Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for the Best Possible Life with Oprah and Jim Murphy

In September 2023, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown was seen reading a book on the sidelines during a playoff game watched by nearly 40 million people. That book was Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy, which had been sitting in obscurity since its original self-publication in 2009. Within 20 days, it sold 200,000 copies and hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. But the week it exploded, Murphy’s mother was dying. He was walking around Dallas alone, unable to pay his credit cards, when he looked up at a skyscraper and felt a question: would he rather own that building or have written the book? He realized he would not trade what he learned for hundreds of millions of dollars. That moment, he says, was the real success.

The problem with chasing success

Murphy’s own story is the book’s central argument. He spent his youth dreaming of becoming a superstar baseball player—"the guy that every guy wanted to be, and every girl wanted to be with." When an eye condition ended that career, he was lost. He gave away his possessions, moved to the desert, and spent five years studying peak performance, interviewing sports psychologists and elite coaches. What he found was that the kind of success most people chase—money, fame, status, possessions—does not deliver what they actually want.