Where Excellence Actually Begins
On why solving difficult problems is the foundation of elite performance.
Last week, I wrote that I had stopped trying to understand everything. Ironically, that process has continued to produce understandings I did not expect. Not answers to the events themselves, but answers about people, environments, and perhaps even about myself.
The realization began after watching a difficult personal situation unfold. The immediate instinct was to ask how it could be possible, followed rapidly by a reaction to find a way to stop further damage. But that mere idea bumped into almost natural obstacles. Everywhere I turned, I found resistance. Almost everyone involved found a “but”—a reason why things could not get done. They hid information, rejected participation, and turned a blind eye.
What surprised me was not the problem itself. Life presents difficult problems all the time, and most of them eventually find some form of resolution. What stayed with me was the almost instinctive tendency of everyone around the situation to orient themselves away from the problem rather than toward it. Every conversation quickly became an explanation for why something could not be done. Every proposal encountered reasons to postpone it, soften it, redirect it, or simply leave it alone. The greatest obstacle was not the complexity of the problem; it was the collective reluctance to engage with it.
That observation remained with me long after the situation itself had faded into the background. I found myself looking backward rather than forward, asking whether this was simply an isolated experience or whether I had been surrounded by this pattern for much longer without fully recognizing it.
The more I reflected, the more difficult it became to ignore.
The Architecture of Avoidance
Looking back over my own life, I realized I had spent many years in environments—both personal and professional—that were remarkably uncomfortable with difficult realities. Sometimes the avoidance took the form of secrecy. Sometimes it appeared as silence, or as ego protecting itself from the possibility of being wrong. Other times it was simply the understandable desire to avoid conflict, discomfort, or emotional pain. The forms were different, but the instinct was remarkably consistent: problems were rarely approached with curiosity and determination.
What makes this difficult to recognize is that avoidance almost never presents itself honestly. It borrows the language of wisdom. We tell ourselves we are waiting for more information, we do not want to overreact, or we are preserving harmony. Sometimes those explanations are entirely legitimate, but often they are simply fear wearing more respectable clothes. I now believe many of the greatest problems I have witnessed were not created by a lack of intelligence, but by an unwillingness to remain with discomfort long enough for genuine problem-solving to begin.
Once I began seeing this pattern, I noticed it almost everywhere. This default state of rejection and escape happens at every scale. We see it at the macro level: Institutions avoid addressing obvious structural problems because the short-term political or financial cost appears too high. Even societies often choose postponement over confrontation, preferring temporary comfort to the discipline required to solve problems before they become crises. We see it in families postponing difficult conversations for years until relationships quietly deteriorate beyond repair. And we see it in organizations that tolerate declining performance because confronting it would threaten established hierarchies.
The High-Performer’s Environment
This week, I listened to a podcast with performance coach Gio Valiante on the subject of elite performance and complex problem-solving. His core idea illuminated exactly what I had been observing: hard problems are not a sign that something is wrong; they are often the exact conditions where performance, growth, and meaning emerge.
Valiante makes it very concrete by describing what goes wrong in ego-heavy environments. If two smart people are given a hard problem and both are attached to being right, the conversation quickly becomes defensive, argumentative, and closed off. That shuts down learning and lowers performance. By contrast, when a group is competent, open, and willing to be wrong, hard problems become a source of excellence. The struggle itself becomes part of the development process because it forces people to stretch and refine their thinking.
Valiante points to Einstein, who broke through a prolonged block on relativity while explaining his thinking aloud to someone else, showing how interaction and problem articulation unlock insight. He uses a similar example from the discovery of DNA, where the work was interactive problem-solving among multiple researchers. The implication is that difficult problems are often solved better in a shared intellectual environment than in isolation. Elite performers do not simply possess greater discipline; they create cultures in which difficult problems are welcomed, the mission is more important than ego, and the challenge itself elevates performance.
The Illusion of the Process
These observations forced me to reconsider my own pursuit of excellence. The Anchor Report was born out of a desire to better understand elite performance. Over the years I immersed myself in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, biology, decision making, and emotional regulation. I wanted to understand why some individuals consistently perform at extraordinary levels while others, often equally intelligent and equally talented, never seem to realize their potential. I learned a great deal about how the mind works, how emotions shape perception, and how attention influences judgment.
Yet, all along, I had overlooked something fundamental. Elite performance is not simply the result of discipline or resilience.
I had grown up in an emotional and intellectual environment that avoided problems and trusted everything would just be okay, and without realizing it, I was still operating under that programming. I was approaching my own challenges without full understanding, quietly rejecting the friction necessary to elevate my performance.
The only way to achieve true performance is when the motivation comes purely from the love of the craft and the integrity of the process. I love what I do—writing and trading. But I realized that, at some level, I had been doing both to prove something. I started writing to get readers and be recognized. I traded to prove myself, hijacked by fear, despite my deep love for the macro analysis, the industry knowledge, and the charts. Accepting a challenge on your ego’s behalf simply gets in the way. It reduces you to your limitations.
Over time, the reward shifted. Publishing became secondary to thinking; the article itself became the problem I wanted to solve. The work itself is now sufficient. Writing has taught me to fall in love with solving ideas, and trading is teaching me to fall in love with solving markets. Both are slowly becoming crafts instead of identity projects.
Champions of the Problem
You see this pure, ego-free commitment to tackling complex problems perfectly represented in professional sports. Exposing oneself to failure night after night, under the weight of immense public pressure, is the required baseline.
Consider a career like Lionel Messi’s. If his mindset had been defined by average behavior, the agonizing string of international defeats early in his career would have been enough to make him permanently retreat to the safety and comfort of his club successes. Instead, he chose to repeatedly engage with the problem. He remained relentless for decades. Where others would have seen an impossible burden, he saw an ongoing challenge to be solved.
The NBA provides another perfect example of this architecture. When Jalen Brunson arrived in New York, the consensus was that he was too short to be the primary star on a championship-contending team and that his defensive limitations would ultimately cap his ceiling. Those were objective, physical problems. Instead of hiding from them, he built his entire game around solving them. Through a fearless love of the craft and a pure embrace of the challenge, he transformed from a role player into the engine that drove the Knicks to the pinnacle.
Looking back, I no longer believe that high-performers are defined by intelligence, discipline, or even talent. Those qualities matter, but they come later. What separates them is something much simpler and much rarer: they deliberately build lives, teams, and environments in which difficult problems are welcomed rather than feared.
While everyone else is trying to escape difficulty, they are quietly moving toward it. That, I have come to believe, is where excellence actually begins.