Make Your Bed.

Yo, happy March! The month that seemingly refuses to stay still. What do I mean by this? Beginning of March comes in pretty loud. Cold mornings that cut through us when we step out the door. The sky can't decide what's going on. There's almost a restlessness battling between different seasons.

And then as we enter into the second half of March, it seems to be leaving quietly. Longer evenings, something green is returning, and this distinct feeling that the world has taken a shift as you are coming up on concluding the first quarter of the year.

The old phrase would capture it well: "In like a lion, out like a lamb." But March isn't just changing the weather, the light also changes. Daylight savings time arrives this month, and with an extra hour of evening, a small structural gift that seemingly reshapes the whole psychology of a day.

Tree’s don’t just pop up randomly. There's a sequence built over the entirety of its existence. And its sudden emergence out of the ground is the output of a root system that never stopped working, even when nothing was visible above the surface. Thus, March is a fitting month to talk about what excellence actually is, where it actually comes from, and what it looks like.

Most people in our life, especially of my generation (Gen Z), would define excellence as fully comprised in intensity, being more hours, more sacrifice, more optimization, and that there is a destination to arrive at through sheer volume of effort, and that the person who suffers the most actually earns the most. I would venture to say that they're building in the wrong direction, and the research is unambiguous about why that is. To put it plainly, excellence isn't a peak you summit; it's a structure that you inhabit.

Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL, four-star admiral, commander of all US Special Operations Forces, and the man who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, opened his now-famous 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas in Austin with a singular lesson that stopped all 8,000 people in attendance in their tracks. He told the graduating class to make their beds. Every single morning, in SEAL training, instructors arrive before dawn to inspect your rack. Are your corners square? Are your covers pulled tight? Is the pillow centered exactly underneath the headboard? Is there an extra blanket folded neatly at the bottom?

It seems crazy to aspiring warriors, but what McRaven was getting at is something that most people miss entirely. It's the first task of the day. It's not that you're accomplishing making your bed or your room's clean, that's a bonus. It establishes something: a psychological posture, and a signal to yourself and your nervous system that you are a person who begins with order and follows through on small commitments, who gets shit done, and who does things well before anyone is watching.

Behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg, through his research at Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, demonstrated that small behaviors performed consistently in the same context lower the activation threshold for everything that follows. The completion of one task reduces the perceived friction of the next.

Research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology by Lally et al. (2010) found that habits anchored to morning contexts formed more reliably and reached automaticity faster than those introduced at variable times of day. The average time for behavior to become truly automatic was 66 days, rather than what is commonly cited as 21 days.

This ties in directly to cognitive load theory developed by psychologist John Sweller in the late 80s, which holds that a human working memory has finite capacity. When your environment is disordered, physical clutter, unresolved small tasks, broken commitments to yourself, those unresolved threads draw on your working memory constantly, draining your capacity, even when you're not consciously aware of it.

Research within this framework found that environmental disorder measurably reduces attention and performance, not because your capability is changing, but because the cognitive resources are actually being spent on managing what should have already been handled (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011). Making your bed is a cognitive offloading strategy. You're eliminating one thread of disorder before it can extract a toll or a cost. Multiply that across a well-ordered day, and you are meaningfully expanding the mental bandwidth that's available to you, what actually requires it: strategic thinking, reading people well, doing excellent work under pressure.

So on this topic of excellence and genuine excellence versus what is the performance of it, Brad Stulberg, the author of The Way of Excellence and co-author of Peak Performance, draws a distinction that clarifies everything regarding this.

He separates pseudo-excellence (seen as hustle culture, optimization theater, and these external metrics as the true measure of worth) from genuine excellence, which he defines as:

Genuine excellence is thus an infinite game, and a process of becoming, rather than a destination that you reach to then put on display. The motivational science supports this directly.

Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, which is one of the most replicated frameworks in psychology, identifies three main needs to which satisfaction is required for a sustained intrinsic motivation:

Cited in the American Psychologist in 2000, their research consistently showed that performance driven by external pressure (such as fear, validation, comparison) actually degrades the psychological conditions that make high performance sustainable. You can operate on that fuel for a while, but eventually it breaks the system. So the person who has made their bed every morning for a decade is not doing it for anyone else, and that's precisely the point.

So genuine excellence, which is not performed under urgency, is legible to other people in ways that we can't always consciously articulate or recognize. Social psychologists have documented the halo effect: perceived discipline in one domain generates assumptions of competence across others. Thorndike 1920, Nisbett and Wilson 1977.

When you operate from internal order, when your environment, routines, and these private commitments reflect sustained discipline, people subconsciously read that signal. They calibrate trust and respect against it, and often without realizing they're doing it at all.

The person in the room who reads situations accurately stays composed when complexity is escalating and acts with apparent ease in moments that tend to rattle others. That person is rarely improvising, but rather, the cognitive bandwidth that disorder and chaos would have consumed has now been freed for accurate and precise observation.

What seems as effortless is actually just the output of a structure that was built long before anyone was watching, just like the tree with intricate root systems that develop that process underneath the soil until suddenly bursting and emerging out of the ground. Stulberg is right that excellence is a process of becoming. And the people who appear most excellent are not at that destination, but are actually deep in this self-sustaining process that has been built on the right foundation. And so, returning back to the point around intensity, their capacity does not come from intensity. It's actually the opposite. It comes from order, consistency, and a quiet discipline of honoring the small things that no one else will ever see, which is, not coincidentally, March's lesson.

My takeaway for all of you in this month is that excellence as a human signal cannot be performed indefinitely. The substrate either exists or just flat out doesn't. And over time, people are going to sense the difference.

So start with order and honor the small commitments. That's what's going to allow you to build the architecture that makes doing hard things, and all of the hard moments, feel "easy peasy lemon squeezy."

I'm not your mom, but make your bed.

Start there, and the rest will begin to compound.

The brains we pulled from this week:

McRaven, W.H. (2017). Make your bed: Little things that can change your life…and maybe the world. Grand Central Publishing.

Stulberg, B. (2026). The way of excellence: A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world. Rodale Books.

Stulberg, B., & Magness, S. (2017). Peak performance: Elevate your game, avoid burnout, and thrive with the new science of success. Rodale Books.

Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.

Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive load theory. Springer.

Thorndike, E.L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25–29.

Nisbett, R.E., & Wilson, T.D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(4), 250–256.

Fogg, B.J. (2019). Tiny habits: The small changes that change everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.


Human Prowess is growing. We're continuing to develop the infrastructure around this work: resources, frameworks, and ways to support those who want to go deeper than a newsletter can take you. None of that happens without an audience that actually engages with ideas at this level, and I don't take that lightly. The fact that you're here, reading this, thinking about this, that matters to me more than I can cleanly put into words.

— Jaron