Schmexcellence vs. Excellence

What it Actually Takes vs. What the Internet Says

This weekend we had two perfect encapsulations of what we’ve come to call schmexcellence: something that has the veneer of excellence, that looks like it’s about performing well and stretching your limits, but when you peel back the window-dressing, you realize it’s anything but.

Podcasters Freaking Out About Sleep Scores

First, there was a popular podcast host ​talking​ about how a few glasses of wine “ruined three days of my life... I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse, and I could track all of this on my Whoop.”

To be clear, I’m not encouraging drinking. I rarely drink, if ever. And if you have a history of substance abuse, it’s even more important not to. And of course alcohol can decrease sleep quality for a night. But this is about how the idea of letting a metric creating a self-fulfilling anxiety disorder. When you outsource your perception of readiness to a metric, your brain and body go where the metric demands. It creates fragility.

The schmexcellence is right there in the explanation. You’ve got two hormones mentioned to create the allure of sciencyness, even though the explanations make little sense. (Writing this post is causing a change in dopamine and rooting for the Detroit Lions spikes your cortisol—so what?) And then the kicker of a tracking system that told him his life was ruined, when in reality, that tracker creates a self-fulfilling feedback loop that causes you to spiral. It seems the most likely case is the podcast host couldn’t perform well because the tracker told him so, and it had a built in explanation (I drank some wine three days ago). Contrast that with an elite performer. They don’t let the marker dictate their day. They know that they can still have a great workout or race even if they feel poor when they wake up or warm up.

History is littered with examples of elite performers doing crazy things in sub-par situations. Don Bowden became the first American to break the 4-minute mile after he didn't "feel much like running, I haven't been sleeping." Herb Elliott set the world record after feeling so poorly and not sleeping that he was convinced he was sick…He wasn’t. Even in knowledge work, my recent book was written with 2 kids under the age of 2, with sleep being a rarity. And I’m certainly not alone in that case. Millions of parents do something similar.

The point isn’t whether alcohol impacts sleep or not (Hint: it can). But that real excellence isn’t about being optimized every day. It’s a fool’s errand. And striving for optimum often gets in the way. It stokes perfectionism, which research tells us may boost performance a tad in the short run, but over the long haul increases fear of failure, anxiety, stress, and burnout. Which all get in the way of actually performing to the best of our ability.

Life is messy! Trying to make things perfect is a futile, losing battle. Control the controllables, but don’t obsess over every little thing always. Doing so actually decreases your performance.

The Steroid Olympics

For our second example of schmexcellence, we’ll turn to the Steroid Olympics, a Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr venture that promised athletes full of testosterone, HGH, EPO, and peptides that would redefine what was possible. On the surface they said it was all about exploring human potential, “transparency,” and seeing what athletes could do when uninhibited.

In reality, it seems more like the top of a sales-funnel for steroids masquerading as sport.

The long game is to sell peptides and other drugs to the person watching at home, the young man or woman feeling inadequate because his or her peak athletic moment came decades ago, back when they scored four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School. It’s a marketing gimmick. And the results showed this to the case.

There was a single performance that barely beat a world record. And it was in swimming, where most of the benefit came from using super suits that were banned a decade ago because they gave such an advantage. In running, things were even worse.

Despite non-stop hyping of world record attempts, every enhanced man who ran was closer to the women’s world record than the men’s. Only one enhanced man would have even scored at this years Texas high school state meet. How bad was it? The Growth Equation’s own Nate Mechler, who was a decathlete and not a sprinter, would have pocketed $20,000 if he’d ran his clean PR...

On the women’s side, it was even worse. Somehow the enhnaced games took world class sprinters and made them slower. No, not just than when they were at their prime, but from their most recent competitive season. Despite being filled with testosterone and HGH and whatever else, they made folks slower... They took talented sprinters and made them look talentless, most of them running slower than they did as teenagers.

Look, steroids work. They just do. Yet, somehow they screwed even that up.

And that’s the point. This was a tech-bro fever dream where arrogance was prioritized over any actual knowledge of performance. They thought if they just gave athletes fistfulls of drugs, they’d get amazing performances, without understanding what it really takes and the time, talent, and hard work it requires to reach something so rare.

Which isn’t too dissimilar from what they’re selling everyone else in their marketing scheme. If you just take this peptide, supplement, or whatever, you too can get strong, healthy, or whatever it is their promising. When most of it is nonsense. There’s no understanding of actual performance underneath it. When you don’t understand actual excellence, you have to sell a story, you have to sell schmexcellence.

The Normalization of Cheating

Do you remember the kid in high school who tried to convince you that everyone cheated? They were trying to normalize cheating. Mostly so they could rationalize their own laziness. After all, if everyone did it, what was the problem?

We see the same thing in sport. Every doper who’s ever been caught, or their doctor, screams that everyone is cheating. They do it for the same reason the high school kid did. They’re trying to rationalize and justify their choices: they aren’t a bad person, that they didn’t really do anything wrong.

And that’s exactly what the Enhanced Games are doing when they try to convince you they’re being “honest” by telling you everyone cheats. It’s why their CEO walked around telling you that a study said “almost 50%” of elite athletes were doping,” without stating that the initial survey included a large number of people who just clicked through the survey so fast that it was clear they didn’t read any of it. When this sampling bias was found and the study repeated, the number dropped to 13%. Other research puts it at between 6-9%. That’s still 6-9% too many athletes who cheat, but it’s also a small minority.

We’ve coached, worked with, and trained with some of the best in the world who are doing it clean. And while yes, elite athletes cheat, the “everyone is doing it” line does sport a disservice. When you default to “everyone is cheating,” it’s not about transparency. You’re trying to shift the narrative so you can get away with manipulating people for your own benefit. Psychologists call it the normalization of deviance. It’s a lowering of the bar so you can get away with deviant behavior. In a recent article, the writer Derek Thompson called it vicemaxxing: everyone is corrupt so I might as well be corrupt and if you aren’t corrupt you are a naive pushover. Another word for that is nihilism.

Do you really want to live in a society where cheating is the norm? Is that what we want in our schools? Do we just shrug and say, “Well, kids are going to use AI for everything anyway, so let’s forget about teaching them how to write or think. Just let them use it on everything”? Of course not.

The Actual Pursuit of Greatness

Somewhere along the way, we forgot the point of competition, or even just pursuing excellence in your craft. It’s not about optimizing your routine so that you have a great recovery score. It’s not about a “win at all costs” mentality where you throw all ethics out the window.

The point of stepping into the arena is to challenge yourself, learn and grow, and figure out how to show up and overcome even, and perhaps especially, on the days where you don’t feel that good. It’s about putting in an enormous amount of work to come face to face with your limits.

It’s also about striving together. Yes, we want to win. But anyone who’s actually been in the arena understands that you relish great competitors because they bring out the best in you. True competitors don’t want easy victories. They want to be challenged.

Excellence is about being part of something bigger. There’s a reason the bonds you form during high school football or cross-country or band or theater hold up across decades. Laying it on the line and performing forces you to be vulnerable and real. It lets you see your friends break down and cry after a brutal loss, and then you help them stand back up.

Yes, there’s idealism in this. And yes, sport, like every part of society, will always have its corrupt side. But we don’t have to give up the fight for some semblance of normalcy. We don’t have to hand over one of the last places where reality still wins, where performance doesn’t have to be the Instagramified version of sport, where you can just get a new filter, change your appearance, adopt a new persona. It might get you some cheap likes and follows. But there’s nothing real about it.

We don’t have to settle for a tech-bro dystopian steroid Olympics.

Actual excellence is about coming face to face with your own limits. It’s about doing the work, and still sometimes falling short. You have to accept and embrace reality. The day we forget that is the day we hand over the only part of sport that was ever worth watching. It’s never been about the end result. It’s always been about how you play the game and who you became along the way. Even at the highest level.

-Steve