The Score That Matters: Growing Excellence in Yourself and Those You Lead

USA Today Bestseller

Redefine success based on who you are and what you value with this indispensable guide from the authors of The Pursuit of Excellence and Surrender the Outcome.

People love to keep score. Managers keep score of a range of business metrics: market share, revenue, profit margin, growth rate. In our personal lives, social media has us keeping score by likes and followers.

These external scores are outcome-driven and serve as proof of our success—money, fame, material possessions, wins—but this constant chase for more validation often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty.

In The Score That Matters, Ryan Hawk and Brook Cupps show that the internal score is what matters most—it reveals whether we are living in alignment with our purpose and values. It also measures how we are leading ourselves and others, prompting us to:

• Differentiate between the two scoreboards that run our life
• Use our fear as fuel
• Avoid the poison of comparison
• Embrace the mundanity of excellence
• Regulate our emotional thermostat
• Create a mentality for attacking adversity

Offering both descriptive and prescriptive advice and anecdotes, The Score That Matters will help us unlock true fulfillment and happiness by discovering our purpose, identifying our values, and creating critical behaviors and living them faithfully every day in all aspects of our lives.

Ryan Hawk is the creator and host of The Learning Leader Show, a top-rated business podcast that focuses on learning from the most effective leaders in the world. He speaks regularly to Fortune 500 companies; works with teams and players in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA; and facilitates Leadership Circles to offer structured guidance and collaborative feedback to new and experienced leaders. Ryan has also built an online leadership school called The Learning Leader Academy. He is the author of Welcome to Management and The Pursuit of Excellence, lauded by Forbes magazine as “the best leadership book of 2020” and “the most dynamic leadership book of 2022,” respectively.

Brook Cupps has been a high school basketball coach for more than 20 years, earning several Coach of the Year awards. His teams have won numerous conference, district, and regional championships, as well as Centerville High School’s first-ever basketball state championship in 2021. In addition, he has spent the last eight years coaching grassroots basketball on the AAU circuits, and helped guide the North Coast (Ohio) Blue Chips to national championships in 2014 and 2019. He publishes weekly essays on leadership and coaching on his site, Blue Collar Grit, and is the author of Surrender the Outcome.