Blurb: The modern world bombards us with messages that we are not enough and need something outside ourselves to be fulfilled. The truth is everything we need is already inside us. We just need to uncover it. Based on the ground-breaking mindset training and culture building platform co-founded by Dr. Michael Gervais and NFL coach Pete Carroll, Compete to Create provides a blueprint to unlock your authentic self, explore the edges of your potential, and live a life of purpose and meaning. In this Audible Original you’ll get an in-depth look at how world-class athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs organize their inner lives to thrive in any environment. Dr. Gervais, who has spent the last two decades as a high performance psychologist, translates his experience in the trenches into actionable skills that you can apply to your everyday life. In each chapter, Coach Carroll shares lessons from his career, insights into building relationship-based teams, and how he helps people find their best. If you know there is more inside you to discover – more to contribute, more room to grow – Compete to Create gives you the tools you need to embark on a life-changing adventure.

Review: This Audible Original was one I downloaded entirely because of the Peter Carroll attachment. It has been in my library for quite a while and by the time I got to it, I had in my head he had co-written it. This was not that. The book comes across more as a Dr. Gervais podcast with Carroll popping in on occasion to say “yeah, we apply this method with the Seahawks”. Reading this shortly after re-reading Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself probably was not a fair comparison to this book either. Walsh’s is considered one of the best ever in this genre of “sports meets real world application”. So, when I say this was okay, not great, take that into mind.

The basic principles covered in this one are: Defining your philosophy, finding your vision, developing a framework for your outlook on life, focusing on the signal and ignoring the noise, building grit, confidence and trust and recovery.

All of those are covered, but none in great detail or with much focus on development tools within each. Work of this kind is probably not best suited for an audiobook, where there are useful exercises on how to define purpose (step one), that tend to not be done by audiobookers like myself who do the majority of my consumption while walking the dog.

There is nothing wrong with this audiobook, but there are others I have read recently (The Score Takes Care of Itself, Level Up Your Life) that I would recommend reading first.