How a former FedEx man became a self-help guru
His mother was dying, he was in debt and his book had flopped – then an NFL star changed Jim Murphy’s life.
In the first 11 days of this year, Jim Murphy estimates that Inner Excellence, his meditation on high-performance strategy, sold “about 25 copies”. That may sound bad, but it’s actually decent, considering the book was first (self) published in 2009, and then reissued, largely rewritten, five years ago in 2020.
The book had garnered some respectful reviews, praised by a couple of successful pro golfers, albeit on the back nine of their careers. Yet it was a long, long way from a hit, ranking as of January 11 at 523,497 on Amazon’s bestseller list. It looked as though Murphy, 58, who since childhood had considered future fame, wealth and glory as inevitable, was destined to be disappointed again.
But then on the night of January 12, something extraordinary happened. By the end of the month Murphy’s tale – part memoir, part self-help manual – was a New York Times No. 1 sensation, having sold more than 200,000 copies in 20 days.
Murphy became a sought-after interviewee and speaker. His social media accounts went wild. His Inner Excellence retreats – intensive motivational and leadership workshops – were inundated with applications.
Now his work is being published in Australia and the UK and scheduled for multiple translations elsewhere. Comparatively late in life, a man whose reach had habitually exceeded his grasp (in part, to be fair, due to events beyond his control, chiefly untimely injury) had finally made it.
A likeable man, rangy and fit, bearing a strong resemblance to James Coburn and sharing a good deal of that actor’s laconic charm, Murphy explains what happened on January 12 as we meet at a studio in East London.
“I was in Dallas, Texas. My mom was dying [she subsequently died, aged 91, four days later], business was slow. That month I hadn’t paid off my credit card for the first time in years. I was wandering around downtown Dallas thinking, would I rather own that skyscraper or have written Inner Excellence? And I decided I’d rather have written the book. Which was cool because a couple of hours later my life changed.”
Murphy was back in his hotel watching college football, a week-old rerun of a game between Notre Dame and Penn State. “I looked at my phone and had a bunch of texts. I thought my mom had died, but the texts said, ‘Check out the Packers and the Eagles’.”
That game, an NFL playoff prior to the Super Bowl, was also on the TV, attracting a huge audience as the only pro-football game on that night. “And there was a picture of AJ Brown, superstar wide receiver for the Eagles, sitting in his uniform on the sidelines between drives reading my book. He was bringing it to every game to get himself centred. I had no idea.”
How big a star is AJ Brown? “Maybe the equivalent here would be my golfing partner from a couple of years ago, Gareth Bale.” Make that Gareth Bale at the height of his powers with Real Madrid and Wales.
The next morning Murphy’s book was featured on Good Morning Football, a TV show. The next week he made it on to the Today show. Then Tom Brady, legendary quarterback, mentioned Inner Excellence on another broadcast. “Two weeks later, the Eagles win the Super Bowl [watched by 127.7 million viewers, the biggest US TV audience of all time] and the fans are all holding copies of the book.” Such is the power, these days, of a celebrity endorsement.
Like much of the genre, the 300 pages of Inner Excellence includes advice such as: act with love, wisdom and courage; people respond better to reward than punishment; don’t worry about your opponent, or the result, the best path to sporting or material or romantic success is exactly the same as living the best possible life, with joy, sacrifice and contentment. Most contemporary elite sport coaches subscribe to a version of this theory: performance is what matters; the result will take care of itself.
Some readers – quite a lot of readers, evidently, including the many leading CEOs who regularly hire Murphy to counsel their top managers – find this stuff helpful, engaging, even fascinating. What I find more interesting is Murphy’s biography, as opposed to his philosophy.
Born in 1967 in Maryland, Murphy grew up in Seattle, where his dad had got a job with Boeing after a career in the American Air Force followed by work as an engineer at Bendix, where he had worked on telemetry for Apollo 11, the first lunar landing.
While still in the service in Tokyo, Murphy’s father met his mother, who was Japanese – her great-great-grandfather had been one of the last samurai before their abolition in the 1870s. They had five children, of whom Jim is the youngest. From an early age he excelled at sports, especially baseball and American football. “Even at seven or eight I believed I was going to be a superstar pro athlete.”
Murphy says he was always “excessive’. As a teenage sports star at high school, “I thought I’d make millions of dollars, every girl’s gonna wanna be with me, every guy’s gonna wanna be me, that’s gonna be my life.” Forgive me, I interrupt, but that doesn’t sound like you were a particularly nice person. “I was very self-centred. I’m still self-centred. It’s my biggest challenge. But I wasn’t that much different from many other 18-year-olds.” Fair point.
I ask if he’s following the debate over a crisis of masculinity in young men. “I don’t have a TV so, no. Young people don’t understand the difference between cockiness and confidence. How do I treat girls? Does a star have to act a certain way? When you’re young, you don’t know these things.
“I’ve realised since that what I always really wanted was to feel fully alive. That’s what Inner Excellence is about. Pursuing a full life and letting everything else be added. We’re created for relationships. That’s what I didn’t know when I was 18.”
That said, Murphy isn’t married, never has been, nor does he have a partner, nor does he have children. Instead he has an enormous network of friends and mentors across the world. He is also close to his brothers, one of whom lives in a Hutterite community (similar to the Amish), where Murphy spends time himself.
“I’ve realised since that what I always really wanted was to feel fully alive. That’s what Inner Excellence is about. Pursuing a full life and letting everything else be added. We’re created for relationships. That’s what I didn’t know when I was 18.”
Murphy was a sufficiently talented baseball player to be signed by the Chicago Cubs, for whom he played in the minor leagues. But then, aged around 22, he developed a devastating ophthalmic problem.
His “dynamic visual acuity”, the ability of both eyes to work together to track a moving object (pretty much the essence of being good at baseball) became impaired. That was his life dream shattered, right there. “My whole identity disappeared overnight.”
During a stint driving a FedEx truck in Seattle, Murphy agreed to coach a local high school team as a volunteer. “They had a losing record the year before and we went undefeated. We had so much fun I thought, maybe my destiny is to be a Major League Baseball coach, not a player. How do I go from 15-year-olds to coaching the New York Yankees to a World Series?”
Long story short, despite some successes, that plan didn’t work out. By his mid-30s Murphy was doing OK, living in Vancouver with his girlfriend, working as a personal trainer. “Life was great, but I was restless. I thought I was destined for greatness. So I left. I broke up with my girlfriend. I gave away my possessions and I went to live in the Sonoran desert just outside Tucson, Arizona, to live a life of solitude and find something I was ready to live and die for. Every day was the same except Sundays, when I went to church.”
What kind of church? “Nondenominational. I guess you might say evangelical.” But evangelical as in sacrificial love, he explains, not guns, Trump and Deus Vult tattoos. The radical Christian leaders he cites as his heroes are not smooth televangelists or tooled-up white supremacists. They are humble philanthropists dedicated to helping America’s urban and rural poor.
After more than two years in the desert, Murphy returned to Vancouver to finish what became the first version of Inner Excellence. It didn’t make much of an impact, but then he “got a call from a golf caddie in Dublin. He said, ‘You’ve got to talk to my boss, he needs help’.”
The boss was Henrik Stenson, the Swedish golfer regularly featuring in the world’s top 10 between 2007 and 2010 but then slipping down the rankings. Stenson’s career revived after his sessions with Murphy. That led to corporate work. “KFC paid me more to do a retreat than I’d earned the whole previous year.”
Among Murphy’s strengths, it is obvious, is he listens and he doesn’t judge. That’s all many people want. “I have this one client, a pro athlete. He said, ‘Jim, I smoke, I gamble, I drink. I do all these things, I don’t think you do all those things. Do you think we can work together?’ I said, ‘If you don’t judge me for not doing those things, I won’t judge you for doing those things.’ We became great friends.”
I say it must be great, after so long in the relative (and, for a while, literal) wilderness, for everything to now be going his way. “Yeah, everyone wants to talk about me,” he muses. “I guess that’s the American dream. But it’s not about me. I didn’t create these ideas, the idea that you should strive for love and joy and the rest follows, 2000 years of wisdom did.” Amen to that.
Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life by Jim Murphy is published by Orion Ignite and Hachette in Australia.
The Times
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