Want to Learn From the Greatest Athletes and Coaches of All Time?

What is the Exponential Athlete?

The Exponential Athlete is a weekly Newsletter that takes deep dives into the specifics of what separates the greatest athletes of all time from their contemporaries. Each week I share insights designed to make you better as an athlete, coach, or high performer in any field. These insights are derived from my extensive study of specific athletes, scientific research, macro trends, and interviews. 

I often find that success is oversimplified. We attribute it to hard work, determination, competitiveness, and god given physical ability. We get so wrapped up in stories around these characteristics, that we often overlook what drives someone to work hard, what mental models create dedication, and where competitiveness originates from. My mission is to find out exactly how much of greatness we have control over and how we can inject this directly into our own life and performance. 

You will learn things like:

• The science behind why athletes have alter egos (Think Kobe’s Black Mamba)

• The goal setting framework that Shoehi Ohtani credits for his baseball success (It is actually taught in many Japanese High Schools)

• Michael Phelps’ keys for turning his visualizations into reality

• Roger Federer’s secrets to career longevity 

• What athletes can learn from elite military units 

• How to program yourself for success like Tiger Woods

• What coaches can learn from video game design about talent development

With each post I also provide a book recommendation and one of my favorite quotes that I came across through my research.

Why should you care about what I have to say?  

I should probably introduce myself! My name is Ken Jee, and I am the person behind the Exponential Athlete blog, newsletter, and podcast. I played Division 1 golf in college and briefly tried to play professionally after school. Like most retired athletes, I wanted to understand why I personally couldn’t make it to the next level. I became obsessed with studying elite athletes, great coaches, and cutting edge performance practices to diagnose my own shortcomings. 

This obsession led me into a career in sports analytics.  For the last 10 years, I have been working with professional athletes and teams to turn their data into insights around performance. Data had always been interesting to me because I felt like it was the ground truth in understanding performance outcomes. While I love data and analytics, my content mostly starts where the data ends. Data mostly explains what happens, it doesn’t talk about why things happen or the tools athletes use to create these incredible outcomes. The newsletter, blog, and podcast are my attempts to go beyond this data to find real insight. 

There are 3 main reasons I would hope you would be willing to give me and this blog / newsletter a chance:

1. I do the research so you don’t have to. I wake up every day excited to put in the work to understand this space. Each month, I read 5-6 books and listen to 20+ hours of podcasts related to athletes and sports performance.This doesn’t feel like work to me because I am completely obsessed with better understanding this domain. 

2. I have a unique perspective working in sports. I have played sports at a relatively high level and also still work in the sports performance domain. I’m fortunate to be able to have access to some of the highest level athletes, coaches, support staff, and researchers through my professional network. I am constantly interviewing and communicating with these people to validate my findings. 

3. I welcome feedback and want to improve. Like scientific research, my journey is iterative. When new information becomes available, I will do my best to integrate it into my existing body of knowledge. A huge amount has changed since I started to research sports performance. I expect many more changes to come. It is my job to explore and adopt new information in real time. 

Why Is it called the Exponential Athlete?

Most people are familiar with the pareto principle. It is also called the 80/20 principle. The idea is that 20% of the things you focus on produce 80% of the value. If people focus on the most important 20% they will make incredible leaps forward. While I think this is an incredible framework for life, I don’t think it necessarily applies to the greatest athletes and the highest achievers. The people at the top have maxed out the 20%. 

This podcast is about maximizing the 20% and also finding each small incremental advantage that adds 100% (or close to it). 

Athletes that executeW many small details well get increasingly better over time. The details build on themselves. In finance or other quantitatively minded professions, we call this a compounding return over time. Compounding returns follow an exponential curve. 

Book Recommendation: The Genius of Athletes by Noel Brick & Scott Douglas

This book is a great primer for many of the topics we will discuss in the newsletter and what I discuss on my podcast. It dives into much of the scientific literature around goal setting, self talk, planning, and perseverance in athletes. You can tell how much I liked it from all the sticky notes!

Quote: Kobe Bryant on the importance of learning in sport

“I asked a ton of questions. I was curious, I wanted to improve, learn, and fill my head with the history of the game. No matter who I was with - a coach, hall of famer, teammate - and no matter the situation -game, practice, vacation - I would fire away with question after question… A lot of people appreciated my curiosity and passion. My approach always was that I’d rather risk embarrassment now than be embarrassed later, when I’ve won zero titles.”

-Kobe Bryant

I think this quote embodies the message of my content well. It’s better to know more and look silly now then to not know and look foolish when it matters!

Next up: “Don’t Be Yourself” - The science of why great athletes have alter egos

More Places to Connect

If this seems interesting to you, please subscribe for free! If you want more content like this, consider check out my podcast (Also the Exponential Athlete). It is a bit longer form and packed with even more insights!

You can also keep up to date with us on instagram, twitter, and linkedin!