Last Saturday night, the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship. It was an improbable, remarkable run, one of the best in NBA history. After going down 2-1 in the first round, they won 15 of their next 16 games, beating the Spurs 4 to 1 to win the title. Their point differential over that stretch was 283, the biggest in the history of the league. Most incredibly, the Knicks trailed all five games in the NBA finals by double digits. They lost the first five quarters by a total of 57 points. They won four of those five games, including a 29-point comeback in Game 4. Today, we're talking about not just what they did, but, more importantly, how they did it. It was a masterclass in excellence, with at least five tactical, concrete lessons that you can start applying in you own life right away. This one's a celebration—but it's also one of the most practical episodes we've ever done.

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Brian Koppelman has been writing great films and shows for 30 years — Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, and Billions, to name a few. Now 60, he's working with as much energy as ever. He'll be back in the role of "Computer" on the hit show The Bear when it returns later this month, and he's three years into a powerlifting journey he began at 57 after almost fainting on a tennis court. When we think about the type of longevity worth aspiring to, we think of Brian Koppelman. Today, he talks about how his undiagnosed ADHD and curiosity shaped his successful career, tells the story of discovering Tracy Chapman while still a college student, and discusses making it through the painful writer's block that almost kept him from writing Rounders. Plus: what Michael Jordan can (and can't) teach us about greatness, separating success from external validation, and staying creative — and excellent — for a lifetime.

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Today, we discuss three moments from the past week that highlight a few of the key habits of truly excellent performers: what Victor Wenbanyama teaches us about caring deeply and being yourself; how the failed Enhanced Games highlights the importance of showing up to put in the work; and why a three-glasses-of-wine hangover proves being antifragile trumps optimization.

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Jim Ryun couldn't make his junior high basketball team, track team, or even his church baseball team. Two years later, he was the first high schooler to run a sub-four-minute mile. He'd go on to run a world record mile in 3:51, and compete in three Olympics. Now 79, he shares with us some of the best stories and wisdom: the time he ran a workout of four sets of 10x400 (doesn't recommend it), how he trained his mental discipline, how he handled the spotlight and media criticism, the best lessons he took from legendary coach Bob Timmons, why everyone needs "balcony people," and what he learned from being unfairly disqualified from the 1972 Olympics. It's a masterclass in excellence—actually.

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We've all got those days: you can't seem to get started, your motivation is low, or something comes up and throws you off track. It happens to all of us! It only becomes a problem when a bad start to the day becomes a bad day, and then a bad couple of days, and then a bad week, and then a bad month... on and on. High-performers who have sustained success over many years are elite at getting something out of days when they're not at their best. Today is all about building your capacity to do the same. Because if you can squeeze a small win out of a day that might otherwise be a zero, those little victories add up into something big over time.

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We're all going to experience pain in some form or another. Unfortunately, our long accepted model for what pain is — and how to treat it — has been wrong. Today, we're breaking down the biopsychosocial model of pain, which presented a recent change in how researchers, doctors, psychologists, and performers think about why we feel what we feel. We discuss an important distinction between hurt and harm from pain psychologist Rachel Zoffness, discuss why two people with identical injuries can have very different experiences of pain, present a taxonomy of three different types of discomfort, and give you a practical toolkit for dealing with your own pain (including a balloon metaphor that might change how you think about recovery).

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Click here for an AI-generated transcript (please excuse errors in grammar or spelling)

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In 1960, A publisher at Random House bet a writer $50 that he couldn't produce a children's book using just 50 distinct words. That writer was Dr. Seuss, and the resulting book was Green Eggs and Ham, which has gone on to sell more than 200 million copies. Sometimes, limits aren't a bad thing. In fact, they often lead to unexpected breakthroughs in creativity, productivity, and satisfaction. This is the message at the heart of David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. This is something elite performers know well. They aren't adding more and more or keeping their options open; they're whittling down to what matters most. So we wanted to ask David on to give us the lessons from his book and from his research that can most effectively help us do that too.

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Not just one, but two (!) men finished this past weekend's London Marathon in under two hours, a time that has never before been beat and was once largely thought to be impossible. Today, we unpack how it happened: the advances in running shoe and fueling technology that made this moment possible, the giant elephant on the podium (the ever present question of doping), and what we can all learn about harnessing the power of belief, confidence, and competition to push past our own perceived limits.

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Click here for an AI-generated transcript (please excuse errors in grammar or spelling)

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