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

by Ben Bergeron

But talent without grit is just potential.

What people don’t see is that behind most every talented person who has become a massive success is a daily schedule of grind, hours of suck, and a whole string of difficult, lonely moments working on the tiny details that will get them where they want to go.

And it takes grit to get through this because in the moment it feels like you’re doing nothing.

Staying positive is difficult for humans because our DNA is hardwired to hold on to negative experiences over positive ones, for sheer survival.

Possibly rooted in original sin??

Negativity, though, is immensely detrimental to performance. When you’re in a negative mindset, you’re slower and less precise.

Amen. When I’m anxious I’m much less creative and solutions-Focused.

If you stay positive, you perform with greater speed and accuracy. You are better, across the board. Because of this, I need my athletes in a positive mindset in order to get the work out of them that will maximize their potential. At my gym, there’s an unbreakable threefold policy:

Focusing on negative feelings or circumstances—It’s so hot out. I’m tired. This traffic sucks. My boss is such an idiot—brings greater focus to things that are ultimately outside of your control and are potentially detrimental to your performance. In no competitive or life scenario will focusing on negative uncontrollable factors improve your performance or stress levels.

energy flows where our focus goes. Tough part is sometimes ambivalence kicks in, where it feels worthwhile to spend times dwelling on the negative or what “could be.” Or guilt where you feel like you don’t deserve to be able to focus on the positive.

If you talk about (or worse, complain about) things that are outside of your control, things that could diminish performance, you will see and experience more of those things.

If you tell yourself, as Katrín does, that no amount of adversity can throw you off your game, you’re far more likely to be resilient and thus successful in the long run. Your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, and your actions dictate your destiny.

How we spend our hours becomes how we spend our days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Positivity doesn’t guarantee anything, but it can lower perceived exertion, make things seem more enjoyable, improve your chances of competing at your potential, and give you a competitive advantage.

This was really profound for me. Positivity doesn’t guarantee anything but it LOWERS perceived exertion, and lower perceived exertion can have a direct effect on performance

in a span of twenty minutes, her standards for what she felt that she could overcome were drastically transformed.

we know this, the challenges, hardships, and struggles that might seemingly look like setbacks and things to avoid become anything but—they become defining moments that create the most dramatic changes and should be cherished and sought after, not feared and endured.

Amen. This is hard when you work around and for people who expect perfection and don’t celebrate struggle as much as you do. I think this might be why it’s so important to try to curate this type of environment when at all possible

We fear adversity and do everything we can to avoid it, even though it is a guaranteed part of life for every species on planet Earth. It’s not a matter of if we will encounter it, but only a matter of when. And when we do face it, the form the adversity takes is far less important than how we respond to it.

So true. A good theology of suffering is so key. We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid a part of life that’s inevitable. How productive is that? I think we secretly think in doing this we can reduce the amount of suffering. While this may be true to some extend it’s important to not confuse this with trying to eliminate ALL suffering.

if life teaches us anything, it’s that very few things ever line up exactly the way we want.

Visualization is a powerful tool, but it’s not enough to simply visualize success. You need to also envision adversity and setbacks. Of course you know how to succeed when things go perfectly. I know the mindset of every athlete when they are getting all the calls, winning, and everything seems to be lining up for them. What I really want to find out is how they will think, act, and perform when things go terribly wrong.

Key! Visualization and expectation of failure. While not allowing this to spin out of control into anticipatory anxiety.

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.

💯💯💯

This equation teaches something very important about the way life works. We don’t control the events in life, and we don’t have direct control over the outcomes. The only thing we do have total control over is how we choose to respond.

Her ability to maximize her potential regardless of the circumstances is where her confidence comes from.

One minute in, I know Katrín is going to win this event. The other girls blitz through the first round, but Katrín lets them go. She’s moving the barbell methodically, completely oblivious to the other women, the crowd, and the announcers. In the fifth round, she starts picking people off. She passes one girl, then another.

Extensive experience is necessary to reach very high levels of performance; however, extensive experience does not invariably lead to expert levels of achievement. “Some types of experience, such as merely executing proficiently during routine work, may not lead to further improvement,” writes Ericsson. “After a certain point, further improvement depends on deliberate efforts to change particular aspects of performance.”

It’s true. Staying in the same routine without steady growth does not lead to improvement

the magic lies in how those hours are spent.

Deliberate practice can be characterized by the following four elements:

It’s designed specifically to improve performance. It is repeated a lot. Feedback on results is continuously available. It’s highly demanding mentally, and not necessarily or particularly enjoyable, because it means you are focusing on improving areas in your performance that are not satisfactory.

The only way you can dedicate yourself completely to something—to be all in, every single day, leaving nothing on the table—is if you’re passionate about it. You have to love it. The people who make it to the top—whether they’re musicians, athletes, or CEOs—are addicted to their calling. They jump out of bed every morning excited about doing their work. Not that they consider it work; they’re the ones who’d be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren’t being paid.

Passion will outperform drive every time, because passion breeds a bulletproof level of resilience.

Passion allows you to persevere when any other sane person would quit.

Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you need to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.

This is the process—acknowledging where you are, identifying where you want to be, and breaking it down into pieces. Excellence is a matter of steps. Excel at this one, then that one, and then the one after that.

“aggregation of marginal gains.”

In reality, it’s the opposite. People tend to focus disproportionately on results, while neglecting the day-to-day things that will get them there. What’s the effort you need to put in in order to achieve that goal? Goals are nothing but the results from which you put forth effort.

It’s a lot easier to focus on the end result instead of put the daily work in that it takes to get there. This is where we stumble

As an elite athlete, there are only five things that you can truly control—your training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset.

They’re concerned about a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they control those things.

back. If you burn through your matchsticks on things that are outside your control, you have less energy for things you can control—things that can actually move the needle on your performance.

Amen 💯💯💯 we only have so much cognitive capacity in our day. Use that wisely without exhausting it in areas that aren’t fruitful.

We don’t say, Look at how much he can lift or how fast she ran. I have to beat that. They’re only competing with themselves.

Once you identify the things you can control, success is a matter of maximizing every detail, every day.

on. Identifying the controllables and owning them in this way takes the mystery out of success. Achievement becomes the result of how committed you are to following the process.

But playing your game while adjusting for someone else’s is like trying to inhale and exhale at the same time—it’s impossible. Ultimately, it cost Mat the title.

Control what you can control. Ignore everything else.

...And most of it is out of our control

If you don’t allow for that—if you don’t let yourself grieve for five minutes—it’ll haunt you; you

Time to process and then move on. Instead of recurrent intrusive thoughts as your brain attempts to process later

She had reverted, temporarily, to the immature and emotional athlete we’d spent the last two years vanquishing.

We will struggle again where we’ve made progress before.

Particularly in a sport like ours, where every event is completely different and has absolutely no bearing on the next one, living in the past is a liability that will diminish future opportunities.”

When you reach a certain level, it’s far easier to hide in your strengths because of the ego-boost they provide—you feel good, you look good, and people are in awe. But it’s a trap; the moment you believe you’ve arrived at the door of greatness, it will be slammed in your face.

Business theorist Chris Argyris, in his book Teaching Smart People How to Learn, outlines why constant self-evaluation is the key to personal advancement:

Hmmmm yes, as long as this doesn’t turn into analysis paralysis.

The most battle-tested, unimpeachable process is nothing unless it is accompanied by the character traits needed to make it stick. Humility is a huge part of the equation; it’s one of the cornerstones of the process—the only way I can make my team better is by acknowledging their limitations. They’re not the best in the world at everything, not even close. As a coach, it’s my job to continually look for weaknesses—for areas where we can be beat.

Build a team who’s also willing to recognize and work on their weaknesses. And to boast in them.

If you can compete with excellence when you’re way ahead, you can do it when you’re

way behind. Like everything else, excellence is a habit.

unwavering commitment

to the process, regardless of what’s going on around you. Competitive excellence

Clutch, simply put, is the ability to do what you can do normally under immense pressure.

The traits you need when the stakes are highest—grit, optimism, focus, adaptability, determination, resilience—must be forged in the crucible of training.

But a curious thing happens when you start acting like a champion—when you commit everything you have to the process, everything else tends to fall into place.

Yes and no. I think this implies too much reliance On A guaranteed outcome which is out of our control. Things may generally be better but we shouldn’t expect a particular outcome just because we’re doing the “right things.”