Mark: Alright Michelle, I'm going to say the title of a book, and I want your gut reaction. Chasing Excellence. Michelle: Sounds like my treadmill's taunting me. Or maybe the title of a PowerPoint presentation from a CEO who just discovered inspirational posters. Mark: Exactly! That’s what you'd expect. But the author, Ben Bergeron, is actually a legendary CrossFit coach. He's trained multiple world champions, including the athletes who became known as the Fittest Man and Fittest Woman on Earth. And this book, which is incredibly well-regarded in performance circles, argues something completely counter-intuitive: that excellence has almost nothing to do with winning. Michelle: Hold on. A coach of champions, whose entire job is to produce winners, wrote a book saying winning isn't the point? That feels like a massive contradiction. How does he even begin to square that circle? Mark: He starts in the most painful place possible: with a catastrophic, public failure. That’s the real entry point to his philosophy.

Michelle: Okay, you have my attention. A story that starts with a disaster is always more interesting than one that starts with a victory lap. Mark: It’s May 2014, in Copenhagen. A CrossFit athlete named Katrín Davíðsdóttir is competing in the European Regionals. She's in first place overall heading into the final events. The CrossFit Games—the world championship of her sport—are within her grasp. Michelle: So she's at the top of her game. This is her moment. Mark: It should be. But she looks at the next event, and her heart sinks. It’s ten legless rope climbs. And rope climbs are her kryptonite. She knows, deep down, she can't do it. She’s practiced it, and she keeps failing. Michelle: Oh, I know that feeling. The one task on a project that you know is going to expose you. It just looms over everything else. Mark: Precisely. The event starts. The other athletes are flying up their ropes. Katrín gets through the first few climbs, but then fatigue sets in. Her biceps are screaming. On the seventh climb, she reaches for the top, her hand slips, and she slides down the rope, burning her hands and her spirit. And in that moment, she just… gives up. She collapses on the floor, in tears, in front of thousands of people. She drops from first place to sixth, missing her chance to go to the Games. Michelle: Wow, that's brutal. To fail so publicly, at the one thing you knew was your weakness. That’s the kind of failure that could end a career. Mark: It felt like it. She was devastated. But then she gets a text message from her future coach, Ben Bergeron. And it says, "I know you might not see this right now, but this could be the best thing that ever happened to you." Michelle: Come on. That sounds like a nice, but ultimately hollow, platitude a coach would say. How can that kind of humiliation possibly be the best thing? Mark: Because it forced an honest diagnosis. The failure wasn't just physical; it was mental. She didn't just fail the rope climb; she gave up. She broke down. The failure revealed that her character and her mindset were weaker than her biceps. It was the data point she needed to realize she had to rebuild her entire operating system, not just her strength. That failure was the price of admission to working with Bergeron and starting a completely new path. Michelle: Okay, I see. The failure wasn't the event; it was the signal. It wasn't just a loss; it was a diagnostic report that told her exactly what was broken. And it wasn't her muscles. Mark: Exactly. It was the catalyst for everything that came next. And that's the first major lesson from the book: champions don't just tolerate failure; they leverage it. They see it as the most valuable information they can get.

Michelle: That makes sense. So if failure is the diagnostic tool, what's the treatment plan? How do you actually use that information to rebuild? Mark: And that, Michelle, is the core of the entire book. It's what Bergeron calls "The Process." It's his answer to everything. It’s a radical shift in focus. Michelle: I feel like "trust the process" has become such a sports cliché. What makes Bergeron's version different? Mark: It’s about a simple but profound equation he teaches: Event + Response = Outcome. The ‘Event’ is what happens to you—the workout is announced, a judge makes a bad call, your competitor sets a blistering pace. The ‘Outcome’ is the result—you win, you lose, you get the promotion. Bergeron argues we have zero control over the Event and the Outcome. Michelle: Right, you can't control the weather or what your boss decides. Mark: The only thing you have 100% control over is the ‘R’—your Response. Your effort, your attitude, your focus, your nutrition, your sleep. The Process is about obsessively, relentlessly focusing only on the ‘R’ and letting the outcome take care of itself. Michelle: Can you give me a concrete example of how that plays out? Where two people face the same event but have different responses? Mark: A perfect example is from the 2016 CrossFit Games, two years after Katrín’s big failure. The event is a Squat Clean Pyramid—a brutal test of strength. Katrín knows she is not the strongest athlete in the field. Women like Sara Sigmundsdóttir are physically much stronger lifters. Winning this event is not a realistic outcome for her. Michelle: So the ‘Event’ is stacked against her from the start. Mark: Correct. So, what does she control? Her response. She decides to ignore everyone else on the floor and just focus on her own lifting, her own breathing, her own technique. She moves deliberately and calmly. Meanwhile, another athlete, Kara Webb, comes out of the gate like a rocket, setting an insane pace. Sara Sigmundsdóttir, the stronger athlete, sees this and gets caught up in the race. She tries to match Kara's pace. Michelle: I can see where this is going. She abandoned her own process to compete with someone else's. Mark: And it cost her. She started rushing, her form broke down, and she failed multiple lifts on the final, heaviest barbell. Katrín, sticking to her own methodical pace, reached the final barbell, took a breath, focused, and made the lift. In the end, Katrín finished fifteenth in the event. Sara, the stronger athlete, finished seventeenth. Michelle: Wow. So by focusing on her own response, Katrín actually beat a physically superior competitor. That’s a powerful illustration. Mark: It’s everything. She didn't win the event, but she maximized her own potential. She "won" her response. And that’s The Process. It’s not about being better than everyone else; it’s about being the best version of yourself in that moment. Michelle: That’s a huge mental shift. It takes the ego out of it. It’s not "did I win?" but "did I do everything within my power to execute perfectly?" That applies to a sales pitch, a difficult conversation, anything. You own your 50% of the equation. Mark: And that’s why the book has found such a following among entrepreneurs and business leaders. It’s a blueprint for sustainable high performance in any field, because it’s grounded in what you can actually control.

Michelle: Okay, but what does it take to actually live that way? It's easy to talk about controlling your response, but in the heat of the moment, when your adrenaline is pumping and your ego is on the line, that’s incredibly hard. What's the secret software these athletes are running that allows them to do that? Mark: That's the perfect question, and Bergeron’s answer is that you have to build the character traits first. The Process doesn't work unless you're running the right mental software. And the most important program is Grit. Michelle: Another buzzword. What does grit actually look like in practice, according to Bergeron? Mark: It looks like Mat Fraser. Today, people see Mat Fraser as the most dominant CrossFit athlete in history, a five-time champion. They assume he’s a genetic freak, a "natural." But the book reveals a completely different story. For two years in a row, he came in second at the CrossFit Games. He was the guy who was almost good enough. Michelle: The perpetual silver medalist. That has to be a tough spot mentally. Mark: After his second loss, he did an honest assessment. He realized his running was terrible. It was a massive weakness. So what did he do? This guy, the second-fittest man on Earth, went to his local high school track coach in Vermont and humbly asked if he could train with the track team. Michelle: Wait, he trained with teenagers? Mark: For six months. He, a professional athlete, got consistently smoked by 16-year-olds. He said, "Everything you’re supposed to be doing during sprinting, I was doing the exact opposite." He had to swallow his pride, be the worst person on the field, and just grind. He didn't just work on his strengths; he obsessively attacked his weaknesses. That’s grit. It’s not about being tough; it’s about the humility to be bad at something and the relentless dedication to get better. Michelle: That's incredible. That completely reframes him. He's not a gifted athlete; he's a master of attacking weaknesses. It’s the ultimate example of what the book calls "double-loop learning"—not just fixing the external problem, but looking inward and changing yourself. Mark: Exactly. He didn't blame the programming or the judges. He blamed his own inability and fixed it. Another key piece of software is Positivity. The book tells a great story about the 2016 Games where athletes had a delayed flight and got maybe three hours of sleep before an early morning ocean swim. Everyone was complaining, frustrated, negative. Michelle: I would be too! That sounds miserable. Mark: A documentarian interviewed the athletes. One veteran went on a long rant about how exhausted and angry he was. Then he turns the camera to Katrín. And she's beaming. She says, "I feel good! I slept on the airport floor, I slept on the plane! I love that we get to go straight through with no rest day, the more volume, the better!" She saw the exact same miserable circumstances as a competitive advantage, because she knew others would be negative while she chose to be positive. Michelle: She reframed adversity as an opportunity. That’s a powerful mental skill. It’s not about ignoring the negative; it’s about choosing where to put your focus. Mark: It’s about controlling your response. She couldn't control the flight delay, but she could control the story she told herself about it. And that story made her better.

Mark: And when you put it all together, you see the whole picture. Excellence isn't a lightning strike of talent or a single heroic moment. It's a system. You use failure as a diagnostic tool to find your weaknesses. You run 'The Process' by focusing only on your response to events. And you power it all with the mental software of grit, positivity, and humility. Michelle: It’s a much more democratic vision of success, really. It’s not reserved for the genetically gifted. It’s available to anyone who is willing to be honest with themselves and do the work, the often boring, unglamorous work. Mark: The book quotes the basketball player Ray Allen, who said the secret to his success was just "boring old habits." It’s not about the game-winning shot; it’s about the thousands of practice shots in an empty gym. That’s the chase. Michelle: It really makes you ask yourself: what's the one 'weakness' I've been avoiding? The one thing I tell myself I'm 'just not good at,' whether it's public speaking, or managing finances, or even just being patient? Mark: And Bergeron would say, don't just think about it. Take one small, concrete action today to address it. Don't try to solve it all at once. Just do one legless rope climb. Or even just practice the grip. That's the start of the process. Michelle: I love that. It’s about making excellence an action, not an aspiration. We'd love to hear what you all think. What's the one 'process' you're focusing on in your own life after hearing this? Let us know. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.