Win the Inside Game: How to Perform at Your Best Without Losing Yourself

What Steve Magness is teaching me about performance, perfection, and finding joy in the process.

This summer, I read the book, Win the Inside Game by Steve Magness, and I don’t know that I’ve ever highlighted so much of a book.

I’ve followed Magness’s work for more than 15 years, first as a runner interested in his research on training and performance, and more recently through books like Do Hard Things, and some other hard things he has been involved with. But this latest book has challenged me in a different way, because, for the most part, I find what he’s writing about so difficult to put into practice.

How do we pursue excellence without losing the joy that made us want to do something in the first place?

That’s the question I keep coming back to.

Chasing a Finish Line That Doesn’t Exist

During a recent Leadership Vision Podcast conversation with Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring about the book (we all read it over the summer), we spent a lot of time discussing our culture’s obsession with achievement.

There’s always another promotion, another championship, another race, another merger, another goal. And when we attach our identity to those outcomes, we can find ourselves chasing something we’ll never quite reach.

As I said during our conversation:

“When you put your sense of self or identity in that, it’s like you’re trying to reach a destination that doesn’t exist.”

Brian talked about how high performers can become conditioned to seek the next accomplishment, often at the expense of their emotional health, relationships, and enjoyment of the process.

I recognize some of that in myself.

As a runner, I love setting goals and working toward them. But I’ve also experienced the strange emptiness that sometimes follows achieving something I’ve worked toward for months. Almost immediately, the question becomes, What’s next?

Is it possible to pursue something wholeheartedly without allowing the result to determine how we feel about ourselves?

Good, Better, Best

This year, I’m coaching my kids’ school’s 3rd through 8th grade cross country team. And from the beginning, I’ve tried to keep one goal front and center.

I want the kids to have fun.

Of course, I want them to work hard, build endurance, and discover what they’re capable of. But most of all, I want them to enjoy running and being part of a team. I want them to feel like they pushed themselves, even just a little bit more, than they thought they could. And maybe that will lead to confidence in other areas.

I’ve adopted a simple philosophy I call Good, Better, Best. I’ve borrowed this from Chicago Bears head coach Ben Johnson, with lots of my own adaptations.

The idea is simple… Wherever you are today is good. But can you push yourself out of your comfort zone to get a little better tomorrow? And then, can you work toward becoming the best version of yourself, whatever that looks like? It’s not about being faster than someone else. It’s about making progress in a way that makes sense for you.

But I struggle with this, too. So much! This is true for me in lots of areas, but let’s use running for a moment since it’s a simple example…

Running is a sport defined by numbers. After my most recent race, I compared my time to last year’s time. I looked at how I did in my overall place, my age-group place, and my gender place. My “best” in these categories is constantly changing. And isn’t part of the joy of competition seeing what we’re capable of? Seeing how we can improve and push ourselves?

On page 169, Magness tells a short story about legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. He talks about how he was finally able to enjoy competition:

“By detaching from the competition and letting go, you can free yourself up to perform.”
— Steve Magness, Win the Inside Game

I love this idea. But how do you actually do it? Seriously, how? How do you encourage a kid to run their hardest without worrying about their finishing place? Or challenge yourself to run a personal best without becoming consumed by the clock?

Or let’s take this to a less objective area, how do you encourage an employee to put in the time or effort on a project without external incentives? How do you strive to be the “best” leader you can be without some sort of financial gain?

I’m not convinced the answer is to stop caring about outcomes.

Maybe it’s about learning to hold them a little more loosely.

What’s something you’re striving toward right now? Are you pursuing it because you genuinely love the process, or because of what you hope achieving it will say about you?

Loving the Journey, Not Just the Outcome

One of my favorite moments from our podcast conversation came when Brian said:

“There’s greater power in the love of the journey than there is in the power of the outcome.”

That really stuck with me.

To go back to running… Some of my best races haven’t necessarily been my fastest. They’ve been the ones where I was enjoying the experience, connecting with people around me, and not obsessing over a particular result. Some of my best parenting moments haven’t been ones where the perfectly planned trip went off without a hitch. And some of my favorite things we’ve done at Leadership Vision haven’t been about a perfect outcome, but about the process of building something that has no obvious outcome.

Brian and Linda often talk about how the best leaders they’ve worked with often approach success similarly. They have high expectations, but they also recognize the importance of creating conditions where people can learn, contribute, and grow without sacrificing their well-being.

During our podcast conversation, Linda emphasized the importance of belonging, of helping people feel valued for who they are rather than simply what they accomplish.

“How do we not just give up the whole of our identity, but really find a way to bring our diversity into the belonging?”

That feels like such an important distinction, whether we’re talking about leading an organization or coaching a bunch of kids.

Maybe letting go isn’t about abandoning our goals. Maybe it’s about loosening our grip on what those goals mean about us.

Progress Over Perfection

Toward the end of the book, Magness identifies love, connection, and joy as common threads among some of the world’s greatest performers. They don’t just love winning. They love what they’re doing, and perhaps even more importantly, the process of doing it.

Of course, as Linda pointed out, you can’t simply tell a high performer to stop striving and start enjoying the journey. There can be a lot of unlearning involved. And perhaps this is where the Good, Better, Best perspective might offer us a helpful starting point.

• We’re not striving for perfection.
• We’re hoping to make progress.

And maybe that’s one of the most important things we can do as leaders, coaches, parents, humans:

create environments where people feel free to improve without being defined by their performance.

Because what if performing at our best actually requires us to stop holding ourselves to impossibly high standards?

What if we could work hard, pursue excellence, and still find joy in the process?

I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.

I realize the stakes are different in business, where outcomes have very real consequences. But I wonder how much of this approach still applies. If the kids I coach finish the season having worked hard, improved in ways that matter to them, learned something about their capabilities, and genuinely enjoyed running, I’ll consider that a success.

Regardless of what the clock says.

Where might you be holding yourself, or someone you lead, to a standard of perfection rather than progress? What might change if you focused on creating the conditions for growth instead of controlling the outcome?

Keep the Conversation Going

On the Leadership Vision Podcast, I sat down with Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring to explore Steve Magness’s Win the Inside Game, the challenge of balancing achievement with well-being, and what leaders can learn from the world’s highest performers.

Listen to the episode: Win the Inside Game: How to Perform at Your Best Without Losing Yourself.