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"excellence, actually" is a podcast from The Growth Equation, hosted by Steve Magness, Brad Stulberg, and Clay Skipper. Drawing on their years of working and corresponding with Olympians, coaches, executives, world-class physicians, and other elite-level achievers in their coaching practice and professional careers, they give you the mental and physical tools, practices, habits, and frameworks used by the best in the world in the pursuit of excellence. Each episode will give you concrete ideas and tips to use in your life immediately to help you become more meaningfully engaged in the pursuits that support your goals and your values. This is not the performative nonsense that is peddled online by grifters and influencers, but the evidence-based systems that work for the best in the world. This is excellence, actually. (This podcast used to appear under the name FAREWELL.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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How to Care Deeply and Compete Fearlessly
How do you want something very badly and still hold the result loosely? Detaching from the outcome is one of the most important skills in performance. It's also one of the hardest. On today's show, we talk about how to detach before, during
Is This The Most Underrated Skill in Elite Performance?
One of the hardest and most important questions to answer if you want to do anything at a high level: Do I need to fix this feeling, or can I forget this feeling and perform anyway? For too long as a society, we pushed the "grind it out" me
Recovery 101: Listener Questions on Rest, Aging, and Turning Off
We've always been big on recovery. (After all, it is one half of the growth equation: stress + REST = growth.) But knowing how to recover, both physically and mentally, is a skill — and one that needs to be refined as we age and as our worl
A.I., Craft, and the Future of Human Excellence
How we should (and should not) use artificial intelligence is a topic we have been frequently and furiously discussing in our group chat. (You too?) These days, it's impossible to avoid its presence in our lives. Nor would we want to! A.I.
How to Have More Agency
"You can just do things" — but should you? The word "agency" has exploded in recent months, but what does it actually mean to be a high-agency person, and when does agency cross the line into recklessness? Today, we're tracing the concept f
How to Tame Your Demons: Healthy Passion vs. Obsessive Drive
Today, we're fielding a listener question that every high performer eventually faces: where's the line between passion and obsession? The thing that makes you great can also be the thing that destroys you, and making sure that it doesn't is
Consistency Over Intensity: How to Show Up Again and Again (and Again)
Consistency is one of the fundamental skills of any discipline. But what does it actually look like in practice? Today, we're answering five of the most common questions we get about the challenges of trying to be consistent in everyday lif
Handling Change: "Find the Smallest Dose that Keeps You Sane"
Change happens — sometimes when we expect, often when we don't. So how do we hold onto what matters amidst big shifts (injury, a lay off, moving cities, changing schedules)? That's what we're tackling today. We'll walk you through the proce
How to Survive Youth Sports Without Ruining Your Kid
Youth sports are simultaneously a disaster and more important than ever. They remain one of the best places for kids to develop and, as we always say, do real things in the real world with real people. But they're also being hijacked by pro
The Sports Psychologist Who Taught MJ and Kobe How to "Manage the Moment" (Rerun)
(This week, we are revisiting a conversation from last year that Brad and Clay had with George Mumford. It's one of our most popular episodes and one we personally have come back to many times — so we believe you'll enjoy it, even on a seco
Peptides 101: Evaluating Hype, Risk, and Reward
Peptides! They're everywhere in the health and performance world (and, increasingly, outside of it, too). So... what is a peptide? Are they safe? Should you be taking them? We're going to get into all of that today, breaking down what the s
How to Not Turn Into a Robot
This week, we're reacting to an article about the rise of souped-up A.I. baby monitors, and a video from popular podcast host Chris Williamson responding to the anti-optimization movement. Both hint at something nefarious happening in the h
How to Reset Your Focus
Why is it so hard to focus these days—and what can we do about it? On today's episode, we talk about the science behind our collapsing focus and fractured attention. (If you're feeling frazzled, foggy, or unable to concentrate, you're not a
The Ten Commandments of Coaching
Coaching is one of the most meaningful and valuable jobs out there. Which is why it's all the more important that it's done the right way. Today, Steve and Brad—who have more than 30 years of sports and performance coaching experience betwe
World Cup & Mile World Record: Consistency, Joy, and Calling Your Shot
Brad and Steve are solo for a throwback episode. First, they discuss Josh Kerr's mile world record: Kerr called his shot four months ago, named the time, named the meet, and then went and did it, fueled entirely, he says, by consistency and
Don't Get Rid of Anxiety. Use It.
It's natural to want to get rid of anxiety. It's uncomfortable, we worry that it holds us back from being our best, and we believe that those who perform at the highest levels have figured out a way to beat it. The bad news is that we can't
How to Endure, According to a 4-Time Tour de France Cyclist
What is it like to race 21 days across France wearing little more than underwear, going over 50 miles an hour, burning 8,000 calories a day, in the shadow of the ever-present threat of a violent peloton crash? Brent Bookwalter did it four t
You Can't Have It All: A Guide to Making Sacrifices
We've been sold a lie: that with the right systems, mindset, and tools, you can have it all — great career, present parent, devoted partner, thriving social life, passionate hobbyist. You can't. But that's not a bad thing! It's the sacrific
Six Books That Changed How We Think About Performance
Brad and Clay Skipper first became friends over books — specifically, a DM about Brad's bookshelf. Today, they return to that origin with a show-and-tell on six books that have genuinely changed how they think about performance: a poet-phil
How to Come Back, from the Greatest Playoff Run in NBA History
Last Saturday night, the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship. It was an improbable, remarkable run, one of the best in NBA history. After going down 2-1 in the first round, they won 15 of their next 16 games, beating the Spurs 4 to 1 t
Longevity, Actually (with Brian Koppelman)
Brian Koppelman has been writing great films and shows for 30 years — Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, and Billions, to name a few. Now 60, he's working with as much energy as ever. He'll be back in the role of "Computer" on the hit show The Bea
Lessons on Excellence: Caring, Doing the Work, and Being Antifragile
Today, we discuss three moments from the past week that highlight a few of the key habits of truly excellent performers: what Victor Wenbanyama teaches us about caring deeply and being yourself; how the failed Enhanced Games highlights the
Dream Big, Start Small: Lessons from World Record Miler Jim Ryun
Jim Ryun couldn't make his junior high basketball team, track team, or even his church baseball team. Two years later, he was the first high schooler to run a sub-four-minute mile. He'd go on to run a world record mile in 3:51, and compete
How to Get Small Wins out of Bad Days
We've all got those days: you can't seem to get started, your motivation is low, or something comes up and throws you off track. It happens to all of us! It only becomes a problem when a bad start to the day becomes a bad day, and then a ba
The New Science of Pain (and What It Means for You)
We're all going to experience pain in some form or another. Unfortunately, our long accepted model for what pain is — and how to treat it — has been wrong. Today, we're breaking down the biopsychosocial model of pain, which presented a rece
The Cost of Keeping Your Options Open (with David Epstein)
In 1960, A publisher at Random House bet a writer $50 that he couldn't produce a children's book using just 50 distinct words. That writer was Dr. Seuss, and the resulting book was Green Eggs and Ham, which has gone on to sell more than 200
How to Break Through Barriers (Lessons from the Sub-Two-Hour Marathon)
Not just one, but two (!) men finished this past weekend's London Marathon in under two hours, a time that has never before been beat and was once largely thought to be impossible. Today, we unpack how it happened: the advances in running s
How to Save Your Brain (with Cal Newport)
There's a good reason you can't concentrate. That's not just a statement; it's also the title of a viral piece that our friend Cal Newport (author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism) recently wrote for The New York Times. Cal argues that w
What Every Athlete Can Learn from Elite Distance Runners
Today, Clay taps into Steve's wisdom as a long-time running coach—which doesn't mean you have to be a runner to get something out of it. The episode covers the most efficient type of aerobic training for any athlete (hint: it's not Zone 2 o
How to Change, Actually (with Eric Zimmer)
Once an addict, Eric Zimmer is now 26 years sober. He has made that one huge change through a series of many small, daily changes, or what he calls "low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction." His theory of be
