In light of Pete Carroll's departure from coaching, here's a brief excerpt from Do Hard Things. Carroll has helped move coaching away from authoritarian leadership and towards a more humanistic one.
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"It’s (Carroll's) job to give them the skills to handle adversity: Teaching guys how to feel confident enough to believe in what they've been prepared to do and believe in what they can do and they go out there and do it, he relayed. Carroll is trying to develop real toughness—a kind that replaces control with autonomy, appearance with substance, rigidly pushing forward with flexibility to adapt, motivation from fear with an inner drive, and insecurity with quiet confidence.”

The Power and Peril of Caring Deeply

(To read on TheGrowthEQ.com, click here.)

You've got to care deeply to do well in just about anything. It's what sport coaches, military leaders, and bosses spend so much time trying to instill: some combination of buy-in, passion, and motivation. Caring deeply about your craft is a ticket to improving.
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Except when it's not.

We often extol the virtues of caring, but we seldom discuss the risks that come with taking it too far, or in the wrong direction. I know this firsthand.

I’m a much more talented runner than writer. During my competitive days, that talent differential was reflected in my approach. I cared a lot about running, to the point of borderline obsession. I was detail orientated, making sure I got in every run, lift, or recovery session. I did the little things. I tried to optimize everything. I cared a lot, as I thought that was the path to high performance.

In writing, I care deeply as well. But not quite as much, and in a different way. I don't mind a typo here or there on a newsletter. I accept that I'll have some imperfect sentences in a book. I remind myself that my foremost goal is to spread ideas. I accept that I'm not going to write prose that rivals Twain or Tolstoy.

This difference could perhaps be best illustrated by how I'd handle a critique or failure in each endeavor. If I under performed in a race, it would sometimes feel like the end of the world. It attacked my sense of self; it cut deep, and the impact would linger. But if someone writes a critical review or tells me they don't like my book, sure I'm disappointed, but it's easy to brush it off. It doesn't feel personal.
​
I've arguably obtained more 'success' as a writer than I ever did as a runner. If caring deeply was the key to performance, how could this be the case?

During a recent press conference, college basketball coach Rick Pitino said, "When we lose, I f***ing hate the world....I want to kill myself and die of frost bite." Pitino has had a lot of success in his career, along with some controversy. But this hyperbolic statement on losing isn't uncommon in sports. Urban Meyer uttered similar words about losing, and pundits often talk about how powerful of a motivator hating losing is.

There are two kinds of striving: secure and insecure. The insecure variety comes from fear: fear of letting others down, of being exposed, of not living up to your (or others) expectations. Secure striving comes from wanting to win, to do your best, but realizing that it's not the end of the world if you fall short. There's a bit of space between you and the pursuit, and the motivation is primarily intrinsic. The incessant hatred of losing that Pitino expressed might sound good on the surface, but it often stems from insecurity.

In a study on striving, researchers found that insecure striving was associated with validation-seeking, unfavorable social comparison, submissiveness, and higher depression and anxiety. In fact, the researchers suggest that this shift towards insecure striving may be one of the reasons for the rise of depression in young adults

Too often we’re told we need to care more to perform. But if we leave it at that, we miss out. We need to care, but at the right point where we don’t get overly attached to the thing and lose perspective. Above all, we need the right intrinsic drivers and foundations behind that care. That's secure striving.
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In my own running, caring got in the way. While I may have started out striving securely, over time that moved towards the insecure variety. The drive to compete transformed from want to, to have to. It's the same in those who hate losing to an inordinate degree. You can dislike failure and be frustrated by it, but if it sends you spiraling out of control, it's likely that you are losing control. You are striving on an insecure basis.

I've always liked writing. But it's never been such a central part of my identity in the way running was. I've been able to stay in the joyful exploration stage. In other words, by and large I've been able to strive securely.

So maybe the old adage that we need to fall madly in love with a pursuit, become obsessed with it, care so deeply that it hurts, is the wrong ideal. A better piece of advice might be to care deeply, but not too much. That balance lightens the burden just enough so that you are free to perform to your potential. Fear and insecurity are designed to save our lives in the short term, to escape from the lion charging at us. But they aren't such great motivators when we have eighty-two basketball games a year to coach for decades.

– Steve​

Here are three things I learned from interviewing Kate Bowler, a professor of religious history, whose stage four cancer diagnosis at 35 years old changed how she thought about the promises made by today's billion-dollar self-improvement, health, and wellness industry.

1. Wellness has become its own form of spirituality, with deeply religious roots. American religion's "prosperity gospel" promised that true believers of God would be rewarded with health, wealth, and happiness. We've largely replaced God with diets, workouts, self-help books, and time management systems. It perpetuates the myth that we are masters of our universe, and that those who can't overcome their problems are failures. "The truth is we all struggle, we're all barely holding our lives together and we're frankly a lot more delicate than we pretend to be," Kate told me.

2. "It’s good to learn to try—and it’s good to learn to stop trying," Kate said. It's okay to care about self-betterment (we're big believers in that at The Growth Equation!), but it's equally as important to recognize there are certain problems that can't be solved through effort and control, and that those might be best served not by striving but with acceptance.

3. Orient yourself towards emotional flexibility rather than happiness. As a society, we are obsessed with pursuing happiness. But, as Kate learned, wanting to have a perfect day just compounds the frustration when your day is terrible instead. So she focuses instead on having a "wider aperture" and more tolerance for the beautiful and the terrible in each day. "That's why I started saying, have a beautiful, terrible day," said Kate. "If you can't have a lovely day, you can at least learn to kind of move through it and have a beautiful, terrible day." (This is the name of Kate's forthcoming book.)

Kate Bowler is this week's guest on FAREWELL, The Growth Equation's podcast. If you want to listen to her episode "How the Cult of Wellness is Failing Us," click the links below, or type "FAREWELL" into your preferred podcast app.

– Clay​

Listen to FAREWELL at the links below, or wherever else you get your podcasts:

• ​iTunes and Apple Podcasts​
• ​Spotify​
• ​Android​
• ​Stitcher​

• ​Dive into the enigmatic mind of Lions coach Dan Campbell.
• "Whenever I see someone touting the merits of, say, neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman’s $370 supplement stack, I’m tempted to go full PubMed on them. You really think the herbal extract Fadogia agrestis is going to boost your “health-span and muscle performance” based on an obscure study of male albino rats published by the Asian Journal of Andrology back in 2005? A grand total of zero human trials is what Huberman means by a “robust foundation of science”?" A great look at the harms and benefits of supplements from Alex Hutchinson.
• Rebecca Solnit with an important reminder that change happens not as it does in movies and stories—dramatically, quickly—but slowly, which requires continuing to show up and do the work even if progress isn't visible: "You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up."
• A longer, literary read on getting out of your mind and into the world via weightlifting: "Getting the Pump."​
• And, as always, some of our prior writing related to today's main piece:
  • ​Learning How to Lose Well​
  • ​To Perform Better, Be Joyfully Deliberate​
  • ​To Perform Your Best, Let Go​
  • ​The Key to a Strong Sense of Self: Diversify Your Identity​

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Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter,

Brad, Steve, and Clay

P.s., if someone forwarded this email to you, you can sign up to get our weekly email here.

To Learn more and go deeper, check out our books:

• ​Master of Change​
• ​Do Hard Things​
• ​The Practice of Groundedness​
• ​Peak Performance ​

For daily insights, ideas, and practices, be sure to follow us online:

Twitter: @Bstulberg and @Stevemagness​
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