Can Excellence be Learned?
This article originally appeared in the Mental Arena newsletter delivered via Substack. Check out more articles on sport and performance psychology, emotional intelligence, and high-performance at mentalarena.substack.com.
I recently listened to a podcast episode with Brad Stulberg discussing his new book, The Way of Excellence. Stulberg is a journalist and doesn’t practice within any of the sport and performance psychology domains I listed in my previous edition.
However, his research into what it takes to be excellent is central to the practice of sport and performance psychology. Remember, it is the study of excellence. Yet many practitioners lose sight of this when discussing the field as a whole. Excellence is available to anyone who moves with insight and intention. They must be self-aware of their thoughts and align them with their intended actions.
“A mark of somebody who has developed their inner capacity is their ability to move freely in the world”—Dr. Michael Gervais, high-performance psychologist
For decades, excellence has been treated as something reserved for a select few. We admire Olympic champions, elite executives, military operators, artists, and entrepreneurs because their performance appears extraordinary. From the outside, their accomplishments often look like the product of rare talent, favorable genetics, or some innate gift that the rest of us simply do not possess.
Yet when psychologists, coaches, and researchers study these individuals closely, a different picture emerges. While talent and genetics certainly influence ultimate outcomes, they explain far less than most people assume. The deeper question is not whether someone can become the absolute best in the world. The more important question is whether excellence itself can be learned.
According to performance psychologist Eric Potterat, the answer is yes. Nathan Chen, the Olympic gold medalist figure skater, as featured in Learned Excellence by Potterat, captures the idea succinctly: “Most people have an inherent ability which gets them to a certain point. Beyond that, getting better has to be learned.”
This view aligns closely with Brad Stulberg’s definition of excellence. Excellence is not a medal, a promotion, a championship, or an external achievement. Excellence is involved engagement. It is caring deeply about something worthwhile and bringing your best effort to that pursuit day after day. It is an internal standard, not an external ranking.
Through this lens, excellence becomes far more accessible. Not everyone can become an Olympic champion. Not everyone can become a Fortune 500 CEO. But everyone can learn the behaviors, mindsets, and mental skills that underpin excellence.
→ The question is not whether excellence can be learned. The question becomes how.
Excellence Begins With Values
One of the most overlooked aspects of high performance is the role of values. While most people start with goals, elite performers begin with something deeper. Potterat argues that learning excellence starts with understanding who you are, what you care about, and what drives your behavior. Despite being a sport and performance psychologist, he doesn’t start with mental skills training. Instead, he helps high performers establish a personal credo, a concise statement that captures their core values and identity.
This matters because excellence requires sustained effort over long periods. Every worthwhile pursuit eventually involves frustration, boredom, uncertainty, setbacks, and sacrifice. During those inevitable stretches, goals alone are often insufficient. That’s where values come in: they provide staying power. Stulberg describes excellence as climbing a mountain that aligns with your values. If the mountain isn't meaningful, the inevitable hardships become hard to justify. But when the pursuit reflects who you are and what matters most, effort takes on a different quality. The work becomes intrinsically rewarding.
“Excellence is quite simply involved engagement. It's caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals.”—Brad Stulberg on the Rox Lyfe podcast
This connection between values and performance appears repeatedly in sport and performance psychology. Athletes who connect training to personal meaning consistently demonstrate greater persistence, resilience, and motivation than those driven solely by external rewards. Potterat was a Navy practitioner who primarily worked with SEALs, yet he still helped them identify driving factors beyond their service alone. He helped them answer why their service mattered and then funneled that into an already high-performing engine. The result is proven high performers working at the outer edges of their abilities.
→ Excellence begins by answering a deceptively simple question: Why does this matter to me?
The Hidden Power of Identity
One of the strongest themes in Learned Excellence is that performers often prioritize identity over reputation. Reputation is external, whereas identity is internal. For sustained excellence, it’s more important to focus on who you are becoming than on how you appear. Potterat writes that top performers act in line with their values and identity rather than worrying about what others might think.
This distinction matters most in times of adversity. When performance struggles arise, reputation-focused individuals often become defensive. They protect their image. They avoid risks and become preoccupied with failure.
“What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”—Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Identity-focused individuals respond differently. They see challenges as opportunities to become the person they want to be. This perspective closely resembles Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset. A growth mindset is invaluable for sustained excellence. Individuals with a growth mindset view ability as developable rather than fixed. They invest their energy in learning rather than protecting an image of competence.
→ Excellence becomes easier to sustain when improvement becomes part of your identity rather than merely a means to achieve a goal.
Focus on the Process
Ask most people about excellence, and they immediately think about outcomes. They think of championships, promotions, recognition, and results. Although elite performers certainly care about outcomes, what sets them apart is where they focus their attention.
→ Amateurs focus on outcomes.
→ Professionals focus on process.
This principle appears everywhere in sport and performance psychology. Athletes are taught to focus on process goals rather than outcome goals. A baseball player cannot control whether they hit it out of the park, but they can do the work necessary to make solid contact through preparation, mechanics, effort, and decision-making.
“Excellence was never about achieving some sort of external destination. It was always about an internal process of giving your best and holding yourself to a high internal standard.”—Brad Stulberg
Stulberg emphasizes the same concept. The best performers learn to break ambitious goals into progressively smaller segments. A four-year Olympic cycle becomes annual goals. Annual goals become monthly objectives. Monthly objectives become weekly priorities. Weekly priorities become today’s training session. This process orientation creates two distinct advantages.
First, it reduces overwhelm.
Second, it places attention on controllable actions.
Potterat calls this “staying in the circle.” Inside the circle are attitude, effort, and behavior. Outside the circle is everything else. Excellence develops when performers consistently focus on what they can control.
Excellence is Consistency
One of the most seductive myths in modern performance culture is that excellence requires constant intensity. While social media rewards dramatic stories, the reality is far less glamorous. Excellence is remarkably ordinary. It is repeated execution. It is consistency. It is showing up again tomorrow.
Stulberg argues that excellence is about building a heroic body of work rather than producing occasional heroic efforts. The performer who leaves one repetition in reserve and trains again tomorrow often outperforms the individual who repeatedly empties the tank.
Potterat echoes this idea when he explains how top performers build routines. Routines turn ordinary people into exceptional people by helping them to manage their time deliberately. Then, they trust their process. They make incremental adjustments rather than chasing dramatic transformations. This mirrors another important concept in sport science: adaptation occurs through repeated exposure over time.
→ Physical fitness compounds.
→ Technical skill compounds.
→ Mental skills compound.
The performer who trains consistently for five years almost always surpasses the performer who trains intensely for six months.
→ Excellence is less about extraordinary moments than extraordinary consistency.
Mental Skills Drive Excellence
If excellence can be learned, mental skills are among the primary mechanisms through which it happens. Potterat identifies what he calls the “Big Four” mental skills:
Goal setting and segmentation
Visualization and imagery
Arousal control
Self-talk
Visualization, especially when practiced using the PETTLEP framework, lets performers mentally rehearse success before it happens. By incorporating physical sensations, emotions, environment, and realistic timing, imagery strengthens neural pathways and improves confidence.
Self-talk influences mindset and behavior. The internal voice becomes a performance coach or a performance saboteur. Elite performers deliberately shape this conversation rather than allowing it to run unchecked.
Breathing techniques such as 4-4-4-4 box breathing help regulate physiological arousal and restore control under pressure. When stress rises, attention narrows. Breathing becomes a way to regain cognitive flexibility and decision-making capacity.
Goal segmentation transforms intimidating challenges into manageable actions. It’s another way of breaking down big, outcome-based goals into daily, process-based goals. And Stulberg is adamant that the ability to focus on what is right in front of you is a true mark of excellence: "The work became the win. I didn't need to add weight to the bar to feel good about myself. I needed to complete the workout and have confidence that I might be on a plateau... if I'm sticking to the process... I've already won."
→ None of these skills are inherent. They are learned and improved with practice.
Mental Toughness Matters
At its core, excellence may be less about talent and more about the ability to function effectively under stress. Potterat defines mental toughness as the ability to manage the human stress response in challenging situations. Excellence emerges from maintaining clear thinking, making effective decisions, and taking purposeful action under pressure.
Through stress inoculation, performers gradually expose themselves to increasingly difficult situations while practicing effective responses. Much like physical training strengthens muscles through progressive overload, mental training strengthens resilience through progressively challenging experiences. The best in the world don’t aim to eliminate stress; they learn to work with it.
They adopt what researchers call a stress-is-enhancing mindset. Rather than viewing stress as a threat, they interpret it as evidence that something meaningful is at stake.
As Kelly McGonigal famously observed, stress often signals that we care.
→ Excellence depends less on avoiding pressure and more on learning how to perform within it.
So, can excellence be learned?
Evidence from sport and performance psychology, and the lived experiences of elite performers, points to the conclusion that excellence is not a trait. Excellence is a practice.
It begins with values and identity. It develops through process and consistency. Mental skills and adversity strengthen it. It grows through reflection, adaptation, and deliberate effort.
The skills that support excellence are not reserved for Olympians, Navy SEALs, CEOs, or professional athletes. They are available to anyone willing to train them. And you don't achieve it. It is something you practice.
Every day you choose your attitude, effort, and behavior. Every day, you decide whether to focus on outcomes or process. Every day, you choose whether to retreat from difficulty or learn from it.
→ Over time, those choices accumulate. That is how you learn to be excellent.
