed, players try to rush the shot — and score far less. Often the move is the opposite: slow down. Take a deliberate pause, collect yourself with a deep breath, and then go. You’re creating just enough space to take wise action. A few tools:

• Name your feelings instead of suppressing them. “That’s my protective brain, the devil on my shoulder, trying to convince me…” When we name something, we can tame it.

• Shift how you talk to yourself. Using the second or third person creates psychological distance. We tune out the voice we always hear — but if it sounds a little different, like a coach, we tune in. “Come on, Steve. You’ve been here before.”

• Adopt a mantra. It might sound silly, but there’s a reason Aaron Donald repeated “controlled aggression” in big moments, or Tom Brady reminded himself he’s a multi-time Super Bowl champ. You’re reminding yourself that you belong here, and what to focus on.

• Focus and act. Field-goal kickers who pick a spot, focus on it, and tell themselves to kick it hard there perform better. Pressure scatters our focus, and darting eyes tell the brain we’re looking for an escape. Narrow your vision on what matters, then give yourself one external cue that reminds you what you’re trying to do.

6. Train It Before You Need It

Surprises are a killer in stressful situations. One of the baffling things about Germany is that they didn’t seem to have a plan for who would take kicks beyond the first five. That lets uncertainty creep in. You want clear instructions and clear roles. And before you reach the moment, you’d better train under pressure — to inoculate yourself against just enough of the stress.

Stepping Forward

While nowhere near the severity of a World Cup, one of my favorite coaching moments came when I was coaching college track and the conference championship came down to the final event: the 4x400. It was a virtual deadlock between three teams. Winner take all. In the chaos before the race, two legendary athletes and coaches on our staff at UH, Leroy Burrell and Carl Lewis, were debating who to put on the relay and who should anchor.

Much like Germany, we had runners who said they’d be on the team but made it clear they didn’t want to anchor. Then one athlete, Drevan Anderson-Kaapa, walked up to the legends and stated, matter-of-factly, “I can anchor.”

Anderson-Kaapa wasn’t even a 400 runner. He was a middle-distance guy — the 800 and the mile. He hadn’t run an open 400 all year. He was also the slowest of anyone on that relay. And his opponents were no slouches; they were champions. One was among the best sprinters in the nation, the other a conference champion at 400 meters. Yet he wanted it on his shoulders.

He got the baton in the lead — and then two sprinters, one a sub-10 100-meter man, came flying past. Oh my god, this is actually happening, he thought. His mind headed straight for panic. All he remembers is, Oh shit, oh shit. Then he tried to right the ship, steadying his inner world by talking to himself: Focus, Drevan. Lock in. It’s game time. Focus. Look for an advantage. When you see it, commit.

Time seemed to slow. His eyes locked on his competitors, hunting for any sign of fatigue. He moved onto the shoulder of the runner ahead of him so he’d have a clear path to strike when the opening came.

As he came off the final curve and entered the home stretch, Anderson-Kaapa seized his moment. He swung wide and roared past his opponents in the final 15 meters. It’s tempting to call him tough, to say he was blessed with some intestinal fortitude the rest of us lack. The truth is more complicated. Handling pressure, coming through in the clutch, it isn’t magic. It’s navigating our biology and psychology.

For Anderson-Kaapa, that meant an honest appraisal to set the stage. Zooming out to create perspective when his mind was spiraling toward an escape route, and zooming back in when he was in the thick of the action. Reflecting on it years later — having since traded his racing uniform for a military one — he put it simply: “Pressure causes us all to spiral. To doubt, to want to escape. Accept that. Then collect yourself, breathe, focus, and find the smallest thing that gives you some way to get through. It’s not magic. It’s facing reality and coming back to your training.”

It’s no surprise Anderson-Kaapa went on to a successful military career. Stress hits us all. Pressure can make even the most prepared of us shrink away. Denying that reality only makes it hit ten times harder. All we can do is set ourselves up the best we can: accept the realities of the arena, surround ourselves with good people, and stack the evidence in our favor.

-Steve

P.S. I’m actually conducting research on how performers handle pressure. Whether you’re a coach, athlete, musician, or anyone who’s stepped on stage, consider filling out this 5-minute survey. Thanks so much.

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Norway has long dominated the Winter Olympics, but increasingly they’re having success in summer sports. Beyond soccer, they have top triathletes, runners, decathletes, tennis players, and have had global success in handball and beach volleyball. They won 8 medals at the 2024 Summer Olympics, spanning 6 sports. Norway has fewer people than the Houston metropolitan area, yet continues to produce world champions across both winter and summer sports.

And this is their youth sports program:

• If you give trophies, they have to go to all kids.

• No keeping score until they’re 11.

• National championships: prohibited through age 12.

• No posting youth results or standings online.

• Youth sport is local-first with travel being minimized.

• Motto: “Joy of Sport for All.”

They let kids be kids. And it works. In Norway, 93% of kids play some sort of youth sport. In America, that number is 58%, with kids in the US in the lowest income bracket only reaching 38%.

By any metric, Norway’s elite athletes are achieving on a global stage. Yet, if we turn to their youth sports, their programs are the opposite of the US.

Norway doesn’t allow for official score keeping until the age of thirteen. They dissuade early national travel teams in favor of local leagues. You can’t even post the results of youth games online without being fined. And almost sacrilegious in certain American circles, Norway doesn’t allow trophies unless everyone gets one. As Tore Ovrebo, Norway’s director of elite sport, told USA Today writer Dan Wolken, “We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports is that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.” Their youth sporting model can be summed up with their chosen slogan, “Joy of Sport for All.”

But not keeping score, giving out trophies, not being “win at all costs”...that’s anti-American! How can they be competitive?

Research backs their approach up.

The Fire Has To Come From Within

If you look at ​research​ on prodigies who eventually become standout adult performers, a deep intrinsic drive is paramount. Researchers found that intrinsically motivated football players were 3.5x more likely to make it to the next level, and athletes in general 2x more likely.

The problem is that early success often pulls young people away from this inner drive. Kids start playing soccer (or violin or chess—this isn’t just about sports) because it is exciting and fun. As they improve, they gain accolades and praise from their parents, coaches, and teachers. They start winning trophies or seeing their names in online commentary. Without even realizing it, their intrinsic drive gets replaced by external validation and a need to please and impress others.

The quickest way to kill that internal motivation? Hype achievements and be a crazy controlling parent or coach.

The best way to create and maintain intrinsic motivation is to let kids dabble, explore, and find something with which their interests and talents align. Then, let them enjoy it without an undue emphasis on success. Praise effort, character, and teamwork, not results. This is easy to talk about but hard to do. Find ways to reward and incentivize the values you want to instill. That means not taking the easy road and talking about who set a new mile best or scored the most points, but instead highlighting who hustled during the fourth quarter, rallied after it seemed like the match was over, or displayed exemplary sportsmanship.

Go Broad over Specialization

Even if the entire point of youth sports was to create future champions (which it’s not), we’d still adopt something similar to the Norwegian model. An ​analysis​ of over 6,000 athletes explored what separates athletes who reached world class and those who came up short.

Those who reached world-class had during their youth:

• More multi-sport than specialized practice

• Started their primary sport later

• Accumulated less overall formal practice

• Initially progressed slower than national class peers

Those who performed well when young, but didn’t progress:

• Started their primary sport earlier

• Specialized, engaging in more practice in one sport

• Made quicker initial progress

Norway doesn’t have 300 plus million people and an NCAA system to funnel talent. They have to develop theirs. And they realize the best way to do that is keep as many people in the system as possible. Sure, soccer tends to start early and not quite have as much sports generalization, but all research points to lots of unorganized play even in soccer.

Why? Because you can’t predict talent development very well! Just go look at the age group record books. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking early performance equals talent and potential. The kid running a 6-minute mile at 10 looks way better than the one running 6:45. But if the faster one is at track practice 5 days a week and the slower one rolls out of gym class in jeans and runs it off “fitness” from just playing, well I’m betting on the slower one!

When we assess performance early on, we’re not measuring talent, we’re looking at training age and opportunity. And we’re crowning winners based on who started grinding first. Research backs this up, kids born early in the year are 9x more likely to be picked at U16 than late-born kids, an edge that nearly vanishes by adulthood.

America gets away with the insane achievement model because we can burn out 9 kids to get 1 survivor. When we narrow our focus too early, we create fragility. A prospective study of 1,544 high-schoolers found highly specialized athletes had 1.85x the rate of lower-body injury vs. low-specialization peers.

Norway can’t afford that. They take the longer, more sustainable model.

Their football associations entire motto is "as many as possible, as long as possible, as good as possible." This is also reflected in their coaching style, which varies based on sport, but generally takes advantage of a more modern ecological approach.

Instead of the old school football coach dictating and demanding, doing his best job of imitating a drill sergeant, Norway and other Scandanavian countries are at the forefront of using more constraints led approaches. They let the environment do more of the coaching. There’s more of an emphasis on play, exploration,varying the game dynamics with small sided games, and constraints. This isn’t every coach or situation, but many of the European development models are at the forefront of minimizing the over prescribing we see all too much in America.

Rethinking Youth Sports

The whole point of youth sports should be for kids to learn, develop, have fun, and want to come back and play again next season! The best chance of developing a D1 scholarship athlete is essentially to do the exact opposite of what our current youth sports fiasco promotes. Even the poster child for early specialization, Tiger Woods, ​acknowledged​ it’s not a good thing for parents to push their kids too hard: “Don’t force your kids into sports,” he says. “I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play. Keep it fun.”

While youth sports in America aren’t going to adopt the Norwegian model anytime soon, we can rebalance the equation. As I outlined in my book, it’s not getting rid of competitiveness, it’s rebalancing the equation to make sure that crazy mom, dad, or coach don’t extinguish the fire that makes great competitors (and sport fun!).

And even though we like to blame that “crazy” parent, it’s often not the root of the problem. The entire system surrounding youth sports is. A 2026 study of 1,229 families found that parents’ over-investment in youth sports was driven by external pressure, especially from club coaches, and not by a delusional belief that their kid was the next pro. In fact, belief in the child’s potential didn’t predict greater spending on youth sports at all. The pressure is manufactured by the system the family is standing in. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes with it.

In research on performance orientation and grades in school, a teaching environment that supported and emphasized mastery , where students focused on the process of learning and comprehension instead of a comparison to others, was also linked to better grades. But it wasn’t the direct relationship that an outcome orientation had. Instead, in one study on college students, a mastery approach was linked to challenge-seeking, which in turn predicted end-of-the-year grades. In another study, mastery goals predicted higher levels of interest and enjoyment. Mastery works on our approach system without activating avoidance. It frees us up to take on a challenge and pursue our interests without getting bogged down by the pressure or judgment that often comes with an obsession with outcomes. The same findings hold true when looking at sport or the workplace. In a large meta-analysis that analyzed the impact of goal setting in sports, process-orientated goals had a large effect on performance. Outcome goals had little to no effect.

These two paths represent a fast versus slow road to success. Both a mastery or outcome focus can lead to better performance, but the latter is akin to taking a shortcut. Obsession over outcomes is the most direct path to improvement, but it comes with some downsides that shift us toward avoidance. The slow path takes a longer, indirect route. It helps improve our performance not by focusing on the results themselves but by supporting the foundation that ultimately leads to better performance. It stokes the fire of enjoyment and interest to sustain our curiosity and work ethic over the long haul. It pushes us toward challenge-seeking so that when we inevitably hit a roadblock, we’ll take it on instead of trying to protect our ego. Both approaches work. One is more sustainable, providing success with less angst. Society has thrown us so far out of balance that we can’t even see the slow route right in front of us.

We can either instill a love of sport in our youth, or we can turn sport into a burden where kids are exhausted, stressed, and scared. We’ve seen this go both ways, and the results couldn’t be more different. One leads to happy, healthy, and better young athletes. The other leads to burnout, family tension, mental health challenges, and quitting. As parents, volunteers, coaches, and community members, let’s all do what we can to minimize the latter and champion the former.

-Steve

This was excerpted from Chapters 2 and 3 of Win the Inside Game, where I evaluate the Norwegian and American system for developing talent and motivation.

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Why does this occur? Because people initially want to jump on the new thing, but then as it becomes saturated, it no longer sets you apart to jump on the thing, so you go the other direction. You gain notoriety pointing out that the hyped thing isn’t the bees knees. It occurs with training, diet, you name it.

It occurred in the 2000-2010ss with HIIT and Tabata training. And now it’s occurring with ‘zone 2’ training.

It’s one of the most frustrating phenomenon in all of exercise land because it confuses the lay person, and most of the time the answer is somewhere in the middle. So if you ground yourself in that middle, you just watch people scream intensity or volume, as they whizz past you going way too far in one direction or the other in order to make a name for themselves.

Which brings us back to Zone 2. What is it? A fancy word for what we used to call normal easy runs. Your typical base building speed. Not slogging around so you’re recovering, but not going so fast that you’re getting closer to your tempo or threshold pace. It was largely popularized by folks like Peter Attia as the “best” way to train in the 2020s. But it’s origin came much much earlier, as we’ll get to shortly.

Recently, there’s been a push back. There’s even been a research review called “Much Ado About Zone 2” that’s made the rounds that it’s not the be all end all.

So…let’s break it all down. Is Zone 2 the greatest or a fraud, or somewhere in between? First, a brief history…

The Volume-Intensity Debate

For over 120 years, endurance training has swung back and forth between folks emphasizing intensity and those saying volume. At first, it was BIG swings. Coaches and athletes doing lots of walking versus those doing all short intervals. Over time, the swings have become more nuanced. Instead of arguing over either/or it’s the best combination of each. Everyone agrees that to run your best 10k you need a decent volume of easy running, now we just quibble over the details, whether that’s 70mpw or 100mpw, whether it’s tons of threshold or just enough, etc.

But in research land, we didn’t make as much progress. While, in coaching we left the extreme debates behind by about the 1960s. In research world, the idea of whether we should do mostly HIIT or mostly Zone 2 is still an argument.

Why? A few reasons. First in coaching land, performance is sacrosanct. You tell really quickly whether a model of training works or not based on real world results. So if something comes along and shows far superior results, it gets adopted and sticks around. That direct feedback mechanism is what helps training evolve relatively quickly.

In the lab, we don’t utilize this nice neat mechanism. Instead, we often measure surrogate markers or mechanisms. Instead of judging based on multiple performances over years, we measure things like VO2max, LT, Running economy, or maybe some enzymes or more invasive shifts to see what’s going on in the body. These are important. It helps us understand WHY training does what it does. But every level down we go, we get a little more disconnected from the thing that matters and tells us the most (holistic performance gives a sense of how the entire system functions together). So if performance is at the top, then the next level down is more direct contributors like VO2max or running economy, and the next level down is more indirect mechanistic stuff (muscle fiber, enyzmes, mitochondria, Red blood cells, etc.).

Second, in the performance arena we get to see long-term results. How training impacts an entire team for years on end with performance data. In the lab, we’re often looking at 6-10 week snapshots. That short term effect can confuse folks on what actually works. (Think of it like this. If I measured performance after a 6 week based period or a 6 week intense sharpening period, performance would improve more after 6 weeks of sharpening. But does that mean the intense work is better then the base? Of course not. If I tried to sharpen for 24 weeks, I’d be training like it was 1940, and my performance would eventually stagnate or I’d burn out…)

So what? While in the real world, we saw a natural evolution of training towards a mixture that includes lots of easy, a solid amount of moderate, and some intense, with shifting depending on the time of year…In the lab we saw a never ending debate over HIIT vs. Zone 2, or any iteration.

In the 2000s, Stephen Seiler tried to help out by doing research based on what he was seeing in the real world. This is where the 80/20 principle (80% easy) came about. Now it’s important that this was a real of thumb, not an exact prescription. But Seiler’s work was important, because it dragged us out of the HIIT/VO2max focused training of the 1990s and said, “wait, people actually doing this at the highest level don’t follow our advice, maybe we should ask why.”

Which brings us to today…

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The Zone 2 Hype Cycle

While Seiler was observing elite endurance athletes putting in lots of relatively slow training, this wasn’t new. It’s the innovation that Lydiard and others brought to the forefront all the way back in the 1960s. It took us away from the days of Zatopek and lots of 400m repeats into the modern era where we first accumulated lots of easy to moderate training. So this isn’t new, it’s long established in the real world.

Seiler and others yanked us out of the VO2max/intensity doldrums and science being science, they couldn’t settle for the easy intstructions to just run easy enough where you can talk, added a “zone” around it. One that if we’re honest is pretty arbitrary. No, it’s not tied to precise adaptations where if you train a little too slow or too fast you miss out. It’s mostly tied to arbitrary physiological markers that allow us to say there’s a meaningful difference. Most of that is overblown. In truth, it just means: mostly easy.

But…people who aren’t coaches like Peter Attia took this zone classification to the absurd end, telling us his zone was exactly between 1.7 to 1.9 mmol of lactate.

And that’s where we went wrong. We not only over-indexed on a false precision, but folks started claiming it did everything. You started to hear a buzz word bingo of what zone 2 did best: mitochondria biogenesis, capilirization, and so on. We went wild for mechanisms to explain WHY folks needed easy running.

Why? Because of sciencyness. As someone in the actual arena explaining to a new person, it doesn’t convince many people that we’ve known this for 60 years because some former milkman experimented with training, his runners dominated, and then everyone else tried a similar approach and it was adopted. It sounds a lot better to use fancy terms. Everyone knows mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Who wouldn’t want more of that?!

So…Is Zone 2 Out?

So what we ended up with is a kind of meme version of the original real world classification of easy running. A false precision, over-indexing on mechanisms, and with the nuance of timing or periodization of training mattering a lot.

And that’s where the current research backlash comes in. It’s critiquing the meme easy running, not the actual thing. Before we dive into what the research got wrong, let’s start with what it got right.

1. There is no magic zone 2 switch. Nothing magically shifts from 1.8 to 2.0 mmol/l or what have you.

2. The mechanistic work on mitochondria development varies so much, that no we can’t say zone 2 is the be all end all for mitochondria biogenesis.

3. If all your doing is easy training, no you won’t max out aerobic abilities.

4. Yes, Attia and others over sold the mechanisms and the precision.

All of that is true and accurate. The hype cycle took us from Lydiard and Seiler’s observation to “do lots of easy running” and gave us some bastardized version of running between 1.8-2.1 mmol/l will solve all your problems…

As I mentioned in the history section, no one in the real world debates whether or not we need easy running or even intense training. We accept you need all of it. It’s not even up for debate. But…where the research review got wrong is they ignored what Lydiard and 100+ years of coaches figured out that many scientists still can’t seem to understand… we need to leave the false dichotomy of easy versus intense running behind. The devil is in the details, not one over the other. They are synergetic, not oppositional.

People like Attia and even more so Inigo San Milan never argued for either/or. They argued for building a foundation and topping it off with other intensities. It’s the same argument Seiler made. He didn’t say elite endurance athletes weren’t doing intense work, just way less than the research was suggesting at the time.

Let’s walk through some mistakes.

1. Zone 2 is horribly defined everywhere…all the time.

Part of the problem in this research and others is that zone 2 is kind of nebulous. In the review, they included research that looked at everything from what I’d consider a fast walk to easy running in some cases. And then waved away studies that were broader or may have included some zone 3 or what have you. This creates problems, because of course there’s a minimum intensity (that varies by person) that will give us lots of aerobic adaptations. A well-trained runner isn’t getting a boost from lots of walking, no matter how long he’s going for. And on the other side, almost no one trains exclusively in ‘zone 2’ so it eliminates any observational studies that just follow base building or regular endurance training.

I’m not entirely faulting the researchers her, it’s why I hate zone 2 as a concept.

When a kind of nebulous concept that was really developed as a kind of rule of thumb for coaches (the 5 zone training model), is rigidly applied, it doesn’t work. First, because few studies rigidly look at zone 2 training, because it’s really hard to define and control. Secondly, because of this, it allows you to pick and choose what’s included as zone 2.

2. It’s mechanism focused

One of the problems is that it’s mechanism focused, not performance. Which isn’t inherently bad, but when you’re considering mechanisms, you have to understand the nuance we discussed previously. For example, one study they pointed to found that 5 months of easy training didn’t improve citrate synthase activity ( a marker of mitochondria changes)….Well, that was in elite endurance athletes! Who almost certainly had topped off their easy volume based adaptations from years of lots of easy. As Canova pointed out, once the aerobic house is big enough, it’s no longer creating new rooms, you’re just maintaining the ones you have and making sure it doesn’t shrink, while you start to decorate the interior.

We can see this throughout the paper. A large share of the mitochondrial argument goes like this:

1. Zone 2 produces smaller changes in AMP, ADP, lactate or phosphocreatine.

2. It therefore activates AMPK or CaMKII less.

3. PGC-1α expression is sometimes smaller.

4. Therefore, chronic mitochondrial adaptation is probably smaller or absent.

Acute signaling is not chronic adaptation. A transient signalling pathway activation is highly variable. For instance, A 2026 meta-analysis of moderate training found significant increases in mitochondrial volume density and VO₂max while finding no consistent changes in PGC-1α.

As my grad school advisor warned decades ago, “be careful falling in love with pathways. Chances are there are dozens we don’t know about or what they do. You’ve got to get to functional adaptation. That’s the king.”

When we over-index on signalling pathways, we miss the forest for the trees.

A similar mistake can be seen throughout the review where they emphasis intensity causes more changes in a variety of markers (pH, AMP/ADP, AMPK, lactate, etc.) to show it’s superiority. But in reality these are just acute markers of an applied stressor. The body does not award adaptation points according to how miserable one session feels or how much stress it causes.

The name of the game is absorbing and adapting. Which again, is why long-term performance measures are your best marker for adaptation.

3. It’s own research counters it’s claim.

The paper's own anchor citations contradict it. Its single biggest source (Mølmen, Almquist & Skattebo), found mitochondrial content rises equally with continuous, interval, and sprint training (23/27/27%, no significant difference). They waved it away on a technicality saying its definition of endurance training was "too broad" to know whether Zone 2 specifically benefits. The other paper (Granata 2018), they use to argue against low intensity, actually concludes mitochondrial content tracks volume. The authors focus on that they found intensity is important to mitochondria function, but left out the other half of the finding…

Even if all we did was care about mitochondria (hint, we don’t), most of the research shows that yes, both volume and intensity produce mitochondria increases, sometimes to the same degree. But volume of training is generally what it tracks.

And, much of this research is hard to do or track. Why? Because for a clear comparison you need long-term training studies. Volume takes longer to work. It’s why Lydiard told people essentially, spend months building your base, and then once you add intensity you can be 6 weeks from near peak fitness. Intensity works fast. Volume takes time. If your studies aren’t long-term, it misses the differentiator.

We can see this in the researchers own claims. They cite Inglis 2024 to show "moderate intensity did not increase V̇O₂max.” It’s a single 6-week study, which itself is contradicted by Mølmen's pooled finding that continuous training raises V̇O₂max similarly to HIT.

This is the problem when we cherry pick data without considering time horizons, mechanisms, performance, etc.

4. It asks the wrong question.

“Which intensity is optimal?” is bad question.

Optimal for what? Aerobic ability, performance, longevity, mitochondria density, VO2max, time constraints, and on and on.

There is no optimal training intensity. All matter.

High intensity generally performs well when you have limited time. If I told you that you have 6 weeks to run fast, cranking out intervals may be your best bet. If I told you that you only had 30min to train, sure something more intense might win.

This time component is often touted as “more efficient" for the modern person. But it neglects a few items. First, with intense work, you have to warm-up. For an easy run, you don’t. Second, after an intense workout, you cool down or at least have to recover. After an easy run, you walk right into the shower. So much of the ‘time saving” is a mirage from not including the warm-up, cool-down, and recovery time.

The 80/20 Debate

I’m sure the researchers were well intended. But this review misses the mark. And the reason I’m calling it out is because it’s making the rounds on social media and podcasts, and does damage to what actually freaking works in the real world.

The review was narrowly focused, mostly on mechanisms instead of functional outcomes. And it created a kind of strawman of intensity vs. volume and then trying to declare intensity the winner based on “time efficiency.”

We can see that most in the argument they make against Seiler’s work. They argue that the “lots of easy” is based on folks training 15-20 hours per week. But for lower volumes, we shouldn’t apply that.

The problem with that is a few fold. First, Seiler included runners in his analysis. Unlike cycling where you can accumulate a crazy high number of hours, in running you are limited by pounding. Even if you are running 100 miles per week that’s ~11 hours per week for sub-elite competitor. Much less than the cyclist. But if we consider most college, high school, and so forth runners don’t run 100mpw all the time, the lots of easy still holds. Most good high school kids may run 60mpw, that’s 7 hours per week. Lower level high school kids running 30-40mpw, (3.5-5hours) still do lots of easy, and not all intervals.

Meaning, that the lots of easy still holds. Sure, it might not be precisely 80/20. But even for relatively low volumes that we’d see in amateurs, the idea that most of your training is easy holds. It’s why if we compare HS to pro runners, the number of hard workouts per week doesn’t vary much. It’s not like HS kids are doing 2 hard workouts and pros are doing 6 a week. No, everyone is doing 2-3 hard workouts a week, or some mixture with more moderate that equals that out.

Now, at some point, if you are only training 3 days a week, will you need more intensity? Absolutely. You can only pack in so much volume in 2-3 days a week, so you have to compensate somewhere.

But even then, the answer isn’t lots of HIIT. It’s to build your base with more moderate intensity or tempo work, as we see with folks who’ve modified the norwegian double method for recreational runners. (Or what Jim Peters showed us 70 years ago.).

And it ignores the point of easy running. One of the reason it works more consistently, is its easier to build up to and handle a decent volume of easy running, then hammering intervals 4-5 days a week. One is demanding and exhausting. The other eventually becomes an easy stroll where you talk the whole time with your friends. Which side note, why volume matched research (which is used in this review sometimes) is not appropriate here. If we match 10mpw of 400s vs 10mpw of easy running, of course the intense work comes out on top. The whole point of easy running is that you can accumulate more of it safely!

So no, the lots of easy isn’t a mirage of high volume training. It’s something that HS, college, and pro runners have known for half a century. Whether you’re running 4 hours or 12 hours per week, you need mostly easy running to build up that aerobic base.

The False Debate

The real reason this irks me is that it sets us back. It puts us arguing, once again, over a false dichotomy: volume over intensity. When that problem was solved many many years ago.

You need both, in the right dose. What’s the right dose? It will vary for individual and event. If you’re training for an 800m, you need more intensity than volume, for example.

But for anything middle-distance and up, or for general aerobic development, no one is arguing that we need only one or the other. That’s a debate that literally occurred between 1930 and 1950. We’ve moved on.

Now, we acknowledge that lots of easy builds the foundation. It allows you to safely accumulate volume to set the stage and build all of those wonderful adaptations, that then are enhanced once we add some moderate and then more intense work on top of that. How much? Depends on your aims. But underlying almost all of it is: lots of easy, add in some moderate as you need to push adaptations, then top of with some intense.

It’s not that HIIT is bad. We need it. But the HIIT evangelicals are stuck in the 1930s. Even Igloi, who did intervals all day every day, realized that he needed to build a foundation with easy intervals. Not HIIT.

Lastly, I want you to imagine a scenario. You have a high school cross-country coach who gets new freshman in. These kids are low volume, they haven’t trained before. What would you say if that coach prescribed them 4 days a week of 200s and 400 intense repeats? You’d think that coach sucked. That he was a football coach who didn’t understand cross-country. And those kids might improve a lot initially (clean slate phenomenon) but soon would be burned out, injured, or quit because they were untrained folks with no background hammering intervals.

Why do we think that kind of advice is good for adults? It’s not. Even more for novices or amateurs, you need to build a foundation. It’s something every high school or amateur coach understands.

And before someone goes, “you’re talking running performance, we’re talking zone 2 or HIIT for health…” the point is that performance captures the underlying items that correlate with health better than singular physiological markers. I’ve shown this before. And the data on sedentary folks and longevity backs me up.

When you actually dig into the longevity data, the biggest wins don't come from getting people to sprint. They come from getting people who do nothing to do something, and then to do a lot of that something. The accelerometer studies are about as clear as it gets. Folks racking up around five hours a day of light activity see somewhere in the neighborhood of almost a 30% drop in all-cause mortality. The whole public health game is volume of sustainable movement.

And the review pivots to fitness to make its case. The argument goes something like, “VO2max is the strongest predictor of mortality, zone 2 might not budge it much, so prioritize intensity.” But even there, on the battlefield they chose, the easy stuff holds up. Mølmen’s pooled data shows continuous training nudges VO2max about as much as the hard intervals do. And a history of training tells us that if you want to increase your Vo2max the most, you do lots of easy and top it off with intense. So even if we drag the goalposts all the way over to VO2max, it’s the same answer. Turns out we don’t need to make grandma do Tabata after all.

I hate to be a call-out guy, but can we just stop? Can we stop ignoring a century of training history with some hand waving and valuing a 6 week training study over the natural experiment of performance data? It’s annoying. And I’d argue it’s bad science. You’re intentionally ignoring good quality data.

We need lots of easy. What lots is will vary. What easy is will ebb and flow, for some really slow, others moderately slow. But you can’t escape that fact.

It hasn’t been up for debate for over 60 years. High intensity and volume work aren’t opponents. They are compliments. Can we get with the times?

-Steve

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On the flip side, others online point to teen phenom Lamine Yamal, who started in an academy at 7 years old. They declare for the US to be competitive we’ve got to start development early. That by the time most Americans start their Academy journey, they are years behind in development.

When it comes to talent ID and development in soccer, what in the world matters? In most sports, we’ve generally agreed that early exploration through multi-sport development with later specialization is the key. In soccer, there’s a strongly held belief that early and often is the key, much like sports like Gymnastics.

With the World Cup in full swing, let’s unpack what the science and real world experience actually tells us about talent ID and development, with lessons that reach far beyond soccer.

Identifying Talent

The USMNT breakout star may be Alex Freeman. The 21-year old son of former NFL star Antonio Freeman. Growing up, everyone asked if he’d follow in his father’s footsteps. He played everything from football to tennis, but harbored a “secret love for soccer.” As Alex said, “I wanted to chase my own dream and make my own path.”

Seems like a slam dunk for talent ID, right?

At 15, he tried out for the closest MLS youth Academy, Inter Miami, to chase that dream. And he didn’t make the cut. They passed on him. It was only thanks to a former coach who encouraged him to try out for Orlando City’s academy. But Orlando offered him a different path. They moved him from a focus on attacking to right back. Miami saw an attacker who wasn’t good enough. Orlando saw a defender who didn’t exist yet.

Even with making it into the youth talent pipeline, he spent years in the reserves, playing on the B teams. Even once he became a pro, he only accumulated 11 minutes of MLS league play before 2025. So up until a year and half ago, he was a fringe pro, and now he’s starring as a key piece on the national team.

I love this story as it gets at the heart of talent ID. We suck at it. Genuinely, we’re terrible.

Not just soccer or the US, everywhere. Consider how many NFL or NBA first round draft picks miss, even though teams have gotten to see them play from 18-22 years old in the exact game they are going to play as adults…

In soccer, it’s just as bad.

In a study of German youth academies that tracked over 14,000 under 12 players in the national talent program, only 0.6% ever made it as professionals. That’s in a program designed to help develop elite players, the success rate is tiny. In a follow up study, trying to identify youth talent, when they used an assessment that included a full barrage of tests including speed, endurance, dribbling, tactics and coaches expert opinions it only explained about 15% of who reached a pro academy. The researchers concluded the metric “wasn't sensitive enough to justify individual selection decisions."

A broader study that looked at youth almost 10,000 players in football powerhouses of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, found only 15% of U17 selected players successfully made it to a senior team. While another study looking at Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Denmark, found that U17 experience was either a non-significant or negative predictor of making it on the senior level (being a part of the national team, champions league, or Europa League). They found that youth performance explained only 3.2% of variance in the number of elite senior appearances.

And we could go on and on:

• In Italy’s national system, only 9% of U16 and 15% of U19 made the national team. Fewer than 20% of those on the senior team had been on a part of the U16 selections

• In Sweden’s national selection system, out of all the senior team members over a 13 year period, 34% entered the national training system at U15–U16, 33% at U17–U18, and 33% at U21 or senior.

• Across multiple sports, a meta-analysis found the best juniors and the best seniors are often different people. Even just comparing U18 versus senior teams, the two groups are up to 93% different. And the overlap is even smaller the younger you get. But you don’t need research to tell you this, all you have to do is look at the U-13 track records...

• Future Bundesliga players first entered a youth elite academy at an average age of 14. In the researchers words, "only a minority of the current Bundesliga players were already involved in these programmes during the earlier age categories."

• Among the players who reached the senior German national team, only 48.2% had debuted in a national youth team by U19. Meaning more than half of senior German internationals weren't in the elite national-team setup through the junior years at all.

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In other words, being the best under 12 year old is a near-worthless predictor of who turns pro. The younger the age group, the worse off the predictive ability. Yes, at some point as we reach our teens, it becomes easier. But the early we “select” for talent, research shows what we’re often doing is selecting for those born earlier in the year (relative age effect), those who hit puberty earlier, or those who have been highly trained from a young age so they appear more talented but don’t have as high of a ceiling.

The younger we try to evaluate talent, the more we are evaluating things that have nothing to do with talent. We’re looking at advantages that wash out by the time athletes reach maturity.

Which brings us back to Alex Freeman. We are awful at Talent ID. One of the reasons is that what makes a great 10 year old is often different from what makes a great 22 year old player. And to Landon Donovan’s point, if we’re selecting based on performance right now, then we dismiss the Freeman’s of the world, without realizing what they might be able to develop into with time. We ask ‘is he good enough right now?’ instead of ‘what could he become?’

It’s why every researcher and soccer professional I’ve talked to says the same thing: Keep as many kids in the pipeline for as long as possible. And allow multiple points of entry or re-entry as possible. The US does a great job of this in Olympic sports. For example, in track, we have free school track and field which is one of the most popular high school sports. And then we have D1, D2, D3, NAIA, JuCo, etc. to extend college careers to give late bloomers a chance to develop.

Okay, so we’re awful at talent ID, but what actually matters when it comes to developing soccer talent? Do we need early specialization, to play in academies early on, what matters?

Developing Talent

One of the arguments in soccer goes something like this, nearly all soccer players start young, so we need to get kids started early! There’s some truth to this, and some misconceptions.

First, most soccer players who make it do start young. A study of MLS players put it on average at 5.1 years old.

But there’s also a caveat here. Even in the US, the most popular U-6 sport is soccer… Why? Think about it. I’ve got a 1.5 year old who kicks the ball around. Our 3 year old can kick and chase and shoot. Why? It’s not because I’m trying to create some soccer phenoms, it’s because it’s the simplest sport to get right away (simple to try, hard to master.) Contrast that with even something like T-ball that takes understanding way more complicated rules. Or even basketball, which requires dribbling, which does not come as quickly to a 3 year old. All kids start soccer young. It’s often the first sport we try.

Now, that doesn’t mean starting soccer young doesn’t help. There’s an argument to be made that learning to kick and dribble with your feet early is important for skill development. There’s data to back up that early play with a ball helps develop our perceptual abilities. But too often, we point to “look all these pros started at 5, we must start practicing early.” But that’s not what research tells us. It’s not drills and practice, it’s something else.

What is helpful with early engagement is developing an early love of the game itself. Because it’s easy to pick up, it’s easy to enjoy. If you can foster and develop that early love, it leads to something we’ll talk about soon which is much more important: lots of chosen free play.

Before we get there, does this mean we need more early deliberate practice or early Academy selection and training? Not necessarily.

In a study looking at the 2022 World Cup, the median academy entry age was 13.2 years old. In Europe specifically, it was slightly lower (11.1) with England being among the earliest to start playing for Academies (8.4 years). For comparison, USA was 12.0. Even Argentina, the champions, had five players enter after age 15.

Most of the research, including that out of Germany and Sweden, shows that what’s more important than early Academy selection is multiple paths into, out of, and back into academies. The turnover rate is very high. And without paths back in, you miss talent. Which again, makes sense, because we suck at talent ID. And if we treat selection as a final verdict, we’re going to miss lots of talent.

What about specialization?

• Sweden- early specialization not related adult play.

• A series of studies out of England found future elite players did engage with soccer early, but they tended to play more sports, and none of the early-exclusive specializers in one study made it as adult pros.

• In a study of Bundesliga pros, they played other sports more and had later specialization.

• In a study on elite German youths, the biggest improvers over a 2 year period had more non-organized soccer play and more practice in other sports.

Most of the research points to early engagement, but holding off on specialization until their junior high years. Why? Similar to what we see in American basketball and baseball. Early specialization is linked to higher levels of burnout and injuries. Which makes sense. If your entire identity and world is on whether you make the U12 team or not, it’s a large burden for a kid developing their identity to carry. And from a physical standpoint, if most of your training is geared toward soccer specificity, you develop more overuse injuries, and less of a robust body that more diversity in movement entails.

Now, in other sports, the generalize than specialize research is much cleaner and clearer. In soccer, it’s less about play other sports early, it’s more about make sure you aren’t just playing and practicing regular soccer.

Practice vs. Play

In the US in basketball, for decades a culture of pickup games drove development. More recently, there’s been a switch to younger and younger AAU/Travel team ball, and it’s now seen as a culprit for changes in our players skill development. In soccer, the same

What we’re left with is a development conundrum, how much organized practice matters early on versus play.

USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino made a similar point recently, pointing to early play with the ball. “This isn’t taught at universities or in soccer schools. What happens is many methods are copied. They set up soccer schools in the United States and tell kids: ‘Pass the ball from here to there, go back and shoot when you get there.’ That’s not soccer. When we learn, when we relate to the game, it’s with absolute freedom. I take the ball and my brother, my cousin, or my friend two years older takes it away from me. How do I get it back later? That’s the game; it’s not something robotic.”

Similar arguments have been made in Brazil’s recent lackluster performance compared to their historical success. Brazil developed their talent through street soccer and Futsal, which lead to a kind of creativity that could seldom be matched. A study on Brazilian female professionals found more futsal practice was related to better offensive decision-making. As the street soccer culture has disappeared, their development may have taken a hit, similar to US basketball.

Research backs this up. In a study on German professionals, the key wasn’t organized drills, it was play that made the difference. Approximately 68% of the soccer ‘training’ that occurred in childhood was non-organized casual play. Researchers found that national team players:

• Played more informal football as kids.

• Played other sports during adolescence.

• Started serious, focused training later.

In a study out of England, those who got a pro contract at 16, tended to have more soccer specific play. Now, not all research backs up the play argument, as some studies find that unstructured play wasn’t related to performance or advancement. But overall, the trend is relatively strong.

One of the reasons this is important is what Poch pointed out. Play develops not just our technical skills, but our ability to see the game in a specific way. Instead of an overly technical game of decision making, we develop a natural variety. In sports psychology, we call this utilizing affordances. We connect perception and action in a free-flowing way. For the Americans, think of it as Patrick Mahomes playing QB versus a mechanical rigid college QB. Mahomes is able to improvise and create on the field. A mechanical QB reads through his progressions like a decision tree and can’t pivot or create if those options aren’t there. It’s the same in soccer.

This often occurs because it feels like you’re actually coaching when you are running drills or giving explicit instruction. It also looks good to parents on the sidelines who are paying you. It doesn’t look as productive when you roll a ball out into the field and step back, getting out of their way.

Most agree that the path for development in soccer is early natural engagement, with lots of informal play. It’s developing a love of the game, without adults ruining it. And having the freedom, with just enough skill development, to develop creativity and a better perception-action system.

It’s a balancing act. Yes, to a degree, it helps to learn the game early on, but often it’s best in an unorganized fashion. Too much technical training, too much specialization, creates a rigid and fragile player who peaks early, gets burned out, or suffers injuries.

It’s the right balance of engagement, play, and gradual movement towards specialization during the early teen years.

So what?

We suck at Talent ID. If we make it a final verdict, we’re going to miss out on players like Alex Freeman. We need multiple paths of entry and re-entry to talent development pipelines because predicting who makes it, even in their late teens is notoriously difficult.

When it comes to pathways, too often we focus on the wrong things, predicting talent instead of developing it. Development early on should involve more play. In this case, Landon Donovan is spot on in his analysis of the plight of his 8 year old. You took him away from his friends, all in the name of ‘winning’ an 8 year old league or whatever have you. Yes, kids will want to compete. Let them. But at 8, 9, or 10, that competitiveness should be driven by the kids, not the adults.

We need to give time for talent to express itself. The older we get, of course we move towards a model of specialization and more development of technical skills and abilities.

While it’s easy to point to Yamal and say we need more 7 year olds in professional Academies, the real solution is much more nuanced. Yamal is a freak talent. And even he agrees that we need more play, "60% to 70% of my game comes from the slyness of playing with other kids."

What we really need is kids trying soccer early, lots of informal play, developing a love of the sport, and a talent development program that provides lots of avenues for entry and re-entry.

In the US, we often have kids start soccer, but then pick another sport during the Junior high period. And we often overly focus on technical and organized development, as there’s little culture of pickup soccer. Instead, we have a pay to play club system that ultimately excludes talent who can’t afford the travel fees, and overly focuses on showing their worth by being the best U-9 team in their area.

While soccer has its own specific nuances, the overall message is similar to other sports and performers:

1. We suck at talent ID and overestimate our ability at predicting future success.

2. We often do things that develop performance RIGHT NOW, and neglect things that develop skills and abilities that help us in the future.

3. We overestimate technical and organized coaching, and under appreciate the value of play and unstructured learning. (This is rampant in education as well!)

There are many paths to the top. Too often, we try to over-engineer a process, to proclaim that we can become a factory of productive players or talent. It’s arrogance. Over and over again, the research and real world experience points to the same thing. Give people a shot to develop their talent. Some will do so quickly, others take time. At the heart of it all is a love of the game and lots of unstructured play, with just enough coaching early on to develop their skills. Just look at Alex Freeman. He’s starting at a World Cup because someone reopened a door one MLS squad had shut. And they gave him a new path to develop on, one that didn’t blossom until much later into his career.

-Steve Magness

P.S. Both of my books are on sale for $1.99 on kindle for prime day, get them here: Do Hard Things and Win The Inside Game.

Our brains are fried. Or at least that’s what it feels like for most of us. Chances are you’ve experienced at least one of the following:

You sit down to read a book, only to find that your brain isn’t complying. You read a paragraph but don’t remember it a second later. Your attention can’t stay focused and your mind keeps jumping from thought to thought.

You’re at dinner with your friends and family; your phone is tucked away in your pocket, but every minute or so, your mind drifts off to what you have to do for work, or what the score of the game is, or if that Instagram post has gotten any more likes. Your friends and family may even ask if you are there…to which you reply yes, but their asking is proof that perhaps you aren’t.

You’re sitting down to work and feel a buzz in your pocket. You grab your phone, slide your finger to open it, only to see that there isn’t a notification. Welcome to the phantom vibration.

There’s even a name for this forgetfulness and inability to focus: Digital Dementia. There’s no secret. Just about every one of us is on our phones or digital devices too much. Ourselves included. We’re losing the battle to the engineers who are designing devices and apps to keep us scrolling and pulling the digital slot machine.

What we want to cover below is how to fight back; how to tilt the battle in your favor just enough so you don’t lose your mind to your phone. First, what’s going on in your brain: A slew of ​research​ shows that our phones hamper our attention and cognitive capacity. We’re pushed to a kind of partial attention, filled with frequent task-switching that prevents us from ever being deeply focused on any one thing. Our brain wasn’t built for this. We suck at multitasking, yet our phones demand it. As a result, research shows that our working memory, focus, and cognitive flexibility are impaired. If you set out to design a device for the sole purpose of deteriorating our attentional skills, it would be hard to beat an app-filled phone…

Other research shows that constant task-switching and information overload dysregulate our stress response. We end up getting frequent hits of stress without a true action to alleviate or act on it. It’s like those rodent experiments where the mouse gets shocked but can’t do anything about it and eventually succumbs to chronic fatigue. We are the mouse.

This combination of cognitive decline and stress dysfunction explains why ​researchers​ found that the higher someone scores on a smartphone addiction scale, the worse they are at self-regulated learning, staying in the present, or experiencing flow. So what do we do about it?

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind:

A common tactic is to put your phone on silent or do not disturb. While this beats having notifications buzzing and beeping at all times, it’s not much better. ​Researchers​ found that the mere presence of a phone, even if it is face-down and off, tends to lower concentration and cognitive performance. In these experiments, scientists even used someone else’s phone (instead of the participant’s) as the distraction. Guess what? Same impact, even though participants knew it wasn’t their phone. Our environment invites action. We’ve trained our brains to think that the rectangular object is the most important thing in the world. It doesn’t just represent social media or text messages, it’s a reminder of all that we have to do and can do in the world. It’s why even if your phone is on silent in your pocket, you can’t stop thinking about the work you have to complete, though your kid is asking about your day.

Your brain is designed to lock on to valuable information. For our ancient ancestors, it meant the rustling of the leaves that could signal danger (e.g., a lurking mountain lion), or the person sitting across from you at the campfire, because your survival may depend on them at some point. Now, it’s your phone. If you want to break free for periods of deep-focus time, you’ve got to remove it from sight altogether.

2. Leave it Out of the Bedroom:

Most of us charge our phones beside our beds. It’s convenient, as the phone acts as an alarm. But it also reinforces our addiction—just think about it: the last thing we see before we go to bed and the first thing we grab for when we wake up isn’t a book, diary, or our significant other; it’s our phone. It’s the ultimate addiction training. It also makes us sleep worse.

In a ​longitudinal study ​on young adults, researchers found that nighttime phone use correlated with feeling stressed and depressed. Other ​research​ found that keeping your phone near your bed is associated with worse sleep. A ​review of research​ linked nighttime phone use to later bedtimes, longer sleep onset latency, shorter sleep duration, insomnia, reduced sleep quality, and daytime tiredness. The best solution is the simplest: Move the phone out of the bedroom, far enough away so that even if you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night you aren’t tempted to be a degenerate and check your phone. For some, that means charging the phone in the closet. For others, that might mean downstairs in the kitchen. It might mean getting an analog alarm clock. Or perhaps turning the ringer on loud, while it’s charging in the other room in case of emergencies. Or maybe even get a separate pared-down flip phone for emergencies only. But the point is that small inconveniences can be worked around.

3. Observe a Digital Sabbath:

Take a day or weekend off your phone. At first, this will be miserable. You’ll be a kind of addict, wanting nothing more than to check social media. But eventually, a kind of mental reset that happens. Your brain lets go of the need to devote a large portion of its cognitive resources to keeping track of your device. You learn to engage in the world again, to be okay with being bored, and to let your mind wander.

It’s not too dissimilar from ​research​ that finds that spending a few days out in the wilderness has a restorative effect on attention and cognition. Scientists have found that nature does a great job of turning down the volume of the constant noise, novelty, and stimulation of urban and digital life. While nature might give you an extra boost, simply being without digital devices has a remarkable effect as is. If you can’t handle locking up your phone, consider investing in a tool like ​“the brick.”​ It’s a simple device that locks specific apps on your phone, essentially turning it into something that only makes calls. In short: live like it’s the 1990s again, even if it’s just for a day.

4. Read Hard Copy Books

Over the past few months, we’ve been having a similar conversation with all of our closest author-friends. Our ability to read feels like it is eroding after we’ve spent too much time on the internet. Our job is to read and write. Although we’ve spent a lifetime doing that, if we aren’t careful, we quickly lose the ability to do so. It’s not too dissimilar from research showing our ability to use maps (or our internal navigation skills) erodes without use. For many people, someone could drop you in the middle of your own city, and you’d have a hard time getting back home, thanks to our collective overreliance on phones and GPS. The same is true for books. Someone could hand you a great book in your living room, but if you are suffering from “internet brain”, you may not be able to read more than a page.

The good news is that we can build back our attentional muscles with a little training. One of the best ways to do this is deep reading. Set aside a few blocks each week where it’s just you and a book. Your brain might resist at first, but the more you get into it, the easier it becomes to find that groove again and focus on the task at hand.

It’s beneficial because reading is one of the greatest sources of knowledge, creativity, and joy there is. It’s also beneficial because the ability to focus is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in today’s world.

5. Set Aside Daily Time Alone in Your Head:

Go for a walk? You’re probably listening to a podcast.

Go for a run? Music blaring.

At a stop light while driving? A brief moment to check your DMs.

On public transport? Scrolling.

Standing in line? Can’t be bored for a moment, grab the phone.

We’ve replaced the times when we used to be forced to be alone in our heads with an instant adult pacifier: our phones. No need to feel restless. No need to be bored. The solution is always in our pocket. But if we never spend time alone in our heads, our very own minds become foreign to us—uncomfortable and unfamiliar places that our brains go on high alert to escape. We need to regain familiarity with our inner world.

To develop interoception, or an ability to slice and dice apart the feelings we all experience, instead of trying to push them away or avoid them. Pick something you do regularly and do it without external input. It doesn’t have to be full-blown mindfulness meditation. It could be every time you wash the dishes. Or leaving your phone at home when you go on a walk or run. Or putting your phone in the glove box when you commute to work. Or not pulling out your phone when at a restaurant and your dining partner gets up to use the restroom. These bite-size moments are great training, and very important. They remind your brain that you don’t have to fill every second of nothingness with stimulation. You don’t need to outsource your brain’s attention and entertainment. There’s a reason so many great scientists experienced their breakthroughs on long walks. It’s wild to imagine that if Darwin, Curie, or Einstein had been addicted to their phones, they may not have made their incredible leaps in thinking, and we’d all be suffering as a result. A recent ​article​ in the Financial Times asked if humans have “passed peak brain power.” We don’t think there is anything internal that is inherently making us dumber, but our addiction to devices very well might be.

***

With everything above, think: practical and good enough, not perfection. When it comes to digital hygiene, too often we try hard to radically limit our use with a large dose of willpower, and then when that inevitably fails, we give up. We tell ourselves some version of, “It’s just the times we live in,” while our kids, friends, or family notice us drifting off scrolling while we lay in bed or eat dinner, instead of living in the real world. The goal is not necessarily to shun all digital devices or rewind the clock to 1990. It’s to place enough constraints in your life so that you can be creative and present. So that you own your phone instead of your phone owning you. It’s pushing back just enough so that you can think deeply and focus intently again.

-Steve