Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform

by Steve Magness

While there’s much to uncover still, the latest neuroscience provides a glimpse into why this occurs. As arousal increases, we have an interplay between two areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Our PFC is our “mental sketch pad,” where executive thinking and planning occur, and the amygdala helps process emotions, filters sensory information, and detects threats. In typical situations, there’s a productive interplay between these two systems. Our PFC takes the lead, receiving input from the amygdala and other areas but acting as a brake. It sends the message, “I hear you, but that’s not that big of a deal right now, so quiet down.” As stress and pressure increase, our PFC goes offline and lets our amygdala start shouting as loud as it wants. We lose our brake and the sensory information we start relying on changes.

We have two main options when our expectations and experiences don’t align. We either update or protect. Updating occurred when the doctors removed the boot, and the man saw no damage. In such a case, new information nudges us to come back to reality. Protection is about keeping the deluded prediction going. We latch on to the wrong information, avoid or ignore anything that contradicts, or even create information to make our expectations and experiences align.

As psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett outlined, “A depressed brain is effectively locked into misery. It’s like a brain in chronic pain, ignoring prediction error, but on a much larger scale that shuts you down.” It’s the same with other mental health disorders. Prediction errors are a hallmark of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and dysphoria’s like anorexia. Those who suffer from trauma experience a similar bad predictive rut. Getting stuck responding to a stimulus (sight, sound, smell, etc.) that their brain thinks means they are in real trouble. Getting stuck, choking, and freezing results from finding yourself in a predictive doom loop. We feel threatened, so we avoid, escape, or shut down.

Sometimes survival mode looks like anger and rage. Other times burnout, loneliness, procrastination, or anxiety. It’s when we find ourselves with a chronic feeling of angst that we aren’t good enough, that we don’t measure up, that we don’t belong. When the world seems uncertain and threatening, our brain tries its best to protect us. And in doing so, it often gets stuck in a bad rut. One that feels just as hard to escape as losing the ability to toss a ball to first base.

In the classroom, it’s much the same. Consider the time-honored tradition in school of giving yourself an out. Instead of spending time studying, students often deliberately self-sabotage before justifying their behavior with, “If I studied, I would have gotten an A. But I just didn’t care.” We do the same thing in other pursuits; “I didn’t really train for this race,” or “This job is just to pay the bills.” Research has found that depersonalization, where we intentionally detach from aspects of our job, is one of the primary coping mechanisms for workplace burnout. Under preparation is a coping strategy to protect our sense of self. Not giving our all is about shielding our ego from harm. This is the real-world version of choking.

okay then!

Put another way, when our world, self, or pursuits don’t add up, we experience a cacophony of negative sensations, and we do whatever we can to eliminate those feelings and give us some sense of order. We get desperate to make the world, and ourselves, add up to align our expectations and experience—even if it means deluding ourselves. We have a self-preservation system that defaults to the quick fix. This is living in survival mode.

But that’s not the only way we defend ourselves. Our protective systems push us to respond by doing one of the following: Avoid or shut down: We detach. Tell ourselves that whoever expressed the view is crazy, or ensure we never have to confront that information again. Fight and defend: We double down on our position, trying harder to prove that the way we see the world is, in fact, correct. We rationalize and justify. Narrow and cling: We shrink our world to the people, groups, things, or stories that confirm our beliefs or worldview. We seek refuge in the places that make us feel secure and valued. We make the world two-dimensional so that we don’t have to deal with the messiness of life. Accept, explore, and update: We integrate the new information into our mental model—a pathway that emphasizes growth and learning over the long haul instead of simply surviving the immediate threat.

During the 2021 school year, a survey of over 15,000 educators found that nearly 30 percent of teachers and 40 percent of administrators had been threatened with violence. No, not from the students, but from parents. Educator Kelly Treleaven saw this trend firsthand, noticing that a surprising number of parents began to see teachers as an enemy. She named them jackhammer parents. They are relentless, loud, destructive, and powered by fear.

In studying meaning in life, existential psychologist Tatjana Schnell simplified to focus on four key components. To have a meaningful life, we need to feel: Coherent: Life adds up. You have a cohesive story. Who you were, are, and will be have a thread that runs through them. Significant: You matter, can make a difference, and can achieve some sort of status in life. Directed: There’s purpose to your life and pursuits. You have goals leading you toward something. You can make progress. Belonging: You’re part of something bigger than just you—family, friends, and groups. You can weave your story into others’ stories.

Unfortunately, many now feel lost and aimless, just wandering through life. This is partly because we’ve been sold a new religion: workism. As writer Derek Thompson explains, we have many “adherents to a cult of productivity and achievement, wherein anything short of finding one’s vocational soulmate amounts to a wasted life. They have found a new kind of religion—one that valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else. And it’s making them a little bit crazy.” When our work inevitably can’t fulfill all of our needs, we’re left wondering how we can find something that does.

It’s time for a new path to success and fulfillment. One that doesn’t leave us feeling lost, threatened, or despondent. The answer lies in how we see and approach ourselves, our work, and our surroundings. To move from surviving to thriving, we need clarity in our inner world. In the rest of this book, I’ll introduce a framework for sustainable excellence: Be—Clarity on Who You Are Do—Clarity in Your Pursuits Belong—Clarity on Where and How You Fit In

In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “American dream.” But he did so not to give the US a pat on the back but to show how we’d gone astray. Adams warned that the original noble ideal had transformed from focusing on well-being, moral character, and opportunity to a “dream of material plenty.” The definition of a good life had changed: moving from the internal to the external. Adams used the phrase in response to an America that had gotten lost during the opulence-filled Gilded Age and ended up in a calamitous Great Depression. As historian Sarah Churchwell explains, “The original ‘American Dream’ was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation.” It was a hopeful, unifying message, one that had been transformed into an individualistic commercialized one. We’ve stuck with the materialistic version—two cars, a house in the suburbs, and lots of stuff—rather than the original version.

quote this

In the classroom, researchers Robert Rudolf and Dirk Bethmann found an interesting paradox: rich countries had sadder children. What was causing the rift? They concluded, “this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in higher-income countries.” Rich countries tend to have a heavy achievement focus, and there’s a tradeoff with living in that kind of culture. The competition, and the need to measure up that follows, is making kids miserable.

South Korea provides an important cautionary tale. Their fifteen-year-old students rank first in the world in math and reading. They reach the top with a pressure-filled system aimed at mastering entrance exams to get into prestigious universities. It’s so absurd that parents of kindergartners are dropping $25,000 on private tutors to prep for future tests. But early obsession comes with a cost. Their early academic lead fades as they enter the workforce. Research shows that their scores on cognitive ability peak earlier and decline faster than their peers from similar countries.

We’ve fallen for the wrong American dream version of success, which has overemphasized the external and neglected the internal. We’ve created an environment that: focuses on achievement above all else; narrows our drive toward obsession, to win at all costs; amplifies comparisons that are downright impossible to measure up; prioritizes extrinsic motivation over intrinsic; pushes us to find security and stability in the wrong places, overidentifying with jobs and pursuits; and mistakes superficial and transactional relationships for genuine ones.

this is why people are miserable

Phrases like “good for nothing” didn’t start out as insults, but as credit reports meant to relay that the person was likely incapable of paying back a loan, so don’t take a chance on them. With reports and ratings mainly based on our business dealings defining whether or not we were worthy of trust, our identities became intertwined with our jobs. Any success or failure was a reflection of our sense of self.

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 what I described early in this chapter. Norway doesn’t allow for official scorekeeping 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 Øvrebø, 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.”

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.

He wrote, “The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it. And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” Smith saw value in the drive to obtain wealth and status but also highlighted that it was a deception.

According to the latest theories in affective neuroscience, we have several emotional regulation systems that guide our perception and actions. Three of the key systems are: Threat and protect Drive and strive Contentment and soothing

The external game is amplifying our threat system and mistakenly believing that our drive system will help us avoid feeling rejected, insignificant, or alone. If we just reach the top of the mountain, our threats and insecurities will disappear. They won’t. All the while, we’ve forgotten our contentment system. Allowed it to wither away like a muscle that’s been stuck in a cast for months. Think back to the protestant work ethic research that found that not working caused distress in people who saw work as a virtue. We’ve made being content seem threatening instead of soothing. We’ve deliberately detrained our contentment system.

To build a secure self, to pursue success without falling for obsession, to connect with others without losing your values. It will take a two-part approach: Build up: We need to fill your basic internal needs with quality content instead of junk food. We need to find significance, coherence, direction, and belonging that is genuine. Dislodge and realign: We need to ensure that when we knock ourselves out of that rut, we are able to find a new path that doesn’t lead to delusion.

Northwestern University professor Dashun Wang has spent the last decade attempting to understand the science of hot streaks. In a 2018 study, Wang and his team analyzed more than twenty thousand artists and scientists, finding that over 90 percent of them had a period where their work had a much greater impact. Contrary to our expectations, these magical periods weren’t related to how productive they were or even at what point in their career they were in. The young and old could experience hot streaks. On average, the hot streaks lasted 5.7 years for artists, 5.2 years for directors, and 3.7 years for scientists, though for some individuals, the streak could stretch upwards of 20 years.

The magic was in the sequence. Exploration or commitment on its own didn’t lead to a hot streak. It took both—in the right order. As Wang reported, “Our data shows that people ought to explore a bunch of things at work, deliberate about the best fit for their skills, and then exploit what they’ve learned.” Or, as we’ve learned in this chapter, broad exploration opens the door for a deep, narrow dive.

In a series of studies, Baer and Deichmann first found that only 50 percent of cookbook authors go on to produce a follow-up. The more creative that initial book was, the less likely an author was to put out another book, even if the first one had been highly successful. In fact, if a cookbook was given substantial recognition or an award for being novel, the likelihood of a follow-up dropped significantly. The reason was simple: authors were protecting their identities.

“There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous,” Taylor Swift expressed in the documentary Miss Americana. Swift was lamenting the extreme end of cementing. You get stuck and stop exploring, partially because the world around you ceases to permit you to grow. It’s not just celebrities or prodigies that experience this. When we get stuck in narrow mode for too long, we slowly shed the potential paths in our periphery. In the identity development literature, this early cementation is called identity foreclosure. We stop seeing other possible selves and get stuck on the one we have.

This doesn’t just occur in athletic or artistic phenoms. According to a recent study, adults labeled as intellectually gifted are at a much higher risk of suffering from a crisis of meaning, an anxiety and depression-filled experience that is partially due to a loss of coherence and direction in one’s life. When we suffer from a crisis of meaning, a slew of mental health issues follow, from compulsions to immune-related diseases to a rapid decline in our overall well-being. When researchers contrasted these individuals with similarly talented individuals who had recently achieved success, the risk for a crisis of meaning significantly dropped. It’s the potential, without fulfillment, that does the damage.

Second, our internal motivation and experience shift. Gone are the days of intrinsic joy and wanting to play or perform. They are gradually replaced by external drivers. Ellen Winner noted that the prodigies who failed to translate early talent to success in adulthood experienced “excessive extrinsic control and pressure, leading to a decline of intrinsic motivation.” She went on to conclude, when we push too hard “the intrinsic motivation and rage to master these children start out with become a craving for the extrinsic rewards of fame.”

Achieving expertise often exacerbates the problem. In studying more than seven hundred thousand consumers, researchers Matthew Rocklage, Derek Rucker, and Loran Nordgren found that expertise leads to emotional numbness. As individuals achieved expertise in photography or wine, they had less intense emotional responses to the experience of consuming whatever it is they were an expert at.

However, Rocklage and colleagues found a solution: Get them to focus on and reconnect with the feelings of consuming art or drinking wine, and the numbness subsided. Or, put another way, to remember what it’s like to explore, to play.

Exploration frees us up to try on different hats and get a sense of what interests us and what we value. But we need commitment to give us a sense of security, continuity, and stability. With too much exploration, we feel lost and unmoored. With too much commitment, we are rigid, fragile, and numb. It’s about holding on to both flexibility and security at the same time.

According to psychologist Peter Gray, play functions to teach us to: Develop intrinsically driven interests Learn about rules and problem-solving Regulate our emotions Navigate relationships and make friends Experience joy

In a 2023 paper published in The Journal of Pediatrics, Gray and colleagues compellingly argue that “a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders [in youth] 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.”

Play rebalances the experiential and cognitive hierarchy, allowing us to feel and experience instead of becoming numb to our expertise. Taking time to do things with little point besides joy will remind you how to get back into exploration mode where you can be oblivious, free from the harsh comparison points that influence so much of our lives.

When he looked at the commonalities between the greats, he noted they were all “Addicted to the process. Winning is a by-product. They get addicted to the process because it’s what they can control.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that substance abuse programs like Alcoholics Anonymous adopt a similar approach. They take a quest or journey approach, giving people the support and tools to make meaning out of their experience, with recovery ultimately occurring in large part because of an identity change. Like the athletes moving from performance to quest, individuals who struggle with substance abuse make a similar switch.

In survival mode, we overidentify to provide temporary security. It’s not just our self-identities but also our social ones. Research shows we treat the groups we are part of the same way. We overidentify or resort to a dominance strategy where one group overpowers all others we belong to in terms of importance. Look at our social media profiles: Republican, Democrat, mental health disorders, trauma, pronouns, or athletic identity. We use labels in our profiles to describe who we are, where we belong, and what we care about. Many of these labels can be useful, but too often, in a world that pushes us to survival mode, we shift the balance from feeling secure to overly attached.

We need complexity. In a world that pushes us to flatten, to avoid, or get rid of the messiness, to be singularly focused to succeed, complexity is more important than ever.

Integration is about reconciling, connecting, and making sense of your different cultural identities. It’s about acknowledging the differences but then seeing how they may complement and enhance each other. It’s seeing power in the complexity. That these two sides of you can work together instead of battle. Integration occurs when individuals feel that they belong to different cultural groups and organize multiple identities within themselves to form one coherent supraidentity. It’s having different roles but understanding how they fit together in a cohesive and unified way.

Contentment and the proper motivational fuel come from recognizing the messiness, seeing ourselves as complex individuals, and integrating those many selves. It’s adding up, not perfectly like some fairytale, but in a way that allows us to learn and grow from our experiences. It’s part of getting wise.

We need to learn how to embrace and deal with the messy parts, instead of creating this false requirement of an ideal self that simply doesn’t exist. There are three keys to dealing with the messiness in a productive manner: Accept with self-compassion Be someone Integrate the messiness

When there is little space between what you do and who you are, we go a bit nuts when we feel under threat. We flip out, throw tantrums, retreat, stop trying, or become apathetic. The way to fight back isn’t to double down or further insulate. It’s to diversify. A diverse array of experiences creates a resilient self, and research shows it leads to a happier, healthier you. Diversify yourself. That’s the true key to being someone.

When it comes to benefiting from writing, the more expressive we are, the better. Expressive writing works via confronting the thing, not avoiding it. And most important, we don’t just need to confront the experience but make sense of it. Psychologist Susan Lutgendorf found that to get the benefits of expressive writing, we must make sense of the difficult. “An individual needs to find meaning in a traumatic memory as well as feel the related emotions to reap positive benefits from the writing exercise,” Lutgendorf told the American Psychological Association. She continued, “There has to be growth or change in the way they view their experiences.” In other words, writing allows us to integrate and revise our experience.

While processing whatever is bothering you on a walk, take off in a sprint whenever you feel the angst, fear, or anger rise. The physical action, and accompanying fatigue and heavy breathing, will often overwhelm the emotions that were bubbling over. It’s why exercise helped Doug Bopst get comfortable with the rest of his inner world. Your brain has to prioritize the sensations it’s experiencing, and often, a strenuous physical act taps into deeper and more primitive areas of your processing, pushing the emotions to the side for a moment.

As Oishi and Westgate wrote, “In rapidly changing environments, a psychologically rich life might be most adaptive for learning and accumulating resources, whereas happy and/or meaningful lives might be more advantageous in stable, benign environments.” We need happiness, meaning, and richness. We’ve neglected the third component of thriving. It’s that component that frees us up, that turns down our threat-and-protect response. When it comes to our sense of self, we need a bit more openness and psychological richness.

Or, as Oishi and Westgate put it, a person on their deathbed “who has led a happy life might say, ‘I had fun!’ A person who has led a meaningful life might say, ‘I made a difference!’ And a person who has led a psychologically rich life might say, ‘What a journey!’”

We hold on to this belief that after a tough loss, a good ass-chewing is needed to right the ship. That tirades like Davis’s show passion. And any display of the opposite, say laughing and joking on the bus ride home, shows players don’t care. We should feel the pain. And if we don’t, it’s a major problem. The only issue with that narrative? It goes against everything we know about the psychology of losing. Joking around, realizing that it is, in fact, a game and not real, and moving on from sorrow to excitement are the exact behaviors that research shows lead to better performance the next go around. Davis’s tirade tells us more about the dangers of losing than the player’s reaction.

In The Status Game, writer Will Storr outlined that we can achieve status in three ways: dominance, competence, and virtue. Losing dismantles the first two and potentially impacts the third. It should come as no surprise why losing in something that is meaningful and important can be so tricky. But there’s something that makes it worse: when the assault on our status is there for all to see. When we lose in public, we face humiliation. A direct attack on who we are, showing the world that we are incompetent and a failure.

Learning to lose is important for one more reason. Researchers found that how we handle winning and losing are connected. If we throw a tantrum and default to avoidance after a loss, we’re more likely to settle into a protective state where we avoid challenging competitions after a win. Similarly, if we respond to a loss by aggressively trying to tear down the opponent to not have it impact our self-esteem, then we take the same approach when we win: defaulting to overly enhancing our “dominance,” which then blinds us to seeing how to improve.

Video games are often derided by older generations as a mindless entertainment diversion that makes kids dull and lazy. But seventy-seven-year-old pitching coach (and throwing maestro) Tom House has another take. “I’m envious of kids who get to grow up on video games today. Lose, then just restart. There’s no better feedback loop to learn how to lose than modern games. This generation wipes away loss and failure faster than any I’ve seen.”

Interesting observation