| If one of your New Year's resolutions was to read more, you may want to take inspiration from Philadelphia Eagles player A.J. Brown. The wide receiver was photographed reading a book called "Inner Excellence" on the sidelines of Sunday's playoff game (which the team won). The book, written by Jim Murphy, has topped Amazon's best seller's list since Monday. I sat down with Murphy to speak about the new eyes in his book, what inner excellence is really about, and what everyone—from football players to desk workers—can take away from its message. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Jim, let's start from the top. What is "inner excellence"? Well, it's really about being clear about what you want most. It's about asking yourself, "Why am I doing this? Why am I working? Like, what do I really want?" Because especially in America, there is this huge obsession about achievement, getting more financially successful and getting a better house, etc. Or this obsession with making more money and taking more trips to Europe. There's this obsession with that. But why is it like this? So it's really about the journey to the destination and not the achievement itself. Yes. Your own personal experience is coming from being and working with professional athletes. How can those who work traditional 9-to-5s also achieve this inner excellence? The thesis of the book really is that self-centeredness is the biggest challenge we face in performance and in life. It leads to fear, because your subconscious knows in your heart it's what's running your life. And it knows every weakness, every failure. And so when you think about yourself, it reminds yourself of that. So then you start to compare yourself to others and feel bad, then you get stressed and anxious. Whereas when you're performing your best at anything, all of us, whether it's you for a deadline or me coaching, or A.J. Brown catching footballs, we're our best when there's no thoughts about self. That's what inner excellence is about, is how you get to be fully alive and then everything in your life expands and improves. So how do you achieve it? The number one goal every day is to learn and grow. Within that are the four daily goals. Number one is to give your best shot every day. Give a hundred percent of what you have today. It's also really important to realize you're not gonna be your best all the time, and that's okay. That's life. You don't need to be at your best. We just want to give the best of what you have. Some days you're only gonna have 50% give, so give a hundred percent of that 50. Number two is to be present. When you're fully present, there's no fear. There's no past or future. There's no self concern, no self-protection. So inner excellence is really about mastering the ego, pursuing what you really want and the person you're meant to become. So you can live a life fully engaged heart, mind, body, independent of your result and circumstances. Number three is gratitude, which is directly linked to inner peace, inner strength and mental toughness. To improve your gratitude, we wanna look for three small moments every day. The smallest moments to train your subconscious to have more gratitude. And number four is to focus on your routines and only what you can control. The book's latest version was published five years ago. How was it finding out about this viral moment that led to so many people buying a copy this week? So it's interesting. I'm in downtown Dallas on Sunday, and I don't know anyone here except for my clients, and I haven't seen them yet. So I'm looking at this skyscraper and I'm all by myself, kind of lonely, and I look up at it and I was like, "huh, would I trade owning that skyscraper for having understood and written my second book?" And I thought I wouldn't. So really putting the Inner Excellence thinking into practice. I hadn't watched the [Eagles versus Packers] game yet, and then all these messages started coming into my phone and then everything unfolded. |
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