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NEWSLETTER & ARTICLES

The Growth Equation Newsletter

Receive weekly insights on the art and science of success from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Join over 40,000 subscribers and unlock your full potential with our weekly newsletter. Every Thursday, we share original articles and links on cultivating a more enduring and fulfilling kind of success and excellence, along with practical tips for day-to-day application.

ARTICLES Archive

Doing the Tough Stuff

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Do Hard Things turns one today. The title of the book implies one of its main messages: embrace discomfort. When we embrace discomfort, it changes how we handle the tough stuff. A study that came out after the book was…

Predicting Potential is Messy

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Track and field is the most objective and straightforward sport there is: did you run faster than the other person or not? When it came to recruiting high school runners when I was a college coach, it should have been…

Big Food, Big Pharma, and Wanting versus Liking

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Millions of people experiencing overweight and obesity are losing significant amounts of body fat for the first time, thanks to Ozempic and other drugs like it in a new class of obesity medications called semaglutides. Though the mechanisms by which…

Don’t Trust Your Gut Unless It’s Calibrated

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Imagine you are walking down a dimly lit street at night in a foreign city. Your shoulders tense up, unease courses through your body, and you become hyper-aware. Just about any sound grabs your attention. You notice strangers, especially if…

Beyond Work-Life Balance

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It is impossible to be the perfect friend, athlete, parent, partner, employee, read 50 books every year, stay up to date on the TV shows everyone is talking about, do all the “self-care” things, and on and on and on.…

Listen to Kobe: Spend Time Alone in Your Head

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“How do you negotiate with your self. That’s the biggest thing.” — Kobe Bryant. When one of history’s greatest basketball players tells us about the power of navigating your inner world, we should listen. We all intuitively know this. We…

Infinite Games vs. Finite Games and Giannis’s Failure

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A few weeks back, the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. The Bucks entered as the one seed. The Miami Heat, the team who beat them, entered as the eight seed. In the immediate…

Why We See Threats Everywhere

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Go for a walk around your neighborhood during the day. Are you constantly stressed, on the lookout for potential danger around you? For many of us (though certainly not all), we can mindlessly walk the sidewalks, daydreaming as we mosey…

How to Regulate Your Nervous System

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Take a big inhale, hold your breath for five seconds, and release over three seconds to regulate your nervous system, posts a large Instagram account. If your attachments aren’t secure, your nervous system won’t be either, writes a psychologist on Twitter.…

Finding Your Optimum Zone to Perform to Your Potential

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This curve is helpful for a variety or pursuits. It outlines the relationship between stress (or physiological arousal) and performance. How do you get in the best place to perform? You find the goldilocks of physiological arousal: too little and…

The Difference Between Judging Your Experience and Living It

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If you stop whatever you are doing and ask yourself, Am I happy? odds are, you won’t be as happy as you just were. The worst way to be happy is to ask yourself if you are happy. Same goes for all…

The Dangers of Going All-In

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By all accounts, it seemed like a success story. At 17 years old, he’d bet on himself. He and his brother packed their bags and moved from the comparatively affluent New Zealand to Kenya, home of the top runners in…

A Better Way to Optimize

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Setting a goal on the edge of your comfort zone and letting it consume you can be as meaningful and invigorating as it gets. Whether it’s a big creative project, an athletic feat, or falling in love, there’s something to…

The Key to Peak Performance? Love.

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Lessons from The Edge: Understanding Peak Performance. The panel featured Olav Aleksander Bu, the Norwegian triathlon coach to Olympic gold medalist and…

A Weight Gain Theory of Everything

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By now you’ve probably heard about a new class of drugs called semaglutides. They were recently approved by the FDA for weight loss. In clinical trials, participants lost astonishing amounts of weight. And so long as they continued taking the…