Sarah Jessica Parker is papped on the regular dashing around the West Village with a hot new novel in her grip. Actor and onetime Jonathan Safran Foer correspondent Natalie Portman uses Instagram to flaunt her bibliophile status, posting selfies with a cocked eyebrow peeking out from behind what is often a highbrow work in translation. Now there’s a new bookfluencer on the scene: 27-year-old Philadelphia Eagles star wide receiver AJ Brown, who was spotted during the fourth quarter of a recent playoff game against the Green Bay Packers looking pensive on the sidelines with his nose burrowed in a paperback.
Though Brown’s performance that day was below his All-Pro standard, the Eagles won the game 22-10. Within 24 hours, the clunkily titled but undeniably winsome Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life was the No 1 selling book across all categories on Amazon after previously being ranked 523,497th, beating out everything from Mel Robbins’s blockbuster self-help tome Let Them and all the weird shapeshifter stories that are fueling the romantasy bonanza.
And now Brown and the Eagles are back in the Super Bowl for the second time in three seasons, having bounced back from last year’s spectacular collapse, thanks in part to a self-help book whose little-known author went $90,000 into debt bringing it to life more than a decade ago.
"Jim Murphy could not have paid for better publicity for a five-year-old book." - Mike Tirico re: A.J. Brown and 'Inner Excellence' ????????????️ pic.twitter.com/nrjpnsP541
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 19, 2025
Former college baseball player and performance coach Jim Murphy’s self-help book did not earn a Kirkus or Publishers Weekly review when he self-published it in 2009, nor did it receive a mention when he put out a second version in 2020. But that’s entirely on brand, as a core message of the work is to vanquish the desire for ephemeral “wins”. The message is resonating. The book has an average Amazon rating of 4.7 stars, and the few detractors don’t even seem to be engaging with the text (“Uhhhhhh this book is called inner excellence and yet the inner part of the book is not excellent. It’s printed upside down and backwards” was an assessment from one of the few readers who was less than won over.)
Murphy, who played one year of football in college and went on to five years as a minor-league outfielder for the Chicago Cubs organization, has whipped up a Zen-infused meditation on letting go of our crass desires. We must lose a grip on our egos, hunger and greed in order to thrive. If we abandon our craving for external validation, and remember what it’s like to be a child at play, then we can live in the moment, tap into our joy and find our “inner excellence.” The book contains lines like: “There’s no failure; only feedback” and: “Mastery of the ego is the great challenge and greatest opponent of every competition.”
In an interview with ESPN, Brown described the book’s resonance thus: “I’m just using it for my peak performance, you know, trying to have my best self out there on the field.” He told reporters after the game, “[The book] states if you can just have a clear mind and remember that nothing else matters, clear conscience, nothing matters negative or positive. You’re willing to take risks. It also says if you’re humble, you can’t be embarrassed.”
Invoking everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius to Henry Thoreau and David Foster Wallace, Inner Excellence’s author offers an elegiac 360 page-long sermon that drives home the idea that we are prisoners of our own fixations on markers of success. The book can be comfortingly - or, depending on your tolerance levels, boringly - repetitive, and serves as a longwinded exercise in heart-opening and setting fire to our craven impulses. Murphy is a Marie Kondo for the modern moment, stressing the need to toss out the mental garbage that weighs us down. His pages lay out a recipe for letting go of our most harmful learned beliefs and trusting in our messy, playful selves.
To go by his brand of attachment theory – or detachment theory, if you will – those striving to conquer boardrooms and tennis courts and divorce courts (inner excellence applies to all) need to look within and focus less on some abstract future larded with laurels that will supposedly cure our woes.“Winning is part of the solution and the problem,” he writes. “We don’t climb mountains to get to the top; we climb to see who we can become in trying to get there.”
We are all prisoners of our bad feelings, you see, and the secret is not some magical elixir or unaffordable self-help retreat (though Murphy does lead those—for corporations and families and solo soul-searchers), but a greater sense of understanding and acceptance. We must do everything we can to immunize ourselves against what Murphy calls the “Affluenza virus”—the modern-day ailment of greed and need. We must rid ourselves of the desire for “PALMS” - “Possessions, Achievements, Looks, Money and Status” and remember what it feels like to play for the sake of play.
Murphy wrote the book over five years, two of which were spent in a near monastic state in the Sonoran desert. He canvassed squads of athletes and sports psychologists, and came to see that winning is about far more than, you know, winning (or social media likes, or shiny ribbons, or shared headlines).
It wasn’t until Eagles defensive tackle Moro Ojamo finally read a copy and shared it with his teammate, Brown, that it became an overnight bestseller. It’s also been the focal point of countless memes during Philadelphia’s run to the Super Bowl. It has appeared on Eagles-themed T-shirts, been handed out by fans at tailgates, while even penetrating the city’s highest corridors of power. When thousands of fans stormed South Broad street on Sunday night to celebrate the team’s win over Washington to reach the Super Bowl, the impact of Murphy’s book was hard to ignore.
The underlying message is far more Maria Montessori than Machiavelli, and it comes as a kick in the guts to the take-no-prisoners Trump 2.0 messaging that is perverting the age in which we find ourselves. Lest any of us forget: Why focus on saying you climbed a mountain when you can still get swept up in the act of climbing one?
