Chasing Excellence book best quotes
On a recent plane ride I read Chasing Excellence by Ben Bergon. I really liked the book and resonated with a lot of ideas discussed. It was one of those reads that manages to articulate some of your intuitions and then build on top of them in ways you hadn't managed to get to by yourself.
Here's some of my favorite excerpts and quotes, I like collecting words so see this as a collection of words with the common theme being they come from the same place.
On the mentality of Mat Fraser (the Crossfit GOAT)
Mat consciously, every day, seeks out things he might be bad at. When he finds weaknesses, he doesn’t just work on them—he eviscerates them. One of the events he struggled with at the 2013 North East Regional was “Jackie,” a CrossFit benchmark workout of rowing, barbell thrusters, and pull-ups. He got dusted on the row—the other men were pulling 1:40 splits, and he was struggling to hold on to 1:50. That put him twenty seconds slower than the leaders, which was an enormous, unsurmountable gap. Relative to his competitors, he straight-up sucked at rowing. After Regionals, he went home, bought a rower, and for the next year, he rowed 4,000 to 5,000 meters of intervals—every day.
On mental reframes
Down on the beach, the complaining continues. Games documentarian Sevan Matossian asks one of the women, a three-year Games veteran, how she’s feeling after yesterday’s slugfest at the Ranch. Her response was included in the CrossFit-produced behind-the-scenes 2016 Games documentary: Waiting in the airport for so long at night, then having to get up really early, was really tiring. It’s already a lot harder than it was two years ago. The first day—everything from getting up early to three workouts in one day—that was a lot harder than what we did in 2014, when all we did on the first day was an ocean swim and then an overhead squat. I felt a lot better going into Thursday. And now we’re swimming on Thursday, so we don’t even get a rest day.
A few minutes later, Sevan finds Katrín, who is emerging from a warm-up dip in the surf. He asks her the same question. Here’s what she says I feel good! I was able to sleep a lot yesterday. I slept on the airport floor, I slept the whole plane ride, then I slept for five hours when I got into bed. I feel really good. I’m happy about that. Love that we get to go straight through with no rest day, love that. The more volume, the better. That’s great. So far it’s been amazing.
On Stoicism
At my gym, there’s an unbreakable threefold policy:
NEVER WHINE.NEVER COMPLAIN.NEVER MAKE EXCUSES.
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.
As Ryan Holiday writes in The Obstacle Is the Way, “There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.” If your story is telling you you’re not good enough, not smart enough, too old, too young, or can’t do it, your subconscious will believe you.
On adversity
Elite athletes know something that most people don’t—adversity is the best thing that can happen to you. The competitors here at the Games know that humans only improve through adversity by embracing short-term pain. Ensuring there is no struggle, no challenge, and staying in your wheelhouse is a recipe for spinning your wheels without improving. It’s the days when you have to do things that scare you, when you have to take risks, when you have to push against challenge and difficulty—those are the days that make you stronger, faster, and better overall.
On autonomy
Racehorses are special. They’re not like just any other horse—they’re elite athletes, and they know it. They train with heart monitors, they do interval workouts, they have coaches and massage therapists, they eat a special diet, and they have recovery protocols. It sounds like I’m describing a human athlete, and I very well could be, because top racehorses and top human athletes are similar in just about every way but one. That one difference is crucial, and it gives racehorses a huge advantage over us: racehorses can’t think for themselves.
I get it; that doesn’t sound like an advantage. But think about it: racehorses are incapable of second-guessing their coaches, overanalyzing their performance, or logging junk miles. They’re unable to sandbag a workout if they’re not feeling up for training on a particular day. They don’t look at the other racehorses and compare themselves, or wonder if they’re with the right coach and training program. On race day, they don’t walk by the stalls of their competitors and think, Holy crap, look at the legs on him! How am I going to compete with that? Racehorses just perform. They can’t second-guess anything, and they have no biological choice but to have a laser focus on the task at hand. They’re able to do what we try to get our human athletes to do, as naturally as breathing. When they win, they don’t change anything about their routine, and they aren’t fundamentally changed. The next day is just another training day because winning (or losing) is part of the process, not the endpoint.
Racehorses aren’t biologically capable of understanding what their competitors are doing. They’re completely focused on themselves. That’s where I want my athletes. If an athlete’s goal is to beat their competitor, then, by definition, they’re not reaching their full potential—they’re simply clearing the bar of the next guy’s potential.
On deliberate practice
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 requirement for concentration is what sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless routine performance and playful engagement. The takeaway here is that while hard work is instrumental to success, it’s not enough. Obviously, the CrossFit Games does not hand out medals based on who spent the most time in the gym. Katrín didn’t win the Games last year because she logged more hours in the gym than all the other women. She won the Games because of the quality of those hours
I know you want me to let you in
on some big secret to success in the NBA. The secret is there is no secret. It’s just boring old habits.
On goals
Mat and Katrín have figured out the secret: that there is no secret. The process is about doing your job to the best of your ability, and Katrín and Mat wield it like a weapon. Do they want to win the CrossFit Games? Absolutely. But we don’t talk about it, and we certainly don’t make it a goal. Because what’s more important to success than a bold and courageous goal is developing a system—a process—to get there
On accepting what you cannot control
I listen to the buzz with growing content. This is the part of the process from which my athletes derive a considerable competitive advantage. 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.
All of this is summed up by the tattoo on Mat’s left arm—the Serenity Prayer. You’ve heard it before: 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. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not—this is exactly the mantra you want to lean in to. Let go of what you can’t change. Make room for the things you can.
Chapter Openings
The book opens every chapter with a quote, some of the quotes were absolute bangers, here they are
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. —THOMAS EDISON
Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but
you’ve actually been planted. —UNKNOWN
When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have
fun, you can do amazing things. —JOENAMATH
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI
Only those who have the patience to do things perfectly will acquire the
skills to do difficult things easily. —FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
Published on 2024-07-16