Ben Chamness

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

James Clear on movement:

“Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking. You don't need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.”

[NBA @NBA]

"I think when you are a father... you realize it's longer about you. It's everybody in the house, it's about them first..."

Powerful words from Mikel Brown Jr.'s dad on making sacrifices!

[Karun Pal @karunpal]

Discipline means creating order within yourself. Without that order, you live in chaos. One part of you wants growth. Another wants comfort. One part wants peace. Another chases distractions. One part wants meaning. Another runs toward instant pleasure. And slowly, you become exhausted from fighting yourself. Real discipline is not forcing yourself to wake up at 5 am because someone online told you to. Or following routines that make you miserable. Real discipline is alignment. When your actions reflect your values. When your habits support the person you want to become. When your mind, body, and soul finally stop fighting each other. That’s when life starts to flow. And it happens when you 'slow down' enough to really understand what you rhythm feels like.

[J.P. Hovey @jhovey34]

Honestly was not expecting Eric Church to give one of the best commencement speeches of all time.

Chief CRUSHED this 🫡

[Greg Berge @GregBerge]

Rick Pitino said it best.

Love without discipline spoils.
Discipline without love hardens.

You need both.

[The Winning Difference @thewinningdiff1]

“The most powerful thing in a team sport is a player led program.
You have to help them navigate it.
But, when you can get them to own these moments, you are just so much better.”
🎥@Thomasdunn24

[James Clear @JamesClear]

You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m increasingly convinced that life gets more interesting when you embrace the boring. Success isn't flashy. It's built through disciplined routines. If you need constant novelty, you won't make it very far. To shine in the light, you have to embrace the boring work in the dark.

[Brad Sparling @playgolfcollege]

Early in my coaching career I had a talented player who was chronically five minutes late to everything. Not egregiously late. Just five minutes, every single time. I let it slide because he was good and I didn’t want the conflict.

Within a month, half the team was showing up five minutes late. Nobody said a word. The standard just drifted.

That’s when it hit me. You’re either actively maintaining your standards or you’re passively lowering them. There’s no neutral position.

I’ve also learned that expectations and standards aren’t the same thing, and that distinction matters more than most people realize.

Expectations are the vision. The why. In my programs they’ve always been simple. Have fun. Create great experiences and relationships. Learn and grow. That’s the emotional foundation everything else gets built on.

Standards are the daily behaviors that actually get you there. Be on time. Be trustworthy. Have a growth mindset and work hard. Take responsibility for your actions. Encourage the people around you. Don’t make excuses.

When those are clear and consistent something interesting happens. The standard becomes the authority, not the coach. I don’t have to lecture anyone. I just point to what we all agreed on. The conversation stays about the behavior, not the person. That’s where real accountability lives without anyone feeling attacked.

What I’ve seen over 25 years is that the teams, families, and programs that define these things clearly and hold them consistently almost always outperform the ones with similar talent that don’t.

It’s not magic. It’s just clarity. People do better when they know exactly where the lines are. Kids especially. They don’t struggle in high standard environments. They struggle in ambiguous ones.

Whatever you walk past becomes your new standard. The good news is it works in both directions. Raise the bar and hold it, and the people around you will rise to meet it. Every time.

[The Players’ Tribune @PlayersTribune]

“You have three older brothers that now look up to you. You will always be our champion.”

As Haley Winn gets ready for @TeamUSA’s gold medal game against Canada, her brothers, Casey, Ryan and Tommy, leave their sister an encouraging and heartwarming voicemail. ❤️

@usahockey | @Olympics

[Tiny Buddha @tinybuddha]

"You can be both gentle and strong. Kind and firm. Compassionate and clear. A calm voice can still make a point, and it’s often better received.” ~Lori Deschene

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“This is the real secret of life: To be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

— Alan Watts

[Words of Wise | Mindset Coach @Wordofwise_]

This will help you get back when you hit rock bottom.

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

Ilia Malinin hadn't lost in 2 years.

Two time world champ. The only human to land all of the quad jumps.

Then...his brain betrayed him.

"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there. And I just did not handle it."

Choking is a threat disorder. Your brain is a prediction machine. Before any big moment, it calculates:

Past experience + current environment + the story you're telling yourself = predicted state.

When that prediction is threat, your brain protects. It latches on to confirming evidence. Ignores the rest. Fear feeds the prediction. The prediction feeds the fear.

Malinin experienced this in real time. He stumbled in the team event days before. His brain coded "Olympics = danger." It had evidence to support the spiral. By the free skate, the loop was cemented.

"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head."

His brain was no longer in the present. It was prosecuting the past. Replaying every negative voice or experience to try to convince him to run away, to escape the situation.

His protective brain was on overdrive, and his brain was convinced the situation was life or death.

When an expert chokes, they regress. The brain shifts from autopilot to micromanagement. Our smooth, automated movements become segmented, like a six-year-old learning to throw a ball. This is partly because with the heightened threat state, the link between perception and action gets severed.

Nothing "feels" right. And we compensate by over-controlling. So we're thinking about every step along the way. And the end result is disaster.

Malinin's quad axel requires mass amounts of trust in thousands of hours of training.

Under threat, his conscious mind tried to control what should have been automatic. It's like pulling back a slingshot and instead of letting it go, trying to push it forward.

What drives our brain to move from slight underperformance to "choking" disaster?

1. Identity Cementation

This threat gets turned up to 11 if our sense of self is deeply intertwined with the outcome.

Malinin arrived as the Quad God. It's his Instagram handle, on his warm-up gear, it's his identity.

When your identity IS the performance, your brain treats failure as existential.

The brain doesn't register "I might lose." It registers "I might lose myself."

When Rick Ankiel got the yips, he explained it in similar terms, "I made the mistake of thinking, being good at baseball is what made me who I was. When that glass is shattered, there was nothing left. Going from baseball's prodigy and poster boy. All of the sudden you are blindsided. You're the most vulnerable you've ever been, and everybody can see right through you."

The harsh irony of performing well is you have to care a lot, and try hard...But caring and trying can be your downfall. Your brain registers caring as a signal that this is sefl-defining, you prime the fear/threat centers, and before you know it, your brain's stress response is freezing, fleeing, dissociating to protect itself.

The key is to care a lot...but having just enough space between you and the thing...

2. Mistake Spiral

The second item that causes us to move from underperformance to choking is the compounding of our mistakes.

Research shows that after a mistake, we get a distinct error signal, an involuntary attention shift, and what amounts to an internal handbrake: motor commands temporarily get suppressed.

If we linger there, the pause becomes rumination. The rumination transforms into catastrophizing.

It's why processing mistakes and failures, taking away their sting is so important.

3. Judgement --> Self-Protection

We don’t choke in practice.

We do so when we are being evaluated or judged, and in front of others. When something meaningful is at stake and we have an audience.

We have a social self-preservation system that is on the lookout for anything that might threaten our social status.

If our self-preservation system is inundated with constant signs and signals that our social status is going in the wrong direction, our system becomes hyperresponsive.
---
So how do we get out of protection mode?

1. Acknowledge the moment is big. Don't fight it.

2. Build an identity broader than any single performance.

3. Be the defense attorney. Give yourself evidence.

4. Find something you can control. The smallest thing you can impact that moves you forward

5. Surround yourself with people who love and care for you no matter what. Good vibes are contagious

6. Simulate the worse. Michael Phelps called it playing the tape. And you have to visualize the disaster, to make sure your brain doesn't freak out.

Before the Olympics, Malinin told ESPN he was treating it "like any other competition."

Afterward: "I honestly definitely underestimated it."

This is one of the most common pieces of advice in sport. Your brain isn't dumb. It sees the Olympic rings, the cameras, and the weight of expectation.

When you tell yourself "just another day" and your brain knows it isn't, the mismatch doesn't calm the system. It alarms it further. It's a prediction error that alerts the brain that our previous stress response isn't good enough. This is NOT just another day, so sound the alarm. And...we overshoot the response, moving to full dread.

It's not too different than what runners experience during preliminary races. They think, this is going to be easy, I should qualify with ease and be able to run slower. But...that mindset primes the brain to overreact to the first sign of discomfort.

The day before he set the world record in the mile (3:51), Jim Ryun wrote in his log "That was hard!" for a 4:07 prelim mile. He ran 16 seconds faster in the final, reporting it "felt easy." The only difference was the expectations going in.

Don't pretend the moment is small. Acknowledge reality. And remind yourself that you are prepared to meet it.

The best of the best feel the same nerves you do.

The same doom loop fires when you freeze during a presentation, go blank in a job interview, or can't find the words in a hard conversation.

It's a human problem. A stress response designed to protect us from lions, tigers, and where being separated from the tribe went death.

We can't fight biology. But we can learn to work with it better.

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

Ilia Malinin was crowned the biggest star of the Olympics before even stepping on the ice. And yesterday, after two falls, he admitted he “blew it” on the biggest stage during a free skate he was expected to dominate.

Though the stakes may be different, when we step into the arena, push our limits, and explore our potential with courage and guts, we will all experience failure.

Failure sucks. It is also inevitable. Keep going.

Plenty has been written on failing well and failing forward, but I think the above three sentences do more than 99 percent of the work.

Sure, we can grow and learn from failure, but there’s no secret recipe.

As you come back from failure, you integrate its lessons into your identity. However, if you are going to experience growth and meaning, these attributes come on their own schedule.

The bigger and more challenging the failure, the longer it takes for you to feel good again.

What doesn’t kill you usually makes you stronger, but it takes time.

I can sit here and write that you ought to expect failure, that any long-term path of excellence includes it, and that nobody achieves greatness without failing along the way.

All of that is true.
But in the moment, failure hurts.

There’s not much more to it, and that’s okay.

There are many theories on resilience, but it really comes down to a few core components:

Leaning into community; allowing yourself to feel sadness and loss while working to maintain hope at the same time; being kind to yourself, patient, and persistent; establishing small routines that support your mental health; and committing to showing up and returning to the work as you trudge through the mess.

The things you care about break your heart.

You’ve got to trust the love of the pursuit is big enough to hold the hurt of failure.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

A mentor once told me: "When you feel overwhelmed, remember, the mind calms when the hands move. Stop trying to fix everything. Fix one thing. Momentum starts microscopic. Ask: 'What actually needs me right now?' Then do just that, nothing else."

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

Try hard. Care deeply. Put yourself out there. Don’t be scared of coming up short, it’s how you grow. Be patient. Realize good things tend to take time. Never sacrifice your health. Walk. Run. Lift. Swim. Dance. Cycle. Depression hates a moving target. Ask for help. Help others too. Learn from failure. Learn from success. But also embrace a next-play mentality. The past is in the past. The future is in your imagination. You’ve only got the moment you are in. Stay curious. Never stop learning. Focus on what you can control. Try not to waste energy on what you can’t. Find things that make you feel alive and pursue them relentlessly. Love deeply: people, places, crafts. Build community. Stand up for what you believe in. Be strong. Be kind. Be confident. Be humble. Take the work seriously, but yourself not so much. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect, lest you’ll spend your entire existence waiting. Fall off the path. Get back on the path. Sleep when you are tired. Life is an infinite game. You never know what’s going to happen next. Keep going.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

The smartest people I know all have this in common: They change their minds often. It’s not a weakness, being wishy-washy, or a sign of flaky beliefs. It’s proof that their ego doesn’t outrank new information. The goal isn't to be right, it's to get it right.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

The world seems to be accustomed to delaying gratification less and less, which means the rewards of delaying gratification grow more and more.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Too many people recognize their opinions as feelings, but mistake their beliefs for facts.

Closed minds hold truths to be self-evident. Open minds are willing to question even strongly held views.

Lifelong learning requires the courage to challenge our own convictions.