This week's book: "Inner Excellence" by Jim Murphy.
"Move beyond the pursuit of happiness to a life of purpose and fulfillment."
Jim Murphy, Inner Excellence
Hold on a minute! Did I just see an NFL superstar reading a book during a playoff game?
That's genuinely what happened in January 2025. The cameras cut to the Eagles sideline during a playoff game against the Packers, and there was star receiver A.J. Brown, one of the best in the business, calmly reading a book while his defense was on the field. Not a playbook. A real book, and a well-worn one, clearly not his first time through it.
It was Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy, a former pro baseball player turned performance coach who works with elite athletes, world-champion golfers, pros, leaders, on the mental side of their game. AJ Brown later said he reads it to refocus during games, win or lose, touchdown or dropped pass. That moment went viral, and the book rocketed from around 500,000th on Amazon to #1 overnight.
I've wanted to read it ever since. Now I finally am, and we're doing something different with it.
We're giving this one two full weeks.
Here's why. I'm already about 100 pages in, and my copy is buried in highlights and notes. This isn't a book to skim.
From the back cover: Inner Excellence will show us how to…
1. Develop mental toughness – and perform with freedom
2. Train your subconscious mind – and expand your beliefs
3. Overcome mental blocks – and get out of your own way
4. Develop empowering habits – and transform your life
Murphy's core idea is that your outer performance, and really your whole life, is a reflection of your inner world: your thoughts, your fears, your attention, what's going on in your heart. Master that inner world, he argues, and everything downstream of it, how you perform, how you lead, how you live, changes too. It's less about productivity tricks and more a way of training the mind, and even the heart.
That's exactly the kind of book that will reward our slowing down strategy.
Over the next two weeks we'll work through Murphy's ideas on performance, fear, focus, and presence, I'll give you my take on what genuinely helps, and we'll figure out how to actually put his teachings to use, not just admire it and move on.
It fits something I've learned about All Star Mentors over the last several months: the goal was never to read more books. It's to get more out of the ones we read.
Here’s a question for you to consider: when the pressure is on and you really need to step it up a few notches, what do you do to get you there?
I'll go first: for years, honestly, not much, I just white-knuckled it, drank another cup of coffee and sweated a lot. Later, I would take a few breaths and envision getting through it with a positive outcome. That helped but wasn’t great. I'm hoping this book teaches me how to finally do it better and really dial in the high level of performance I want. That's part of why I'm reading this one slowly.
This week and next
We're staying with Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy through next Saturday. If you'd like to read along, there's plenty of time to grab a copy and catch up.
If someone forwarded you this, you can get the daily insights free at www.allstarmentors.com.
Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Helping you become the best version of yourself