Welcome to Mindful Monday!

This week, we focus on how to respond to failure, the 5 rules of training, good writing, chosen suffering, and wise words from Henrik Karlsson. And... CLICK HERE to read our USA Today Best-Selling book, The Score That Matters.

#637: Tom Ryan - Choosing The Harder Path

​Tom Ryan is the head wrestling coach at Ohio State University. In college, he wrestled for Dan Gable at Iowa, where he was a two-time All-American. As a coach at Ohio State, he’s coached more than 75 All-Americans and led the Buckeyes to a national championship in 2015. We filmed this in his office in Columbus, OH, after spending the morning watching some of his championship wrestlers practice. It was one of the coolest days I’ve had in a long time. We talk about chosen suffering, what the best have that the good don't, the tragic loss of his son Teague (the most emotional moment on the podcast in 10+ years), his brutal car accident, and so much more. Of all 637 episodes, this is the one you should DEFINITELY WATCH on YouTube.

The Five Rules of Training

We have a temptation to want to skip to the ‘cool, sexy’ stuff. It’s boring to do endless easy runs or to spend hours working on the starting position in the sprints. But the ‘boring’ work serves as our foundation. While this article was written for physical activities, it applies to all types of training as well.

Chosen Suffering

Last month, I drove to Columbus, Ohio, to meet with legendary wrestling Coach Tom Ryan. Multiple people had told me that if I wanted to meet the ultimate "Learning Leader," I needed to talk to him. They were right. Watching his wrestlers move through their morning practice, something struck me about the atmosphere in that room. These athletes weren't just going through the motions. They were choosing to be there, choosing the difficulty, choosing the grind. CLICK HERE to read more...

Good Writing

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it's painted. CLICK HERE to read more.

Wise Words...

“Good writing isn’t about studying how great essays or poems look and then figuring out how to reverse engineer that (though that’s part of it). Rather, it’s about learning how to pay close attention to your thoughts and feelings and the concrete materiality of the world, and mastering the craft so you can translate what you see onto the page.” - Henrik Karlsson​

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Ryan Hawk Author: The Score That Matters, Welcome to Management, & The Pursuit of Excellence​ Host: The Learning Leader Show​