Book review: Win the Inside Game by Steve Magness
It was sometime in the 1960s that self-help books exploded, and, since then, everyone has been getting better. They’ve been improving all the time. This means the self-help cliff (which is nearly always an airport shelf) is now a crowded one - you have to swing big to make a nest. “Why don’t we just put fuck on the cover” or “why don’t we say it’s specifically not a self-help one” are a few tactics previously employed for some space. In Steve Magness’ case, the pull for “Win the Inside Game” is in gold caps above the title. It’s two words - Steve Magness.
Go to Twitter, to Bluesky, to Instagram, to Spotify and gouge with an interest in sports science: you’ll see Steve here and there, sniping contrarians, talking the Norwegian method or polarised training or VO2 max. On podcasts, Steve is intellectually assured - on podcasts he espouses on the world with an air of perpetually bemused amusement. And he has written five books, these range from “The Science of Running” about sports science to “Do Hard Things”, about mental toughness more generally.
On Instagram, in February,
posted about this new book, saying that: “In many ways it's the book I've been trying to figure out for decades”. Those decades saw him go from being a young phenom runner, who just failed to ever drop below the 4-minute mile (4:01.02), to landing a dream coaching job at Nike, to enduring a ten-year nightmare as a doping whistleblower against the company. Throughout the book this all gets tied in, but the latter of these experiences - the ten-year battle - is the cornerstone to this book.So what did they teach Steve, those decades? They taught him something intuitively unconventional…
But first, if we take a peak behind the performance preachers curtain (this one here - with the audience about the size of a galaxy). You’ll notice a seductive consensus has evolved: success - it comes from locking in. Success comes from obsession, from staying focused, from being driven to the point of peer misunderstanding. And it is against this industry (and it is, now, an industry) that Steve has ranged himself in Win the Inside Game.
His aim, if we’re to generalise, is to rebut this narrow-mindedness. Arguing instead for a more holistic, hard-to-find optimal balance between states of being. Locking in - it makes you rigid, and brittle. Whereas diversity, balance, and perspective - these allow for agility, and an authentic resilience. In its way, Win the Inside Game is an orthodox takedown of ideology in favour of recognising our dynamic complexity.
The titan of industry, then, who opted to melt with stress at his computer screen instead of catching the school play. And the young athlete, who forgoes other hobbies to double or triple-down on their favourite sport. These people, they are over-invested, they have too much sunken cost. This is because Steve is interestingly defeatist (or realist?) about the arena of high pressure. In this video of Matthew Syed, a fellow improvement guru, you see the opposite of Steve’s philosophy - at no point is it acknowledged that, ideally, you shouldn’t be stressed - Matthew thinks you will be stressed, and here’s some mental techniques or tricks (including Orwellian doublethink) to help you through. Steve on the other hand argues that if you’re vulnerable to choking, it means you’ve already gone too far.
This is because optimising perspective is not a mental trick - it is something to be deliberately engineered through diverse meaning. If your work pitch was shite, at least the soft-ball league on Tuesday wasn’t. If the soft-ball league on Tuesday was shite, then maybe your board game night with the family on Sunday wasn’t. If the family board game on Sunday descended into political ebullition, then maybe your dog still loves you. And so it goes on. And here we observe a kind of meta-functionality that is required to sell the balanced existence to the driven and the ambitious - don’t lock in too much, David. You need to see your kids more, your dog. Why? So you can be more, calm, more resilient - so you can eventually work even better.
Unlike much of writing and talking in this sphere, which is often not much more than self-aggrandising anecdotes (and advice as the afterthought. Anyway, let’s get back to Everest) - Win the Inside Game is completely devoid of self-indulgence. It looks outwards more than inwards. And Steve doesn’t shirk the necessary jabs for a credible argument - Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and the successful collegiate coach Urban Meyer are all people whose obsessive philosophies are challenged throughout. Not just with opinion, mind, but with data and stories as well - there is plenty of study references, and these are only tempered, potentially, by the famous and incomprehensible complexity of each human mind.
And here we enter the “but” section of the review. In chapter 3, Steve introduces his first proposal - about balancing over-commitment with exploration:
“Success and uncertainty in our present world often push us to cement and exploit. We need to counterbalance this pull by embracing play, perspective, and exploration.”
He’s talked about “rabbit hole” days, where he openly explores a new interest with no goal in mind. That was chapter 3 - the very start. But this philosophy is not then applied to the writing of the rest of the book, which, structurally, is dogmatic and repetitive - he is somewhat committed to telling us an anecdote (with a subversive punchline), followed by a lesson, followed by data, a conclusion, and a repeat of this cycle.
And there’s also Steve’s tendency to list, and to list quite extensively, what it’s like to experience something. When we experience higher levels of stress, over the next page, here is apparently what happens:
Our cognitive abilities decline, our memory becomes flash-bulb like, we get stuck on danger in front of us, our perception systems go a bit haywire, our world looks and feels different, we lose our ability to discern relevant from irrelevant information, we can’t decipher what matters and what doesn’t, we pay attention to the wrong feedback, sensations or thoughts, our signal-to-noise ratio deteriorates, we turn up the volume on the wrong information. We also move from being primed into action to avoidance, we freeze instead of fight, we play dead instead of run away, we can’t see the forest through the trees, we’re left seeing and feeling the game in a completely different way, and we’re a bit delusional.
And that’s just being stressed. Try being angsty, or defensive, or what researchers term disanxiousuncertilibrium. Throughout you bump into, and then have to walk alongside these descriptions, patiently nodding at Steve whilst waiting for the point. His motive here, I presume, is to be comprehensive - the coaches desire for mental alignment (a pre-requisite for malleability) - these passages come across scattergun and bloated however, and by the end they test stamina (by the end they make you feel tired, they make you feel fatigued, they make you move from concentrated to frustrated, and you start worrying if there’ll be any forest left).
The philosophical changes proposed by Steve have had their champions elsewhere - people more concerned with things like mental health and less concerned with things like optimisation, they have been talking about this stuff for ages. Well, now Win the Inside Game has arrived in the rearguard - compassionate, self-assured, and well-researched - at the battle against developmental extremity. Reliant, presumably, on the fact that everyone on the other side is either too knackered, too brittle, or too narrow-minded to eventually win anyway. As for the books stylistic frustrations - maybe Steve was too busy to fix them. Maybe he was out running, or on a rabbit hole day.
And who could begrudge him for that?