In this inspiring episode of Epic Begins With One Step Forward, Zander Sprague is joined by former CFL athlete, teacher, and executive coach Quinn Magnuson to explore a game-changing philosophy: Effort Over Results. Drawing from his professional sports background, coaching experience, and leadership training, Quinn reveals why focusing solely on wins and losses sets us up for burnout, while recognizing effort builds resilience, growth, and long-term success. Together, they unpack how celebrating small wins, embracing a growth mindset, and creating psychological safety can transform not only sports and education but also business and family life. From marathon finish lines to classroom struggles, Quinn shows that progress—not perfection—is what truly defines achievement. This conversation will inspire you to value the journey as much as the destination.
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Effort Over Results: Rethinking Success With Quinn Magnuson
Unveiling The “Effort Over Results” Philosophy
I am honored to be joined by Quinn Magnuson. Quinn, tell us who you are and what you do.
I do a lot of things. I was born and raised in Canada and what I am now and what I am bringing to the world is the message of effort over results through the philosophy of recognizing effort and celebrating those small wins and really growing people through a growth mindset and psychological safety, recognizing the effort they put into things, not just focusing on wins and losses.
I come from an athletic background. Everything was about results, everything was about wins, achievements and accolades. What I recognized in being a parent, a coach, a teacher, and now a Business Coach and Executive Coach is that we need to focus more on the work we’re putting into things as opposed to just the results that happen because we can’t control that. The effort over results movement is really what I’m bringing forth through the book that I’m writing, through the podcast that I have, as well as social media posts and just working with the clients that I do around the world.
Welcome. I’m excited to have you here. I wanted to quickly touch on the fact that you were a professional athlete, is that correct?
Yeah, so I know there are a lot of Americans out there who don’t consider the CFL professional football, but actually, the league has been a professional league for 127 years, longer than the NFL has been around. Yes, we do not make the kind of money that NFL players do, but it is still a professional league filled with tons of American college players that you would know the names of, you know of. I played in the CFL for five years as well as being a member of our national track team here in Canada, having gone to 2 World under 20 championships I say back in the 1900s because it was in 1988.
Last century. I feel you.
The 20th century. Really strong athletic background, not just myself. My uncle played for the Chicago Black Hawks for ten years. I had multiple cousins who were Division 1 athletes who went on to play in the MLB and NHL. Big, strong, athletic background in the Magnuson family. I think that’s where our drive and work ethic come from, obviously, and really what leads to success.
From Athletic Legacy To Mindset Shift: Quinn Magnuson’s Journey
I’ve got to ask, just because you got the last name of Magnuson. Any relation to Magnus Magnuson, the world’s strongest man?
I would love to take credit for him being a distant cousin. I don’t see anything in the family tree on Ancestry.com.
I just thought I would ask.
Yeah, definitely, size and strength do go in our family. I’m 6’5”, 270. I played at 300 pounds. My son is the same height and weight. He plays college football. Our family is fairly tall and big, but I think that’s just the Scandinavian background. My grandparents came from Norway and Sweden, and so there is most definitely a Viking heritage there. I have not gotten any letters or postcards from Magnus yet. Fair question, though.
Clearly, I know my obscure sports and stuff like that. Cool. What are the things that you took from being a professional athlete that you now apply? Obviously, when you play at a top level, like you did, and I think the CFL is just as much a professional football league, I don’t think you tackled or got tackled any less hard than people in the NFL.
I have nine surgeries to prove it.
Exactly. What are you taking from that? Obviously, growing up as an athlete, as you said it, it’s all about the win and there’s a mind shift, and I love your mind shift. That’s why I have you on. It is about the effort. It’s about how you’re doing the journey, not just your destination.
I’ve been on this self-reflection, very introspective journey, especially since the pandemic. I’m not saying the pandemic caused it, but it really started to have me think about the way my relationships were with others, first and foremost with my family, but in the workplace, and when I was coaching sports. I’ve had a few people over the years espouse the concept of focus on whether the student you’re teaching, or the athlete you’re coaching, or the employee that you’re leading, focus on the efforts that they’re putting in and the work ethic they have as opposed to just the result. I took that to heart.
With my own children, I was a bit of a typical Gen Z helicopter parent in the early 2000s. We get involved with all of our kids’ sports. I coached both my son and daughter in multiple sports, and I was heavily involved in that. I started to realize that parents, teachers, employers who focus solely on the outcome of a game, the outcome of a test, the outcome of a week at work, whether it be KPIs or metrics that you’re measuring in the workplace, when they’ve heavily focused on that, it really burns the student, the athlete, the employee out.
Parents, teachers, and employers that heavily focus on the outcome—the game, the test, a week at work, whether KPIs or metrics—burn out the student, the athlete, and the employee.
My athletic background, I started playing sports at the age of seven, just like every Canadian kid. You got skates on your feet by the age of four. I got into hockey, played baseball young, got into football because I got really big at the age of 12, 13. What I learned from all of that, and the coaches that really meant a lot to me was yes, everybody wants to win. We want results. We want to get those gold medals, the accolades, the personal best and whatever, but you can’t control that. You can’t control the outcome.
The one thing I do love about individual sports, and I’ll use track and field, for example, is that I can go out and I can have a personal record day. I was a shot putter and I can throw 17 meters, which would be 56 feet for you Americans. I might beat my own personal record by half a foot and finish seventh. That’s the greatest example of focusing on what you achieved. Did you get better now? Is there progress in what you’re doing day to day, even if it’s just incremental, rather than did you hit the goal you wanted?
I remember seeing, I believe it was Emmanuel Acho, who did a TEDx talk on goal setting and how he doesn’t like goal setting. I listened to it and it made a lot of sense because he said when you get so micro-focused on just the goal itself, and whether you achieved it or not, you lose sight of all the lessons you learned from the mistakes you made, maybe there was failures along the way. However, you still improved. You still had a process and a progress that made you, as a human being, better. That’s really what EOR stands for. It’s the concept of celebrating small wins on a day-to-day basis.
It’s putting your gym bag by the door, even though you may not have gone to the gym yet. It’s doing those little steps, those atomic habits, as James Clear would say, to get towards your goals. What I preach is to be directionally correct, not absolutely correct. What that means, and I’m sure it’s pretty evident, is to make the efforts and take the steps to go towards what you want, but don’t be so obsessed with whether you got it or not.
It’s like people who get on a scale every six hours when they’re doing weight loss. All you’re doing is setting yourself up for misery and failure because you’re focusing too much on that. Did you eat better today? Did you exercise today? That’s a huge win. My athletic background, even though athletics is really all about the wins, taught me to learn about the work ethic and effort that has to go into success, but not throwing it out the door just because you didn’t succeed.
“Not Yet”: The Optimism Of Continuous Improvement
There are so many things in my own life that I look at that are so true. I played athletics through high school. In my adult life, I’ve run marathons and ridden a road bike.
Marathons would be a great example, Zander. Did you finish?
Yeah, exactly. I’m still a marathon finisher. I was lucky enough to get to run the 2014 Boston Marathon. I want to be very clear, I did not time qualify. The corporate sponsor gave me a bib. I’m very grateful. It doesn’t matter where I finished, I am a Boston finisher and that will never change. I finished the Boston Marathon. For me, that was always the goal. Yes, I would like a PR. I would like to improve.
I’m not a gifted athlete, but I loved playing. I loved being able to participate. Yes, I liked to win when I played soccer and lacrosse and coming up through junior high and high school and stuff. Of course, I like to win, but I also knew there were people who were better than me. As a runner, if you could run faster than me, you’re going to beat me, but I’m still a finisher.
You might beat yourself, though. That’s the thing. Comparison is the thief of joy. I don’t know who said it. It’s a saying I saw. I love that saying because as soon as we start comparing ourselves to others is where we lose the joy in our own life and where we become unhappy. Social media does that to us. When you start comparing your today to your yesterday, and you go, “I’m a little bit better today because I put effort into anything,” it doesn’t matter what it is, big win right there. Take that. Build those layers.
One of the things that you said and I talk about in my book, it’s a big part of what I do is, for me, the concept of not yet. Not yet has so much optimism. You are writing a book. Congratulations on that. That’s awesome. Quinn, has your book come out? Not yet. If you just say no, it’s such a hard stop. It’s never going to happen.
I know, having put out three books, that it is not yet. You say, “I’m going for this.” You get into the editing process and all of a sudden, you think that a month is enough time, but it turns out that the month comes, you’re still reading proofs of it and having other people proofread it and finding comma errors and I dropped this word. Whatever. It’s coming out. It’s a not yet.
Talking about our kids, no one asks a freshman in college, “Do you have your degree yet?” Why? We already know that there’s a path for them to go, and they’re just beginning. Of course, you’re not going to ask a freshman, “Why don’t you have your degree yet?” “I got like three and a half more years of studying to do to earn it.” Yet in our adult lives out in the world, “Quinn, why haven’t you come out with your book yet?” For me, I love to promote the concept of not yet. You put your gym bag by the door.
Have you gone back to the gym yet? I asked my daughter that for six months. Finally, she started going. It’s okay. It’s on your time. Your achievements and your growth and your progress is on your time and nobody else’s. As I said, when we start to compare ourselves to others, or when we are trying to achieve stuff to get others’ approval, that’s when we get burnt out. That’s when we start to hate life. That’s when we start to really be sad and anxious about things. It’s like, focus on you. Focus on what you can control, which is your attitude and your effort, and you’ll be much happier.
When we compare ourselves to others, or try to achieve for others’ approval, that’s when we get burnt out. That’s when we start to hate life.
Beyond Grades: Valuing Effort In Education And Life
Your best effort is what it is. I remember when I was in high school, I was really struggling with geometry, and I was upset because, honestly, the grade did not reflect the enormous amount of effort I was putting in. I remember my dad said, “Are you trying your hardest? Are you doing your best?” I said, “Yeah, dad. I’m going to extra tutoring. I’m so frustrated.”
He is like, “Your mother and I don’t care. If you get a C+ in this, and that’s your best effort, that’s all we want for you.” Awesome advice. I honestly held onto that as a parent and said to my daughters, “There are classes that you will take that is like it’s written in another language. It just doesn’t make sense to you.”
That story is literally a mere image of the second chapter in my book. I said the exact same thing to my son. He was a terrible test taker. He was smart kid, but hated tests. He would always do poorly on tests. He always would panic that we would get angry he’d get a 50 or 60 on the test. Finally, once I started implementing the EOR, the effort over results philosophy, I said to him, I go, “If I see you studying and I’ll study with you.”
I was a teacher. I said, “If I see you studying all week for an exam, and I know you’ve prepared and I know you’re ready for it, you go in, even if you fail that exam, I’m not going to be upset about it. You put your best effort in. You can’t control the test that’s put in front of you. You can’t control the objective or subjective marks the teacher may give you. All you can control is the effort you put into it.” That story as, Zander, and this is exactly what we’re talking about in my book and everything that I do. How much pressure did that take off of you?
So much. Honestly, what it was is that I didn’t want them to be disappointed. As a kid, the worst thing that you could feel is that you’ve disappointed your parents. We’ve all done it.
They gave you something you could control. They gave you the benefit of that.
As boys, and I put you and I still in that, I told my daughters when they were young, I said, “Boys are dumb. I’m dumb. Teenage boys are especially dumb.”
Especially when they get together
They’re like, “I don’t really get it.” I’m like, “Let’s go to YouTube. Put in people hurting themself.” We chose a five-minute video. We watched and I said, “How many of those people were male and how many were female?” I think there was like 1, maybe 2 females out of what probably was like 30 or 40 clips. I said, “Understand that men in general, boys, we think, ‘Dude, let’s ride our bike off the roof. Let’s go.’”
They’re like, “I don’t get it. Don’t you know you’re going to get hurt?” I said, “It’s only when someone’s on the ground with their ankle pointing a direction it shouldn’t go that someone goes, “We could get hurt.” They’re like, “I don’t get it.” I’m like, “I understand. I just want you to understand.” Boys are dumb. I disappointed my parents because I made some dumb maneuver, stupid maneuvers and stuff. My two sisters made stupid maneuvers, but they weren’t necessarily the same stupid maneuvers that I made. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. I worked incredibly hard in school. I had a friend of mine in college who’s like, “I don’t understand why you don’t have a’s.”
He’s like, “I know you know this material better than me.” I really hate writing. Writing is really hard for me. We were talking about the last century. Back in the last century, we had to handwrite everything and my hand would cramp up and I just wanted to be done. Best class I took in college, I had to give a two-hour lecture. I rocked that thing. It was great. I look back and say in high school and college, if I’d been able to take my exams as an oral exam, I think I’d have had much higher grades because I knew the stuff.
That’s actually one of the reasons why I left teaching. I taught high school for five years and I realized that rote memorization tests and fill in the blanks and the type of ways that we’re educating our kids, it’s all just memorization. The smart kids are just going to stay smart. They’ll always get 90s and the other kids are going to struggle because everyone learns differently.
The mass congregation type education we still are putting out there, largely because there’s really no other way to do it, it is so antiquated and old because kids don’t learn in that environment. You try to learn an environment with 35 of your peers sitting right around you. Try to learn an environment where you don’t read very well.
As you said, if you had an oral test, you would do better because you could just verbalize what you wanted to say, but you don’t write it down correctly. Don’t get me started on the education system because I think there are a lot of teachers out there who probably think the way I do. Why I left is because I couldn’t deal with these kids failing and struggling because of the system, not because of them.
I was meeting with someone from the college I went to and was talking about my college days and stuff like that. I said, “I got into college and I felt like I was sold a bad bill of goods.” I spent twelve-plus years before I got to college, memorizing and regurgitating. You get to college and unless you’re doing math or science or something, I was doing social sciences. I got graded on how I could argue, how it could back up what I believed. It didn’t have to be what the professor thought. If I could have another argument and back it up, I would get a good grade. That’s a completely different way of learning than I just spent my whole educational career doing.
When people in college struggle, because all of a sudden, they’re like, “There’s not a right or wrong answer. There’s a degree of correctness of I backed up my argument with evidence. Often, I was disagreeing with my professors, but I made a good argument and got a decent grade because it wasn’t whether they agreed with me. It was like, “You said this, you backed it up with this research and these facts. You get an A on that.”
I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of Canadian and or American education and stuff. It is challenging. I think this whole idea of all of a sudden you get to college and there’s a completely new way to think and people struggle, I wonder why. That would be like you played Canadian rules football. If you came down and played in the NFL, the field isn’t as big. There are some different rules. You might struggle a little.
I want to go back to what we preach with effort over results. One of the elements, one of the pillars of the three pillars of EOR is growth mindset. Growth mindset basically says with enough time and resources, anybody can really achieve anything. The example I use when I do keynote speeches, one of the first things I do is with the audience, I bring three people up on stage and I give them a list of questions and they can’t use their phones. I say, “Answer these questions.” It’s just like who’s the current United States president, simple stuff like that. Sure enough, there’s always one person who finishes first. There’s always the third person that finishes maybe a minute or two after them.
I say, “Now I’m going to give you a new set of questions and you can use your phones and the order reverses.” I give a new set of questions. I said, “It’s not about who’s smarter. It’s about do you have enough time to do it? Are you given the resources to be able to find the answers.” It’s no different than if I decided I wanted to become an astrophysicist at the age of 54. I can do it, but do I have enough time and do I have enough resources? The growth mindset, this is the same thing with your employees, with your students, with your athletes. It’s like you’re going to have athletes of different levels. You’re going to have students at different levels, employees with different levels and skills and abilities.
It doesn’t mean they’re not capable. It just means are you putting them in a position to succeed? Are you providing them with enough time and the right resources to succeed? We fail students. We cut players from teams and we fire employees because they didn’t do it right away. That’s what we need to start moving away from.
There’s going to be detractors out there. They’re going to roll their eyes and go, “I own a business. I don’t have time to find out if my employees can do something. Either they do it right or they get moved on, or they get fired.” I understand that. I own my own business too, but I also will throw back at them, “You hired them in the first place. It’s your fault for hiring a person who is incapable.” We need to just dial it back on the results obsession and just allow people to grow a little more. That’s really what leadership is nowadays. If you want to talk about leadership, I think that’s where we start.
Redefining Leadership: Strengths, Culture, And Growth Mindset
The other thing, I do this in some of my workshops and stuff, I’m working with management teams and executives. I have them go and do the Gallup StrengthsFinder because I think that’s such a great tool. They give you a whole list of 32 things. I say, “Here are the things that are your areas of strength.” Funny thing happens.” The days I get to work in my strength areas, work is decidedly easier. I’m a lot more successful. As an employer, if I understand what strengths my team has, and let’s say you have someone like me who loves to present and is really good at it.
Wouldn’t you want to put me out to go talk to other companies and sell the company? That’s my area of strength. I spent seventeen years doing technical instruction. I taught people how to use software. I swear to God, I spent half of my time in the office trying to educate the executives on the importance of having someone in training who knows how to be a trainer who knows how to teach.
They’re like, “No, you can’t do that. We’re going to put this engineer in there.” I’m like, “That guy is so much smarter than me, wrote the code, knows this better than I do, but he or she is not a good teacher.” I was horrified. You as a high school teacher, there are people who may be really smart, but they cannot teach. When a student asks a question and like, “What don’t you get? I just explained it to you.”
That happens in sports, too. You get a guy like Wayne Gretzk,y who is the greatest hockey player ever, and he becomes a coach and his team fails because he sees the game completely differently and maybe can’t express it. I see this in all walks of life, Zander, and I love it. That’s the one thing I do pride myself in, and you probably do too. I’m very good at coaching and teaching. It’s not dumbing things down, but it’s presenting things in a way that people can understand.
I taught sailing for six years. I taught kids and adults how to sail. If you’ve never been sailing, the ability to teach such a highly technical skill and be able to find words to explain something that is a feel. Have you ever been sailing?
No, but I have friends and I just go, “I have no clue how you all do this.”
There is a whole thing when you are sailing a boat, it’s a feel. You’ve got to feel where the wind is, how it’s shifting, what you need to do to adjust it. I was given a really great piece of advice, which is, as a teacher, f I explain something to you and you don’t get it, it’s beholden upon me, the radio transmitter, to change the message so that you could do it.
Without sounding too braggy, I seem to have a skill for trying to explain stuff. If you will indulge me with a super quick story. I was originally from Boston. I was living in Boston at the time, and my mom said to someone, they were having a problem with their computer, and they’re like, “Zander’s really good at understanding the computer.”
The Art Of Teaching: Making Complex Ideas Accessible
I went over and I helped her. She, of course, talked to someone else and I was helping this woman and I helped her get her computer set up to connect to the internet. I do that. She’s like, “Show me the internet.” I’m like, “What do you want to see?” “No. Show me the internet.” I can’t tell her that the internet is actually not a place, but it’s thousands of interconnected computers sharing information. That would’ve been lost on her. We could tell our kids that and they would get it. Here’s how I explained the internet to her in one sentence. “Think of the internet as the world’s largest library. You don’t go in and say, ‘What’s a good book?’”
“What are you interested in? If you say, ‘What is a good English murder mystery?’ Now I can answer that question.” In that one sentence, this woman who at the time I think was about 65, understood what the internet was. Understood how she could access it to find the information. I think that is an example of being a good teacher.
Put it in terms that they can remember. Ultimately, I will come up with 1,000 different analogies. If you remember one of them two weeks from after I taught you, I’ve succeeded because now you remember, or you remember Zander’s stupid story, but now you remember. As a high school teacher, you’re like, “I don’t care how you remember it, I just want you to remember it.”
I think when you think back to your childhood, the people that were your favorite teachers, your favorite coaches, the favorite adults that you hung around, aunts, uncles, whatever, the reason why they were your favorite is because number one, you felt safe around them. They made you feel okay to fail and or make a mistake. They took their time with you to help you. They made you feel like you mattered. That’s so key in workplaces now. You also need managers, supervisors and leaders that are willing to take that time with individual people to help them succeed.
We have people who are put in management positions and leadership positions who are not managers or leaders, but they’ve been there the longest, or they know the most. They’re the worst companies. They’re the worst people to lead because they’re impatient. They see things differently and they’re super smart. I’m not saying they’re not valuable, but they just shouldn’t be leaders.
In my 22-year corporate career, I remember this one manager, and I always say, best manager I have. Why? It’s because he did a few key things. First thing he did was had enough strategic vision and said, “In six months, I need Zander to work on this.” He doesn’t have the skillset. He tells me back here, “I need you to learn how to do this.” There’s that intersection of when he needs me to do it, I now have the skills to do it, versus just telling me, “Go do this.” “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know this program. I don’t know Java.”
“Just figure it out,” and then being upset that I’m not writing Java code. Of course, I like that. He also did a great job, big corporation, lots of memos of this change and that change, and you’d literally send it out to the team, wind above your head, meaning read this, but don’t worry, it doesn’t affect your day-to-day life. That’s a good manager who’s like, “Don’t freak out about this. It doesn’t change us. We still keep doing what we’re doing.”
Their job is to smooth out the bumps. It’s not to make things easier to allow slacking. It’s to smooth out the bumps and to give you an environment where you feel like you can go at the speed you need to go. Some days it’ll be faster, and some days it might be slower, and that’s fine. They are the ones helping, they’re the guide on the side. That’s really what they should be.
If we go back to sports quickly, we look at some of the most successful coaches. There are obviously different kinds of coaches. You look at someone, and I think we could both agree, like Bill Belichick in his NFL group, unbelievably successful. There are all those things. Clearly, a good coach was able to get what he needed, and frankly, put teams together.
People were like, “Why did you bring that person in? Why did you decide to draft that person?” He clearly saw something and figured out that by the time they come up to skill, this person, we can develop this skill, that’s where I’m going to put them in. You go, “Look at this breakout season.” Bill Belichick knew that three years ago when he drafted the guy.
It was all about fit into his system. Workplaces don’t need to hire the best people. They need to hire the people who are the hard workers and fit well into the culture and into what everybody’s trying to achieve collectively. The best championship teams aren’t the ones just covered in all-stars. You mentioned Belichick with the 5’7” receivers that nobody else wanted. It’s a quarterback that they drafted in the sixth round who turns into an absolute GOAT.
Michael Jordan and the Bulls, the rest of the Bulls without Jordan. When you take a look at a guy like Dennis Rodman, he was brought in specifically just to rebound. That’s what companies are doing now. It’s more about attitude and a little less about aptitude, because they need it to fit the culture, because culture these days, this isn’t just a buzzword anymore. It is literally the success of the future of your company.
For companies today, it’s less about aptitude and more about attitude, because they need to fit the culture. Culture isn’t just a buzzword; it’s literally the success of your company’s future.
I know when I was interviewing, I’d be like, “What is the culture?” The one thing that always made me nervous is when they say, “We work hard and play hard.” I don’t know about you, Quinn, but I’m a little nervous these days about play hard. I hear play hard, and I just think, “Is this going to hurt?”
Yeah, me too. Golfs about as much as I want to go physical activity with my body.
Quinn, I want to thank you so much. What a fascinating conversation. I love what you’re doing.
Cool. Thank you. It’s been a great journey for me too.
Connect With Quinn: Effort Over Results In Action
If people want to learn more, contact you, how can they get ahold of you?
I think we’ve put enough out there on the internets, the interwebs, as some people would say. You can find us by literally just googling Effort Over Results. I would even just make it all one word. Our website is EffortOverResults.com. You can actually go there and learn more about the philosophies and the three core pillars of what we do.
Our YouTube podcast channel, we just hit 1,000 subscribers, we’re super pumped about that, and 40 episodes. You go to YouTube.com and once again, search for Effort Over Results. Instagram, same name, @EffortOverResults. We actually have a TikTok page. I’m not doing any dances yet, Zander, but a lot of the shorts from our YouTube episodes are on there and a few fun things as well. If anybody wants to reach out to me, literally just Google that or you can email me at
Qu***@Ef***************.com
and the book comes out in November 2025.
Awesome. Congratulations on that. That’s huge. I want to thank you so much again, Quinn. I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Quinn Magnuson
- Ancestry
- YouTube
- Effort Over Results on YouTube
- Quinn Magnuson on Instagram
- Effort Over Results on TikTok
- Quinn Magnuson Email
About Quinn Magnuson
Founder of Effort Over Results (EOR)
What if we stopped measuring success by outcomes—and started honoring the effort that makes growth possible? That’s the question driving Quinn Magnuson, former pro football player, educator, and now founder of Effort Over Results (EOR)—a leadership and performance coaching company that’s redefining how individuals and organizations build resilience, confidence, and sustainable success. Quinn’s journey spans the worlds of elite athletics, teaching, and coaching, giving him a rare, lived-in perspective on what it takes to lead well—whether you’re raising kids, building a business, or guiding a team.
After years of chasing results and watching others burn out doing the same, Quinn realized that we’ve got it backwards. The real competitive edge? Teaching people to value and optimize effort—the only thing we can control. Today, Quinn helps CEOs, entrepreneurs, leadership teams, and parents adopt this powerful mindset through keynotes, coaching programs, workshops, and his podcast. His work is grounded in performance psychology, behavioral science, and the real-life application of effort-first leadership. The result is a practical, inspiring approach to success that people can use immediately—at work, at home, and everywhere in between.