Hearts and Minds of Champions
THE TRIPLE
What you are capable of, when you stop carrying what was never yours to carry.
Alumni game. Freshman year of college. I stepped into the batter’s box and hit a bomb over the center fielder’s head. Standing on third base, dusting off my jersey, my high school baseball coach leaned in close.
THIRD BASE · ALUMNI GAME · CIRCA EARLY 1990S
“It’s amazing what you can do when your parents aren’t here to f*** it all up.” – “Hawk,” my high school baseball coach
I felt three things standing there.
First – seen.
Like he had watched it all along. The weight I’d been carrying to every at-bat. My dad under the tree past third base with his igloo cooler, beer going in, criticism coming out the other side. Walking in the door after games to hear,
“I wonder why you can’t hit like I could”
…and then him grabbing my bat, voice rising, swinging it loud enough that part of me genuinely wondered if I was about to get hit.
Second – redeemed.
Like the player I actually was had finally shown up without permission from anyone.
And third – just happy I hit a triple.
I’ve thought about that moment for thirty years. Not because it was the greatest athletic achievement of my life. But because of what Hawk saw that I couldn’t yet see myself: the gap between who I was on that field and who I had been at every at-bat before it. That gap wasn’t about talent. It was about the mental and emotional pain and chaos from my parents’ divorce and my dad going deep into alcoholism that would fuel rage. That’s what I had been carrying to the plate. That’s what wasn’t there that day.
This series is about that gap.
Over the next weeks, maybe months, maybe a year, we’ll see where it takes us – we’re going to go deep on the hearts and minds of champions. Not the kind of champions who had every advantage and ran downhill their whole lives. The kind who had every reason to quit and chose not to.
The kind who found the word CAN in the middle of the hardest season of their lives and decided to build something with it.
I’ve been obsessed with this territory for over twenty years. It started on a mountain bike, when my coach, a world champion, handed me a book about the mind instead of a training plan and said,
“it’s all up here.”
I thought he was going to give me intervals and nutrition splits. He handed me Mind Gym by Gary Mack and changed the direction of everything.
Then life handed me things that books couldn’t fully prepare me for. A divorce that gutted me. Dark nights that taught me more about who I was than any victory ever could. I started writing a book about it, started it in my thirties, confident and ready to tell the world how I’d overcome everything. Then the floor disappeared. And I had to go find the real title.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – until you watch enough people get broken by hard things and never come back. The missing word is CAN. What doesn’t kill you CAN make you stronger. But only if you choose.” — What Doesn’t Kill You CAN Make You Stronger
CAN
That choice – that single word – is what this series is built on. And I want to take you through it the same way I lived it. Not from the mountaintop. From the trail. With dirt on my jersey and a coach’s voice still ringing in my ears.
WHAT THIS SERIES IS (AND ISN’T)
Hearts & Minds of Champions
This isn’t a self-help lecture. It isn’t a list of tips. It’s a journey through the books, stories, science, and hard-won lessons that have shaped how I think, and an invitation for you to take what’s useful and apply it to your own life.
Each week we’ll go deep on one big idea. We’ll pull from the greatest minds and hearts I’ve found: the Bible, Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius, Dr. Carol Dweck, Dr. David Hawkins, Scott Peck, James Allen, Ryan Holiday and others. And we’ll always bring it back to one question: how does this make us stronger, individually and as a team?
I’ll share things from my own life I haven’t shared before. Some of it is hard. All of it is real. And none of it is meant to impress you, it’s meant to be useful to you.
THIS WEEK: SIT WITH THIS
Where in your life are you carrying weight that was never yours?
It might be a voice from childhood. A story someone told you about who you are or what you’re capable of. A failure that got attached to your identity instead of your education.
You don’t have to answer it out loud. Just notice it. Because the triple was always in you. It just needed the weight off the bar.
I’m glad you’re here. I believe in every single one of you more than you probably know. Let’s go find out what we’re made of together.
Lots of love,
Nate
