I HAVE BEEN LET IN ON A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: WINNING CHANGES NOTHING. In his autobiography Open, Andre Agassi revealed that reflection after winning his first major title, Wimbledon. For many of us that feeling is familiar. You hit the milestone, and it doesn't quite land the way you thought it would. So you reset, you aim higher, and you go again. It looks a lot like ambition. But most people never stop long enough to ask what's actually driving the cycle. I was forced to. M

For most of my life, I thought that spirituality had no place in high performance. Faith felt like a lack of ownership. A handoff of responsibility. In 2nd grade, I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the story of a young Japanese girl who, after developing leukemia from the Hiroshima bombing, folded 1000 paper cranes in a desperate wish to survive. As I read it over, and over and over again, I remember trying to make sense of how a higher being could allow such cata

I used to believe that effort was the key variable in high performance. And for most of my life, that belief served me well. Work ethic and consistency were the engines that carried me through every competitive environment I entered. And in those early stages, the relationship was linear. The more I poured in, the more I got out. BUT PERFORMANCE AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS DOESN'T BEHAVE LIKE A STRAIGHT LINE. My third ACL tear drove that lesson deeper than any leadership book eve