What's the Excellence Reflex?
Lessons from Marcus Aurelius, why the best days are ahead, being kind to yourself, & more
“The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they're right.” — John Cleese
Coaches,
Here you go!
ARTICLES
19 Rules For A Better Life (From Marcus Aurelius): Ryan Holiday shares some of Marcus Aurelius’ rules to give you “a design for living.”
Put people first. My favorite story about Marcus Aurelius comes in the depths of the Antonine Plague, a horrible pandemic in Ancient Rome that killed millions of people. Rome’s economy has been devastated, people are dying in the streets, and everyone feels like it can’t possibly get better. What does Marcus do? He walks through the imperial palace and begins marking things for sale. Then for two months, on the lawn of the great emperor’s palace, he sells jewels, furniture, and finery owned by the emperor. He’s sending a message saying, ‘I’m not going to put myself first. I don’t need these fancy things—not when people are struggling.’ To me, this is like the CEO who takes a pay cut in a bad economy. This is the athlete who renegotiates their contract so the team can bring on new players. This is the leader who sacrifices and struggles and puts their people ahead of their own comfort and needs. That’s what greatness is.
The Best Days Are Ahead: If you are coaching any athletes that are either not going to play at the next level or are getting near retirement, this is a post you should share with them about preparing for the next stage in life.
Trading is a young man’s game. Sports are a young man’s game. But even after you age out of those careers, you have so much wisdom and experience to offer the world.
PODCAST
Dr. Julie Gurner on The Knowledge Project podcast was an incredible listen on performance, motivation, discipline, and more. Check out two great quotes below (Apple | Spotify):
"I think that there are two ways of looking at things that have happened to you. You can be a victim or you can be a survivor. Those are two very different cognitive positions. You can’t control what happens to you in either circumstance, but one is very powerful. You have overcome. One is you have had something happen to you and you are under that thing for quite some period of time. For me, if I hear someone and I hear that helplessness, one is that I want to reframe that experience. I want to tell a different story. I want them to tell a different narrative to themselves. I want them to rewrite that. In some ways, you want them to rewrite that narrative to survivorship and overcoming and what it took. You ask the right questions to get them to see that their own throughway in that case is based on their strength and ability. You want them to see those things rather than seeing the helplessness and powerlessness."
"When people are telling me that “I’m doing this because of my childhood” or “I’m doing this because of this,” I think you’re giving up some amount of power. You’re giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself, and also how you’re interpreting that event is not useful to you. There may be a lot of truth to the terrible things that have happened, but those terrible things—you have to shut the door at some point and say, “I am my own man or woman, and I move forward. ... if you are somebody who uses other events as a reason to self-destruct, you’re ceding power… We see that even in companies—“I’m doing this because so-and-so made me angry. I’m doing this because…”—and you end up making some poor decisions and ceding power because of someone else. You’re willing to make a poor decision. You’re willing to give up. Sometimes people are willing to give up their entire future dreams because of X, Y, and Z, and it’s a tragedy. You want people to really understand the power they have to create their own lives at some point, and that creation is not given to anyone else but you.”
MISCELLANEOUS
Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer on the excellence reflex:
“People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn’t right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring, and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can’t train for. Either it’s there or it isn’t. So we need to train how to hire for it.”
Laurie Deschene on being kind to yourself:
"Even if you’ve made choices you wouldn’t make based on what you know now, you don’t deserve to feel inadequate, ashamed, unworthy, or inferior to anyone else. You don’t deserve the anguish of beating yourself up over the past, or the insatiable emptiness that comes from believing you’re fundamentally lacking. No matter where you’ve been, you deserve the opportunity to go where you’re going, less burdened by your own mind."
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