Brian Johnson uses his son Emerson's chess match to show how to spot your kryptonite: the habits and choices that tank your performance. Notice when you break your own rules, learn from losses, and cut what weakens you.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In the last couple 1s, we've been squeezing the winner learn juice out of a recent poor chest performance. As I was working on that last plus one, Emerson came back into my office to tell me how mommy wants to spend her birthday this week. Hint. That will involve going off the normal food menu. Perfect. We have bright lines to know when to cross them and when not to cross them. Now, I had the last plus one open on my screen, and I asked Emerson to read that passage on losing by chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley. He read it out loud. It was awesome. I repeat, in a chapter called losing because you will, grandmaster Maurice Ashley tells us, no one likes to lose. Yet how we handle losses is one of the most powerful measures of of our eventual success. And then he continues by saying, the late, great Kobe Bryant was once asked, what does losing feel like to you? His reply? It's exciting because it means you have different ways to get better. There's certain weaknesses that were exposed that you need to shore up. It sucks to lose, but at the same time, the answers are there if you just look at them. Now. One more quick winner, learn distinction, Then we'll carry on. Note, I'm deliberately repeating myself here because learning how to take win or learn off the bumper sticker and make it a weapon in your armamentarium is really, really important for you and your kids and colleagues, et cetera. So after Emerson and I chatted about the impact of his nutrition choices on his chest performance, I asked him, hey, you know Superman? He says, yeah. I said, well, you know what happens when he gets exposed to kryptonite? Emerson said, yeah. I said, well, what happens? And he says, he loses all his power. And I said, exactly. Isn't that fascinating? Kind of like what just happened to you, huh? Emerson got big eyes and enthusiastically said, yeah. And then I said, we should probably avoid kryptonite before the next tournament, huh? He laughed and said, yeah, and that's today's plus one. You have any suboptimal performances lately? Of course you have. You're human. Well, you got any kryptonites in your life? Of course you do. You're human. Now get excited. Make the connection between how you perform and when you're following your protocol and how you perform and when you go off the rails a bit, then get even more excited as you flip the switch. Eliminate the kryptonites and give us all you've got today.
