Steve Magness (@stevemagness)

Some of the best sprint coaches in history are slow white guys who can't sprint. Some of the best endurance coaches in history look like they couldn't jog a mile. There's a difference between coaching & doing If you judge a book by its cover, you may miss out on brilliance....

There is a mathematical formula for growth. A study in Nature found that to maximize learning, you should aim to fail 15% of the time. Too easy? You drift. Too hard? You quit. It's the 85% Rule. The sweet spot for difficulty....

We need to do hard things. We live in a meta-world filled with cheap feelings and superficial connections. We get outraged online to simply feel something again... We are starving for feeling alive. Taking on meaningful challenges is the path....

We think that positive self-talk is the key to high performance. Just tell yourself "I can do this" and you will succeed. A fascinating new study suggests we are missing a crucial ingredient. It turns out, your body has to believe your mind. They need to be in sync for self-talk to have an i...

A new study shows why it's far easier to maintain or rebuild fitness, than it is to build it in the first place. Your cells retain an "epigenetic memory" of training. Even after a long layoff, they are primed to adapt at a cellular level. It's as if your body remembers, "I've been here before." ...

How you act in church is different from how you act watching football after. We all code-switch and play different roles. This shifting is actually a powerful tool for high performance. In performance psych, we call it adopting an alter ego: 99, Black Mamba, Agent Zero, Sasha Fierce, Slim Shady ...

At the 1928 Olympics, women could run something longer than a sprint for the first time. They raced the 800. Disaster quickly ensued. Just about every paper reported the same thing: 5 women dropped out, Everyone else collapsed. It was chaos. And dangerous. As a result, women would barred from any...

We've got the saying wrong. It's not quality over quantity. It's quality in the quantity you can sustain. One frames it as a tradeoff. The other frames it as a practice. Sustainable excellence requires both working together....

Creative breakthroughs rarely occur when you're grinding. They arrive during the "in-between" times: the hot shower, the long walk, or while mindlessly chopping vegetables. Yet, our modern world is hellbent on crowding these moments out. We treat silence like a vacuum that must be filled...with...