Perseverance creates hope
How my client Jim Murphy's viral moment reminds me to "just go on"
The book is dog-eared, frayed, its cover curled up from being bent backwards during reading. The camera captures this detail even from a great distance away, as it zooms in onto the book resting on NFL player A. J. Brown’s knee.
I recognize the book's cover before I even read the video’s caption. It’s performance coach Jim Murphy’s book, Inner Excellence.
Knowing that Murphy was one of my book coaching clients, my son has sent me this clip from the January 12, 2025, NFL playoff game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Green Bay Packers that he is currently in the middle of watching.
Camera crews caught wide receiver Brown calmly reading a book between drives in Sunday’s match, looking for all the world like he was checked out of the game. But far from it, Brown was intently checked into his mental game—which is where, in Inner Excellence, Murphy says that such contests are won.
Within seconds, internet sleuths discover the book’s title and author. Reporters interview Brown about the book after the game. Eagles fans start snatching up copies of Inner Excellence and leaving positive reviews. Murphy is inundated all evening with interview requests from broadcasters and media outlets from around the world. Literary agents and publishers reach out to him as well.
By the next morning, Murphy’s book had become the number one overall bestseller on Amazon, moving up from the 565,268 sales rank position to number one. It held this place for half of this past week, and at the time of writing, it still sits at #2 Bestseller overall. Murphy says that he went from selling five to around ten thousand copies per day.
While Jim is busy fielding calls from networks and newspapers across the country, The Best Possible Life—the book I just finished working on with him in November—also crawls slowly up the charts, reaching number one bestseller in half a dozen categories. At one point, I noted that The Best Possible Life stood at 150th bestseller overall, though it has not maintained that position.
So that’s cool. I’m happy to have had a small role in a book that has reached bestseller status. But I’m even happier because The Best Possible Life’s content is worthwhile and will help many.
While Murphy is glad for the attention Brown drew to his Inner Excellence book, he remains even-keeled about it. “I don’t want to be a distraction,” he told reporters on Monday. “I’m just a messenger. … I’m just so grateful that A.J. is bringing attention to the idea of what’s possible when you focus on a purpose greater than yourself and realize that selfless is fearless,” Murphy said.
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I’ve been fascinated this past week by Murphy’s story, not because it looked like the quintessential overnight American success story, but because I knew how much it was not.
Jim is what I might call a fifteen-year overnight success. In fact, it might be better to call him a twenty-year overnight success: fifteen since the initial publishing of Inner Excellence, but twenty years since he first began researching it.
In 2003, Jim went down to Tucson, AZ to work with performance coach Ricky Scruggs (who is also a current book coaching client of mine). While in Tucson, Murphy spent several years living in solitude in the desert, researching fifty to sixty hours per week on what would become the book Inner Excellence. He interviewed more than forty sports psychologists to answer the questions: How can a baseball player stand at the plate in Game 7 of the World Series and find peace and confidence? And, how can an Olympic athlete who has spent four years training for an event that will last less than sixty seconds be filled with peace and confidence—when so much is out of their control?
When the book was eventually published in 2010, Murphy found himself $90,000 in debt, with only a $100 cash advance on a maxed-out credit card to his name. Overwhelmed with anxiety, Murphy called up Scruggs to ask him what to do. Scruggs told him to find a person in need and help them out.
Murphy walked out the door of the Starbucks where he’d been sitting and found an unhoused man directly around the corner—playing a full-size harp.
How many unhoused people have you seen carrying around full-sized harps?
Murphy gave this man his last hundred-dollar bill and went back to where he was staying.
I know this story well, not only because Murphy is a friend and client, but because he wrote about this incident in the first chapter of The Best Possible Life, the book I worked with him on this past year. I suggest you pick up a copy and read the story there for the full effect.
Long story short, this harp-playing man later reveals that his name is Zoe.
Okay, I’m thinking. An unhoused man playing a harp, of all things, whose name means “fullness of life”—a subject that just happens to be the very subject of the book Jim has just written. What are the chances?
I floated the idea to Murphy that many legends feature a king, an angel or Christ Himself dressed in the disguise of the poor, yet who comes bearing a message or lesson. He’s intrigued, but this detail doesn’t make it into The Best Possible Life.
After this meeting with Zoe, Murphy’s life begins to completely change. Through a unique series of events, he surrenders his life fully to the God who reveals Himself as the poorest of the poor.
Murphy begins to see miraculous answers to prayer. One of these was a call from PGA golfer Tiger Woods’ coach, Sean Foley. He had read Inner Excellence and wondered if Murphy would come work with another of his clients, Hunter Mahan. A few months after Mahan and Murphy began working together, Mahan won a PGA Tour event, and then went on to win the World Championship (Match Play) a few months later.
The rest, as they say, is history. However, you should read the full story in the first chapter of his new book.
Not only did Murphy put in the hard work to get his first book out to the world, but he has continued to do the same hard work over the past fifteen years. The result is that at the moment his book suddenly became a viral success and bestseller—an event outside of his control—he was well-placed to take advantage of the boost.
Don’t get me wrong, Jim had a successful performance coaching business before this moment. He routinely travels around the world to work with professional athletes in the PGA, LIV Golf League and the NFL, as well as with numerous Olympic athletes.
Jim has never changed the subject over all those years and has kept developing both himself and his content. He’s now in incredible demand—and well-situated to be able to meet it. I admire Jim’s perseverance.
He’s currently in Philadelphia where he met A. J. Brown yesterday. Tomorrow he’ll be part of the pre-game show for the Eagles playoff game against the L.A. Rams. Not only that, there are plans in the works between himself, his mentor Shane Claiborne who lives in inner-city Philadelphia and the A.J. Brown Foundation to potentially develop a literacy program for inner-city children.
“So often I’ve prayed for more opportunities, but I think it’s more powerful to pray to be prepared for opportunities when they come,” Murphy said in a post on X from April 2017.
Looks like he was.
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What prepares us for opportunities when they come? Well, obviously, having shown up over and over, done the work, and persevered against the odds. But there’s another factor: faithfulness in challenging circumstances.
Jim’s viral moment comes at a time when, for me, it would be easy to look back over many failures and false starts in my life and wonder if I’ve been completely off track all these years. I take comfort in one vital passion I have never changed: my writing.
Still, as both Inner Excellence and The Best Possible Life will both tell you, material success or renown are not the measure of the fullness or faithfulness of one’s life. I’ve been around parts of the church that will try to tell you that obedience to God leads to worldly success, or that following God’s will leads to a smooth path in life.
If anything, I’ve discovered the opposite to be true.
Along with the biblical character of Job, I have had frank discussions with God about the nature of suffering, obedience, faith and hope.1
Perhaps this is why I insist on the “hidden life” concept. The world is full of quiet, hidden people whose lives are an influence on many but who never become any kind of apparent success—at least according to the world’s terms.
Friends, family and colleagues may look at these individuals and wonder what on earth they are doing. These individuals may even look at themselves and wonder why they just can’t seem to catch a break. But none of this necessarily means they are disobedient, unfaithful to the calling of God on their lives, or not diligent.
I was encouraged over the Christmas season by encountering again these lines from Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings:
“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. … Folk seem to have been just landed in them, [as if] – their paths were laid that way….
“But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end” (emphasis mine).
“We hear about those as just went on, and not all to a good end.” Those are the tales that matter, Sam says in “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol” chapter in The Two Towers, as he ponders what sort of a tale he and Frodo find themselves in.
“Those as just went on” has become an encouraging phrase for me. Sam is talking about those who persevered, no matter what the circumstances around them looked like. Those who didn’t give up and completed the task set for them, even in the face of impending failure.
I’m struck by the idea that in The Lord of the Rings, what looks like failure frequently ends up becoming the turning of the tide—and often not because of anything the characters do.
In true eucatastrophic fashion, the characters are often delivered by an unforeseen turn of events. Some of them actually fail, only to have their failure turned to success by unexpected forces outside of their control. The point is that each perseveres in the face of seemingly certain failure, only to find their reality suddenly transformed.
This is why Tolkien is such a transcendent writer. This is a profound truth. In life, most things are outside of our control. Failure often looks certain; yet all that is within our control is the “just going on.” All that is up to us is to complete our mission—successfully or not.
Sometimes, we are miraculously delivered from catastrophic failure in our mission. Sometimes, we are not. The truth is that from an eternal perspective, both outcomes may actually be successful. God doesn’t define success in the way that we do.
Remember the Cross?
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As Murphy points out in his writing, the human default position is one of self-centeredness—believing that our personal success on earth is all that matters.
I’m here to agree that it is not what matters, and to add that success on earth has very little to do with how God defines success. Since our view is so limited, we may not see that what looks like earthly failures may actually be successes from a timeless point of view.
Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Father Stu, or Stuart Long. A man from a rough background with lots of ambition but apparently less common sense, Long was drawn into the church because he wanted to impress a young woman. He converted to Catholicism to win her over.
Not long after doing so, he became convinced that he was called to the priesthood—which of course meant marriage was off the table. He broke off his engagement with the woman he had worked so hard to impress and applied to enter seminary.
However, within a few years of entering seminary, Long began to experience a strange weakness in his body. He was diagnosed with a debilitating and progressive condition that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair, unable to perform even the most basic tasks for himself.
But Long just kept going. He was convinced of his calling to the priesthood. He completed his training and was finally ordained as a priest in his diocese. When he was eventually unable to adequately perform the rites of communion, he went to an assisted living center. However, by this time the people of his parish had come to love him. He earned their respect through his painful perseverance. Lines of people would wait in the hallway of the center to speak to him and receive ministry.
Not many years later, he passed away, having served as a priest for seven years.
A failure? A cruel path of needless suffering? So the world would say. Yet from an eternal perspective, Long’s life continues to inspire many.
“Hear me out,” Long says. “All our outer nature's wasting away. But our inner nature is being renewed every day. This life, no matter how long it lasts, is a momentary affliction preparing us for eternal glory. We shouldn't pray for an easy life, but the strength to endure a difficult one. Because the experience of suffering is the fullest expression of God's love. It is a chance to be closer to Christ” (emphasis mine).
I have thought long and hard over the years about the nature of suffering, perseverance and hope. I suppose I used to think that having hope was a prerequisite for perseverance, for enduring suffering and hardship.
Yet, that’s not what we’re told. We’re told that it works the other way around.
“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”2
It’s persevering through hardship that actually creates in us the ability to hope. This is counterintuitive but true. It’s not the other way around, that hope is what gets you through hard times. You have to “just go on” through the hard times in order to allow a deeper transformation and become a person who embodies hope.
We’re told that persevering through hard times creates character in us. Character, then, is what leads to the virtue of hope residing in us.
We’re trained through the way we encounter God in hardship. It’s different than at other times. As Long says, God somehow draws near to us in struggle or suffering in a way that seems different from other times. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that struggle and suffering attune us to God in a unique way. Whatever the case, suffering seems to be the prerequisite to a depth of intimacy with God.
We do NOT like to hear Long say that “the experience of suffering is the fullest expression of God’s love.” Yet it’s where we meet God in a new way and share in His suffering. We don’t seek suffering, of course, but when it comes, we embrace the experience the best that we can. Having said that, we also don’t shy away from challenging ourselves.
We live in a world that increasingly seeks to infantilize us—to make us soft, fragile and dependent on machines and government. It doesn’t want us to challenge ourselves, to be strong, persevering or resilient. At the same time, we often face odds so potentially overwhelming it makes us want to give up.
This is why the great stories are so important. In them, we see an example of how to persevere through trials.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
“And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it. We should be very hard put to it, even it if were not for this dreadful chance” (emphasis mine).3
These words resonate powerfully as we look at our current times. But the darkness of our times is not the end of the story. What we do with the time that is given us is an act of worship—no matter the apparent outcome of our actions.
A friend sent me this post from Ian Simkins, pastor at the Bridge Church in Tennessee. While I don’t know anything about Simkins or his church, he puts the truths I’m getting at eloquently:
Sometimes he [God] multiplies the loaves and fish. Sometimes he lets the perfume be ‘wasted.’Both are worship.Sometimes faith looks like multiplication. Sometimes faith looks like surrender.Sometimes God fills your hands. Sometimes he asks you to empty them.Fruitfulness is God’s responsibility. Faithfulness is ours.God’s job is outcomes. Our job is obedience.God’s job is results. Our job is response.God doesn’t call us to control the harvest. He calls us to be faithful in the sowing.Jesus never said, ‘Well done, good and successful servant.’ He said, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’I think God values devotion over efficiency.
I agree.
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“A life well-lived triumphs over an argument well-formulated.” —Jordan Peterson
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” —Paulo Coelho
For example, Job 19:8-12.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2.
This is such a beautiful piece of writing and went straight to my heart. You don’t know how much I needed to hear these words.