Ryan Hawk “The Pursuit of Excellence” Uncommon Behaviors of World’s Most Productive Achievers

Ryan Hawk’s “The Pursuit of Excellence” unveils powerful strategies for unlocking your full potential. This game-changing book delves into the minds of top achievers, offering practical insights to boost your productivity and success.

Discover the secrets of world-class performers and transform your approach to success – read on to uncover Hawk’s blueprint for excellence.

Genres

Self-help, Personal Development, Leadership, Productivity, Success, Motivation, Career Advancement, Psychology, Entrepreneurship, Management, Career Success, Business and Money

“The Pursuit of Excellence” explores the habits and behaviors of highly successful individuals across various fields. Hawk draws from extensive interviews with top performers to identify common traits and strategies that drive exceptional achievement. The book is structured around key principles such as continuous learning, deliberate practice, and resilience.

Hawk emphasizes the importance of developing a growth mindset and embracing challenges as opportunities for improvement. He highlights the role of mentorship and surrounding oneself with high-achievers to foster personal growth. The author also delves into the significance of goal-setting, time management, and maintaining physical and mental well-being.

Throughout the book, Hawk provides actionable advice on cultivating discipline, overcoming obstacles, and maintaining focus on long-term objectives. He stresses the importance of self-reflection and continuous improvement in the pursuit of excellence.

Review

“The Pursuit of Excellence” stands out as a comprehensive guide to achieving peak performance. Hawk’s approach combines research-backed insights with real-world examples, making the content both credible and relatable.

The book’s strength lies in its practical applicability. Each chapter concludes with actionable steps, allowing readers to implement the strategies immediately. Hawk’s writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex concepts easy to grasp.

One of the book’s highlights is the diverse range of experts and achievers featured. This variety ensures that readers from different backgrounds can find relevant examples and inspiration.

However, some readers might find certain concepts familiar if they’ve read extensively in the personal development genre. Additionally, the sheer volume of advice could be overwhelming for some, potentially requiring multiple read-throughs to fully absorb and implement.

Despite these minor drawbacks, “The Pursuit of Excellence” offers valuable insights for anyone striving to elevate their performance and achieve their goals. It’s a worthy addition to any success-oriented individual’s library, providing a roadmap for personal and professional growth.

Introduction

The Pursuit of Excellence (2022) offers a thoughtful approach on how to become the best, most excellent version of yourself. Compiling wisdom from hundreds of interviews with world renowned experts and entrepreneurs, the author lays out the best habits and practices that anyone can use to improve their career and their lives.

Here’s a question for you: Which would you rather achieve – success or excellence? The two may sound synonymous, but there’s an important distinction. Success can only be determined by making comparisons to others, whereas excellence is something you can measure personally.

Success can be fleeting. It can come and go, and how it’s defined can often be out of your control. As a result, chasing success can ultimately end up being an unsatisfying fool’s errand. The more satisfying and rewarding pursuit is excellence. The only question here is personal growth. Am I improving? Did I learn or do something today to make me a little better off than I was yesterday?

In this summary to Ryan Hawk’s The Pursuit of Excellence, we’ll look at the nuts and bolts of pursuing, well, excellence! Hawk interviewed hundreds of world-renowned experts and entrepreneurs to determine which habits and practices are most effective, and he boiled these down to three essential points. We’ll explore these three habits – and show how the pursuit of excellence can lead to more satisfaction in life as well as more exciting growth in your career.

Achieving excellence requires a Purpose Mindset which focuses on the process.

Before we get into the three key habits, let’s look at how the pursuit of excellence rather than success can lead to the kind of rewards that make life truly fulfilling. When we shift our focus from success to excellence, we get more personal. We’re not in competition with some external factor we have no control over. The pursuit of excellence is all about becoming better at what you do – becoming more skillful, more knowledgeable.

The other big difference is that success is generally a finite game. You set a goal, hit it, and are then left to wonder what’s next. The pursuit of excellence, on the other hand, is an infinite game. As such, it’ll keep you focused on growing, getting better, and achieving your greatest potential. In other words, the pursuit of excellence is always there to provide purpose and meaning, no matter where you find yourself. And this is exactly what a fulfilling and satisfying life needs: purpose.

Now, you’ve likely heard the old advice that says all you need to do is follow your passion. When your work involves doing something you’re truly passionate about, then it won’t even feel like work at all. Or so the saying goes.

This advice is well-intentioned, but it’s also problematic. Many of us have followed our passion and run into the kind of setbacks that lead to doubts and second-guessing. Wait, wasn’t it supposed to be effortless once we found our passion? That’s why the better advice is this: don’t let anyone tell you it’ll be easy. Excellence, and achieving great results, requires hard work. It takes the kind of focus and determination that will test your boundaries. There are no shortcuts, cheats, or hacks that will allow you to avoid the hard work. But don’t let this get you down. Once you shift gears and adopt the purpose mindset, you’ll find that the rewards are constant and can propel you forward – even when times are tough.

A purpose mindset is one that is focused on the process. It’s about achieving steady, constant growth rather than finite results. And this is one of the first keys to pursuing excellence: respect the process.

What does this mean? Well, the process is about long-term results. That means you don’t let setbacks or mistakes derail you. Even better, when you focus on the process, you’ll find that the results take care of themselves. In a way, this can provide a welcome sense of freedom. Your responsibility is to create the plan and then stick to it. This is what you can control; the rest doesn’t matter. You can let it go.

In mathematical terms, this concept is described as freedom equals discipline. This was one of the big conclusions the author made from looking at the career of Eliud Kipchoge. Kipchoge was born in Kenya, grew up in a modest household, and went on to become what many consider the greatest marathon racer of all time.

As Kipchoge puts it, “If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and passions.” Not only that – you’re also a slave to outside factors like your competitors, politics, or what other people are saying or doing. If you’re disciplined and focused on a daily process of improvement, then you don’t have to worry about these external things. You can rest easy knowing that you’re following your plan and doing the hard work.

Kipchoge is blunt about it. He says, “To win is not important. To be successful is not even important. How to plan and prepare is crucial.” When you plan and prepare well, success and winning will follow. In other words, when you respect the process, the results will take care of themselves.

Respecting the process also means that you don’t have to come out of the gate like a champion. Your only expectation is in doing something today that will make you better than you were yesterday. It doesn’t have to be big. In fact, planning out a series of small, doable steps is the better way to go.

This is the first of the three big tips the author learned from his conversations with James Clear, the best-selling author of the book Atomic Habits. The second is to turn positive behaviors, the kind that will help you reach those goals, into rituals or habits. The third is to remove obstacles from your environment.

Let’s look at a few examples of how these three tips go hand-in-hand.

Say you want to write a novel. Which plan sounds more likely to succeed: setting one big end-of-the-year deadline, or setting a series of goals to write a minimum of one hundred words per day? The latter one, right? It’s all about establishing a process – or, as Clear calls it, a habit or ritual – that guarantees progress.

There’s a good quote from the nineteenth-century journalist Jacob A. Riis – which is still so relevant today, in fact, that it can be found in the locker room of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. It reads, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” This is respecting the process. Your job is to chip away a little bit each day, knowing that your persistence is the hard work that will pay off in the end.

Unfortunately, results don’t come just from setting goals. But they do come from forming new habits and rituals, which only happens when you adopt a new lifestyle. Changing your lifestyle is basically another way of saying you’re starting a new plan and adopting a new process. And this is what gets results.

You might say, From now on I’m going to eat better, get in shape, and waste less time watching television. Well, that’s great – but in order for it to happen, you’ll need to establish a new lifestyle that supports these goals. If you keep following your old one, it’s extremely doubtful that you’ll get the results you’re after. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Along with your new lifestyle, removing obstacles in your life will help as well. You might change your habits by getting up a little earlier in the morning to make time for a prebreakfast workout ritual. But it’s also a good idea to remove temptations from your environment. If you want to eat a healthier diet, why not make it easier by removing the sugary snacks from your cupboards? If you want to watch less television, then remove the TV from your workroom. Make your environment conducive to your plan. It may sound simple, but it’s very effective. Lots of things are out of your control, but you can control your lifestyle, your habits, and your home environment.

All of these tips are about taking action. It’s easy to make plans. Many of us do this at the start of every new year. In order to follow through, you need to actually make the change and then keep at it day after day. This slow and steady determination – a commitment to gradual improvement – is what separates excellence from mediocrity.

Pursue what you love and surround yourself with transformational relationships.

At this point, you might be thinking, OK, so what I need is to up my willpower game, right? In order to be determined and persistent in my process, I need to will myself to excellence.

Not so fast. Like the idea of simply following your passion, relying on willpower alone is another common misconception that can lead people to throw in the towel too early.

People as successful as NBA legend Michael Jordan have spoken about “willing themselves to greatness.” But, as comedian Jerry Seinfeld has pointed out, they’re overlooking the crucial factor of love. No one is going to achieve excellence if they hate the process. On the other hand, when you truly love something, you have what Seinfeld refers to as “a bottomless pool of energy.”

This is different from someone saying, “If you do what you love, it won’t feel like work.” The better way to put it is, “If you do what you love, you won’t have trouble finding the energy needed to put in all the hard work.” That’s a big difference, right? The first one implies that once you find your love, it’s smooth sailing. The second one is more accurate. It implies that doing what you love will still involve a ton of effort, but you’ll have the energy to do it. That’s why, once you have the purpose mindset in place, the next step is to find what you love.

Michael Jordan loved the sport of basketball. Jerry Seinfeld loved the art of stand-up comedy. They both had that bottomless pit of energy for getting them through all the ups and downs of the process. Love is what keeps excellent athletes returning to practice and running drills – even when their bodies are still sore and tired from yesterday’s training session. Love is what keeps excellent performers returning to the stage even after they’ve bombed and received terrible reviews.

Everyone has to find their own thing that they love. But there’s another step that can boost you along your path to excellence, and that’s asking for help. So many of us are afraid to ask for guidance or mentorship – but there really isn’t a good reason for this, aside from the fear of being turned away or sounding foolish. In the long run, these aren’t the kind of fears that should hold you back. As Steve Jobs once rightfully pointed out, “If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

There’s a good chance that if you reach out to someone who’s also pursuing excellence, they’ll be responsive. People you admire have probably received guidance or mentoring from someone along the way, which means they’re likely to see the value in passing along that debt of gratitude.

Many of the people Ryan Hawk spoke to commented on the importance of getting over fears such as this one. You have to be willing to fail from time to time. Remember, failure is not an end – it’s just part of the process.

Beyond just asking for help, another important factor in the pursuit of excellence is surrounding yourself with excellent people. Reaching out to a possible mentor is just one way of doing this. There are a number of other factors to consider when trying to build a supportive, positive community around you. In fact, surrounding yourself with the right people is as important as any other action you can take in the pursuit of excellence.

So, one of the first things to consider is yourself. It’s not hard to understand why you would want to have a strong support system of bright and talented minds around you. But ask yourself, Why would they want to have you? Being a value-add, or a value-enhancer comes up a lot in the conversations the author has had. Many of his guests, including Todd Henry, the writer and host of the Accidental Creative podcast, speak about the importance of establishing your value to others. What kind of attitude and work ethic are you bringing to the table? Are you establishing mutual respect in your relationships, or are you trying to assert yourself as a know-it-all?

To be recognized as a value-enhancer, you need to put in the work. You want someone to see you and think, That person makes the team better and stronger. That person digs deep, is eager to learn, and can be relied upon, without a doubt. But being a value-enhancer is also about personality and trust.

Obviously, no one is eager to spend a lot of time with folks who are going to drag them down. And you shouldn’t be either. You want to surround yourself with inspiring people. In other words, rather than transactional relationships (you do this for me, I’ll do that for you) you want transformational relationships. These are the kinds of relationships that change both people for the better. People in transformational relationships challenge each other to push their boundaries and reach new heights of excellence.

Sometimes, it can be hard to spot the difference between the transactional and transformational people in your life. So to steer clear of transactional people, here are some questions to ask yourself when making new encounters.

Are they constantly dropping names in order to establish credibility? Do they ignore the details and talk a big game while actually doing very little? Do they only show up when there’s something in it for them personally? Are they always saying “I” and rarely saying “we?” Are they often on the lookout for ways to break the rules in order to win?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then the person in question may be lacking integrity and be more interested in a transactional relationship. This means you’re probably better off keeping your contact with this person to a minimum.

Trust, humor, vulnerability, optimism, mutual respect, and gratitude. These are the qualities you want to look for because these are the qualities that make up a transformational relationship – the kind that will help you a great deal in your pursuit of excellence.

Reframe failures as progress and never stop learning and growing.

Surrounding yourself with the right people will have transformational effects in terms of self-improvement, but it’s not going to remove all the speed bumps on the road to excellence. There are going to be mistakes, setbacks, days when you want to throw the plan out the window and go back to the comforts of your old habits.

How we meet these moments makes all the difference. Simply put, those who embrace the struggle are the ones who excel in their pursuit of excellence. Again, it all comes back to that purpose mindset and how it allows you to reframe setbacks as being part of the process. Here are some more tips on how you can keep yourself on the right track, reframe your failures as progress, and resist the urge to give up when times get tough.

The first is to remember that achieving excellence is primarily the result of stretching your boundaries and pushing yourself. With this in mind, you can start to see failure as a positive. If you’re not failing from time to time, that just means you’re not really pushing yourself as much as you could be.

This feeds into the next tip: study, learn, and grow stronger. Having a purpose mindset is very much in line with having a growth mindset. When you hit a speed bump, you discover where your current limits are. That doesn’t mean you can’t work to push that limit further back for the next challenge. You can get a little bit better every day by studying, learning, practicing, and strengthening. Kobe Bryant wasn’t born excellent and ready for the NBA. What made him excellent was his amazing work ethic – his dedication to stick to his plan and continue to improve no matter what.

It should come as no surprise that growing and learning is key to achieving excellence. Richard Feynman was someone who knew something about excellence. He pioneered the field of quantum electrodynamics and reached such impressive heights that Bill Gates considered him “the best teacher I never had.” Feynman’s life has been so thoroughly researched that we now have what’s known as the Feynman Technique, which is essentially a process for learning.

It’s a process that is centered around a pretty simple idea: Can you explain what you’ve learned to a child? The key here is to do enough research to cover all the gaps in your knowledge. This should allow you to organize the details into a clear story that even a child could understand.

If you’ve ever had to deliver a keynote address that explains a complex subject, you might be familiar with the general idea of the Feynman Technique. It’s not only useful for your audience; it’s also a way to ensure that you’ve fully learned and absorbed the information.

This technique can be useful in developing other habits that lead to success, like diversifying your skill sets and writing. The simple act of writing can be transformational – so put your plan in writing. Write down your small, daily goals to stay on track. When you learn a new skill or piece of information, write it down – and turn it into a simple story that a child could comprehend. When you make a mistake, write it down – and make a note of what you’ve learned from that mistake. Turn failures into new goals. Turn a daily journal into your ongoing memoir of excellence.

Hopefully these tips will help inspire some new habits of your own. Achieving excellence isn’t an easy task, but it is one of the most rewarding things we can do. A life well-lived is a life filled with purpose and meaning. And nothing ticks those boxes quite like the pursuit of excellence.

Final Summary

As we wrap up this summary to The Pursuit of Excellence by Ryan Hawk, let’s take a moment to go over the main ideas one more time.

According to Hawk, the pursuit of excellence is different from the pursuit of success. It’s focused on lifelong self-improvement and setting small goals that you can achieve on a daily basis. By adopting a purpose mindset, you’ll begin to respect the process by keeping the big picture in mind – and not letting temporary setbacks get you off track.

The purpose mindset is focused on internal factors that you can control, such as creating a lifestyle and environment that is conducive to your goals, and surrounding yourself with mentors and positive relationships. It also involves maintaining a growth mindset, where you constantly test and push your limits to new heights.

With these tips in mind, you’ll be one step closer to pursuing excellence.

About the author

Ryan Hawk is the creator and host of The Learning Leader Show, a top-rated business podcast that focuses on learning from the smartest, most thoughtful leaders in the world. He has interviewed over 450 leaders, including such luminaries as Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, Kat Cole, General Stanley McChrystal, Jim Collins, and Adam Grant. The Learning Leader Show has listeners in 156 countries worldwide. Forbes called it “the most dynamic leadership podcast out there,” and Inc. magazine listed the show as one of the top five podcasts to “help you lead smarter.” A sought-after professional speaker, Ryan is the author of Welcome to Management, which Forbes called “the best leadership book of 2020.”

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction
Success Versus Excellence
Don’t Sacrifice the Gift
The Pursuit
Why?

PART I THE BUILD

1 Purpose Mindset
It’s About Growth
Self-Audit
“This Is a Process”
Change Your Mind
Choose Transformational Relationships
Build Through Dialogue

2 Focus and Discipline
3.9 and 4 Flat
What Is Your Wall?
Hold onto the Fishing Pole
Show Up Consistently
Learn the Small Stuff to Do the Big Stuff
No Cheap Tricks
Moki Martin: The Lesson of the Sugar Cookie
Consistency: Keep Hammering
If You’re Not Embarrassed, You Waited Too Long . . .

3 Resistance
January 1 Is the Next Day
Progress Happens in Uncertain Times
The Pain of the Process Is the Point
The Handstand Coach
Surviving the Hanoi Hilton
Keep Taking One More Step
Mortals Don’t Get to Determine Your Fate

PART II THE FUEL

4 What Lights You Up
Love Versus Will
Die Empty
Get Out of the Sand
The Most Useless Question
Find Your Edison
Turn Your Flywheel

5 The Power of Others
A Tale of Two Coaches
Stack the Deck
How to Ask
The Unknown Unknowns
The Full 360
Listen to Comprehend
Learning as a Competitive Advantage

6 The Confidence Flex
Your Mental Muscle
Sasha Fierce
No Discounting Allowed
Meet the Moment
Act When Others Are Scared
Build Charisma
The Value of Admiration

PART III THE CHASE

7 Making the Commitment
Opportunity Is Not a Lengthy Visitor
A Sparkling Pocket of Greatness
Stand Out and Speak Up
The Shape of a Laugh
Adapt Like the Frog
It Starts with How You See Yourself

8 Building Your Band
Make Trust Your Opening Bid
Stay Away from the Poison
Never Stifle a Generous Impulse
Practice Generosity, Humility, and Vulnerability
Smile
Be Punctual
Listen with Your Eyes
Create Your Junto

9 It’s a Lifelong Pursuit
The Good Fortune of Knowing Nothing
Personal Mastery
What’s Under Your Pillow?
The Feynman Technique
Step Back to Move Forward
The Dinner Table
Excellence Takes Time

Conclusion
Accountability Is Required
Publish Your Work
Go to Camp
Be a Griot
Leave Fresh Tracks

Epilogue: “This I Believe”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index