Chasing Excellence

What does it take to become the absolute best—whether in sport, work, or life? In Chasing Excellence, elite CrossFit coach Ben Bergeron argues that the difference between good and truly great performers has little to do with physical talent or luck. The secret, he says, lies in your character and process—how you think, train your mind, and dedicate yourself to the habits that forge excellence. Bergeron shows that greatness is not reserved for the gifted few but available to anyone willing to master the mental game.

Coaching CrossFit legends Katrín Davíðsdóttir and Mat Fraser to world championships, Bergeron discovered that the fittest athletes on earth share a remarkably consistent mindset. They focus not on winning trophies, but on mastering what’s in their control and acting with intention every day. The book blends gripping stories from the CrossFit Games with timeless lessons that apply to any pursuit—from running a business to raising a family.

The Pyramid of Peak Performance

Bergeron teaches that performance builds like a pyramid. Most people focus only on the top layers—ability and strategy. They chase physical strength, better techniques, or clever tactics. Champions, however, attend just as fiercely to the base: character and process. Without these, no strategy survives adversity. Developing humility, grit, and purpose allows an athlete—or anyone—to stay composed when challenges strike. This foundation supports an obsession with daily improvement rather than a fixation on results.

The Power of the Mental Game

From years inside the crucible of the CrossFit Games, Bergeron shows that mental toughness is a skill you can train. Traits such as commitment, positivity, confidence, control, and resilience can all be strengthened through deliberate practice. These aren’t vague slogans; they’re disciplines built one rep at a time. Katrín’s rope-climb failure in 2014, which cost her a spot at the Games, became the seed of her future victories because she and Ben learned to treat adversity as training.

In the same way, Mat Fraser’s decision to practice sprinting with high schoolers—even when it bruised his ego—embodies true humility. Both athletes learned that every weakness is an opportunity to get better, not a verdict on who you are. This mindset aligns with business theorist Chris Argyris’s concept of double-loop learning: the most successful individuals look inward, own their shortcomings, and continuously adapt.

Excellence as a Process, Not an Outcome

The heart of Bergeron’s philosophy is simple: focus on the process, not the prize. Borrowing from coaches like Nick Saban and Bill Belichick, he insists that you can’t control outcomes—only the decisions you make today. Champions don’t visualize standing on podiums; they focus on showing up for every practice and giving their full effort to each rep. When you do that long enough, excellence becomes almost inevitable.

Success, Bergeron reminds us, “is a decision, not a gift.” It’s found in how you breathe through the hardest moments, how you turn the page after setbacks, and how you define victory in your own terms. By the end of the book, “chasing excellence” feels less like a sports motto and more like a philosophy of life—about living deliberately, embodying your values in every action, and loving the pursuit itself more than the result.

Commitment, for Ben Bergeron, goes beyond merely working hard. It’s the decision to align your actions, habits, and focus with your highest goals—no exceptions. In the CrossFit Games, where athletes train up to ten hours a day for a single week of competition, commitment separates the contenders from the champions.

Beyond Complacency

Bergeron illustrates commitment through his athlete Cole Sager, who narrowly qualified for the Games in 2016 after a risky last-round comeback. When Cole celebrated, Bergeron told him bluntly: “Are you ready to go pro?” True commitment, he said, means transitioning from working hard to working without limits. It’s the space beyond competence, where you trade short-term pleasure for long-term growth.

Imagine a spectrum: on one end is complacency—the comfort of being “good enough.” In the middle is competence, where most high performers live. On the far end is excellence, the rare territory of those who dedicate every minute toward self-mastery. Champions like Mat and Katrín exist here, where discipline replaces motivation. Commitment is the decision to live by systems rather than moods.

Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain

Bergeron reframes commitment as the art of embracing short-term pain for long-term gain. Waking early, refining fundamentals, or skipping a night out may feel costly today, but they compound into confidence tomorrow. (This perspective echoes Angela Duckworth's research in Grit, where perseverance and purpose consistently outperform talent.)

Commitment also requires clarity: knowing exactly what you want to become and working backwards from there. For athletes, that means mastering the five controllables—training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. For the rest of us, it might mean identifying the small, repeatable actions that move the needle most in our craft. In every case, commitment means living today like it matters to the bigger picture.

To “go pro,” as Bergeron puts it, is not just to train harder—it’s to decide that your habits will match your dreams, minute by minute, day after day.

Grit is one of Bergeron’s most powerful lessons. It’s not flashy or genetic. Grit is the ability to persist in the face of boredom, fatigue, and failure—to keep showing up even when it’s painful. As coach of the fittest human on earth, Bergeron insists that every champion is built, not born, through consistent application of grit.

Mat Fraser’s Unseen Work

Mat Fraser is Bergeron’s model of relentless drive. After finishing fifth in the 2013 Regional competition, Fraser turned every weakness into a project. He bought a rowing machine after losing a rowing event and rowed intervals for up to 5,000 meters every day for a year. When he struggled with a 580-pound “Pig” at the 2015 Games, he bought one and flipped it alone in the gym every Sunday for six months. No cameras, no audience—just grit.

This mindset is what Bergeron calls “embracing the suck.” The best athletes seek difficulty; they see discomfort as a laboratory for growth. When Fraser says, “That shit hurts,” it’s not a complaint—it’s a creed.

Talent vs. Grit

Society idolizes talent, but Bergeron dismantles the myth of “natural-born greatness.” Even Mozart, he notes (citing Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code), practiced relentlessly until his hands were deformed. Talent might get you started, but grit keeps you in the race when enthusiasm fades. The difference between potential and performance is persistence.

What makes grit so rare is that it’s uncomfortable. It demands committing to monotonous work that yields slow results. But for those who commit—like Fraser running a 7K trail during the Games after years of conditioning—grit becomes a superpower. It’s the quiet, durable strength behind every highlight reel.

For Bergeron, positivity isn’t fluffy optimism—it’s a competitive advantage. The difference between seeing obstacles or opportunities defines performance under stress. He contrasts two women at the 2016 Games: one complains about fatigue and travel delays, while Katrín Davíðsdóttir beams, “Love that we get to go straight through with no rest day. The more volume, the better!” They had identical circumstances—only their stories differed.

Rewiring Your Brain for Performance

Humans are wired to notice negatives (a survival mechanism once vital for avoiding danger). But Bergeron says dwelling on negatives steals focus and energy from what matters. That’s why his athletes follow the commandment: Never whine. Never complain. Never make excuses. Even neutral remarks like “It’s cold outside” subtly signal weakness. By refusing to voice negativity, you retrain your brain to focus forward.

Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky explains this as the “frequency illusion.” The more you talk about something, the more you notice it. Complain about fatigue, and you’ll feel more tired. Focus on progress, and you’ll see it everywhere. Positivity isn’t denial—it’s attention control.

Telling Better Stories

Every result in life, Bergeron says, depends on the story you tell yourself. Katrín turned sleeping on an airport floor into proof of her adaptability. Similarly, your internal narrative—about work, setbacks, or relationships—dictates your resilience. As Ryan Holiday writes in The Obstacle Is the Way, the story you tell determines whether hardship becomes a wall or a launch pad. Choose the narrative that serves you best.

Positivity, then, is not naïve—it’s strategic. Champions choose their focus deliberately, because they know that attention shapes perception, and perception shapes reality.

Adversity, Bergeron argues, is where growth happens. While most people run from discomfort, elite performers deliberately step into it. The CrossFit Games are designed to test this brutally—heat waves, surprise events, and failure are all part of the challenge. What matters isn’t avoiding adversity but using it to adapt faster than your competitors.

The Advantage Hidden in Hardship

Bergeron describes Brent Fikowski, a rookie who qualified for the Games only after tearing his hip labrum. While injured, he focused relentlessly on upper-body strength—his biggest weakness—and later dominated the field. Psychologists call this adversarial growth: the phenomenon where obstacles force the fastest progress.

The same goes for Katrín’s famous fear of cold-water swims. Once traumatized, she trained in icy Boston Harbor until fear became mastery. By facing what scared her most, she redefined her threshold for discomfort. Bergeron believes adversity is the most honest mirror—it shows you exactly where your growth edge lies.

Expecting the Unexpected

Bergeron now teaches athletes to expect adversity. Visualization isn’t about imagining perfection but rehearsing how you’ll respond when everything goes wrong—like Michael Phelps winning Olympic gold with fogged goggles because he’d practiced swimming blindfolded. Hope for the best, says Bergeron, but train for the worst. That mental preparation transforms chaos into control.

Every time life throws you something difficult—an injury, layoff, breakup—it’s another rep in your resilience training. You may not choose adversity, but you can choose your response. And that choice, repeated over time, is what makes you unbeatable.

Perhaps the central pillar of Chasing Excellence is Bergeron’s devotion to the process—the daily pursuit of mastery divorced from outcomes. Borrowing from coach Nick Saban’s doctrine, Bergeron urges you to “focus on what you can do in this drill, on this play, in this moment.” It’s not about winning the championship. It’s about doing your job perfectly, right now.

Building from the Basics

Bergeron recounts how, after Katrín won her first CrossFit Games, they started over—literally with the basic air squat. For six weeks, they rebuilt from fundamentals until each movement was flawless. Later, they spent six months perfecting her muscle-up one rep at a time. It wasn’t glamorous, but it built the neuromuscular precision that championships require. Excellence, he says, “is a matter of steps. Excel at this one, then the next.”

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

Like cycling coach Dave Brailsford, who revolutionized Team Sky by improving everything by 1%, Bergeron teaches that small, seemingly insignificant improvements compound into massive breakthroughs. Over time, the difference between 1% better each day and 1% worse each day is exponential. The process is the discipline to keep stacking those marginal gains, year after year.

That’s why he forbids his athletes from discussing “goals” like winning the Games. Goals are results; processes are actions. You don’t control outcomes—you control inputs. And when process becomes your passion, success becomes a byproduct.

Control is freedom. Bergeron teaches that the only way to perform consistently is to filter the world into two buckets: things you can control and things you can’t. Everything outside those five controllables—training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset—is a distraction.

The Matchstick Principle

Bergeron compares your daily energy to a book of matches. Spend matches worrying about judges, rivals, or weather, and you’ll run out before you can ignite what matters. His athletes actually list everything that could go wrong—delayed flights, miscounted reps, broken shoelaces—and separate what’s controllable from what’s not. Once it’s on paper, the uncontrollable loses its power.

This mirrors the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer—accept what you cannot change, have courage for what you can, and seek the wisdom to know the difference. The best competitors, like Mat Fraser, live this mantra. When reporters ask him to guess upcoming events, he replies, “I don’t guess events. Waste of time.”

Extreme Ownership

Owning your performance—good or bad—is the hallmark of control. When Fraser was repeatedly “no-repped” during a judged event, he stayed composed instead of arguing. That composure paid off later when he won his heat. Control doesn’t eliminate chaos; it simply dictates where you spend your energy. In life and leadership, that discipline amplifies effectiveness in every arena.

No matter how prepared you are, mistakes happen. Bergeron teaches that champions distinguish themselves by how quickly they recover from setbacks. The practice is called turning the page—acknowledging an error, learning from it, and refocusing immediately.

Managing Emotion under Pressure

At the 2016 Games, Katrín lost precious points after a small technical mistake in an event. Furious and tearful, she retreated behind the stadium. Bergeron joined her briefly, gave her five minutes to grieve, then said, “What can you do right now to prepare for tomorrow?” That reset prevented emotional residue from seeping into the next day’s competition.

The same idea applies everywhere. After a bad meeting or argument, allow yourself a brief debrief—then move on. Lingering in frustration burns energy that should fuel your next action. Bergeron trains mindfulness daily with his athletes—ten minutes of focused breathing to practice returning to the present moment. This mental discipline becomes the engine of composure during chaos.

As Bergeron puts it: “Once it’s happened, it no longer exists. The only thing you can do now is take action.” Turning the page doesn’t erase failure; it transforms it into fuel for your next rep.

Humility, in Bergeron’s world, is strength under control. It’s the willingness to admit you’re not the best at everything and to work your weaknesses every single day. Both Mat and Katrín embody this quality. Mat practiced sprinting with teenagers until he could beat them; Katrín spent a year dragging heavy objects she once couldn’t budge. Their dominance was built on the willingness to look foolish in pursuit of growth.

This humility supports what Bergeron calls competitive excellence—the habit of performing with full effort regardless of circumstances. When Mat mathematically had already won the Games, he still competed as if he were behind. Like Alabama’s Nick Saban or the New England Patriots under Bill Belichick, he lived the creed: “Do your job, right now.” Excellence wasn’t a switch; it was a way of life.

For anyone chasing excellence, this means detaching from the scoreboard. You don’t work hard because someone is watching; you work hard because that’s who you are. Competitive excellence is consistency personified—an unwavering pursuit of your best in every moment, win or lose.

In the book’s closing chapter, Bergeron tackles what it means to be “clutch.” It’s not luck or magic—it’s preparation meeting pressure. Clutch is performing the same way under the spotlight as you do in practice. It’s the ability to translate mastery from low-stress to high-stress environments.

Katrín’s Final Test

In the final 2016 Games event, Katrín faced her Achilles heel: the pegboard climb. Tia-Clair Toomey was just 23 points behind. In ten minutes, the title would be decided. Katrín methodically battled through five ascents—five times more than her lifetime best—by focusing only on the next foothold. She didn’t panic, didn’t look sideways. When the buzzer sounded, she didn’t yet know she’d won. But she’d stayed true to her process, and it was enough.

Preparation Creates Calm

Bergeron notes that clutch performers—from athletes to entrepreneurs—execute under stress because they’ve rehearsed these moments mentally and physically. As author Paul Sullivan says in Clutch, it’s not the Hail Mary passes that make champions, but the ability to perform routine plays under immense pressure. You cannot summon what you haven’t trained. Clutch, therefore, is not talent under pressure—it’s training revealed.

In business, relationships, or sport, being clutch means one thing: when it’s time to act, you trust your preparation and simply do your job. That’s the mindset of a champion.