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

I’ve had a few posts go viral during the world cup, and the most frequent reaction is to be inundated with comments and DMs of “It’s football. I can’t trust anyone that uses soccer.” Never mind the fact that I’m American with a primary American audience, I used the forbidden word.

But why is this the case? After all, the English literally invented the word soccer. Americans didn’t. It comes directly from the British. And to this day, they still use it, as one of the popular TV shows in the UK is called “Soccer Saturday.”

So why do we get this uproar? Something that doesn’t occur in the sport of Track and Field, which the British call Athletics. No one loses their mind at Americans calling it Track. We understand that different words can be used in different cultures.

It’s time for a dive into the psychology of identity through the lens of the word that shall not be said.

The Controversy

First, the etymology. Soccer is British slang that was used to distinguish association football from rugby football. It wasn’t controversial for nearly a century, and was used widely in the UK.

Across the pond in the US, American football got it’s name in a similar way. Back in the day football meant any variation of a game that resembled rugby or soccer. It’s why Rugby still holds on to “Rugby football.” And if you know the history of American football, it originally limited forward passes and such, and was more similar to Rugby. So the traditions of the day, to call anything that came out of the Rugby type lore football, stuck around.

So historically, both names make sense, even if American football doesn’t describe the game perfectly well. It has historical meaning.

And for a very long time, it wasn’t a big deal at all…Stefan Szymanski and linguist Silke Weineck tracked the historical usage and found that the word peaked around 1980 in the UK and then fell off a cliff. Meanwhile in the US, it grew steadily over a century. They tied the abrupt British decline to the rise in popularity of American soccer. First in youth sport and then with the world cups in the 1990s and the founding of American professional leagues, soccer became more mainstream in the US. So the British revolted. They abandoned the term precisely because Americans embraced it.

As Syzmanski wrote, “The penetration of the game into American culture has led to backlash against the use of the word in Britain, where it was once considered an innocuous alternative to the word ‘football.'”

It’s a defensive posture. One that becomes increasingly clear because the Americans take the heat despite Australia, Canadians, South Africa, and other nations also using the word soccer.

The Psychology Behind the Soccer Crisis

At the turn of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud coined the phrase "the narcissism of small differences." He posited that when communities have a great deal in common, they become more prone to feuding and mockery. They’re hypersensitive to minor differences and treat them as bigger than they are. When we have so much that is shared, amplifying the small differences allows us to feel distinct, to create a boundary instead of feeling like we blend in. It gets at a heart of humanity, the need to feel both a part of a group, but also distinct from it.

We can see this in modern Social Identity theory, which tells us that similarity is threatening. Psychologist call this the reactive distinctiveness hypothesis. Research tells us that when there’s low distinctiveness among groups, we look for ways to differentiate ourselves. When the “out-group” gets too similar, you push harder to re-establish difference. Or in the case of England and America, when our cultures feel like they’re a bit too close, especially in something that is strongly tied to our national identity (e.g., the national sport of ‘football’), then we push hard to re-establish a difference. Thus, England goes on a rampage scolding Americans for using the “lesser” term of soccer.

Research in 2008 point to almost exactly what happened with the use of the two terms. Across a series of studies, they found that people abandon cultural tastes when out-group members adopt them. In one study, they found that college students stopped wearing a particular wristband once members of the "geeky" academic dorm next door started wearing them. What was once cool now becomes a defining characteristic of another group. “We don’t wear those wristbands. They do….We don’t say soccer. They do!” You deny something you once wore or said, because the out-group took it on.

It’s an identity signal. The words we use, the things we wear, all signal to others and ourselves where we belong, and what sets us apart. It’s why the you wore different things in high school depending on whether you belonged to the jocks, math club, or goths. It’s why words and phrases that became popular within one group, were abandoned once they reached popularity in other groups. We all experienced this in high school. And despite thinking that we’ve evolved and are better than that…well, group psychology wins.

Add in the fact that a group we are similar too, starts to have success or achieve notoriety in something we care about, then that instinct to create differentiation is even stronger. And while the US is not on England’s level in soccer, it’s undeniable that America is having more success and interest. Which amplifies the threat to England. Our identity wiring screams, “Oh now, you’re going to intrude on our national sport!”

Success converts the out-group from harmless imitator into legitimate claimant on the thing that's supposed to be "theirs.” And the word-policing increases dramatically.

We want to be a part of a group, and distinct from others. Especially when it comes to something that is a core piece of our identity. A secure identity doesn’t feel as strong of a pull to police. One that is fragile, afraid of losing the thing that makes you special, polices non-stop. It’s why that need was strongest during our teenage years when we’re just trying to find our place in the world.

Unfortunately, with the rise of social media, many of us can’t escape high school. We’re still the band geek, jock, theater kid, or goth just trying to fit-in, while at the same time being unique from the masses. So next time you feel the urge to police language, remember. It’s more of a sign of insecurity. Real ownership is quiet. It's the anxious claim that shouts.

-Steve
(And in many ways, this post is a test. Freak out and get defensive, and you might as well be proving Freud right… Maybe we can take a page out of my favorite sport, and understand you can call it track and field or athletics, and either is fine.)

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

The harder you are on yourself for failing, the more likely you fail again. We suck at losing. Just look around and you’ll see it in sport, work, and especially politics. When we treat failure as a self-defining existential crisis, we never get to a place where we can learn and grow from the experience. We’re stuck protecting our ego.

I want to walk you through 19 tools to help you handle setbacks and failures better.

Process and Deal with the Emotion

1. The 24-hour rule. Feel the pain or glory, then back to work. When we linger too long, we get stuck in either catastrophizing or complacency. The work grounds us in what’s importatn

2. The reflection window opens after the alarm closes. We have a sensitive window where criticism turns what happened into a kind of traumatic threat. The athlete can’t hear you while their ego is still defending. Wait for the dust to settle before you fully debrief.

3. Develop a short memory. In the middle of the action, give yourself a moment to feel it. Then have a reset ritual to shift your focus to what comes next.

4. Sanitize your worst moments. Failures left raw become scars. Failures processed become information. You’ve got to have some way to process the thing: write about it, talk through it, whatever helps you make sense of it. The memory you ingrain is the memory you’ll retrieve.

5. Failure is information. It may sound cliche but the more we can put space between ourself and the result, the more we can treat failure as data we can use.

6. Recall, then rewire. If a particularly bad result still haunts you, rewatch or recall it while listening to your favorite music and trying to see it in a different light. Give it new meaning.

Direct the Inner Critic.

7. The harder you are on yourself for failing, the more likely you fail again. The cruelty that feels like accountability is exactly what produces the next slip. Your brain is predictive and you are ingraining a bad prediction.

8. Compassionate self-awareness changes you. Harsh self-criticism freezes you. Honest, kind self-observation isn’t for ‘soft’ athletes. It’s what allows you to see what occurred clearly enough so you can move it to something you can do about. You want to be just kind enough to take the sting off just enough so that you can focus on the next step.

9. Deliberate rumination, not intrusive rumination. The same act of dwelling can grow you or trap you. Deliberately replaying the event so you can problem-solve can be helpful. Go in with a specific goal or intent. But replaying the failure over and over with no control, letting the critic dictate is just a recipe for disaster.

Getting to Growth

10. It’s my fault, but I’m going to fix it. Take honest accountability. Not in a way that beats you up, but one that lets you accept what occurred and move towards a plan of fixing the thing.

11. Vent up, not down. As a coach or leader, don’t vent to those you are in charge of guiding. Vent to a peer, your assistant, or your journal if you have to, but losing it on your athletes might make you feel good, but it often just pushes them deeper into the rut. Don’t make them pay the price for your need to release.

12. Make sense of the loss, but be wary if it’s too neat. If the lesson arrives instantly and is generic, it’s probably your brain’s coping draft. “It made me stronger.” “I needed that.” That’s what we’re trained to say. It’s okay if the lesson is messy, that’s real life. Researchers Howells and Fletcher tracked Olympic swimmers through trauma and found two phases: early illusory growth, then real growth. The clean comeback story right after the loss is usually a coping mechanism, not the work.

13. Don’t fall for the “it didn’t sting enough” myth. We assume long misery is the lesson, to show that it mattered a lot. That we’ve gotta feel it for a long time. That’s just rubbish. Research shows that elite performers are great at feeling the thing, then getting out of stressed mode so they can deal with the thing.

Putting it in Perspective

14. You are not the result. Hold the performance as something you did, not who you are. When we fuse identity to outcome, every loss feels like a death sentence.

15.Define success on your terms. Too often, we outsource our definition of success. Research on Olympic swimmers shows that when they adopt a more exploratory mindset versus an outcome one, they are more resilient.

16. Embrace acute failure for chronic gains. Muscles only grow when pushed just enough past comfort. Failure is the signal that adaptation is required.

17. The master has failed more than the student has tried. The number of failures is the resume. Don’t read the W-L column as a character report.

18. The car ride home is the practice. The high-emotion moments after the race are when learning gets ingrained. What you say in those minutes lasts longer than anything you said in practice.

19. Sensitive windows: emotion plus attention equals change. After a bad race, the brain is wide open. What you ingrain in that window is what they’ll retrieve next time. Use it on purpose, or it’ll get used by accident.

—

In my lifetime of working with performers at the highest level, if there’s one thing that separates the best from the rest, it’s the ability to deal with failure. Do you let it linger and transform into rumination, or are you able to move on to the next play and learn from what occurred. That’s the key to so much in life.

-Steve Magness

P.S. My book Win The Inside Game is on sale for only $1.99 on kindle! This deal ends soon!

The idea goes something like this, what if Lebron, Tyreek Hill, and all our best NFL and NBA guys chose soccer from a young age. To answer that, let’s turn to one of my favorite charts, and the one time I got to act like I knew something about soccer….

—

A decade ago I got invited to speak at coaches clinic put on by the MLS team the Seattle Sounders. As someone whose first love was soccer, I jumped at the opportunity, even though the last time I was involved with the sport was when I was 14. I gave a presentation that centered on individualizing training. I put up a picture of four different middle distance runners I coached at the time, all with similar 800m bests, but some who came at it from the 400m side running 46 second 400 splits. While others who were endurance monsters. Some ran 90 miles per week to get that 800m time, others ran 30 miles per week. My point was simple: most of soccer is like middle-distance events combining speed and endurance. But even within that frame, you need to know what kind of athlete you’re working with.

Fast forward a few years, and one of my favorite charts from research came out. It plotted muscle fiber types of well-trained athletes in a bunch of different sports. And where did soccer fall? What sport did it look like? Middle-distance running.

Which gets to point number one of the social media argument. Most American sports are games that favor speed. Our “athleticism” is based on 40 yard dash times and explosive events. But soccer isn’t that sport. It’s a 90 minute game with minimal breaks, where athletes cover miles with short spurts of fast running. Soccer is a game of endurance with some speed. Not speed with conditioning to recover.

Now, there’s always variation. Yes, of course there are a few sprint type athletes who make it. But by and large they are the exception. We can see this in further muscle fiber type data.

That’s why I like comparing it to middle-distance running. Yes, you’ll get an 800m guy who can split an astonishing 44 point for the 4x400. But he’s still got the endurance to run a 4 minute mile. He’s not Usain Bolt, or better yet, Carl Lewis who ran a pretty pedestrian 2:07 800m in the “Superstars” competition of the 1980s. For the pure sprint type, their endurance falls off fast…

We don’t have to look at muscle fiber types to get to this conclusion, just look at the soccer players who’ve run track. Every year in the NFL draft we get several players who’ve run the 100m in 10.0 to 10.4 in either college or high school. It’s not rare. In soccer, having a legitimate professional have anything remotely close is so rare that it’s noticeable. Yes, not as many soccer players run track in their later years as NFL guys, but we can see it with their early track times. (You likely aren’t running 10.0 at 18, if you only ran 11.5 at 15 years old for example.)

Just look at some of the fastest documented track times of soccer players (Note, there’s a lot of “I ran X hand time…” I’ve discounted those and went with verified times).

Nedum Onuoha ran 11.09 at 14 with a very strong wind (+4.4mps).

Gareth Bale claims he ran 11.4 at 14 in the 100m (and has documented 4:59 for 1,500 at 13).

Theo Walcott has a documented 11.5 at 14 (He’s claimed he ran 10.6 later, no results)

Marvell Wynne ran 11.05, 21.87 (+2.3 wind) and 48.01 in high school

Fakhri Ismail ran 10.59 for 100m.

When put against a solid sprinter in a 25m dash, Ronaldo finished a massive 0.3sec behind him, meaning (extrapolating a lot here…), Ronaldo is maybe a mid-11 100m guy.

I could go on, but if I’m honest after spending hours and hours tracking down all the claims, it’s pretty thin. Yes, there are legit sprinters like Adam Gemili who played youth soccer, but what we’re looking for is those who played professional soccer and have demonstrated track speed. The list is astonishingly slim.

Gareth Bale might be the best example. A guy who was known as a faster player, who had high MPH marks in the game, whose first love own youth track results show he was almost certainly a mid-distance runner with good wheels.

That’s the primary soccer type. And it makes sense, because the physiological demands of the game require endurance. If you were to pick one track event and said who would be best at playing for 90 minutes with lots of jogging around and 40-50 surges or sprints sprinkled in with relatively short recovery. Who are you picking? It isn’t Carl Lewis. He’ll be gassed. It’s someone like Cooper Lutkenhaus. Strong speed + strong endurance.

We also could just look at soccer’s best players and see that most of them are closer to the body type of a middle-distance runner than a sprinter. Messi is 5’7 145lb. Ronaldo 6’2 180. Mbappe 5'10" 165lb. Salah 5’9 155lb.

While they might need a little more muscle to jostle than their mid-distance counterparts, for the most part it fits the bill of Wanyonyi (5’7), Sedjati (5’10), Lutkenhaus (6’2), and so on.

Now, I want to be clear, we’re talking physiology here. Of course, the main component of soccer talent is their skill with the ball. That comes first. But too often the assumption is that freak athlete in one sport translates into freak talent in another sport. That can work if the sports demands are similar enough and they have the necessary skill. It’s why you sometimes see a former basketball player become an NFL tight end. But in soccer, the demands are different from most of what American team sports select for. Not entirely, but for the most part.

So what?

Maybe LeBron would make an exceptional goalie, I don’t know. But the super-tall basketball stars and the super-fast NFL guys aren’t the talent pool soccer selects from. If anything, it’s the high-motor guys with decent speed — the NBA guard who rips a 4:45 mile in conditioning like Allen Iverson, or the receiver who isn’t the fastest but never stops running, like Jerry Rice.

So when someone says we’re wasting our best athletes on the NFL and NBA, they’ve made a category error. They’re imagining one universal pool of “athleticism” that soccer just fails to dip into. There isn’t one. Soccer selects for a specific engine and a specific skill, and the two have to be grown together from the time a kid is small.

Fast enough to run by you. Not so fast your endurance falls off a cliff. That’s the soccer player. It’s not the same talent pool. It never was.

-Steve Magness

Thanks so much for reading. I’ll be bringing some content on the psychological side of the World Cup over the upcoming weeks, so be sure to subscribe for free to get it delivered to your inbox.

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All around the country, students are graduating from high school and college, and we’re treated with commencement speeches filled with reflections and advice to help propel the younger generation forward.

I wanted to join the fray, but with my own twist. My “cheat sheet” version of a commencement speech, a selection of rules or heuristics that I wish I knew as I made my way into the real world.

But before we do so, a quick reflection. This week I received the honor of being selected as George Mason University’s alumni of the year for their college of education and human development. I got my Master’s degree from GMU, but the funny thing is, I had to practically beg to get into the program because I had no GRE, no application, and no plan.

It was November 2008, and I was pretty much a bum. I’d finished my undergrad that June and my once-promising running career had flamed out. I didn’t know what to do, so I spent three months living with three other guys in a two-bedroom apartment, training, because I had no idea what to do with my life.

I was visiting my brother in DC and got nudged into checking out the local university’s graduate programs. I sat down with the exercise physiology professor. We talked back and forth for a while, and somewhere in there I thought, hey, this might actually be fun to pursue.

So I asked him about getting admitted. It was Thanksgiving time so he assumed I meant the following fall. I said, “No. How about January?” He politely walked me through how graduate school admissions actually work, and the deadlines were well past. I asked if there was any way at all. He said: tell me everything you know about a topic in exercise physiology.

My eyes lit up.

I launched into a long diatribe on blood lactate. About how I’d been testing my own for years in training, my theories on how to utilize it in training, and on and on. It won him over just enough to give me a shot. He didn’t give me a promise, but told me go home take the GRE this week, fill out the application, and we’ll see what happened.

So I did just that. I had my younger sister re-teach me how to do math by hand (the GRE didn’t allow calculators back then), and I took the test a few days later.

Long story short, it worked.

The University’s Alumni of the Year only walked into that office because he was scrambling to look like he had a plan, so his parents wouldn’t think he was a bum. And he happened to land in front of a professor who saw a kid who was uber passionate and just needed a little guidance.

So much of how life turns out comes down to a chance encounter, and someone willing to take a shot on you.

When you feel lost, keep showing up anyway. You never know which room has your professor in it.

---

What I wish I knew as a graduate…

1. What you give attention to gains in value. What are you feeding? Too often, we all feed negativity, mindless scrolling, and the superficial junk that feels important in the moment but isn’t. What are you feeding your attention diet? Junk food or clean living.

2. No one cares. We think everyone around us is judging us. That if we mess up, wear the embarrassing shirt, or fail, we’ll wear a kind of Scarlett letter for life. It’s not true. The audience we create in our mind isn’t real. Nobody's keeping score but you. And the people who genuinely care will be there no matter what. Go do the thing.

3. Do Hard (Meaningful) Things. Challenges are what make us feel alive. They force us to be present and engaged, to take a risk to see if we can rise to the occasion. Seek those challenges out, both physical and intellectual. As musician David Bowie put it, “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. When you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

4. Chase your interests, not passions. Commencement speakers tell us to find our passion. That’s horrible advice. It treats passion as some kind of love at first sight. How it actually works is you try interesting things out for long enough to see if they’ll grow and develop into a passion. Go do interesting things. Explore.

5. Don’t Play the Status Game. Some of the most miserable people I know are the most accomplished. It’s not the success that is doing it to them, it’s that the quest for the external markers—the fame, notoriety, and accolades— can never be quenched. If you define yourself by those, you’ll forever be seeking, never content.

6. Care deeply. The only reason I got into graduate school is I cared A LOT about the physiology of running. It’s the same with everything I’ve had any success in. I found things I cared enough about to go deep on. To be called a “nerd.” Caring is cool. Nothing important was ever accomplished without deep curiosity and a lot of caring.

7. Consistency over Intensity. Crazy workouts, ice plunges, marathon working sessions sell on social media. But what actually matters in the real world is consistency. Can you show up for months and years on end. That’s what all great artists, athletes, and performers all possess.

8. Surround Yourself Wisely. The old adage to show me your friends and I’ll show you who you become has merit. You will rise or fall to the level of those you spend the most time with. Pick your friends, and even more so, your spouse, wisely.

9. Learn to Respond Instead of React. Discomfort and stress are everywhere. And they both push us to react. Which results in an endless cycle of rumination and catastrophization. Toughness is about putting space between the stimulus and your response. That space allows you to take wise action.

10. Spend Time Alone in Your Head. When every moment is filled with something, we make our inner world foreign. We start treating time in our head like an enemy, a problem to solve. Whether it’s a walk, run, or commuting in your car have some time where it’s just you and your thoughts.

11. Reserve Time for Boredom and Thinking. When Charles Darwin moved into his home, he made sure he could have a walking path because he knew his best ideas and clearest thinking came while on the move, not at the chalkboard. With so many distractions, reserve time for thinking. Boredom is often the prerequisite for creativity.

12. You Need Recess. When we’re little, we are great at playing. As we grow older we convince ourselves that everything must have a point. Look around, we’ve turned sleeping, exercise, reading into “productivity.” Have something in your life where the point is to be present and engaged, enjoying the activity itself, not the reward that comes after.

13. Confidence Demands Evidence. You don’t get confident by faking it or talking a big game. External bravado is a mask. Real confidence is quiet and comes from deep within. It’s founded in doing the work, putting in the reps. Insecurity is loud.

14. Hold opinions loosely, but values tightly. When you’re young, you’re like a sponge. Willing to learn, ditch an idea, and find a better one. As you get older, you start to hold on to opinions and ideas as if they are a part of you. This is a mistake. The moment we tie our identity to a belief, it becomes something that we defend and protect. We no longer are capable of learning. On the flip side, we often shove our values aside to fit in. We’ve got it backwards.

15. Don’t chase the highlight reel. Be messy. You’re going to mess up, fail, do and say stupid things. That’s part of life and is often the key to growing into someone with wisdom. If you avoid anything that doesn’t look curated, well, you’re never going to have the experiences that force you to grow.

16. There are no overnight breakthroughs. In running we have a saying, great fall cross-country seasons are made in the summers. The breakthroughs occur because you put in months of work when no one was watching. It’s true in any endeavor. You’ve got to put in the work for a long time. Delayed gratification is the name of the game.

17. Joy wins. The people who love what they do outlast the ones grinding through gritted teeth. You can go hard and have a blast doing it. The greats usually do.

18. Plant lots of seeds. You never know what conversation or book or connection will change your life. Sometimes it may take years for that plant to grow. And we never know what seeds will blossom. The best thing you can do is spread a wide net, do interesting things, connect with genuine people doing good work, and see what sprouts.

19. Give yourself a shot. Most people give up before they've even given themselves a chance. You can never guarantee success, but you can put yourself in position to do something. Sometimes that something results in a breakthrough, other times you fall apart. But the only way you find out where your potential lies is by giving yourself a shot. Don’t get stuck playing not to lose.

20. Normal is relative. Whatever feels impossible right now is two or three expansions of normal away from routine. When I was in undergrad a 20 page paper felt long. In graduate school I had to write a 100 page literature review. That was what gave me the confidence to write my first book. Something that seemed unimaginable only a few years earlier.

21. You don't rise to your potential. You rise to your self-concept. The story you tell yourself about who you are and what matters is important. Too often, we let others write our story. We hand over our pen and let their voice echo in our heads. You get to write your story. Write it well.

22. Create space between who you are and what you do. Going all-in looks great on social media. In the real world, it pushes us towards being protective. Our story becomes “I am a failure,” instead of "I failed at running." Diversify your sources of meaning.

23. Abide by the 24-hour rule. Win or lose, you get 24 hours to wallow or celebrate. Then it's time to move forward. Doing the thing keeps you grounded on what’s important.

24. Fear of looking bad might be the most expensive emotion there is. Look, we all have a bit of high school in us. We’re still the kid who’s afraid of looking silly in the halls. If you hold on to that, you’re never reaching your potential. You’ve got to embrace doing things that might seem a bit cringe.

25. Under-preparation is a coping strategy. We are masters at self-sabotaging. "I didn't really try" is a softer story than coming face to face with your limits.

26. Your environment is stronger than your willpower. Make the right thing the easy thing. Rig your environment to invite the right kinds of actions.

27. Getting better is as much subtraction as addition. A good book is made great by cutting the mess, not adding more writing. Same goes for most of life.

28. Do things you suck at. Being a beginner keeps you honest. It humbles you and reminds you what learner mode feels like.

29. Do real things in the real world with real people. Go touch grass. Real things ground us. Real people will support us and call us on our BS.

30. You can't shove your way to success. Do the work, put yourself in position, and see what's there.

31. Sometimes quitting is the tough, and right, decision. Quitting opens you up to explore new opportunities. You’ve only got so much bandwidth. Blindly pursuing something you hate or think you should do is a waste of time and energy.

32. Love people for who they are, not what they produce. Including yourself.

33. Chase belonging, not fitting in. One is performative. The other demands honesty and vulnerability.

34. You were built to matter in your neighborhood. Now you're trying to matter to the entire world. No wonder you feel lost. Go local as much as you can. Join a running or book club. Contribute to your community. Know your neighbors.

35. Performative greatness is obsessed with heroic days. Actual greatness concerns itself with heroic decades.

36. Periodize your life. Know when it's time to grind and when it's time to back off. There's a reason athletes have off-seasons.

37. Don't chase the ghost of yourself. You’re constantly changing and evolving. You don’t have to live up to a former caricature.

38. Hard work is different than hard-to-do work. We mistake fatigue for progress, then spend all our energy creating days that are hard to get through instead of doing the work that gets us somewhere.

39. Remember why you fell in love with the thing in the first place.

40. Risk not winning. The only way to find out how good you can be is taking a shot.

-Steve Magness

Rick Barry is 4th all-time in the NBA in free-throw shooting. He shot nearly 90% from the line. By every metric and account, when it comes to shooting free throws, Barry is a master. There was just one problem. He shot underhanded. Or, as most of us grew up calling it on the playground, he took “granny shots.”

When Shaquille O’Neal was at the height of his career, everyone knew his weakness. He made only 52% of his free throws. It was so bad that teams built an entire strategy around sending him to the line to neutralize his otherwise dominant game. They called it “Hack-a-Shaq.”

When Barry offered to teach him the underhand shot, the big man refused: “I’d rather shoot 0% than shoot underhand. I’m too cool for that.”

Shaq wasn’t the only great to wave off the granny shot. Wilt Chamberlain was another dominant big man who shot just 51% from the line. For one season, he tried shooting underhanded and posted a career-best 61%. During his mythical 100-point game, he went 28 for 32 underhand.

And then, after it literally worked, after it improved his game, he ditched it. His free-throw percentage dropped right back down. He explained: “I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded.” And then he admitted what he’d known all along: “I know I was wrong.”

Looking like a sissy felt worse than being worse. The fear of looking bad beat the evidence and his own judgment.

Think about that for a moment. Two of the greatest to ever play the game knowingly left points on the table because they were afraid of looking silly. Shaq was being paid millions to perform, and even that couldn’t overcome the fear of embarrassment. And it’s not just them. Almost no one of note has seriously tried the underhand shot since Barry retired more than 45 years ago.

If that doesn’t tell you the power of fear, and how much control we hand to others judging us, I don’t know what will.

This isn’t just a basketball problem. We all have our own version of the underhanded shot.

We’re all familiar with the pull. It dominated us in junior high, when we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing whatever Grandma bought us, or being seen in public with our parents. But we still carry it as adults.

It’s the question you won’t ask in the meeting, because you’d rather look like you understand than admit you don’t. It’s the help you never ask for, because you want to keep up the facade that you know what you’re doing. It’s lifting heavier than you should with ugly form, because looking strong matters more than getting strong. It’s the person who’s too cool to try, who gives off an air of nonchalance to protect his ego, rather than taking the risk of finding out whether he’s any good at the thing. It’s holding back from something that might bring you joy, because someone might smirk.

Every one of those is a free throw we’re choosing to miss. And we hand the outcome to an audience that, mostly, isn’t even watching.

The Ancient Alarm

First, the pain of social rejection runs deep. When researchers put people through a game while scanning their brains, they found that social exclusion lit up the same brain region, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, as physical pain. The more it activated, the more distress people reported. Their hypothesis is that evolution “borrowed” the physical pain system to police social connection, because for our ancestors, exclusion from the group meant death.

So even a 7-foot giant succumbs to his brain’s ancient wiring, the part that treats social embarrassment as a physical threat to his survival.

Second, as Malcolm Gladwell laid out in his podcast on the subject, sociologist Mark Granovetter found that we each have a kind of threshold for how many other people have to be doing something before we’ll do it too. It comes down to this: can you tolerate the social discomfort of acting alone, or do you need a lot of social proof before you’ll join the herd?

Rick Barry had a low threshold. The social discomfort was small, and it was easily outweighed by the performance benefit. Wilt and Shaq had a higher threshold. They needed the crowd’s approval, and without it, they stuck to the status quo, even when it meant performing worse. The people who break from the herd have a higher tolerance for looking foolish. Their inner calculus runs a little differently.

Any time we face discomfort, the brain runs a kind of calculation. Is the risk worth the reward? Is the temporary discomfort worth the long-term payoff? It’s the same devil-versus-angel battle we face in the middle of a hard race. Or when we’re deciding whether to raise our hand, send the risky email, or put our real work out into the world.

Sure, the context differs. The risks and rewards change. But that’s the point. Your brain is running a calculation based partly on the information in front of it, and partly on your own proclivities. Rick Barry might have an unusually high tolerance for social discomfort, and maybe Shaq was never going to be the guy who went first. But we can shift our own calculus, even if only slightly, by changing the information we feed it.

The Boogeyman Isn’t Real

In truth, we’re all training our alarms to be a bit more like Shaq and a bit less like Barry.

Our social-exclusion alarm is the product of an evolutionary mismatch. It was built for a world where being separated from the tribe meant death, and where your tribe was a couple dozen people you knew your whole life. Now we live in a world where exclusion is inevitable, because we’re “connected” to tribes of millions.

Social media is practically a social-exclusion training machine. Most of us feel like we’re performing on a stage. Just ask the high school coaches and drama teachers who work with kids terrified of their bad moments showing up on TikTok. We live in an era of judgment, and from a young age, we’re learning to trip that alarm at the faintest hint of exclusion.

We build it up in our head as if all these other folks are watching and judging us. Every misstep feels like it’s happening on a stage, with a crowd leaning in, keeping score of how we measure up.

That crowd largely doesn’t exist. Sure, on the surface of social media, it’s there. But research shows we dramatically overestimate how much other people notice us and what we do. Psychologists even have a name for it: the spotlight effect.

In one classic study, psychologist Thomas Gilovich had students walk into a room wearing an embarrassing t-shirt. Beforehand, they guessed about half the room would notice. In reality, only about a quarter did. And most of those forgot almost immediately.

Everyone is the center of their own universe. The person you’re worried is judging your performance is busy worrying about their own. Or, in a way the kids might relate to, we’re Non-Playable Characters in everyone else’s video game. Anyone worth listening to is far too busy with their own stuff to keep tabs on yours. The audience you’re performing for is mostly in your head.

That’s why step one for dealing with this fear is recalibrating it against actual reality.

No one really cares.

No one really cares if you look silly singing karaoke or doing the Elaine dance from Seinfeld at the wedding. No one really cares if you shoot underhanded, as long as it helps your performance. Sure, someone might snark online, but that’s mostly their own insecurity talking as they fish for validation in likes. The people who actually care about you will do so no matter how silly you look, or whether you win or lose. They’re there for you, not for the performance.

So much of what holds us back isn’t real. It’s false expectations. A fear of judgment from people who aren’t actually watching, or who won’t even remember by next week. When you stop performing for an imaginary crowd, you stop playing from fear. You stop making the small, safe, conservative choices designed to avoid an embarrassment that was never coming in the first place.

With so many of the athletes I work with, from high schoolers to professionals, my whole job is to convince them the boogeyman isn’t real. That the fear of looking silly, of being known as the person who lost, is overblown in their mind. That they’re handing power to people who will mostly forget within fifteen minutes, and who, even if they don’t, aren’t worth giving that power to.

We start by defining whose opinion actually matters. Your parents, your coach, your teammates, whoever genuinely cares about you as a person and not just a performer. Then we define the worst-case scenario. What if you flame out, lose the game, get embarrassed? Sure, it’ll sting. But it’s not life and death.

One of the best things that ever happened to me was going through exactly this. I was a young phenom in the early days of the internet who then flamed out, spectacularly and publicly. And I realized no one cares. That insight is what later let me thrive in a craft, writing, that is rife with public judgment and criticism. I mean, the reviews are right there, sitting next to wherever people buy your work.

Fear Wearing a Costume

The people who change things, who stand by their values over the social pull, aren’t smarter or tougher or of higher character. They just have a higher tolerance for looking foolish along the way. And often, a different source of pride.

Researchers have identified two kinds of pride that split based on how you explain your success. Authentic pride is rooted in mastery and effort. It comes from attributing success to the work: “I succeeded because I put in the time.” It’s the satisfaction that comes from chasing something meaningful and getting better at it. Research links authentic pride to self-control and adaptive goal pursuit.

Hubristic pride is rooted in ego. It comes from attributing success to a global, fixed self: “I succeeded because I’m great.” It’s when the social image takes over. Research links it to arrogance and impulsivity. It’s the engine behind “I’m too cool for that.” It’s about the image, not the work.

And the research adds a twist worth holding onto: that kind of pride usually masks insecurity. Hubristic pride is linked not to high self-worth but to lower genuine self-esteem. The bravado is defensive. So “I’m too cool for that” isn’t really confidence. It’s fear wearing a costume.

When we make it about the image, we’ve primed the alarm to go off. It comes down to two things: our capacity to tolerate discomfort, and the meaning we’ve attached to the pursuit. Our inner calculus shifts, either nudging us toward the escape hatch, the “I’m too cool to try” button, or toward the thing itself, the step forward, even if we fail.

We can either let fear drive the ship, or let the wheel be held by mastery, by love of the craft, by the desire to find out where our limits actually are.

This isn’t to say Shaq or Wilt or anyone else was driven entirely by fear. Of course they had huge doses of mastery and authentic pride. It’s that every one of us has something in our life where the ego, or the made-up audience, crowds out our own internal desire. Where the devil on the shoulder shouts louder than the angel.

So no, you might never have the social tolerance of Rick Barry. But we can all turn that alarm down, just a bit. And we can make sure that what’s left is fueled by the right kind of drive. In a world that pushes all of us to feel like we’re always on a stage, that recalibration isn’t optional. It’s paramount.

It’s not about eliminating the ego. It’s about quieting it just enough that we can dare to find out how good we might be. That we can care deeply about the craft, and stop flinching at the cynics on the sidelines who sneer “try-hard.” That in a world increasingly built on the superficial and the fake, we can make giving it our all, even when we fall short, a source of pride again.

Remember: no one really cares. You get to define success.

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Coaching Corner: Practical Takeaways to Help You Perform Better:

1. Expect the fear. Doubt and fear aren't a sign you're not ready. They're the price of being in the arena. The best performers don’t try to ignore them, wish them away, or fight them. They accept they are a part of it.

2. Reframe the feeling. A racing heart and jittery nerves can be interpreted as a sign you don’t want to be there or that it’s your body getting ready to go. They're your body getting ready to go. Change the meaning, change the signal.

3. Create space, then respond. Fear shouts “do something now.” Toughness is putting about putting space between the feeling and the action. That’s the difference between reacting and responding.

4. Name it. When you label the fear, it stops being a scary boogeyman and becomes an unwelcome acquaintance you already know how to handle. Naming it hands the control back to you.

5. Anchor to the present. Fear lives in an imagined future where it all goes wrong. Pull your focus back to right now: your breath, your feet, the next small action.

—

Thanks so much for reading my work. I’m working hard to make this Substack the place to be for performance, be it in sport, music, art, business, parenting, or life. Expect weekly stories and research, with a practical coaching takeaway that can be applied to your own life.

-Steve Magness

To keep the conversation going, interact with me on:

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win The Inside Game

In short, he became the first high school boy to run under the 4 minute mile as a junior. This was just a decade after Bannister broke the mythical barrier. As a senior, he dropped his time down to 3:55.3, in a race where he beat the previous year’s Olympic Gold and Silver medalist. He set the American record and was the fourth fastest man in history, just a touch off the world record. He was legitimately one of the best in history as a high school kid in a sport dominated by 20-something year olds. His high school record is so good, that it took nearly 40 years for someone to break it. And still, 60 years later, there’s only been one American high schooler to run faster, despite crazy advances in tracks, shoes, training, supplements, and more.

It’s painted as a story of a phenom, of insane talent. But more than his peers like LeBron and Tiger who showed prowess at an early age, Ryun’s success provides clues the rest of us can actually use beyond “have great genetics.”

Growing up, Ryun was awful at just about every sport he tried. And he tried all of them. As he told me “I wasn't able to make an athletic team. I'd been cut from the junior high basketball team, the junior high track team, and then I was cut from the church baseball team, which tells you a lot about where I was going to go."

When he finally found running, the spark wasn’t instant either. As he relayed, “"I remember the first time I made a team, it was last man on the C team, which meant I was 21st on the cross country team. And while that wasn't, you know, phenomenal in any sense of the word, it was a beginning point."

The first mile race he ever ran was only 5:38. To put that into context for the non-track folks, I ran 30 seconds faster in 8th grade off no training. And my wife ran essentially the same time as Ryun in 7th grade. It wasn’t awful, but by no means indicated anything special.

Ryun’s talent only expressed when he started training. And when it did, he shined in a big way. That sophomore year he made it all the way from 5:38 down to sub-4:10. His coach told him he could be the first high school boy to break 4, and the rest is history.

Too often, when it comes to talent, we think of it as this magic spark. Once you find the match, you’ll know instantly. We see it as the Tiger Woods phenomenon, the kid at age 3 who somehow can swing a golf club really well. Whether it’s an athlete, writer, or musician, we call them ‘natural’ because it seems like they’ve been blessed with a gift.

But more often than not, there’s another kind of talent. The type that Ryun possessed that needs training to uncover it. For those who don’t know, Ryun was known for his insane training. As a high school kid he was doing 40x400m repeats, spending hours at the track going round and round. Looking back, Ryun marvels that he didn’t get hurt or over trained. Or, “"As one of my sons lovingly said, 'Dad, you were a freak. Look at all those workouts. How'd you do it?”

But the crazy training is what uncovered his talent. It wasn’t readily apparent until he’d spent time doing the thing.

I call this the grower vs. shower talent phenomenon. Some people, you just watch them run or play music for the first time, and their talent shines through. Others, it takes training before you see that they have a lot of potential.

This pattern isn't unique to sport. It runs through how we think about passion in general.

Your Mindset for Passion

Far too often, we discount the growers. We don’t give people a chance to see how they respond to training or coaching. We label them as not very good and brush them to the side. It’s often only in no-cut sports like cross-country that those people are given the opportunity to see what they can do.

It’s not just in sport that this occurs. When we look at developing our passions, most people think it should be kind of like a Disney fairy tale. We find the right prince or princess, and the magic is undeniable early on. According to the latest science, 78 percent of individuals hold this fit mindset of passion, meaning they believe happiness comes from finding an activity or job about which they are immediately passionate, something that feels intuitively right from the get‑go.

While this mind-­ set may be the most prevalent one, it’s not necessarily best. Individuals who adopt a fit mindset of passion tend to overemphasize their initial feelings. They are more likely to choose pursuits (and especially professions) based on preliminary assessments, not potential for growth—­ even though the latter is generally more important than the former for lasting fulfillment and satisfaction.

People with fit mindsets for passion are also more likely to give up on new pursuits at the first sign of challenge or disappointment, shrugging their shoulders and thinking, I guess this isn’t for me. Furthermore, studies show that individuals with fit mindsets actually expect their passions to dwindle over time, setting themselves up for midlife crises once their initial enthusiasm for an activity has diminished. Put all this together, and a compelling story emerges: A fit mind-­ set for passion is constraining; it inherently limits one to activities that feel good immediately and makes one fragile to challenge or change.

So in the end, it’s not just that as a society we only tend to look at talent as those who show it from the get go. It’s that in our pursuits, we hold the same kind of expectations. If we aren’t good at this thing initially, it can’t be our passion. It can’t be the job or craft that we were meant to pursue.

We’ve set up our society to look for the Tiger Woods, but in doing so we might miss out on the Jim Ryuns. It’s true at a societal level and an individual one. We need to give kids and adults time to explore their interests. To dabble long enough to see if that passion and expertise grows.

The entire reason you’re reading this right now is because I was given long enough to dabble in writing. In middle school and even high school, writing wasn’t my strong point. For one, my handwriting was atrocious and my grammar wasn’t much better. I was a math and science kid. But I was fortunate enough to have teachers who encouraged me to write about what interests me, and the skill will develop over time. Initially, that meant being one of the earliest running bloggers, detailing my training as a high school and college athlete. By the time I got to graduate school, I had professors asking for help on rewriting their articles, and others encouraging me to submit some of my work for publication. Even with that, my first book was rejected by every agent and publisher because it was too technical. Fast forward to a decade later, and now my books have sold over a million copies in total.

The point is, we never know how good we will be, or whether something will truly become a passion until we’ve spent long enough exploring too. We overemphasize initial fit, spark, or signs of talent.

Development is unpredictable. Sometimes, it looks like a rocket taking off, other times it’s a slow burn where you don’t see the promise until the last possible second.

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Coaching Corner: Three Applied Takeaways:

This insight came from an interview I did with Ryun. You can watch it here or on my podcast, Excellence, Actually. Three more takeaways from that conversation with Ryun:

1.Failure isn’t a verdict. It’s a detour.

The line Ryun keeps coming back to with the young runners he helps at his camp “Failure is a temporary detour to success. So hang in there and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.”

A detour assumes you’re still going somewhere. A verdict assumes the trip is over. Most people stop after a setback because they treat it as the latter. Most kids wouldn’t have survived continually being cut from the team. Ryun didn’t treat it like an indictment on himself personally.

2. Confidence is built from small wins.

Before the records and the Olympics, Ryun was the 21st man on the cross-country team. Last man on the C squad. How’d he make progress?“You start with small successes and you build, and they become like a snowball going down a hill.”

3. Take Ownership

The night Ryun first broke four minutes at age 17, he couldn’t sleep. He started thinking: what if I take more ownership? Sleep better. Push harder in training. His words: “That moment began changing my life from being part of a program to taking on more responsibility.”

Every great performer has that moment where they get to take ownership and decide do I want to see how good I can be?

—

Thanks so much for reading my work. I’m working hard to make this Substack the place to be for performance, be it in sport, music, art, business, parenting, or life. Expect weekly stories and research, with a practical coaching takeway that can be applied to your own life.

Thanks so much for being a part of this community. And feel free to drop suggestions on whatever could make this place better. In a world filled with lots of superficial nonsense, I want to drill down on what actually moves the needle and works.

-Steve Magness

To keep the conversation going, interact with me on:
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Podcasters Freaking Out About Sleep Scores

First, there was a popular podcast host ​talking​ about how a few glasses of wine “ruined three days of my life... I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse, and I could track all of this on my Whoop.”

To be clear, I’m not encouraging drinking. I rarely drink, if ever. And if you have a history of substance abuse, it’s even more important not to. And of course alcohol can decrease sleep quality for a night. But this is about how the idea of letting a metric creating a self-fulfilling anxiety disorder. When you outsource your perception of readiness to a metric, your brain and body go where the metric demands. It creates fragility.

The schmexcellence is right there in the explanation. You’ve got two hormones mentioned to create the allure of sciencyness, even though the explanations make little sense. (Writing this post is causing a change in dopamine and rooting for the Detroit Lions spikes your cortisol—so what?) And then the kicker of a tracking system that told him his life was ruined, when in reality, that tracker creates a self-fulfilling feedback loop that causes you to spiral. It seems the most likely case is the podcast host couldn’t perform well because the tracker told him so, and it had a built in explanation (I drank some wine three days ago). Contrast that with an elite performer. They don’t let the marker dictate their day. They know that they can still have a great workout or race even if they feel poor when they wake up or warm up.

History is littered with examples of elite performers doing crazy things in sub-par situations. Don Bowden became the first American to break the 4-minute mile after he didn't "feel much like running, I haven't been sleeping." Herb Elliott set the world record after feeling so poorly and not sleeping that he was convinced he was sick…He wasn’t. Even in knowledge work, my recent book was written with 2 kids under the age of 2, with sleep being a rarity. And I’m certainly not alone in that case. Millions of parents do something similar.

The point isn’t whether alcohol impacts sleep or not (Hint: it can). But that real excellence isn’t about being optimized every day. It’s a fool’s errand. And striving for optimum often gets in the way. It stokes perfectionism, which research tells us may boost performance a tad in the short run, but over the long haul increases fear of failure, anxiety, stress, and burnout. Which all get in the way of actually performing to the best of our ability.

Life is messy! Trying to make things perfect is a futile, losing battle. Control the controllables, but don’t obsess over every little thing always. Doing so actually decreases your performance.

The Steroid Olympics

For our second example of schmexcellence, we’ll turn to the Steroid Olympics, a Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr venture that promised athletes full of testosterone, HGH, EPO, and peptides that would redefine what was possible. On the surface they said it was all about exploring human potential, “transparency,” and seeing what athletes could do when uninhibited.

In reality, it seems more like the top of a sales-funnel for steroids masquerading as sport.

The long game is to sell peptides and other drugs to the person watching at home, the young man or woman feeling inadequate because his or her peak athletic moment came decades ago, back when they scored four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School. It’s a marketing gimmick. And the results showed this to the case.

There was a single performance that barely beat a world record. And it was in swimming, where most of the benefit came from using super suits that were banned a decade ago because they gave such an advantage. In running, things were even worse.

Despite non-stop hyping of world record attempts, every enhanced man who ran was closer to the women’s world record than the men’s. Only one enhanced man would have even scored at this years Texas high school state meet. How bad was it? The Growth Equation’s own Nate Mechler, who was a decathlete and not a sprinter, would have pocketed $20,000 if he’d ran his clean PR...

On the women’s side, it was even worse. Somehow the enhnaced games took world class sprinters and made them slower. No, not just than when they were at their prime, but from their most recent competitive season. Despite being filled with testosterone and HGH and whatever else, they made folks slower... They took talented sprinters and made them look talentless, most of them running slower than they did as teenagers.

Look, steroids work. They just do. Yet, somehow they screwed even that up.

And that’s the point. This was a tech-bro fever dream where arrogance was prioritized over any actual knowledge of performance. They thought if they just gave athletes fistfulls of drugs, they’d get amazing performances, without understanding what it really takes and the time, talent, and hard work it requires to reach something so rare.

Which isn’t too dissimilar from what they’re selling everyone else in their marketing scheme. If you just take this peptide, supplement, or whatever, you too can get strong, healthy, or whatever it is their promising. When most of it is nonsense. There’s no understanding of actual performance underneath it. When you don’t understand actual excellence, you have to sell a story, you have to sell schmexcellence.

The Normalization of Cheating

Do you remember the kid in high school who tried to convince you that everyone cheated? They were trying to normalize cheating. Mostly so they could rationalize their own laziness. After all, if everyone did it, what was the problem?

We see the same thing in sport. Every doper who’s ever been caught, or their doctor, screams that everyone is cheating. They do it for the same reason the high school kid did. They’re trying to rationalize and justify their choices: they aren’t a bad person, that they didn’t really do anything wrong.

And that’s exactly what the Enhanced Games are doing when they try to convince you they’re being “honest” by telling you everyone cheats. It’s why their CEO walked around telling you that a study said “almost 50%” of elite athletes were doping,” without stating that the initial survey included a large number of people who just clicked through the survey so fast that it was clear they didn’t read any of it. When this sampling bias was found and the study repeated, the number dropped to 13%. Other research puts it at between 6-9%. That’s still 6-9% too many athletes who cheat, but it’s also a small minority.

We’ve coached, worked with, and trained with some of the best in the world who are doing it clean. And while yes, elite athletes cheat, the “everyone is doing it” line does sport a disservice. When you default to “everyone is cheating,” it’s not about transparency. You’re trying to shift the narrative so you can get away with manipulating people for your own benefit. Psychologists call it the normalization of deviance. It’s a lowering of the bar so you can get away with deviant behavior. In a recent article, the writer Derek Thompson called it vicemaxxing: everyone is corrupt so I might as well be corrupt and if you aren’t corrupt you are a naive pushover. Another word for that is nihilism.

Do you really want to live in a society where cheating is the norm? Is that what we want in our schools? Do we just shrug and say, “Well, kids are going to use AI for everything anyway, so let’s forget about teaching them how to write or think. Just let them use it on everything”? Of course not.

The Actual Pursuit of Greatness

Somewhere along the way, we forgot the point of competition, or even just pursuing excellence in your craft. It’s not about optimizing your routine so that you have a great recovery score. It’s not about a “win at all costs” mentality where you throw all ethics out the window.

The point of stepping into the arena is to challenge yourself, learn and grow, and figure out how to show up and overcome even, and perhaps especially, on the days where you don’t feel that good. It’s about putting in an enormous amount of work to come face to face with your limits.

It’s also about striving together. Yes, we want to win. But anyone who’s actually been in the arena understands that you relish great competitors because they bring out the best in you. True competitors don’t want easy victories. They want to be challenged.

Excellence is about being part of something bigger. There’s a reason the bonds you form during high school football or cross-country or band or theater hold up across decades. Laying it on the line and performing forces you to be vulnerable and real. It lets you see your friends break down and cry after a brutal loss, and then you help them stand back up.

Yes, there’s idealism in this. And yes, sport, like every part of society, will always have its corrupt side. But we don’t have to give up the fight for some semblance of normalcy. We don’t have to hand over one of the last places where reality still wins, where performance doesn’t have to be the Instagramified version of sport, where you can just get a new filter, change your appearance, adopt a new persona. It might get you some cheap likes and follows. But there’s nothing real about it.

We don’t have to settle for a tech-bro dystopian steroid Olympics.

Actual excellence is about coming face to face with your own limits. It’s about doing the work, and still sometimes falling short. You have to accept and embrace reality. The day we forget that is the day we hand over the only part of sport that was ever worth watching. It’s never been about the end result. It’s always been about how you play the game and who you became along the way. Even at the highest level.

-Steve

The Enhanced Games are what happens when a culture forgets that competition was never merely about the output. They’re the logical endpoint of a tech-bro fever dream, where “optimizing” everything in the name of some metric matters more than the human actually doing the thing. They’re the end result of a “win at all costs” mindset that cares about one thing: profit.

And there’s a reason this is coming out of the same world that got us all addicted to Facebook, TikTok, and whatever social platform came next, while sitting on their own research showing how badly it was hurting the people using it, especially the teenagers.

When the end result is all that matters, you stop seeing people as people. You start justifying the spectacle, as long as the bottom line looks good.

We don’t have to live in that world. And very few of us actually want to live in the tech-bro fever dream that the Enhanced Games represent...

The Erosion of Norms

Just think about it for a moment. Do you really want to live in a society where cheating is the norm? Is that what we want in our schools? Do we just shrug and say, “Well, kids are going to use AI for everything anyway, so let’s forget about teaching them how to write or think. Just let them use it on everything”?

Of course not. It’s the same with sport. Few people want to live in a world where the default is that every athlete has to become a science experiment just to compete. Where competing requires sacrificing your twenties to drugs that often carry long-term health consequences, drugs that frequently require taking other drugs for years, because you’ve jacked up your body’s hormones in the first place.

When you default to “everyone is cheating,” it’s not about transparency. You’re trying to shift the narrative so you can get away with manipulating people for your own benefit.

Do you remember that kid in high school who tried to convince you that everyone cheated? They were trying to normalize cheating. Mostly so they could rationalize their own laziness. After all, if everyone did it, what was the problem?

We see the same thing in sport. Every doper who’s ever been caught, or their doctor, screams that everyone is cheating. They do it for the same reason the high school kid did. They’re trying to rationalize and justify their choices. It’s the self-protective ego telling a story: that they aren’t a bad person, that they didn’t really do anything wrong.

And that’s exactly what the Enhanced Games are doing when they try to convince you they’re being “honest” by telling you everyone cheats. There are several problems sitting underneath that pitch.

First off, contrary to their opinion: no, not everyone is cheating. How do I know? I’ve been in the arenas at the highest level. Hell, I was the whistleblower on one of the biggest anti-doping busts of the last decade. People cheat. But it’s not even close to “everyone.” I’ve coached athletes who finished top 10 in the world, and top 10 at major marathons, clean. I’ve trained and worked with people who were among the best on the planet and did it clean. I have close friends who’ve coached the literal best in the world, athletes I’d bet a lot of money were clean.

You can still be among the best in the world clean.

This isn’t to say people don’t cheat. Of course they do. But 2026 isn’t the 1990s, when Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds dominated the headlines. Testing has improved massively. It’s not perfect. But what it does is force people to be sophisticated to get around it. And even when athletes do dope, they can’t go full-blown 1980s style about it. It pushes them toward microdosing and similar methods. That at least minimizes the effect a little. More importantly, it keeps athletes from going so far that their health collapses into the kind of catastrophes we saw in the 1970s and 80s, back when doping ran completely unchecked.

Second, the Enhanced Games amplify every incentive that drives people to go all the way. Sure, they’ll tell you their “scientists” are monitoring the drug use. But when you put a million dollars on the line, do you really think an athlete who’s already crossed the line is going to stop the moment some doctor says that’s enough? Especially when there’s no serious anti-doping system holding them accountable? Of course not. They’ve willingly stepped into a world that is win-at-all-costs. The incentives don’t align with restraint.

Third, there’s no real autonomy here. In theory, no one is forced to dope. In practice, once the field is doped to the gills, the clean athlete isn’t making a free choice. They’re choosing between their values and their viability. That’s not a more honest product. It’s not science. It manufactures the appearance of science and “transparency” as a marketing gimmick. It’s no different from Facebook trying to convince you it’s part of the solution to our modern problems because it promotes “connection.” It’s no different from what’s happened in the workplace, where we’ve quietly replaced building trust with building systems to monitor people 24/7. We were sold the idea that it would make companies more efficient. What it actually did was erode autonomy and trust, and burn out the very people who might have been our best performers.

The real question is what kind of competitive world we create when enhancement becomes the default.

What Sport Was Actually For

Somewhere along the way, we forgot the point of competition. That it’s about drive and discipline. That it’s about putting in an enormous amount of work just to come face to face with your limits. That it’s about learning to handle winning and losing. That sometimes you’re not good enough. That sometimes your limits arrive before you’d ever want them to.

It’s about striving together. Yes, we want to win. But anyone who’s actually been in the arena understands that you relish great competitors, because they bring out the best in you. True competitors don’t want easy victories. They want to be challenged.

It’s about being part of something bigger. There’s a reason the bonds you form during high school football or cross-country hold up across decades. Sport forces us to be real. It lets us see our friends break down and cry after a brutal loss, and then helps us stand them back up.

Yes, there’s idealism in this. And yes, sport, like every part of society, will always have its corrupt side. But we don’t have to give up the fight for some semblance of normalcy. We don’t have to hand over one of the last places where reality still wins, where performance doesn’t have to be Instagramified. We don’t have to settle for a tech-bro dystopian steroid Olympics.

We forgot that our kids are watching. They’re learning what mom and dad actually value. Do we want to give them the green light to become the full-blown lunatic youth-sports parent who hands their child HGH so they can “go D1”? Sure, a few insane parents already do that today. But is that the default we want? Is that the norm we’re trying to build?

Do we really want to live in a world where “win at all costs” is the default, where the ends always justify the means?

A meta-analysis of 7,726 young athletes found a strong relationship between the moral climate of sport and young athletes’ behavior. A prosocial moral climate was tied to more prosocial behavior and less antisocial behavior. An antisocial climate was tied to the opposite. Do we really want to give away one of the few places where kids actually learn their moral underpinnings?

In so many other corners of life, we’ve already let the cheating, the surveillance, the misguided “optimization” take hold. And we’re paying for it. Just look at the chaos around us. The anxiety. The rates of mental health disorders. The creeping sense that nothing is quite real anymore.

Sport is one of the last bastions of reality. It’s not perfect. People cheat. But it’s still one of the few places where we get to strive to see what we’re capable of, to find out where our limits actually lie, to compete with some real degree of fairness.

Our kids are watching. They’re learning whether the point is to become the best version of themselves, or the best chemistry experiment money can buy. We get to decide which lesson we hand them.

The Enhanced Games is selling you the AI Instagramified version of sport. One where you can just get a new filter, change your appearance, adopt a new persona. It might get you some cheap likes and follows. But there’s nothing real about it.

Sport is about coming face to face with your own limits. It’s about doing the work, and still sometimes falling short. You have to accept and embrace reality. And the day we forget that is the day we hand away the only part of sport that was ever worth watching. It’s never been about the end result. It’s always been about how you play the game, and who you became along the way. Even at the highest level.

-Steve

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When it comes to their child’s athletic pursuits, parents can go a bit crazy. They lose it on the sideline, yelling at the referee at their 8-year-old’s soccer match. They stress over whether their kid is making progress and if he or she is good enough for the travel team or to make varsity. Even those who keep their cool can get swept into the march toward college scholarships, and maybe the allure of professional sport. They hire private coaches, move high schools to provide better opportunities, and go all-in, transforming their family into one dominated by soccer, baseball, football, track, or whatever the chosen path is.

It’s natural to want your kids to succeed, to want the best for them. Occasionally, this behavior is a result of the parent vicariously living through their children. But more often than not, the parent’s heart is in the right place. They want to support their child, to give them the best opportunity to succeed. Which is why a few recent conversations with a few former professional athletes struck me as interesting.

For instance, Lindsay Gallo observed, “My sense…is that (former elite athletes) are relatively more laid back about their young kids’ athletic endeavors.” Gallo was a former teammate of mine on a post-collegiate track club. She was also one of the best in the country, placing 6^th at the Olympic Trials in 2008. Wouldn’t you expect the parents who made it to the top themselves to be hard-charging, to give their kids the advantages they wished they had, to pass on the lessons that got them to the top?

My inclination is that those who made it to the top understand both the difficulty in doing so and the luck involved. They know that it’s a long, windy path, and that in order to get through, the deep motivation and relentless drive is going to have to come from within. No amount of cajoling will help. Other former elite athletes expressed to me that there will be enough expectations and pressure on the child already, so why add more? Instead of yelling or videoing every move, they sit quietly on the sideline of their kid’s games.

The high expectations, authoritarian style of parenting that we think leads to resilience, toughness, discipline and more, actually leads to the opposite. Research shows authoritarian style parenting leads to more misbehavior, worse discipline, lower levels of motivation, and an inability to regulate your emotions. As I outline in the book, research shows you need a high level of support, care, and responsiveness to develop healthy, happy, motivated little human beings. It’s easy to kill motivation. It’s much harder to build it.

After spending over a decade in the coaching world, helping high school and college athletes excel at and continue their athletic pursuits, I got to interact with my fair share of parents. The vast majority were great. But there are a few lessons that I’d like to pass on. Parenting is difficult, and I’m not trying to say this stuff is easy. This is just one person’s perspective from being on the other side. Consider it a coach’s version of parental Bootcamp, lessons I wish every parent knew when it came to supporting their child’s endeavors, be it athletic or academic.

1. The fire has to come from your kids.

This may seem obvious, but it’s worth repeating. If you look at the research on prodigies and phenoms who eventually become standout adult performers, a deep intrinsic drive is a requirement.The problem is that success often pulls us away from this inner drive. We start out playing soccer or the violin because it is interesting and fun. As we get better, we get accolades from our coaches, teachers, and others. We start winning trophies, hearing our name on the morning announcements or in the online commentary, and before we know it, we’re pulled towards the external.

The best way to create and maintain intrinsic motivation? Let your kids dabble, explore, and find something where their interests and talents align. Then let them enjoy it, without an undue emphasis on success.

2. Make sure your kids are doing it because they enjoy it, not because they see you enjoying it, and thus want your love and support.

One pitfall I saw quite often is that kids learned that they could get mom or dad’s undivided attention, love, and support when pursuing an activity. If dad was all about football, then of course little Johnny wanted to play football. When kids are young, we often confuse them doing the activity because they like it with them doing it because they know mom and dad like that they are doing it.

Kids just want to be loved, supported, and cared about. If the only way they get that is through some sport or doing some crazy thing, they’ll do it. It’s great to connect with your kids over shared interests. But like most things in life, there’s a healthy balance to be had. Or put it simply, “love your kid, not what they are doing.”

3. The car ride home is the most important part.

Remember your role in your child’s activities. There’s no need to critique, berate, or even coach your kid up after the game. That’s not your role. If after a win or loss you’re always obsessing about the game, what message does the child receive? It’s very easy to turn a child’s passion into something they dread by ending every activity with a lecture on what they could do better.

In psychology, there’s a concept called the peak-end rule. It’s a heuristic for how we remember past events. We tend to remember the peak of the emotional experience, maybe when you scored the game-winning goal, and the last part of it; in this case, the car ride home.

Be there to support, no matter the outcome. Resist going into coaching mode. You are the parent. Leave the coaching to the coach.

4. Teach your kid how to lose well.

Sports are great for teaching life lessons. A tough loss forces us to deal with our competitiveness and a swirl of negative emotions. The message shouldn’t be that losing is bad; that we should ignore that experience; or that we should learn to hate losing.

Failure is a part of life. The earlier someone learns how to process, learn, and grow from failure, the better. If you see your child losing it, freaking out, unable to handle a tough loss, consider it as a sign they need perspective. (Same goes for the parents.)

Losing well is about creating space between who you are and what you do and having multiple sources of meaning in your life. This allows you to occupy a place where of course you want to get better, but it’s not the end of the world if you suffer defeat. In this way you can more easily rebound and then evaluate what went wrong with a clear mind. We do our best when we are challenged, but not threatened. Don’t set your kid up to be in threat mode.

5. If your kid is going to be good or even great at something, they’ll figure it out.

Private coaching, travel teams, and so forth aren’t going to make or break your kid. If he or she is good enough to make it at the highest level, they’ll get there.

I know this sounds sacrilegious. To just trust that things will work out. To not spend your life obsessing over how to give someone a one-up. But we often overemphasize the minor items, blowing them up as if they are what matter most. Sure, some extra help and support are sometimes needed. But what often happens is people take advantage of a parent’s desire for their child to make it, whatever “make it” means. Be wary of anyone promising results, scholarships, and the like. Be wary of anyone who tells you that their child needs to quit their team in favor of some private coach or special organization. There’s a whole cottage industry of youth gurus promising performance, scholarships, and more.

Don’t be the parent who thinks the coaching guru or a recruiting service is the difference-maker. It isn’t. If your kid is good enough and motivated, they’ll figure it out.

6. Your support should be unconditional; it should not be dependent on the results of the game (or if they even play a game to begin with).

This is a simple, but worthwhile reminder. Win or lose, be there. That’s it. It’s not complicated.

In Win the Inside Game, I outline research on high school, college, and even professional sports teams that shows creating an environment where athletes feel supported and cared about leads to more motivated, happy, and even better-performing athletes.

7. Resist the urge to always step in.

Let your kid figure things out. Support them. But let them figure out how to navigate some of the challenges that come with sport. Look for your spots to step in when needed. But don’t be the overbearing parent who goes to the coach or teacher every time your child underperforms. Let them navigate it. Sport and the classroom are great and safe containers for the real world.

8. Hold yourself back from going all-in.

A few times a month I get a message from a worried parent that their kid isn’t measuring up or progressing as fast their peers. They obviously care, but they suggest drastic interventions as the solution. So I’m going to say this: Don’t move across the state or country chasing athletics. Your kid isn’t that good. And if he or she is, they’ll make it regardless of where they are at.

You may think going all-in to help your child is a good thing. The more invested you are, the more pressure and expectations fall on that child’s lap. You want to support, not obsess. If you obsess, I promise it will end up backfiring. If the child chooses to be a bit obsessive about their sport, it should be entirely their decision. Your job as a parent then transitions to providing perspective, to help ensure that his or her passion is the harmonious variety and not the obsessive, that they don’t fall for the same trap that Lance Armstrong or Elizabeth Holmes did.

9. Chill out and step back.

Every coach has a story of a parent who by all accounts was loving, yet their simply showing up to a game or meet would cause their child to underperform. It wasn’t anything they said at the competition. It was just that their parent was in the stands.

In fact, research shows that choking in sport is partially because we perform in front of an audience and feel judged. In an article entitled The Many Threats of Self-Consciousness, Massimilano Cappuccio and colleagues concluded that “concerns about self-presentation may be the origin of the increased state anxiety for choking-susceptible athletes.” It’s not that audiences are a requirement for choking. It’s that they encourage and activate threat mode, when our sense of self is in danger in something that we care about. Choking isn’t succumbing to the pressure; it is a self-protective strategy gone wrong. And one of the items that activates this is when we are performing in front of people we care about, people whose opinions we value.

It’s why when researchers studied a variety of ways to increase anxiety and the impact each had on performance, it wasn’t punishment or playing for money that causes anxiety increase and performance to decline. It was performing in front of teammates or coaches. The same holds for parents. People want to perform well in front of those that matter. They feel like they let you down if they don’t. This occurs even if you are the kindest, most loving person in the world. It’s human nature. You can think of all the above principles as ways not to exacerbate it.

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After spending a decade handing out athletic scholarships before stepping away from collegiate coaching, the best advice I can give is to not play the “pursuit of the scholarship” game. If the child is good enough and wants it, they’ll figure it out. If it’s coming from mom or dad, the coach will see that.

My first year in college coaching a parent and kid walked into my office. The parent spent 30 minutes going on and on about their child, the talent they had, and how they had so much more potential than the results they’d shown so far. The kid barely talked.

The tennis coach who had an office next to mine came in after the parent had left. He said, “Just a word of advice, you don’t want that athlete. It won’t turn out well for the kid. And the parent will be a headache.”

And more often than not, in similar situations, that tennis coach was correct. Let your kids be kids. Support them. But don’t get in their way. They’ve already got enough expectations and pressure from living in a world where they are constantly judged on social media, where they have to measure up against the world instead of just their local school. Give them space explore and basic support, and then get out of their way.

The odds are your child isn’t going to be a champion. It’s just how odds work. So do you want to leave them with a positive experience, with life lessons on learning how to fail, compete, be a great teammate, and so on? Or do you want to wring every bit of joy out of the process, in the minuscule chance it helps them make it to the top, when the reality is your pushing probably actually hurts over the long haul.

Take a lesson from those who’ve made it, like Lindsay Gallo. It is okay to be laid back about your kid’s future athletic success. In fact, it probably helps.

–Steve

Today, 84% of 11 year olds aren’t allowed to leave their street, with 53% not even allowed to leave their front yard. For 14 year olds? 92% aren’t allowed to leave their neighborhood, and 55% can’t leave their streets.

In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.

What in the world happened? Why are we so afraid to let kids explore?

There’s a temptation to read this as a story about phones, screen time, or modern danger. It isn’t. It’s a story about us. The parents, coaches, and grownups who decided, somewhere in the last two decades, that the right amount of freedom for a 10-year-old is to be visible from the kitchen window.

We told ourselves we were keeping them safe. We were doing something else.

Why the World Shrank

When I tell people these numbers, the usual response is some version of “the world is more dangerous now.” It certainly feels that way. The only problem is that all of the data we have shows it’s much safer than when you or I were wandering the streets. Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s. Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today.

The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.

In the 1970s, professor of communication George Gerbner coined a term for a similar phenomenon‑mean world syndrome. Gerbner found that we tend to see the world as more dangerous and threatening than it is and that it was related to the overabundance of violence on TV.

A 2008 study found that media exposure explains why Americans, in particular, often see the rest of the world as dangerous. Other research shows a link between the amount of crime reported on the news and the degree of fear people have over crime. It’s not just worry. News consumption is related to avoidance behavior as a way to deal with the fear of violent crime. It’s not just traditional media that plays a role. A recent analysis found that social media consumption is linked to an increased fear of street violence.

When we are inundated with a message that the world is threatening, we start to believe it. The difference between the era I grew up in and today is that we weren’t constantly pinged with notifications of crimes by the neighborhood app or local facebook group every day. These notifications make it feel like crime is abundant and happening right next door. It makes sense that our brains are primed for thinking that if our kids wander too far they’ll get abducted. They’re working off the information they have.

A 2025 study backs this up, a fear of “stranger danger” more than doubled the likelihood of risk-averse parenting and keeping your kids contained to near the house. We’ve got a perception-reality gap that is hard to close because it involves our most precious cargo.

But it’s not all just in our head.

Depending on where you live, cars, traffic, and more distracted people staring at their phones while driving has certainly risen. That’s a legitimate and structural concern. We absolutely need better urban design, more parks, sidewalks, etc.

But the major problem is that it’s not just people not letting their kids out of the front yard because of fear of cars, it’s that nearly all behaviors related to autonomy of kids are down. From making their lunches to walking down a different aisle of a store, to not being able to use a knife, have all declined. We’ve not only taken away more “high-stakes” independence like walking in the neighborhood but also low-stakes tasks, which signals a much larger problem than just fear of abduction or cars.

Again, much of it is in response to a environment that punishes parents for giving kids autonomy. A 2023 study found that state laws are all over the place and often disconnected from what the best science says is age appropriate. For example, Maryland law effectively says no child should be alone before the age of 8. While Minnesota allows 6 year olds to be unsupervised. There is no consistent national standard, and most laws have no developmental rationale.

And this leads to another legitimate fear. No one wants to be reported to child protective services. And it happens at an astonishing rate. According to a 2017 study, approximately 38% of all children will be investigated by CPS by the time they are 18. And the majority of those cases aren't about abuse. They're about supervisory neglect, children being somewhere without an adult.

Which ties into another thing preventing parents from lengthening the leash, judgment of others. If there’s one thing that’s skyrocketed over the last few decades it’s certainly judgment. With social media and other outlets, we walk around criticizing any and everyone. According to some recent data, 25% of parents admitted they had personally criticized another parent for not adequately supervising their child. So a quarter of parents are walking around as the enforcement mechanism.

While research published in 2024 found that “intensive parenting attitude” produces stress, anxiety, depression, and guilt in mothers. We feel guilty when we aren’t always on, always there. We feel like bad mothers and fathers.

The feeling creates anxiety and that anxiety pushes us towards over-protecting. And we’re well aware of it. In fact, we want better. We just don’t follow through.

In a survey of parents of 5-11 year olds, four out of five parents actually agreed that unsupervised free time is good for kids. They wanted more of it. But in practice:

• Only 50% would let a 9-11 year old find an item at the store while they shopped in another aisle

• Only 15% would let them trick-or-treat without an adult

• Only 20% of 5-8 year olds prepare their own snack

• The top reported fear was that “someone might scare or follow” the child

And the kicker is that it largely wasn’t about actual danger, as only 17% reported that they lived in a neighborhood that was unsafe. The researchers concluded that parents “may be unintentionally restricting their child’s path to independence.” They want to let go. They just can’t.

The Consequences of Safetyism

We live in a culture of safetyism. And it’s largely an English speaking phenomenon. These same views aren’t held in other countries. For example, a 2023 study found that while English-speaking parents generally expect kids to handle some independence around 9 or 10, Japanese and Kenyan parents expect that same level of independence at 5 or 6.

Similarly, in an international study that looked at 7 to 15 year old children across 16 different countries they found that most english-speaking countries were in the lowest autonomy tier (12th- Ireland, 13th- Australia, 16th- South Africa). Americans weren’t surveyed, but countries like Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Denmark scored the highest on autonomy. For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.

Once again, part of this is structural, with easy access to bikes and such, and we should absolutely address that. But increasingly, the data points to a large part of this being the safetyism that has taken hold in places like America.

Safety is preventative. It’s the impulse to prevent every possible discomfort, fall, or bruise. It's making sure that there aren't monkey bars at a playground so that no one can fall. It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom. Safetyism provides the illusion of security. It has the appearance of care, but in reality, it’s avoidance.

We confuse safety with security, and they aren’t the same thing.

Security is something different. It’s having the knowledge that if you fall, someone you trust will help you get back up. It’s the idea of knowing that if you make a mistake in the office, you should let others know so that you can improve the processes, instead of hiding it away for fear of losing your job. Security gives you a base to explore from. Safety builds walls.

The strange thing is that the more we choose safety over security, the less of either we get. A 2024 meta-analysis on trigger warnings found that they make no difference at best, and at worst they increase anxiety, because our predictive brain prepares for the disaster we just got warned about. Watch what happens at recess when adults always step in to mediate. Children stop learning how to resolve their own arguments. Watch what happens when a parent always rescues a child from a hard math problem. The child stops trying, learning that mom or dad is there to save them.

It’s part of the reason (along with phones, social media, etc.) that we’ve had such an alarming surge in youth mental health issues. According to the CDC 40% of US high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023, up significantly from earlier data. Suicide among children under 15 rose 3.5-fold between 1950 and 2005, then another 2.4-fold by 2020.

A 2020 longitudinal study followed 500 adolescents from age 12 through 19. The teens whose parents stayed at persistently elevated levels of psychological control across those seven years showed measurably worse trajectories of both depression and anxiety. A 2024 meta-analysis of 52 studies on overparenting confirmed the pattern: across cultures and income levels, overparenting predicts higher rates of depression, anxiety, and internalizing symptoms in offspring. When we eliminate the small discomforts that build emotional regulation, we don't make kids safer. We make them more anxious.

It’s why Peter Gray and colleagues writing in the Journal of Pediatrics concluded, “A primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”

The Power of Freedom

Early in my high school coaching career, I learned a hard lesson that stuck with me. It was easy to get someone to finish a workout while I was standing there watching them. I could get 14 year old freshman to do lots of mile repeats or go on a 10 mile run if I, as the coach, was running with them. But what ultimately mattered and determined their success is what they did when I wasn’t. Did they do their runs over the summer when we didn’t have practice, or run the whole way instead of walking and taking shortcuts when we ran at the local park. That’s what mattered.

And research shows that when we use a leadership style where control by the coach is the key, kids work hard while you’re there, but don’t when you aren’t working. On the other hand, autonomy supportive coaching, where you lengthen the leash and empower agency does. It increases intrinsic motivation, self-belief, confidence, and even resilience.

That’s because our body and brain were meant to be stressed appropriately. Just like a muscle needs to feel the strain of lifting a weight or running a mile to adapt and grow, humans need exposure to just manageable risks, peer conflict, and personal discomfort to properly wire our executive function and build cognitive resilience.

Pickup games are the lab where children practice being human. Research shows kids learn to solve conflict and disagreements on the sandlot or at recess. Playgrounds are where kids learn to take appropriate risks for their current capabilities. They don’t know if they can climb the wall, hang on the monkey bars, or what not until they try.

When we replace the sandlot with the travel league, we replace the curriculum with a script. The coach picks the teams, calls balls and strikes, intervenes during any conflict. We learn to outsource everything. The thousand small acts of judgment that built emotional regulation in previous generations have been quietly handed back to the grownups.

Similarly, when we’re never given the chance to bike to our friends house, walk to school, or explore the world around us, we’ve created an artificially small world. Not only, do we never develop our internal spatial awareness, but we ingrain a mental model that says the outside world is dangerous and we are not capable of navigating it. We never learn to make risk-assessments ourselves. And as we are learning, an appropriate assessment of risks, rewards, and our capabilities is how our brain decides whether to work hard and give effort or not. If our brain is convinced everything is risky, we default to “why try mode.”

By completely removing unsupervised exploration, we’ve inadvertently denied kids the raw material required to overcome normal developmental anxieties. The things that helped develop self-regulation, conflict resolution, an internal locus of control…are gone.

It’s as if we took everyone in school and said, use AI to solve all of your work because doing math, staring at a blank page to write, or giving a speech are too uncomfortable. Sure, we might complete the assignments and they’ll have the appearance of doing math, writing an essay, and so forth…but there’s zero learning going on.

By stepping in to eliminate all minor discomforts and physical risks, parents disrupt the child’s capacity to learn through physical trial and error. In many ways, we’ve systematically engineered learned helplessness.

Lengthening the Leash

In my coaching work, I tell every athlete the same thing on day one: my goal is to make myself kind of obsolete. I’m trying to coach them toward independence, not dependence. That doesn’t mean I disappear or check out. It means I gradually give away control, in small bites, until the athlete is the one steering the ship. My role slowly shifts to guide, mentor, or even a co-pilot on the journey.

In order to get there, you have to gradually give away responsibility and choice. Sure, it may start out that you dictate the workouts precisely. But over time, you ask and collaborate more (What do you think? What would you do?). You hand over decision making. At first, it might be something simple, do you think you can do one or two more reps? But over time, you provide more responsibility and autonomy. Those are the ingredients that build self-reliance, toughness, and a sense of agency.

The late Kobe Bryant put it well, when watching his daughters basketball practice, and there was a parent on the sidelines encouraging and yelling at their daughter with things like “Dig deep!“ After practice, Bryant pulled that parent aside and said, “When she’s doing those line drills, don’t say anything. Because there’s a conversation that’s happening inside her head. She’s talking to herself pumping herself up to do it. So for an outside voice to come in to give her guidance and the push to keep going actually interrupts her process. Let her be. Let her figure it out herself.”

Parenting works the same way. If we’re always the person dictating and controlling, it might look and feel like the right thing in the moment. But too often we’re preventing them from developing the exact skills that allow them to thrive when we’re not there.

So of course we need to fix the structural elements to allow our kids to roam. Of course, we want violence and danger to be low and should be aware of the safety of the area we’re in. And of course, a 5 year old is going to have a different leash length than a 10 or even 15 year old. But… we’ve got to let them navigate discomfort, to feel bored, to face conflict, to wander. Those are the building blocks of confidence, resilience, self-determination, and emotional regulation.

I think about this when I watch my own daughters. Every instinct in me wants to fix the small problem before it becomes a hard one. As a person with OCD, there’s always a tinge of fear of what will happen when our oldest reaches for those monkey bars or climbs the rock wall that I’m not quite sure if she can handle yet. Part of my brain is always screaming “Danger! Intervene!” But just like I learned with OCD, not every feeling or thought needs power. Some we have to sit with it, realize that the world isn’t on fire and that we aren’t going to die. And eventually, that thought quiets down to its rightful level.

Every parent I know has similar instincts. We aren’t bad parents. We’re just living in a world that has conditioned us to be afraid. But the kindest thing I can do, the thing that will actually make my daughters resilient, is to let the small problems happen. To let her negotiate the friendship I could fix in one phone call. To let her ride further than I’m comfortable with. To gradually, appropriately lengthen that leash.

-Steve Magness

For more, you might like my piece on The Hidden Costs of Comfort or my books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game.

We treat coaching as if the prescription, the telling folks what to do is the thing. It’s not. I was fortunate to be a part of a panel with NBA champ Shane Battier, author David Epstein, 9 time Olympic medalist Ryan Murphy, and Sloan professor Shira Springer. We spent an hour going around what matters in performance at the mecha of data anlaytics. And where did we end? All of the data and processes are fascinating and important, but you’ve still got to connect with the human sitting across from you, and figure out how to get them to change their shot or mindset.

Early in my coaching career, I was convinced it was all about the workouts. If I could just figure out the perfect training plan for the athlete sitting across from me, everything would take care of itself. It didn’t work like that. I quickly realized, I had to coach humans.

Former football coach Pete Carroll had a similar revelation. As outlined in a wonderful article in a conversation between Carrol and Steve Kerr:

“How are you gonna coach your team?” Carroll said.

“What offense are we gonna run?”

“That stuff doesn’t matter,” Carroll said.

“What do you mean?”

So Carroll told him his theory of coaching. His main job was to decide what emotions he wanted his players to feel every day and then foster an environment that created those emotions. What’s practice gonna feel like? What’s the vibe?

Coaching is a craft. It’s about creating a philosophy that helps you impact, and ultimately change the people you work with. So with that in mind, I put together 33 coaching principles I’ve collected over the years. It’s my little cheat sheet guide to my coaching philosophy. I hope you enjoy, and let me know any that you’ve picked up along the way that you found valuable.

1. Coach from dependence to independence. Coaching is about making your own job kind of obsolete. Works towards having our athlete be more self-sufficient, with a coaches role moving towards a kind of mentor and partnership.

2. Coaching comes from conversation. And most of that is observing and listening. The athlete tells you everything you need to know…if you're paying attention.

3. Caring comes first. If they know you don’t care, the perfect plan won’t matter. The old saying “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” is still true.

4. Standards without warmth makes them fragile. Warmth without standards leaves them lost. You need both. In parenting research they call this authoritative instead of authoritarian.

5. Be opposite the moment. When they’re frantic, be calm. When they’re flat, bring intensity. Your job as the leader isn't to amplify the room. It's to counterbalance it.

6. “Coach the athlete you have. Not the one you wish you had.” Robert Collins. Don't fit the athlete to your preferred template. Adjust the template to whoever's in front of you.

7. The story they tell themselves runs the show. Coach the story. Knowledge doesn’t change behavior. Story does. “It’s hard to outperform your self-concept.”

8. You can't want it more than they do. The day you start trying to is the day you've lost the room. Your job is to set the conditions and pull the lever, not push the cart.

9. Effort is contagious. So is dread. Pay attention to which one you're spreading. You are the thermostat not the thermometer. You're changing the room temp.

10. Challenged, not threatened. We do our best when we're stretched, not when our worth is on the line. Hard things land different when failing doesn't mean you're worthless. Stretch the challenge. Keep the worth out of it.

11. People perform best when they feel valued as a person and not just an athlete, that they belong, and when they’re performing out of joy instead of fear. Joy is a performance enhancer.

12. Reward what you preach. If you say process and only celebrate outcomes, the brain hears the second message.What is honored will be cultivated. Watch what you praise.

13. Action is the antidote to anxiety. One purposeful step convinces the brain the situation is manageable. Don't wrestle the monster. Point at the work and start moving.

14. Confidence is quiet. Insecurity is loud. Arrogance sits on insecurity. Confidence sits on experience. The brashest voice in any room is usually the one most afraid of being found out. Real confidence comes from earned experience. Do the work.

15. What gets your attention becomes important. Choose wisely.

16. Teach the inner critic to coach. Acceptance drains the power. Fighting amplifies it. Often the critic doesn't know the threat has passed and keeps yelling. Give it a useful job and directions.

17. The athletes who feel safe take more risks. The ones who don’t, hide.

18. Ego kills sync. It crowds out the signals that lead to connection.

19. Always stay in learning mode. Be curious. “Once you stop learning about your athletes, you've stopped coaching.” Brother Colm O’Connell

20. “Fun is a performance enhancer.” Holly Benner. We forget that it’s still supposed to be fun, even for the best of the best.

21. Explain the why. The why is half the workout.

22. Skills come from struggle. Don’t over coach or step in too early. Rescue them too soon and they don’t keep what they almost figured out. Productive failure beats premature help.

23. Empower agency. We perform best when we feel autonomy, like we’re contributors that make a difference. It’s why micromanaging kills motivation.

24. Plant seeds constantly. And water them. Any coach, teacher, or parent will tell you of the kid who told them years later they finally get it. We can’t force understanding. Just keep cultivating the space for it to grow.

25. Define success yourself. Don't import a definition that gets in the way of the person you're trying to help become. The borrowed definition almost always fails the person who's actually in front of you.

26. Lower the bar, raise the floor. Too often we focus on those rare days when everything aligns. You can’t control when those show up. Focus on raising your floor, making the average days better.

27. If they can only succeed with you, you’ve failed. The goal is to give people autonomy and agency. To teach them how to do the thing, and then ultimately let them go.

28. The first person you have to coach is yourself. Don’t ignore your own needs and what you can get better at. It’s easy to get into coaching mode where you’re always focused on helping others. Take care of your own needs, have the support system that allows you to do the job over the long haul.

29. Teach, don’t just train. Too often, we get stuck in prescriptive mode. Remember, you are fundamentally changing the person in front of you.

30. Prior success only buys you time. Then you have to earn it again. No one really cares what you’d done in the past, they care about how you’re going to help them.

31. Coaching is pattern recognition. We pick up patterns when we pay attention. Build a database deep enough that you can see what an athlete is showing you. Then trust it.

32. Be in love with an idea, just don't marry it. Don't become the person who swears by a single diet for everyone. Every system eventually fails, and if you've tied your identity to it, you go down with the ship.

33. The car ride home is the practice. After a hard race or a bad workout, the brain is wide open. What you say in those minutes lasts longer than anything you said in practice all season.

34. Get out of your own way. Most of coaching is helping people stop self-sabotaging. Under-preparation is a coping strategy. The athlete who skips the work is protecting his ego.

Thanks so much. I’m conducting some research on people’s experience as coaches or being coached. If you have 5 minutes consider filling out this survey.

-Steve Magness

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