The Excellence Audit

Learn what deserves your best effort for the next 30 days — and do something great.

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On Monday, we chatted with Brad Stulberg about excellence. Read the post here.

The conversation got me thinking about what actually stops us from achieving excellence. One big culprit relates to my book, Scarcity Brain.

I don’t think our problem is that we don’t try hard enough.

I think we try too hard in too many different areas. We hurl our best efforts at too much: work, health, networking, side hustles, obligations, meetings (good God, so many meetings).

It makes sense why we do this. Each area is important, and we want to do well and not let other people down.

But in doing so, despite our best efforts, we end up half-assing everything. We don’t produce our best work where it matters. And we end up feeling stressed, burnt out, and oddly unfulfilled.

Getting ahead in life and achieving great things isn’t about trying harder everywhere. It’s about figuring out what’s worth full-assing—then doing it.

We can’t drop all of our other responsibilities. But we can get far more out of the time we invest in what we actually care about.

Today, we’re going to run an Excellence Audit.

The goal is simple: help you identify what deserves your best effort right now—and give you the tools to aim that effort deliberately instead of scattering it.

This audit comes in two parts.

• In Part I, I’ll lay out five questions to identify a goal or part of your life that’s worth going all-in on.

• In Part II, we’ll help you set the stage to actually achieve that goal and reach excellence.

Today you’ll learn:

• The “Excellence Audit”: A data-backed framework to stop scattering your effort.

• Why having endless options actually makes us worse at committing to the right ones.

• Research published in Nature that discovered why we overlook optimal decisions and end up stressed and burnt out.

• How to identify what to devote your best effort to over the next 30 to 90 days.

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The Excellence Audit Part I: What to Go All-In On