Chasing Excellence: A Story About Building the World’s Fittest Athletes

by Ben Bergeron

Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.

Am I committing everything I have to make myself the tiniest percentage better than I am right now, no matter how hard I have to work, no matter what I have to give up, no matter how long it takes?

What is grit, really? It’s a word that’s been used to describe everything under the sun, but it means something specific: when things get hard, you push harder; when you fail, you get back up stronger; when you don’t see results, you don’t get discouraged, but you just continue to pound away day, after day, after day, with relentlessness, consistency, heart, and passion—that’s grit.

People want to boil down elite achievement to “born with it” talent; it gives them an excuse for why they’re not at the same level.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. —Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.

Elite athletes know something that most people don’t—adversity is the best thing that can happen to you.

Confidence doesn’t come from knowing that you control the outcome of a given event or moment. It comes from knowing that you control your response to a given event. Confidence is about your competitive drive, your focus, positivity, perseverance, and grit, and whether you can maintain those characteristics when it matters most. Can you maintain the characteristics of a champion, regardless of what life throws at you? If you can—that’s confidence.

watch Netflix, and eat pizza. Katrín doesn’t do anything that normal

The process is about focusing on the steps to success rather than worrying about the result.

As Bob Knight, the famous basketball coach, used to tell his team, “Do what has to be done, as well as it can be done. Then do it that way all the time.”

As an elite athlete, there are only five things that you can truly control—your training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. If it doesn’t fall into one of those categories, I tell my athletes, forget about it. Control the things you can control, and ignore everything else.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Single-loop learners search for external factors to explain why they’re not succeeding; they put it down as having the wrong coach, the wrong program, the wrong equipment, the wrong people around them, or what have you. Double-loop learners iterate, and then look inward for the solutions to problems that arise. They’re the kind of people who can take a hard look in the mirror and tell their reflection, “I’m the reason I’m not succeeding,” and then proactively change into a better version of themselves.

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare. —Japanese Proverb