The book that's messing with my head (in the best way)

I don't usually write about books.
No one wants a book report.
But I picked one up recently that I can't stop thinking about, so here we are.

It's called Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy. A football player was spotted reading it on the sidelines during a game. Made national news. Sean and I both heard, read, and recorded what is now my favorite episode of Sales Life (ever), and it’s based on this book. Technically, we never made it past the first chapter.

Here’s a trailer:

I thought it was going to be a performance book. A "how to close more deals, be more disciplined, wake up at 5 am club" book.

Nope.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all about winning… but not how you think.

The premise is simple:

There are two roads. One is external. IE, you're chasing status, wins, the commission check, the car (not Sean he doesn’t care about cars), and/or what people think of you. You want to be seen performing. This hits home.

The other road is internal. IE, you're building from the inside out, and winning becomes a…

…byproduct.

That’s it. That’s the deal. Winning is a byproduct of producing inner excellence.

You want extraordinary performance? That's the same path as wanting the best possible life. You can't separate them.

I've spent a lot of years thinking the goal was to close more deals. To hit bigger numbers. Hit my crazy expectations of myself (good luck). And honestly, some of that is still in me. But the book puts a mirror up to that and asks:

Why? Why do you want that?

Turns out, for a lot of us — myself included — the answer traces back to fear. And this is the part that really got me.

Murphy defines fear as self-centeredness. Not selfishness in the way people use that word. Self-centeredness as in: you think it's all on you. You think your survival, your family's security, your future — it's all yours to manufacture. That weight sits on your shoulders alone, so you're constantly scanning for threats, constantly measuring yourself against some invisible benchmark you never quite hit.

That's fear. And that fear pulls you out of the present moment — which is the only place real performance, real connection, real life actually happens.

Planning the next thing while the current thing was happening right in front of me. Torture.

Here's what I'm taking into my work right now:

The casual workday — the one where you picked up the phone at 8:30 and suddenly it's 5:45 — the book says that workday can be thrilling if you're fully absorbed in it. And you can be high-performing. Not forcing yourself to be present. Actually present. Experiencing it fully, vividly, without your mind already racing to what's next.

I want that. I don't have it every day. But I want it.

One ask I make of our listeners in this episode is one I’ve been doing myself: write down your insecurities. The ones that impair you in some way. The ones that make you self-conscious. Because self-consciousness is your attention turned back on yourself — and when that happens in sales, you miss everything that actually matters in the room.

Tackle that. Freedom follows.

More on this soon.

—Justin

P.S. If you want to hear the full conversation, the episode is up now. As I said, it’s my favorite we’ve posted.