In this blog I dig deeper into the mental side of sport: psychology, neuroscience, neurobiology and training methods to understand what makes us great.

I played a bit of tennis when I was younger (quite a lot of tennis, actually), but I wasn’t good enough to go pro.

I graduated from Stanford in mechanical engineering and spent my career in technology and consumer electronics at places like Apple, WebTV and Bose. I realized that we attach ourselves emotionally to products and companies through stories. The most successful places I’ve worked at have the best stories. Great stories lead to great outcomes.

On a Tuesday morning in 2009, a question appeared in my head:

How do the stories that we tell ourselves allow us to produce our best performance?

That question has led me to study how elite athletes think. I want to unpack their stories down to the most fundamental level and understand what makes them the best.

I’ve written a book about the psychology of elite athletic performance called The Importance of Walking.

The Importance of Walking: A Journey to Elite Performance from Dublin to Monte Carlo
by Stephen Jungmann

The Importance of Walking explores how elite athletes and world-class performers are made, not born. Based on a true story, the main character’s passion for tennis explodes into his life from a glowing television screen in the summer of 1977 as Bjorn Borg is reaching the height of his powers at Wimbledon.