John Amaechi knows what it takes to go from overlooked to unstoppable. The NBA veteran and psychologist reveals the mindset behind his success—how mastering the mundane, handling setbacks, and focusing on small, deliberate actions led him to achieve the extraordinary. 

Success isn’t about talent—it’s about paying the FEE: Focus, Effort, Execution.

JOHN AMAECHI: A high-performance mindset requires being eager in the face of the mundane and the vexing. Part of the challenge of understanding this is simply that we see the products of success. And so you might see an NBA player at the peak of their career doing something amazing. You might see a captain of business handling with aplomb the challenges of their work, but you don't see the precursors to that. Training in basketball for me was so boring.

I remember doing entire sessions that were just me catching a ball, doing a pivot, pivoting back, passing the ball for half an hour. But that's what you need to be able to tolerate if you're trying to achieve something remarkable because it comes through handling stuff that frustrates and confuses you, and it comes through repetition, ad nauseam, of things that seem small and unimportant until they're combined.

Hello. My name is John Amaechi. I'm a psychologist, a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School. I've written a couple of books, including "The Promises of Giants," and I used to play basketball in the NBA.

I wrote in my school yearbook that I was going to earn a lot of money and play on an NBA team. It was a stupid teenager's kind of goal and something so rare in terms of Britain. Everybody told me it was ridiculous. Everybody told me it had never been done. Everybody told me that a fat kid from Stockport who liked eating pie and reading books was hardly a candidate for the world's best basketball league. But to me, it was compelling. So I dedicated myself, my young life anyway, to trying to become an NBA basketball player. I played for a year in England before I wrote three thousand letters to American high schools. I received three replies, two of which were no, and ended up going to a school in Toledo, Ohio where a coach, Ed Heintschel, took care of me for a year and guided me to Penn State University.

And then I broke into the NBA. I didn't get drafted, so my success has been lumpy, but that's probably the way that it is for most people. People make the mistake of thinking that I am a basketball player that is now a psychologist, and that is not true. I knew at the age of seven that I would be a psychologist, so I was always a psychologist who played basketball for a time.

Studying for a doctorate while you play in the NBA is not as hard as people think. There is an inordinate amount of downtime as a professional athlete. Hours where you're in a plane for you to do stuff that might energize your brain, and so that's what I did. I had a distance education, and I studied while I was in transit. It's an amazing way to get your degree at thirty thousand feet.

Success does require a clear, vivid, and bold picture of the future. It's part of what makes all the dull, hard stuff worth it as you go along. But then you say, what needs to be true to get to that? And not just what needs to be true in two years' time or three years' time if it's a long-term vision, but today. What do I need to do today? What one small step will take me towards this vision or goal that I have? And what will I need to do tomorrow? What muscles will I need to build? What skills will I need to develop in order that in six months or a year's time, I can do something even more consequential that drives me towards what I want to achieve?

So I adopted something called the FEE model when I started talking to young people at basketball camps in the summertime. Paying the FEE: focus, effort, execution. You ask kids, "Who wants to play in the NBA?" and their hands would shoot up. Their minds had already transported them onto an NBA court. They were already there. But they hadn't considered, as I watched them play in the summer camps. They weren't doing some of the fundamentals that I thought would be essential to get them there. And so the FEE model was a way of encapsulating what's required.

Focus. Focus is the idea that you can curate your whole attention into this moment. Regardless of how dull and uninteresting it might feel, regardless of how consequential or important for your future it might be in your mind, regardless of whether you like or don't like the person talking to you, can you lever your whole mental faculties to that point in time and pay attention in a really proactive way?

Effort is the first e. It seems obvious. The idea that if you're going to achieve something, frankly, whether it be remarkable or ordinary, you have to put in some effort. It seems obvious, but most people don't think that. And indeed, most people spend most of their life, whether it be at work or in sport, seeing just how many percentage points off 100% they can offer. How little effort can I get away with. Rather than thinking, how about for the time that I'm doing this, which will not be forever and should not be forever, my effort will be a 100%. But effort alone isn't enough because effort is often boundless activity and energy. And that's great, but it requires that that is done in a way that's going to drive you forward.

Execution. Somebody did a great disservice to the idea of practice by misunderstanding the research on practice. They just said "practice makes perfect." And it's like, no, it doesn't. No. No. No. No. Well-executed practice makes perfect. Practicing in a way that is very conscious of the right ways of doing things, of the structures that must be in place, of the movement of your body, of the activity of your brain, that's a really key element to success, and that's the FEE, paying the FEE.

The first question that kids would be interested in asking me is, "Have you ever been dunked on?" And I'm like, "Of course, I've been dunked on. My first game was against Michael Jordan. Yeah. I've been dunked on." If you haven't been dunked on in whatever context you're in, you set your sights too low because that is an inevitable part of challenging yourself to meet and then stretch your potential.

And when bad stuff happens to you, you're allowed to be down for a bit. People think resilience is this idea that your performance is here, and something happens to you, and your performance stays here. And that's not what resilience is. It never has been. Resilience in the face of setbacks is the idea that here you go, something happens, and there's a dip. But resilience is the idea that you recognize this setback is a part of your achievement pathway, and you're going to return and maybe even exceed your previous performance despite it. You learn from those experiences. But more than that, they are just going to happen if you have ambition.

One of the reasons that setbacks are often disproportionately negative for people is because it sets off a cascade of voices in their head. "Well, you were never any good." "You'll never be any good." "This is just a sign of your failure." And they echo around you. And I encourage people to remember a couple of things. One, the voice in your head is not you. You are listening to that voice. That's you. That voice in your head is not you. It is a Frankenstein's monster of all the disapproving looks, all the unsupportive managers or teachers, all the friends who told you that you you couldn't possibly achieve this thing that you wanted to achieve. It's a Frankenstein's monster that has only one purpose, to make you feel bad. And we need to treat it like what it is. It's a heckler in your head. If any of us with our brilliance, all the stuff that we really do do well, our jobs that are complex and sophisticated, if we walked along the street and a random stranger, perhaps hanging from a scaffold, yelled at us, "Oh, yeah. You're not prioritizing your strategy correctly." You wouldn't look up at them and say, "Oh, yeah. You make some good points." You'd recognize that this is a detached stranger with no goal other than to make you feel bad, and you would ignore them. And that's what we need to do. Ignore them.

And if you do struggle with this, remember that the heckler responds badly to really smart questions being asked. "Oh, yeah. You're going to do terribly in this next speech." "Why do you say that?" You can literally ask the voice in your head, "Why do you say that?" And it's amazing how silent it will become. Because in your head, you have evidence of times you've succeeded in exactly that circumstance. In your head, you have evidence of all the work you've done to get to this point and be capable in that moment, and the heckler falls silent.

If you want to achieve something extraordinary, you have to recognize that rarely is that achieved alone. You need to build a group to go with you. Who's going to help you on your quest? No good story about achieving something remarkable is just one person trudging with their own thoughts. It is lots of often unexpected roles around you. Some of them are always with you, and some of them appear and disappear in different contexts. But who are you building around you? Who's your tribe that's going to help you do something remarkable?

I've had that my whole life. My mother, while she was alive, and even now as a guiding force for me. My sisters, two very different people, but with skills and perspectives that have often slapped me when I'm being morose and cynical, as they do lift me. Who are these people who are going to see that vision of yours and hold you to it? In those moments when you doubt, in those moments when you're deciding it's too much hard work, who are those people who will support you? Build that group of people, and they will help you thrive. They don't detract from your success in the end. You don't need to deny that they ever existed because only a fool believes that success achieved alone is real.