Reclaim Your Excellence: The Path To A Meaningful & Joyous Life w/ Brad Stulberg | The Rich Roll Podcast

So you set your big goal.

That's step one.

And then step two is you want to break down the goal into the component parts.

That's going to help you get to achieve that big goal.

Today, I'm joined by Brad Stolberg.

Brad is a sustainable excellence expert.

He's a human performance coach, and he's also a bestselling author.

Step three is you largely forget about the big goal because it can be overwhelming.

It can force you to rush and get impatient and then fall off a cliff.

And you focus on those small steps, those component parts, the things that you can do day in and day out, the little victories.

And then the final step is when you catch yourself stressing about the time horizon or thinking about the peak that's still thousands of feet away metaphorically, you come back to those small steps in the moment.

All right, Brad.

So it's the new year.

Everybody out there has pondered their goals and their dreams.

They've put pen to paper.

I think the best way to launch into the discussion that I want to have would be for you to share some of your best advice on how to set everyone up for sustained success in 2026.

I think the biggest trap that people tend to fall into with any fresh start, but perhaps particularly at the beginning of a new year, is you've got all this motivation right off the bat and you set this big, audacious goal.

And the idea of the goal is great.

It's really fluid in your head.

You've got a plan for how it's going to work, but then that plan meets reality and life gets in the way and there are hiccups, or maybe you realize that you overshot the target a little bit.

And there's this all or nothing mentality, where if you're not firing on all cylinders all the time, then it's like to hell with it.

Why even pursue this goal?

And a much better approach is to accept that failure is going to be inevitable.

Whatever you had planned is never going to work.

Dan Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for the planning fallacy, right?

Like we plan and things go 40% haywire all the time.

And the same is true with our personal goals.

So I think, in situations where people are struggling, the number one thing that I would say is just get back to focusing on consistency.

What are the smallest steps that you can take?

And the bigger the goal, the smaller those steps.

It's the first thing I'd say.

The second thing I'd say is maybe you've got to do a quick evaluation and determine did you set the right goal?

And the way that I like to think about goals are are they aligning with your values, like who you are, who you want to become?

And if they are and you're not on track, then it's simply a matter of you're probably trying to do too much too soon.

But perhaps the goal is out of alignment with your values and then it's okay to release from it and go back to the drawing board, learn from whatever selection mistake that you made and set some kind of new aspiration that is more in alignment with your values.

Yeah, there's a lot in there.

First of all, the idea of are you setting the right goal for yourself?

My experience is that most people set goals reflexively or based upon social expectations or whatever their peer group is doing, and they're not spending enough time really thinking through whether, to your point, that goal aligns with their values.

Do we even spend enough time thinking about what our values are?

Do we have clarity on that?

What is the practice of really honing in on the specificity of somebody's values and that process of then establishing a goal that is intrinsic to that value or serves that value?

The metaphor that I like to use is a goal is the peak of the mountain.

And we can think about it.

We can look up at it.

That's where we want to go.

But you spend 99.9999% of your time on the sides of the mountain, right?

Actually doing the climb.

And when you set a goal, the achievement of the goal might be a split second if you're an athlete, or a week if you're a creative.

The day that your book comes out, whatever it is.

But so much of life is lived in the process of going there.

And that's where the goals that you work on and the way in which you work on them also work on you.

And that's why it's important to get values alignment.

To answer your question more directly, core values.

There's a fair amount of research that shows that most individuals benefit from having somewhere between three to five.

And these are things like creativity health wisdom kindness strength compassion discipline, consistency.

I could go on and on.

And it's not enough just to have a list of these lofty buzzwords on your mirror.

You really have to be able to define them and say well, if your core value is health, what does health mean to you?

If your core value is community or belonging, what do those things actually mean to you?

And then, when you select a goal, you can ask yourself is this goal allowing me to show up every day and build community, or work on my health, or be more present, whatever that core value is?

So a big goal that I have in my life is I want to deadlift 600 pounds.

It's like a big number for me.

I don't know if I'm ever going to get there.

But what I can tell you is that that goal supports my values.

One of my values is mastery and craft and progress.

Well, that's a chance to experiment with those things.

Another one of my goals is community.

I don't deadlift alone in my basement.

I go to a gym.

Another one of my goals is curiosity.

Well, the number one antidote to fear when I'm walking up to that bar in a heavy training session and I don't know if I'm going to make the lift or not.

It's being curious.

So the 600-pound deadlift, it's either going to happen or it's not.

But in the process of going for it, I'm going to hopefully become a person that is more in alignment with my values.

There is a distinction between setting a goal and having a direction.

I mean, there's an interplay in between these two ideas.

And I think the juice that weds these two things together has to do—

With your relationship to external outcomes, but also your relationship with patients.

You said like oh, you're not getting the results right away or life interferes, and then you just get derailed and you give up.

A lot of that has to do with how you calibrate these goals.

Like you set, and I think we're aligned in this idea that most people wildly overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and really don't think at all about what they can accomplish in a decade.

And so you're sort of setting yourself up for failure by layering your goal with time-bound expectations that are unrealistic in the context of our busy modern lives.

Yeah, 100%.

There's no such thing as an overnight breakthrough.

Like behind every overnight breakthrough are months, years, sometimes decades of work.

And a big problem is generally we only see the overnight breakthrough, right?

We see the person on the peak of the mountain.

We don't see the long climb that they took to get there.

And I think sometimes that bleeds over into our expectations for ourself.

And if you go in with an expectation that things are going to click or you're going to get there much faster than reality, you're just going to constantly be frustrated and disappointed.

And this is the value of a process mindset.

And I think it's something that's talked about.

It's thrown a lot in athletic terms, but I think it's very useful for just about any goal.

And it's really simple.

Simple doesn't mean easy, but it's really simple.

So you set your big goal, whatever it might be.

Step one i mean step two is you want to break down the goal into the component parts.

That's going to help you get to achieve that big goal.

Step three is you largely forget about the big goal because it can be overwhelming, it can force you to rush and get impatient and then fall off a cliff and you focus on those small steps, those component parts, the things that you can do day in and day out, the little victories.

And then the final step is when you catch yourself stressing about the time horizon or thinking about the peak that's still thousands of feet away metaphorically, you come back to those small steps in the moment.

One of my favorite interviews was with Callie Humphries, one of the best winter Olympians of all time for America three gold medals, one bronze medal, multiple time world champion bobsledder.

And I asked Callie, I said, you know, how do you think about an Olympic cycle?

And for her, this will be her fifth Olympics, so we're talking like 20 years of a career.

And she immediately told me that well, the Olympics happen every four years, but every four-year cycle is broken down into two two-year cycles.

One is base building, one is peaking.

Each of those two-year cycles is broken down into one year.

Each of those years is broken down into quarters.

Each of those quarters are broken down into months.

Each of those months are broken down into days.

And some days I have one workout, some days I have two workouts.

I just try to win more workouts than I lose.

And that's the path to a gold medal, winning more workouts than you lose day in and day out.

Now in our own life.

So often, I think we just we obsess over the metaphorical gold medal, where we want to be, and we don't think about what are the workouts that we're trying to win.

And if the best in the world, if her bar is just win more workouts than she loses, then that can be our bar too, because if you do that for five, 10 years, the outcome is going to be great.

One of the things that I appreciate about you is you're one of the few people where I feel total alignment.

We share daylight over this core notion that so much of this landscape with respect to change and transformation and personal development is fraught with dualities.

There are all these yin-yang kind of push-pulls between opposing forces that on the surface appear to be incompatible but in fact are rather fundamental.

Like, you need effort, but you need rest.

You need discipline, but also self-compassion.

You have to strive, but you also have to surrender, you know, the outcomes.

You have to really care—this is a big piece in the new book—

But you also have to be detached, right?

You have to have that intensity, but you also have to do it for the joy of it.

Things that butt up against each other.

And I think that creates a lot of confusion for people.

It's like well, I really need to be driven, but now you're telling me I need to be happy when I'm doing it too.

Like, how do we, you know, pull on all of these threads and find the right, like symbiosis between all of these dualities to, you know, kind of move us on that better trajectory?

So much of Western thought is linear and binary, this or that.

You either have intensity or joy.

You either have self-discipline or self-kindness.

So much of truth, East or West, is non-binary and non-dual.

And I think that the joy of striving for excellence or change or personal transformation, the fun of it is that you get to experiment with holding these seemingly opposing forces at the same time together, in figuring out where on the spectrum of intensity and joy are you and where do you need to be.

Where on the spectrum of self-discipline and self-compassion are you and where do you need to be?

It's one of my favorite ones to talk about.

So I think it's a concrete example that hopefully helps is just that self-discipline and self-compassion.

So you go to the bookstore and there tend to be these two aisles, okay?

Aisle one, books written by football coaches, Navy SEALs, it's the self-discipline books.

And these books tell you that You know, no one's coming to save you.

Personal responsibility.

Pick yourself up by the bootstraps.

Like, you've got to do the hard thing because no one's going to do it for you.

You've got to be self-disciplined.

And then there's another aisle of books that I'll call the self-kindness or the self-compassion books.

And these tend to be written by yoga teachers.

And these books say that life is so hard and there's so much that is truly challenging about being a human, that's all the more reason to take it easy on yourself.

And they're in completely different aisles of the bookstore.

Mm-hmm.

But then you go, look at elite performers, people who are performing at the highest level and what you find is that they have extreme self discipline.

They are bad asses amongst bad asses, and they've also learned how to be kind to themselves, because if you can't be kind to yourself when you fail, then you're never going to have the sustainability of that self-discipline.

It's like if every time you go in the arena and try to do something really hard, you beat yourself up if you don't do well.

Or your identity is on the line.

Yeah, why would you step in the arena again?

It's too much pressure.

So I think that is it.

Something that I found in the reporting of this book is this term that I never had even thought of before.

It's like a humble badass.

And so many people who pursue excellence at the highest level they become humble badasses.

So they are tough as nails.

They're humble and they're also kind.

They're kind to others and they're kind to themselves because the process of pushing themselves and doing really hard things, it softens you.

It can't help but make you kind because it is hard.

And life is hard.

And that is all the more reason that you've got to pat yourself on the back and take it easier on yourself.

But at the same time, if we're just holding hands and singing kumbaya, then nothing's going to get done.

We're not going to achieve our goals.

So there's so many characteristics like that where popular culture, conventional wisdom or Western thought comes at them is this or that, but it's actually this and that.

You have to have that healthy ego, that self-belief, that sense of self that you can do difficult things and climb those very tall mountains while also inhabiting a quiet humility at the same time.

And it's so interesting.

You're no stranger to... uh, you know, what's going on in the internet.

Like you're, you're sort of an anthropologist of you know like of, like you know what, what people are saying and and you know there's a lot of attention farming out there and it's very dopamine inducing.

You know, to your point about, like Navy SEALs or coaches et cetera, like get off your ass, get after it.

Like these are valid messages.

I think a lot of people need to hear that and it's very motivating and it is the right message for the right person at the right time.

But, as you know, and as I know, as somebody who knows, you know many, many high performers across a wide diversity of specialties and fields.

The people who are able to sustain high performance at an elite level over the course of a very extended career are the people who, can you know, inhabit that yin yang of yes and and both.

Yeah, that's right.

I think that the things that work, work until they get in the way.

So to your point.

For a lot of people the David Goggins message of just do it, harden up, that's so powerful and that is so helpful.

Because most people actually aren't doing it.

Right, they need it.

They need the hype speech, 100%.

However, if at a certain point in your journey, you're really struggling and what you actually need is to step away and take some rest, or else you're going to have physical or emotional injury, Or if you have such a chip on your shoulder and you are fueled by anger and resentment and proving everyone wrong that you stop enjoying the thing,

99 of people are not going to last that long, because you kind of have to have fun in what you're doing, to do it for a long time.

And you have to be compassionate towards yourself.

Again, when those inevitable failures come.

So I think that these two core principles, not this or that, sometimes this and that, and then the things that work work until they get in the way.

So being really, really self-disciplined and showing up regardless is rocket fuel until what you need is a break and you show up regardless and then you blow your knee out.

Being really kind to yourself and being really supportive of yourself can be rocket fuel until you no longer take accountability and you're going too easy on yourself.

And I think, just constantly having these things in the back of your mind, which is hey, is this quality, is this attribute that I'm leaning on, is it still the right emphasis, or do I actually need to shift and look the other way?

The rubric that I've been using to think about this—I'm curious what you think about this—is threefold.

There's the doing.

That's sort of the Goggins of it all, right?

You've got to get off your ass and do shit, right?

But at some point, if that's all you're doing, you're going to hit a plateau or you're going to hit a wall.

And at that point, you have to— perhaps start undoing some things.

It's like, what is the story you're telling yourself about who you are?

And why do you believe this and that about yourself and your own kind of potential and capacity?

And that can take you all the way back to childhood, where some story got rooted in you about the limits of your capacity and what your life could or could not be.

And then the third is like the being piece.

Like that's where you're getting into, like the loving kindness, because you know from a Buddhist perspective, like you don't really need to do anything.

You know, you just have to be okay with yourself in the present moment.

And if you can root yourself in the present, you're in this space of allowing, where the answers sort of come to you and the right intuition is allowed to kind of like flourish and flower.

Yeah.

I love that.

And I think a core attribute of the being is also a curiosity, right?

Like if you're just aware and you're inhabiting that being state, you can be curious.

I mean, that's at the crux of these contemplative practices, nonjudgmental awareness.

There's a sensation.

You're curious about it.

There's pain.

You're curious about it.

There's a story you tell yourself.

You don't judge it.

You observe it.

You're curious about it.

And what's fascinating is Kobe Bryant.

Mamba mentality, killer instinct, fierce as anyone on the court.

In an interview before his tragic death, he was asked if he's the kind of player that plays not to lose or if he's the kind of player that plays to win.

And he said, I'm neither.

I play to learn things.

I play to figure the game out the arguably one of the most competitive athletes of a generation, who's known for his ferocious intensity.

The way that he approached the game was very much in this kind of being like.

I'm just, i'm curious.

Uh, because when, when you're curious about something, it takes so much pressure off of the need for this acute result right, because you're constantly learning, you're constantly, you're constantly growing.

Yeah, I mean, curiosity is sort of the skeleton key to so many things.

It's the unlock to the failure hangover.

It is a portal into what your values actually are.

A lot of times and I've said this before on the podcast many times When you throw words around like purpose and satisfaction and even the word values, it's confusing to a lot.

It's like, I don't know, what is my purpose?

How am I supposed to know what that is?

Or what exactly are my values?

But I think investing in your curiosity is really the pathway towards clarity on all of those things.

And when you just allow yourself to kind of move in the direction of where your curiosity is naturally going to lead you, that's where you find those answers.

Yeah, I love that.

And it can also be such a powerful antidote to fear.

And I think that this is so important and it can be very practical.

So I'll tell a story six years ago, seven years ago maybe now.

Uh, I'm living in California at the time and at the gym starting to train seriously and going for a PR deadlift.

I don't know what was on the bar at the time, but it was scary for me.

It was a lot of weight.

My training partner, Justin, he looks at me and he's like, how you feel about that lift?

You don't look too good.

And I'm like, eh, I don't know.

And he said, brave new world.

And what he meant by brave new world is that approaching that barbell with more weight on it that I've ever had before.

I don't know what's going to happen.

I don't know if I'm going to make her miss the lift, but it's sure going to be interesting to find out.

So let's let it rip.

And that mantra, brave new world, has stuck with me ever since when our second child was born.

I turned to my wife in the freaking operating room.

She had a C-section.

She probably doesn't remember this because she's on anesthesia.

And I'm like, brave new world.

Like, now we've got two.

I don't know what's going to happen.

Growing my creative practice, taking on big projects where I'm feeling scared and overwhelmed.

Brave new world.

Like can I truly just be curious about it?

And there's fascinating neuroscience that shows that the pathways in your brain that are associated with panic and rage and that are associated with curiosity and problem solving, they're zero sum.

They can't both be on at the same time.

So literally, by shifting into a mindset of curiosity, your underlying neurology changes in a way that makes you so much less angstful and so much less fearful.

And of course, this is what all the wisdom traditions knew before the modern science.

That's the crux of nonjudgmental awareness.

Like, can we just get curious about things?

The brass tacks of that though.

I mean, I understand what you're saying, but there is a degree of difficulty.

If you're somebody who has staked their identity on a certain outcome and things are not going well and you fall short of that, you're going to be disappointed.

So it's convenient to say, well, brave new world, or this is awesome.

Look how many data points I now have to get better next time.

So, as much as There's wisdom in saying be process oriented, be curious about this, you know.

Detach from expectations and external outcomes etc.

Like other than the mantra of brave new world.

Like how does somebody make that transition so that they can be truly process oriented?

That's a great question, Rich.

The first thing I'll say is I think there's a misnomer where people think that being process oriented means that you don't care about results or that results are not important.

And that's not true at all.

Outcomes matter.

Oftentimes, outcomes are associated with financial gain or other opportunities for you in your life.

If you're running a business, outcomes are how you pay the people and they make their livelihood that work for you.

Outcomes matter for your identity.

Unless you have years of spiritual practice.

You are going to identify with the things that you care about and you're going to want to succeed.

So outcomes matter.

Let's be really clear about that.

However, stressing about outcomes and obsessing about outcomes and having each outcome send you on either a crazy high or a really tough low, you're not going to get the best outcomes from that.

The way to get the best results that you want is actually to hold those results with a little bit more softness and to really focus on the process itself.

So then you ask the nuts and bolts, how do you do this?

I do believe in the mantra Brave New World, and I think it's one of those things that sounds so simple, but if you just continually say it when you feel fear and when you're faced with challenge, you actually start to believe it and you start to approach these challenges with a mindset of curiosity, and that becomes your default.

The second thing that I'll say is it can be really helpful to not overly identify what with any one element of your life.

The schema I have that I think is really powerful is to think of identity like a house.

And if you have a house and that house just has one room in it and that one room catches fire or floods, you've gotta move out of the house completely.

It's gonna be a very discombobulating, disoriented experience.

But if you've got a house that has multiple rooms in it and one room catches fire or floods, then you can go spend time in the other rooms and seek refuge in the other rooms while the fire and flood resolves itself or while you take care of that room.

So in your identity house you might have a room of parent or partner or entrepreneur or creative or artist.

If you're spending all your time in one room and if your house forecloses and it shrinks to just that one room and then you're the athlete that gets an injury or that fails on the big stage, or you're the artist who thought you were going to have this great showing at the gallery and didn't go as planned, that's going to be such an attack on your entire identity and entire sense of self.

It's going to be extremely hard to reckon with that.

Whereas if you've got more than one room in your identity house, then when you face failure or when you face a setback in the athlete room, then you can go spend time in the creative room or the parent room or the community member room.

And it's not to say that we should be, quote unquote, balanced.

I actually don't think that pursuing excellence and balance are really compatible.

We don't spend the same amount of time in each room in the identity house, right?

There's different seasons for spending more time in one room than the other.

You just never want to let any important rooms get too moldy.

And this is so, so important.

So you can spend 90 of your time in the triathlete room if you're really trying to qualify for Kona.

But you've got to tend to your marriage room just enough.

And if you're also someone that loves reading books, you better keep reading books, because what happens if you tear your Achilles?

You need those other rooms.

They have to be there for you.

And by having those other rooms, you free yourself to really go for it, because you know that your entire sense of self is not on the line.

As you have or as we have a multiplicity of values, we must have a multiplicity of identities.

And I think that's really wise in the athlete context or perhaps even in the triathlete context.

You know, I think of Chelsea Sedaro.

Like.

There's this notion that if you want to achieve you know maximum optimal performance, you've got to go live in a cabin in the woods and have everybody go away and all you do is train all day long.

And you're just crunching the data and you're obsessing about the 1 details of every single thing that you're doing, from your nutrition to your sleep, et cetera.

And that is gonna be the equation that's gonna set you up for greatness.

And it might in the short term, Not in the long term.

Like anybody who has run that experiment ultimately has perhaps some short term success, but it's unsustainable and it's too vulnerable to disruption.

And when you have those disruptions, it's too disrupting to the ego and that sense of identity.

And so ironically, somebody like Chelsea, who's a mom and is married and has a full life outside of being a world champion Ironman athlete, this seems to be a better equation for sustained, long-term success.

And she's just one of many examples.

Yeah.

So it's like build your identity house, make sure that it has more than one room and then be really intentional about hey, during this season of life, I'm going to spend a lot of time in the athlete room, or I'm going to spend a lot of time in the parent room if you just have an infant, whatever it is.

And you just have to have these minimum effective doses to stay in touch with the other rooms so that they're there for you when you need them.

On the subject of balance, I pulled this quote from the new book.

I want to read it to you and have you respond to it.

You said, The times when people say they are at their best and feel the most alive are also the times when they are the least balanced.

And this speaks to another kind of dualism or conundrum here, like this notion or this social pressure that we should be living balanced lives versus the pursuit of excellence which requires us to be out of balance.

Quote, or the backstory is better put of that quote is in the reporting on this book, speaking with high performers across domains artists athletes chefs surgeons, you name it.

I'd ask them all I'm like tell me the times in your life when you were, just like the most deeply satisfied.

And to a person they all described going all in on something, trying to win an Olympic medal, my fellowship when I was training at Mass General opening a restaurant, writing the book falling in love.

These are periods of disharmony in our lives, yet these are the periods that people said they were most satisfied.

However, another interesting thing happens.

You zoom out and you look across those people's life And across their whole life, they actually look somewhat balanced.

Balanced in the macro.

Bingo.

At any given point of time, you zoom in and they're focusing on maybe one or two things.

That is the strong emphasis.

But then you zoom out and you look over 40 50 60, for some of the old timers 70 80, 90 years and they have this full life.

So, instead of trying to be balanced in the conventional sense by doing everything always, all the time, there's a seasonality to life.

And you have certain seasons for emphasizing certain pursuits.

And I've become such a firm believer that that is a much more reliable path to deep satisfaction than trying to have balance Again.

At least is the self-help industrial complex tells us that we should, which really means I need to be the perfect husband or wife, the perfect community member.

I need to go to the gym five days a week, stay up on all the shows, read all the books, follow pop culture on, and on, and on.

And it's like you're just going to make yourself miserable if you try to do all those things.

Speaking of dualities, the last book was all about groundedness.

And this book is about excellence.

Is there not an inherent kind of conflict between these two pursuits?

And how do you reconcile that?

Oh, I think they're complete compliments.

Like you've got to be grounded to soar.

So say more.

Yeah.

If you don't have a solid foundation in your life of habits, of relationships, of knowing yourself, of who you really are, then you're going to be extremely flimsy while you try to climb that mountain.

Once you have that solid foundation, well, then you can climb as high.

The sky's your limit, literally.

And I think that again yes, grounded and soaring feel really different, but they're completely compatible.

And the more that you strive for excellence and the more that you soar So long as you're doing it in a way that is aligned with your values the more grounded you become.

You know, I think the shift in my thinking is, I would say, actually the way to be really grounded in your life is to pursue excellence and not pseudo excellence, not hustle culture excellence, but like genuine, heartfelt excellence, involved engagement and worthwhile pursuits that align with your values and goals, like trying to contribute and get the best out of yourself on things that matter.

That's how you become grounded.

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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

The new year does not require a new you.

But don't you deserve to be a better and less burdened you?

I mean.

I think so, which is why this year, I'm focusing on overcoming a few things that have burdened me for too long, preventing me from becoming the better version.

My family and my friends and my peers deserve past childhood stuff perfectionism, overwhelm and the anxiety it produces.

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So this time of year, every January, it's like there's this spell that gets cast and suddenly everybody is motivated to take their health seriously again.

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Talk a little bit more about how you're defining excellence versus how perhaps people are interpreting it, misinterpreting it.

The way that I define excellence I'll start there is what I just said involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals.

So deep focus, getting real, intimate and close to a craft, to an activity, striving for mastery, doing it in an activity that you find worthwhile, that's going to be, in the eyes of the beholder right, and then making sure that it's in a way where it's supporting your values.

And So you might think that you're trying to master building a table or run a marathon or compose a piece of music, and you are doing that.

But the training for the marathon or the craftwork that goes into building a table that's also working on you as a person.

And that's why the values component is so important.

And that's a big part of what differentiates excellence from flow.

Maybe we'll get into that later.

Unfortunately, I think what happens at large and certainly on the Internet and really in all pop culture, is this kind of genuine excellence.

It gets crowded out.

And a big part of the project with this book is to reclaim genuine excellence.

What does it get crowded out by?

On one extreme, there is hustle culture greatness.

So this is I need to work all the time.

I need to essentially give up most of my relationships because I'm working all the time.

I need to wake up at 4am and have a 47 step routine and monitor and track every single breath that I take and then create content based on every single breath that I take.

And that's the most important piece.

I'm going to be flexing so hard from that cold plunge at four in the morning.

That's what I call hustle culture or pseudo excellence.

Some of those individuals that perpetrate this are world class at something.

They're world class at marketing, but they're not necessarily world class at a creative pursuit or an athletic pursuit or anything else.

Because the people who are world class, they're too busy doing the thing to produce content all day.

So because of this pseudo excellence and hustle culture greatness, a lot of people are like I want nothing to do with that whole enterprise.

Like, nope, I don't want that.

Then there's this other extreme, which says that you look out in the world and there is so much that is wrong.

There are so many systems and structures that feel really broken.

And it's like, how dare you even talk about greatness or excellence?

We should just complain about everything always, essentially.

And in some circles, like that's a way to gain status.

It's like if you say that you're going to try to be great, well, that's not cool, right?

That's not what you should be doing.

And then what gets crowded out is this genuine, heartfelt excellence, which is not only key to becoming the best version of yourself and living a life of deep joy and satisfaction.

But it's also key to contributing, and it's what makes the world go round.

Every single inspirational athletic feat or piece of art came from someone who was pursuing heartfelt excellence.

Every single medical innovation came from someone who was pursuing heartfelt excellence.

Every great invention, every new technology that has benefited us, that came from someone who was pursuing excellence.

And even if we're not going to change the world...

We can change ourself and we can change the communities around us.

And the way to do that is to find these things that light you up, that make you feel alive, and to go all in.

That's how you contribute.

So, on this spectrum of people's ambition around excellence, you have on the one polarity, you know, the hustle porn and all of that.

We all know that anybody who scrolls on the Internet sees probably a lot of that.

Well, I don't know.

That's my silo.

It depends on your feet.

My feet has a lot of it.

And then on the other end, it's how dare you.

This is a privileged pursuit, yada, yada.

We talked a little bit about that.

But I think in the middle, there's a lot of people who are like, you know what?

My life is pretty good.

I'm pretty much happy.

I've got a little setup here.

Everything's essentially fine.

Could things be better?

Yeah.

But why should I get all wrapped up in this idea of excellence?

I'm paying my bills and I get together with my buddies on the weekend and we watch football or whatever right.

And I think that's probably like where most people are kind of sitting and, you know, they're not going to go full Goggins, but they're not going to throw up their hands either.

They're just sort of, you know, making their way like an average citizen.

So what is, what is the message to them about why they should care about this?

It's a great question.

Um, I think the message to those people are if you're truly happy and you're truly content and you say your life is great, then who am I to tell you to change anything about your life?

I think most people don't answer that their life is truly greater.

They think it's as great as it could be.

Then what I would say is for those guys that are watching sports when you watch Steph Curry take over a basketball game, you like feel that in your body, right.

Like you don't think, Oh, this guy's good.

His mechanics are great.

Look at his elbow and the arc of the ball.

It's like art.

You feel that in your body and you're doing that somewhat passively because you're the spectator, but still like that lights you up.

You're going to talk about it the rest of the week.

Imagine creating that for yourself.

That's why you should pursue excellence.

Excellence creates that for yourself.

You might never play in the NBA, but if you can find an activity or pursuit to try to get the best out of yourself in, you can have that feeling and you don't have to rely on Steph Curry to give it to you.

You can still appreciate Steph Curry.

We all do.

I do.

But you can also create it yourself.

You know, it's like deadlifting.

People always ask me and it's my armchair pursuit is powerlifting.

And deadlifting is arguably the most trivial thing in the world, right?

There's this heavy ass bar on the ground and the whole point is just to get it to your hips, not even over your head, just to your hips.

And I spent hours and hours doing this.

Yeah, it's just a completely useless affair.

Totally useless.

The only other time I hinge like that is loading the dishwasher, right?

It's a completely useless affair.

However, being in the pocket of a good deadlift feels like probably a great swim stroke.

Like the bar just flies.

Your mechanics are right.

The pressure and the ground is right.

You feel so alive.

And the reason you feel so alive is because no machine can do that for you.

No robot can do that for you.

Years and years of training lead up to that point where you become more skilled.

And that is such a core driver of satisfaction.

And then again, in the case of my own pursuit, I'm doing it in community and I'm doing it in a way where it's helping me as a person.

Because every time I face my fear in the gym, I get a little bit better at facing my fears out of the gym.

Yeah.

One of the things that you say on this argument of why you should want to be excellent is that it is an antidote to alienation.

Yeah.

Alienation is a philosophical term.

It's just a fancy way of saying it is a feeling of disconnection.

And it can be a feeling of disconnection from other people or a feeling of disconnection from yourself, sometimes both.

And alienation is when we go through the world and we're just kind of numbed out. right?

Like we're not completely going through the motions, but we're also not really caring too deeply about anything.

And we can lose a sense of who we are.

And by pursuing excellence in something.

It forces you to get really intimate with what you're doing and to get really intimate with yourself.

If you try to learn an instrument and you want to have any success, you can't be distracted while you're doing it.

And when you come up upon challenges, it's just you and the guitar, you and the piano.

You're going to also reconnect to yourself.

You're going to feel frustration.

Oh, this is a feeling.

How do I manage frustration?

It's just the opposite of being numbed out.

And I think what so many people are seeking right now is a sense of aliveness in in a world where there's increasingly going to be robots that can do things for us, and Just more and more a I slap.

We're already seeing it everywhere.

What?

What is a concern of mine is that we become more alienated from each other and ourselves, and We really become more alienated from the human experience.

Like.

What separates us from machines is that we feel deeply, and you only feel deeply if you have intimacy, and And excellence is just a beautiful way to work towards intimacy with a pursuer, with yourself.

When you are training hard for something, when you're writing a book, use the example of an instrument.

It can be anything.

You have to confront your own mind.

You have to confront your own obstacles and barriers, and it forces you to get close with yourself.

I like how you set this up as a communal enterprise.

The idea around excellence, for myself and for a lot of people involves a lot of alone, isolated time.

You know what I mean?

Particularly like the book example, right?

Like if you want to be excellent at something, you're cutting yourself off from the world.

You're making that sacrifice and saying no to a lot of interpersonal issues, inner relationships, in order to achieve a certain goal.

And you're saying something totally different that excellence is best pursued as a communal enterprise and as a way to more deeply connect with other people.

So maybe highlight a little bit more around how that might work.

Yeah, I think it works in a couple of ways.

I think the first is that if you pick a mountain to climb, literal or figurative.

There are generally two ways you can get to the top.

You can get to the top all by yourself, or you can get to the top with other people.

And it's more fun, often, especially if they're the right people if you climb with other people.

So for any big goal, for any big mountain, I think it's really worth asking yourself how can I do this or how can I involve other people in the pursuit?

Another way to aspire towards excellence together is, even if your goals are totally different than mine or totally different than your other friend's, If everyone is doing something that makes them tick, something that they're excited about, that energy is contagious.

There's research that shows that attitude, motivation, these things are contagious.

It's why we used to have artist communes.

That's why athletes go to training camps together.

That drive to flourish is really powerful and it's really contagious.

And then the third thing that I would say is even a more solitary pursuit like writing a book, I would argue, doesn't have to be so solitary.

So when I wrote this book, I'm thinking that I am doing my absolute best to take the torch from a lineage of other writers, many of whom are dead.

Robert Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Man.

It's Eric Fromm to have her to beat.

Persig is all over this book.

There are so many humanist thinkers who I have read their work.

I've been in conversation with their work.

And many of these folks were dead before I was even born, but I'm in an intellectual lineage with them.

And that's really powerful.

The way that you perform this analysis or this autopsy on excellence is sort of threefold.

You have the biology of it, the psychology of it, and the philosophy of it.

And starting with the biology aspect of this, what is really fascinating is the way you establish that this is um, not only uh, you know, an evolutionary kind of uh prerogative of the human animal.

Um it's, you know, it's something that we're hardwired for.

So you're basically saying, like this is not the realm of the exceptional, like we're all, on some level, um set up to pursue our version of excellence, you know, in our unique life circumstances.

Yeah, that's right.

Biologists call this homeostatic upregulation.

And it traces itself back to the very beginning of life, like single cell bacteria.

They have this imperative to persist and flourish.

And for a bacteria, all that that means is sense, although they don't have nervous systems, but they somehow know how to move towards conditions that will help them proliferate.

That's flourishing for a bacteria.

And then out of these single-cell organisms evolved multicellular organisms.

And then eventually we have nervous systems in brains.

But for the longest time, homeostatic upregulation just meant survival.

That was flourishing.

We are a species now that can do more than just survive.

There's still a strong imperative to pass on our DNA, but But we live to 80 or 90 or, if we're lucky, we live to 100.

So that imperative to persist and flourish doesn't go away.

Now, unless you're going to have 40 kids and that's your definition of persisting and flourishing you need to find other outlets for that.

And the pursuit of excellence is just that.

It's finding ways in which you can flourish.

And what I found so fascinating in the research is that So much of excellence is pre-intellectual.

So we don't think it.

We feel our way to excellence.

Like you don't think your way to the perfect swim stroke.

You might have some cues, but ultimately you're feeling the water.

I use the example of Steph Curry earlier.

We don't cognitively deduce why he's great.

When you're in the presence of greatness, you just know you feel it.

So it's the fact that it's this deep seated feeling that really confirms, like this is something that is in our hardwiring.

We know it long before we even have to think about it.

Maybe this is where the discussion around the distinction between excellence and flow comes in because yes, there is this the cognition of it all, especially when you're trying to learn a skill.

And then there's the what do you call it?

Like the unconscious.

Yeah.

Getting in the zone.

Yeah.

Like basically you're like where you're not thinking about like.

I've swum so many laps, I don't think about my stroke.

Steph Curry certainly doesn't have to think about his jump shot, et cetera.

And when you're in that state there's an autopilot where your unconscious mind is kind of controlling the whole affair and you're in the pocket like you're in the zone.

So what is the relationship between what we consider to be a flow state and excellence?

So there's a couple similarities and a couple differences.

The first thing is that flow states are absolutely a part of excellence.

But excellence starts long before the flow state.

So we love the transcendent moments, but you don't get to the transcendent moment without all the mundane reps that are very effortful, where you are really struggling.

You have to have conscious competence.

You have to think about being good before you have unconscious competence before you can just be good.

The other big difference between excellence and flow is that flow is values neutral.

So flow does not have to be connected to your values.

There's this term that I love.

It was coined by the psychologist David Pizarro.

And he calls it shitty flow.

Oh, is he the guy who has the Bad Wizards podcast?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that guy.

I do too.

So he coined the term shitty flow.

And shitty flow, he essentially said, is unfortunately in today's world the predominant way that people experience flow.

So he uses the example of scrolling on X, And when you scroll on X, and particularly doom scrolling, you often lose track of time.

You lose a sense of yourself.

So it's not like a conscious act.

You're just kind of doing it.

Your perception shifts and you often come out of it and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I've just spent two hours on X.

Those have all the hallmarks of flow.

Right.

Or at least many of the hallmarks of flow.

But because most people's values aren't to spend two hours on X, it's shitty flow.

Yeah, you don't emerge from that experience feeling joyful and fulfilled.

Sports gambling, another great example of shitty flow.

Or going to a casino, right?

Shitty flow.

Excellence asks you to make sure that what you're doing supports your values and goals.

And that is so important in today's world, because what can happen is there are flow junkies that just go chase flow experiences, but they often don't have that much satisfaction, because if what you're chasing isn't aligned with your values and the person that you want to become, then it's kind of futile.

What's the point of all of it?

It's earning that rewarding flow state.

Yes.

And there's no shortcut for putting the work in.

If it's a book, ass in chair.

However many days of being frustrated before finally you have that moment where suddenly time evaporates.

Yeah.

And you get satisfaction.

I've been thinking a lot about that word.

So many people, I think, have this goal of happiness and And I got nothing against being happy.

I want to be happy.

I want my kids to be happy.

It's great to be happy.

But happiness tends to be fairly fleeting and ephemeral.

And so much of life is not always happy.

Life is pretty hard.

But satisfaction.

That's what you get from the pursuit of excellence, from making progress, from aspiring towards competence and mastery.

And satisfaction seems to be so much more grounded and so much more lasting.

And I think that sometimes we aim for happiness is our objective, when the objective ought to be something like satisfaction, or maybe meaning, which is a close cousin of satisfaction.

And in the Robert Persig of it all, it's really about who you become in the process of this.

It's like the thing that you're doing is informing you, just as you're informing the thing that you're creating.

And, you know, it's this two-way communication between these two things.

And even if your eye isn't on, like who am I becoming in the process of it?

Just by focusing on, you know the mastery of the thing.

Whether you're building a table, or you know rebuilding the engine in your car, whatever it may be, the sense of satisfaction emerges from the devotion to the process of doing the thing as best as you can.

Yeah, I mean, you know this better than anyone, I'd imagine.

Like finding ultra was about becoming a great ultra athlete, but it's also about finding yourself in the process of becoming a great ultra athlete.

And that's true for all of us.

There's a woodworker, Peter Korn, who has this beautiful quote that's in the book.

And he says that for the longest time he thought that he wanted to make a table that was really durable and just had so much integrity.

And what he realized is that he actually wanted himself to be a durable person with integrity.

And building the table was just a venue to try to learn those qualities and those characteristics for integrity shitty flow.

I think there's a common, a commonly shared experience where somebody perhaps at some point in their life did get excited about pursuing excellence in some specific Lane, but things didn't work out, you know, and that was followed by a great deal of disappointment and, of course, with that you know, fear of trying again.

And it's just easier in our distracted world to, you know, grab the phone and opt for the you know the shitty flow state than to try to earn a new one.

So what is the counsel for the person who's flirted with this in the past and has suffered, you know, that kind of setback and disappointment?

How do you get that person reengaged with all the things that you're talking about?

Yeah.

The things that you care deeply about are the things that break your heart.

It's just inevitable.

It's the cost of stepping into the arena.

It's the cost of caring deeply.

Heartbreak is a part of this.

If you give your all to something and it doesn't go your way, it is absolutely going to hurt.

I'd rather have loved and lost than to have not loved at all, really.

That's the thing, right?

And in the book, you have like, The first section is the biology, psychology and philosophy.

And then you get into all of these like habits and practices.

And, you know, my favorite one in the whole thing is like caring, like you got to care.

And I remember when I was reading that, I was remembering when I interviewed Alexi Pappas for Outside Magazine and we kind of put a button at the end of the article when she said I can't wait until it's cool to care again.

Like somehow earnestness has gone out of vogue.

And this is a self-protection mechanism that we all have because we've been wounded and we don't want to suffer that again.

And there is company in just... this uh this idea that uh it's just better to be blase about everything and you know it's a very i'm gen x you know i grew up this is the generation that i grew up in like nothing matters and no one should care about anything uh and so you're really cutting across the grain to say no i actually do care and i'm going to put myself on the line and that's That's scary, especially if you've done it in the past and it didn't pan out.

Yeah.

Most people can probably remember the cool kid or the popular kid in school who was too cool to try.

So they never tried hard academically.

They never tried hard in gym class because they're just way too cool for that.

And what was actually happening is that kid was probably very insecure and scared of failure.

And by not trying.

Well, you didn't have to worry about failing, because if things don't go your way, you didn't try.

So many adults have yet to outgrow this tendency.

The cost of caring deeply about something, the cost of going all in, the cost of pursuing excellence is that you open yourself up to heartbreak.

You make yourself vulnerable.

And you just have to hope that the love of the process and the journey of becoming and really framing this is a lifelong, infinite game of personal growth and becoming.

The love that you get from that is big enough to hold the hurt of failure.

Really, tactically, what do you do?

You surround yourself with other people who care deeply and who are committed.

You surround yourself with great art.

When I'm stuck, when I have my heart broken by things that I care about, I turn to music.

Music just helps get me through.

You read great books.

You have to put these things around you, these structures in your life, these sources of inspiration that, when you do feel that heartbreak, they help you get back on the bandwagon.

And having that panoply of identities, so that you're not staking everything on this one thing as a way to buffer, you know, whatever heartbreak you might have to suffer.

Yeah.

And it's okay to let it hurt.

I think that also there can be a misconception.

Maybe this is a part of, like pseudo excellence or hustle culture excellence which is, like you know, bad result.

Like you just learn from failure.

You immediately grow from failure.

Go, go, go.

And I do think that you don't allow yourself to feel or grieve or be upset.

Just get right back into it immediately.

And I do think that you learn from failure and you do grow from failure, but these things take time.

And I think that you have to give yourself the time and space to grieve.

Um, I think one of the worst things that you can do is have this big goal or this big ambition and come up just short and not grieve it.

Just like immediately get back to work.

Thinking about these things in in, in as spectrums again um, You have the person who isn't going to try at all because they're too terrified.

You have the person who does nothing but try constantly.

But then in the middle you have people that flirt with trying, but always seem to fall short of completing anything.

And this is what I love about the section that you have in there about completion.

This gets to Seth Godin's idea of you have to ship the work.

You're not an artist until you ship, right?

So there is something about completion that is so essential in this conversation around the pursuit of mastery or excellence.

Yeah.

So, all right.

I said earlier that the way of excellence is an infinite game.

And the whole point of an infinite game is just to keep playing and to keep learning and to keep growing.

But at the same time, back to non-duality, all these themes come together.

There are these finite games along the way.

And a finite game has a start and an end, and you can win or lose.

So you publish the book or you don't.

You finish the marathon or you don't.

You launch the successful business or you don't.

And every time we complete a finite game, it's worth stepping back and pausing and reflecting and learning from that.

And I would say that even before you get the objective or external result, so before you get the sales numbers on the book, before the book's even published, when you turn in the manuscript, step back, celebrate that, savor that, learn from that and then get back on the path.

I think that what often happens today in our modern world that's just so go go, go is if we don't have these moments of completion and we don't have rituals around completion, we can just kind of float from one project to the next and we can really lose our bearings.

Way back since the beginning of time.

In so many different cultures throughout history, you have these rituals, these rites of passage, feasts.

They tend to be communal, but they're things that really provide you gravity in both senses of the word.

Gravity is in they hold you to the path, so you're not just floating along, but also meaning.

Meaning.

And I think a trap that type A pushers myself included, can run into is we just go from one project to the next.

We never stop and we never mark moments of completion.

And I think it's very important to do that, to stop, to savor, to learn, because you don't grow without reflection along the way.

There's a difference between routine and ritual.

Like ritual implies, you know, kind of something sacred and divine.

You know you are investing this moment with an energy that is very distinct from like.

Oh, we're going to celebrate this.

Like there is a solemnity to it, I think, that is really important.

And I'm bad at this, you know, of all the things.

And I was going to say, what are what are your rituals?

Yeah, I'm not good at this one.

I coached a guy a long time ago.

His name's Rutger.

And he he's a winemaker.

And he had like this beautiful vineyard and a farmer, just a really fascinating guy.

And long story short, he's got like the best wine that's not in California.

And he gave me like this super nice bottle that had aged. and i told myself i'm gonna open it when i publish a book and that was three books ago and you still haven't opened it open the wine so what do you think that what do you make of that like what's the hang up there like is there some kind of weird you know ocd thing going on here like if you open it it will symbolize something that it will auger no i honestly think that it's exactly you feel like you haven't earned it it's it's either i feel like i haven't earned it or it's like the day that the book's published like i'm doing events And then I'm getting on a plane for the next event.

And then it's been two weeks.

And now it's like, well, am I really celebrating?

It's been two weeks.

I think you need to go back and read your groundedness book.

Yeah, I mean, but we all do, right?

Like we write the books that we need.

And these things are hard.

Completion especially.

The feedback I got when I shared early drafts with folks was that the completion is the hardest.

Mike Dunleavy Jr, who's the general manager of the Golden State Warriors.

Former NBA basketball player.

He's like great book.

Yep, I agree with all this.

But oh, my God, the completion chapter opened my eyes because I haven't done this at all.

And he's had all of these great accomplishments.

And then he's like we need, as a team, as an organization, we need to figure out how to have these moments of ritual and completion, because they're really important.

So I don't just think it's me with the bottle of wine.

My guess is there's plenty of people tuning in and they have their own version of that bottle of wine.

And again, there's a duality here.

Because it's not to say that every Tuesday you do something great, you want to celebrate it and have this ritual and become super content.

But I think that for the driven pushers, I think that this often gets overlooked.

Sure.

Because the idea is like this gets to the undoing aspect, right?

Like if I oh, if I take my foot off the gas for even a second, like I'm setting myself up for the whole ship to capsize.

Like, if I take a moment to like open that bottle of wine, that means that I'm really not committed to the process.

You know, or there's some psychological tweak there that is preventing you from being able to engage with that.

Yeah, I think it probably represents complacency, like somewhere in the subconscious.

And it is a duality because you should be about the process and it shouldn't really matter.

But it does matter.

And it's important to recognize that it matters and like honor that.

Yeah, I love the myth of Sisyphus.

So the Greek gods condemn Sisyphus to push a boulder up a hill.

And then the penalty is he gets to the top of the hill and the boulder just rolls back down.

And he does this for his whole life.

And there are many different interpretations of this story.

The one that I like best is in some ways we're all Sisyphus.

So we're born and our life is just a series of pushing boulders up the hill.

And then, because we're never content, we're never satisfied, the arrival fallacy, the boulder just rolls right back down.

We'll never graduate from that.

And, you know, ultimately it's all futile.

Yeah.

We're just pushing the boulders up the hill.

Like my deadlift.

Talk about pushing a boulder up the hill.

Like no one cares.

It's futile.

And yet what the philosopher Camus said is that if we can push the boulder up a hill with a smile on our face, then we're living a good life.

And what I would add to that is, when we get to the top of the hill, if we can pause for just a second, just a second to savor it and to reflect on it before we start pushing the boulder up the next hill, like that helps us do the whole thing with a smile on our face.

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I can't help but think about...

The video that, like Ryan Holiday, will share pretty much every time one of his books hits the New York Times bestseller list.

Like he'll be sitting in his office and his agent will call and be like great news.

You know, you're like number one or number two.

And he's like working on the other book at the time.

He's like, oh, thanks so much.

That's great.

Yeah.

All right.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

And then he's just like back in it yeah, and like i want him to go have that bottle of wine, and he probably does, he does.

But i think the message that he's conveying is like it's not about that.

You know in in, in ryan.

I mean, i know ryan really well, i know you do too.

Ryan has fun doing what he does.

Yeah, he loves it.

Yeah yeah, so he's in, he's in the pocket Yeah, exactly.

And I think that maybe sometimes what ends up happening is, if you feel the need to have a massive celebration all the time, maybe that actually signals that you don't love the thing that much because you're doing it to get the celebration at the end of the tunnel.

Well, on that topic again, trying to inhabit the average listener or viewer who would look at someone like Ryan and say well, he's gifted and talented.

He's clearly doing what he's supposed to be doing, or choose an athlete or an artist or what have you.

But I'm just an average person.

And when I go to try to achieve a certain goal, there's so many red lights and I hit all these obstacles.

How do you know when to stick With it and continue to pursue that goal.

And when do you say maybe this isn't the right goal or I'm on the wrong path and maybe I should retreat and rethink the whole enterprise?

Yeah, you're getting to another great duality, which is like grit or quit.

And there's time and a place for both.

And you use gumption as a way to contextualize this.

Yeah.

And gumption is it's this forward inertia and the sense of enthusiasm for what you're doing.

And gumption is it's like the psychic gasoline.

Right.

That like fuels the whole train of progress.

And even the best of us who love what we do.

There are times when gumption runs low.

I tend to write with decent gumption, but sometimes my gumption from writing is zero.

And then I've got to restore it.

So how do I restore it?

I step away from writing.

I rest.

I renew.

I go listen to great music.

I watch sports.

Maybe I'll read other books.

But I do things outside of my core pursuit that really help fill me up with inspiration.

But that doesn't really answer your question about when to hold on versus when to let go.

I think there's a few heuristics here.

The first that is really practical is to ask yourself am I prolonging the inevitable or am I genuinely curious to figure out what might happen next?

So this is something that I often use with some of the athletes that I've coached and counseled that are considering retirement.

And you can ask them are you just not retiring now because you know it's happening, it's inevitable and you're just prolonging it.

You're scared.

Or are you genuinely curious to see what happens if you try to compete again at 37 or 38?

And most people know the answer to that question pretty quickly.

And based on how you answer, that really determines what you ought to do, or at least what you ought to consider doing.

The same thing is true when we're pursuing a goal, feels like we're prolonging the inevitable, which is like eventually, I'm going to quit this thing because I don't like it.

I'm not getting better at it.

It's tedious.

It's insufferable.

It's making me an angry, resentful person.

Well, then it maybe just isn't the right goal and that's okay.

But if it just feels hard and you're curious about whether or not you can overcome the hard thing, or you look at other people who have overcome the hard thing And you admire them and then you ask them what was it like for you when you were starting?

And they're like, oh, it was terrible.

Those are all signs of curiosity.

And I think those are good reasons to stick with something.

One of the things that we have in common is that we've both changed careers.

Yeah.

And when you're sharing that, I'm reflecting upon my extended career as a lawyer, which every day was misery.

Yeah.

And I'm just trying to think like oh, if I just had Brad as my coach, would I have quit this career earlier to start something new?

And I don't know that I would have.

And so I'm trying to imagine the person who is stuck in a maybe less than awesome position, career path or job or situation, but there is a sense of feeling trapped or a challenge in trying to access the idea that something could be different when you don't know what that thing is.

And that leap of faith just seems too treacherous to make.

And when people say to me like oh, you know oh, you had this other career and then you had this, it's like oh, that's so amazing.

And it's like no actually, like i stayed in this thing way too long because i was completely handicapped.

I couldn't see it for what it was.

I didn't have enough confidence or enough vision to imagine that something could be better for me, and i was just determined to try to make it work and refuse to believe that, just because i was jamming a square peg in a round hole, That that you know I was just on the wrong path and that there was a better path for me available.

Yeah, I think that it's really challenging.

Like this is a perennial challenge that so many people struggle with.

The first thing that I would say is that we often put so much emphasis on our career and on our work when, for some people, a job is just a job.

And you can work nine to five.

You can kind of coast.

It pays the bills.

And if it allows you to have the family life that you want, or then on the weekends you get to go race triathlon or paint watercolor whatever it is that you do, collect bonsai trees and you pursue excellence there.

You can have a really good life like that.

So I think that the problem becomes when everything just gets stale.

Or, like in your case, when you're in a job that is not the right fit and it's consuming all your time because it's a really high stress, hard job.

And in those instances, I think that there's a tendency for this kind of like all or nothing thinking, which is, either I have to fight through and do it regardless, or I have to like, quit tomorrow and take a leap of faith.

And what the research shows is that the people that are able to make those changes and do it successfully.

They tend to not in all cases, but they tend to do it more gradually.

Um, so, you know, in my case, I was working in the corporate world.

The only thing worse than a big firm attorney is a McKinsey consultant.

So here we are at the same table, right?

I'm in the corporate world.

I didn't just decide like, I'm going to quit.

I started a blog.

This was back internet 10 and I started doing it as a side hustle and seeing like do I like writing.

Do people like my writing?

Am I talented at this?

And I built that thing up.

Like I didn't leave the corporate world until my first book was published.

By staying in the corporate world, yes, it was hard.

Yes, I didn't like it.

Yes, it was square peg in a round hole.

But it actually allowed me to take the risk to write the book because I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck trying to write clickbait articles.

And it started with curiosity.

But it started with curiosity.

And it started with coming back to my innate temperament.

I think back to myself as a kid in high school.

I mean, it's pretty crazy that...

I was the editor of the school newspaper and the captain of the football team.

And now what do I do?

I love writing about athletes and performance.

And it took a long way to find my way back there.

But in many ways, I'm just back in high school now.

That's who I am.

And it might not be the exact fit for people, but I think a good inroads is to look back to when you were a kid and ask yourself what did you really enjoy?

What made you tick?

In this process of trying to understand excellence and all the people that you interviewed and spoke to, was there anything that caught you by surprise?

What changed your mind about this?

Because I'm sure you went into it thinking, this is what it's going to be, and then...

Maybe somebody said something that you had to think a little bit more deeply about it.

Well, a couple of things.

The first thing, I think, is that ultimately, at the end of the day, you have to be yourself and go all the way.

And that is so easy to say, but it's hard to do.

Really know yourself, have confidence in yourself and then just go all the way, whatever that means to you.

And that came to mind.

I hope I'm not going to get him in trouble by saying this with an interview with John Moreland.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, singer-songwriter, one of my favorite musicians.

If you haven't listened to his stuff, people go listen to it.

It's great.

And Moreland's music is just so deep and his songwriting has just so many incredible parts about it.

And I asked him, like what he does, to decompress after writing a song and reflect and grow and get better at the craft.

He's like, shit, man, smoke a joint and do the next one.

Now, I'm not advising that.

It's the last thing I'm advising.

I'm going to get all of us in trouble.

But that's who he is, right?

He's not trying to force himself to be this like meticulous craftsperson that goes back to the drawing board and has this really arduous process.

Whereas if you went to someone else that is the meticulous craftsperson and told them they need to be a cool artist and just smoke a joint and do the next one, they wouldn't want to do that.

So I think that, at the end of the day, like yes, there are these habits, these mindset, these factors that are integral to the pursuit of excellence.

That is like the recipe on paper, but then you've got to make it your own and you really have to know yourself to do it.

On the topic of knowing yourself, you talk a lot in the book about you know, intuition and the importance of you know kind of the emotional aspect of all of this.

And I think a lot of people are living their lives so reactively and there's so much distraction out there and so little time for boredom and self-reflection that there's a disconnect in our relationship with ourselves, so that we don't quite know who we are, maybe in the way that we would have 50 years ago or something like that.

You know, and so that process of, like knowing yourself or trying to decipher what your emotions mean so that you can translate them into behaviors that are moving you in a in a positive trajectory of your life, become a little more treacherous than they used to.

So to say, be yourself or like know who you are, like for somebody for whom those are foreign concepts like how do you begin?

What's your counsel on how to engage with that?

Yeah, start taking a walk without your phone, like 20 minutes a day.

And that's scary at first.

Really scary.

It's crazy that that should be a threat to people.

But it is.

It is.

And just have protected times and spaces.

And the reason I like to do it on a walk is there's something about being in motion that really helps the psyche get out of log jams.

There's tons of research that supports this.

And you're going to find fears that pop up.

You're going to find creative thoughts that come up.

You're going to find insights that come up.

So many people have come up with their masterpieces while walking.

They've solved marital distress while walking.

They've made big decisions while walking.

And so few people now go for walks without input.

So really, that would be the starting point, as simple as that, a 20-minute walk with nothing.

Another inroads to this is when you go run errands, leave your phone in the glove compartment of your car.

So go to the grocery store and just wait, in line with nothing but yourself and nothing but your thoughts.

Interesting things happen.

Um, when I go out to dinner because like I'm a mortal human, I'm not perfect on any of this.

Uh, I give my wife my phone, she puts it in her purse because I know that if that phone's in my pocket, even if I don't check it, I'm going to be like thinking about checking it.

Uh, so I think that the more that we can create these like small ecosystems or small environments in our life where we don't have the adult pacifier, which is any discomfort, I pull up my phone. the more that we're forced to confront our own minds and to get comfortable with our own minds.

And again, it's like to learn who we really are.

That requires a degree of discipline.

Discipline is something that you've thought a lot about and written about extensively.

How do you define discipline?

And how is your definition?

Perhaps a little bit different than kind of the commonly understood version of it?

Yeah, so I think that a lot of people think that discipline is this machismo manly, thumping your chest, bravado.

And I think what actual discipline is at least what I've come to believe based on my reporting is it's just doing what you say you're going to do showing up and doing it.

And some days it's hard and some days it's easy.

Most days it's somewhere in between.

But you do what you say you're going to do.

You do it with integrity.

And then you get on with the show.

Like real discipline doesn't need a parade.

And I think a big part of real discipline is also that self-kindness.

Because it's hard to do hard things.

Like it really is.

And you've got to learn to become your own friend and to have your own back.

Otherwise, it's just like it's not going to be sustainable.

But I think that when you strip discipline down to its essence, it's just like showing up to do what you said you're going to do.

There's also the discipline to know what to say yes to and know what to say no to, like how to flex those no's that are a function of your values and whatever this thing, is that you're pursuing excellence in.

And incident to that, is creating an environment that is conducive to.

You know that that happening right, so we all default to our systems and our environment, and you know the extent to which we need to exercise discipline or or alternatively, willpower is really a function of how well honed our environment is.

Yeah, you never want to go grocery shopping when you're hungry Because you're in an environment where you're going to make the wrong choice, and that's true for just about everything in life.

Philosophers have these two kinds of freedom, negative freedom and positive freedom.

And negative freedom is you're free from constraints.

So you're free to go to bed whenever you want.

You're free to drink as much as you want.

You're free to eat whatever you want.

You're free to watch whatever you want to watch on television.

You want to use porn.

You're free to use porn.

You have total freedom.

That's negative freedom.

You are free from constraints.

Positive freedom is the freedom to become the best version of yourself.

And often...

Positive freedom, pursuing that, requires sacrificing some negative freedoms.

It requires putting constraints on yourself.

It requires saying that I am going to go to bed early so that I can wake up early, because that's going to be the window of time that I have to myself.

It requires saying that if I'm someone that has normalized drinking two to three beers at the end of the day just because that's what I do, I'm going to get help for that, because that's actually not a great habit and that's getting in the way of me aspiring to be the person that I want to become.

And I think that too often people just think about freedom from constraints, like the freedom from again having to go to bed at a set time, whatever it is.

And we neglect to think about positive freedom.

And so many people have said that discipline is freedom.

Elliot Kipchoge, the greatest marathoner of all time, was giving this interview about his lifestyle.

And it's fairly mundane.

And this is already at the point of his career where he could do anything that he wants.

And he said, like, I don't need to go party and celebrate and be super famous.

My discipline is my freedom.

And what he meant by that is it's his freedom to be the best runner that he can be.

But drilling that down to its most practical circumstances.

Walk me through.

You're at the bar and you're ready to go home and your buddy's like hey, just one more.

Or the alarm goes off early and you're just like, I'll just hit the snooze.

Just those little micro moments where you're testing your discipline and the commitments that you've made to yourself.

And you have that voice that wants you to indulge in those negative freedoms.

How do you mute that or quell that?

Is there a tactic or a practice that you can deploy?

Because it's the micro things, and it's the accumulation of all of those little micro decisions that we're all making every single day that are really determining what that trajectory is going to look like.

I think, when you're in the moment, you can ask yourself does this serve my ultimate values and goals?

And if the answer is yes, then do it.

And if the answer is no, then it at least forces you to pause.

But we know it doesn't.

And we still do it.

We override.

But we don't ask ourselves that question.

I think we just do it on autopilot.

Well, this is the distinction between being reactive and being responsive.

Yes.

And if you're reactive, you just do.

You're on autopilot.

But if you're responsive, you're not always going to make the right decision.

Maybe 60% of the time you won't.

But you at least give yourself a chance to make the right decision.

Something else that can be really helpful is not to think about what it's going to feel like in the moment, but think about how you're going to feel the next day.

So try to really embody your future self and say, would your future self be happy with this?

But ultimately, it comes down to putting yourself in the right environment.

So if you're going to hang out at the bar, You've already made the decision before you left the home.

Yeah, exactly.

Or... you've got to have built that discipline.

So I'm fortunate I don't have a history of alcoholism or substance abuse.

So for me, I can be in a bar, but I've also built the discipline to be able to say no.

I got to write my book tomorrow.

And no one's laughing at you.

That's another thing.

We build up all these stories in our mind that oh, they're going to think we're not cool, or they're going to think we're no fun.

No, people are too busy worrying about themselves.

So where's the struggle?

Where's the darkness, Brad?

Where is it tough for you?

What is the obstacle that you still bump up against?

I have so many.

I don't know where to begin.

Where's the darkness and where's the struggle?

I think that I'm still... more insecure than I wish I was.

Um, I started school in a private school um, and I got bullied really badly uh, to the point where I had to transfer schools in fourth grade.

So this wasn't like, you know, people call me names like physically beat up.

Um, and I think that for the longest time that was like a motivating force and a chip on my shoulder.

To be really good was that I was just this little kid that got beat up and picked on.

And I would vomit before school because I was so anxious about going to school.

It was really, really bad.

And I've come a long way with self-acceptance and with knowing that hey, I can love myself and people can love me.

I don't need to prove myself.

But I still think there's that little kid in there that's like hey, if you don't perform well, this book doesn't hit the bestseller list.

If you don't have your shit together, you're just going to get beat up.

You're going to get bullied.

Yeah.

Achievement is a proxy for love and acceptance.

And behind every you know, striving high performer, there is some childhood story similar to that.

Like, I certainly have my own.

And I think the journey towards self-acceptance and decoupling from that like it's so innate that you know I have to get this thing because that's how you know, that's the only.

The only way that I can earn love because otherwise I don't deserve it, you know?

Yeah.

It's that sense of undeservedness that is driving that impulse to achieve.

And that can lead you towards excellence in many ways, but fundamentally it's unsustainable.

And so this notion uh, that you talk about in the book of like joy, like that's, that's like the leap, like joy, like you mean, i just do this for joy, you know, like what would that be like?

You know, that's still foreign territory yeah, and and i'm really glad that you went there because you beat me to it and and i said that like i've done a lot of work and accepting myself and in trying to move beyond that, and the number one thing that's been helpful for me personally Is just to make sure that i'm having fun doing the hard work.

If i'm not having fun writing a book, Then i'm doing it wrong.

Not every day is going to be fun.

Like it's still really freaking hard.

There are days that are extremely tedious and mundane, but if the totality of the process isn't fun, Then i'm not doing it the right way.

Um, courtney de walter is the story that I use in the book.

I think past guest of the pod.

Yeah Yeah, um probably the greatest ultra marathon runner of this generation.

Talk about like a certified kind, humble badass, right?

That's Courtney.

She won three, 100 mile races in a period of 10 weeks.

No one had ever done it before.

Uh, you have to be so intense to even think about doing something like that.

Like so intense.

But when you talk to Courtney, she says that joy is driving the bus.

And she says that, even in those dark moments When you're at mile 76 of a race and you're alone on a ridgeline and it's the middle of the night and you want to quit, maybe joy is in the passenger seat, but it's still up front in the car.

And she's constantly having to remind herself that I'm out here doing this crazy thing and I'm getting paid to do this crazy thing in her case.

And like, what a privilege it is to do this.

And when I think that I'm crazy, I am a maniac.

And can I just laugh at myself? can I not take myself so seriously?

I can take the race very seriously, but can I not take myself so seriously?

And what Courtney has said is that it is that joy that allows the intensity to be sustainable.

Yeah, I mean, she's a freak of nature athletically, but I think her defining quality and what makes her so endearing to so many people is the fact that it's all about joy for her.

She really is joyful in the pursuit of all of this and she holds it all very loosely.

She's not, you know, she trains like a maniac, but like it's not all optimized.

And you know, I mean maybe she has a coach now but like I think the last time I talked to her it's just like she gets up in the morning and just does an internal check and sees how she feels and like, basically just goes out and runs and figures it out along the way and doesn't seem to take it.

I mean, she's tenacious as an athlete, but in the right way, isn't taking it so seriously.

But I think That's her hardwiring.

I would imagine she's kind of always been that way.

And for somebody like me and maybe yourself, there's all this internal hardwiring that has to be unplugged and undone to get plugged in in that way that she kind of came out of the womb with.

Yeah, that's true.

And it's a practice.

But I think that we're all capable of making progress.

And maybe you and I are never going to be as innately as joyful as Courtney DeWalter.

But I think that we can.

I know personally I can't speak for you I experience more joy now than I did five years ago, three years ago because I've really worked on it.

And a huge part of it is also the people I put around me when I do the work and when I'm working on hard projects, because they're often a source of joy.

I think another phenomenal example of this, Golden State Warriors.

Steve Kerr, coach of the team, their two core values are joy and compete.

Those are the core values of the Warriors.

And then you look at their star, Steph Curry.

Shortly before we recorded this maybe it was a couple weeks ago Steph Curry had this stretch of games where he went for over 40 points in back-to-back games and he's over 37 years old and he was just slaying teams.

And he has the biggest smile on his face.

He gets followed going to the basket hard.

The camera zooms in on him.

He's just smiling.

After the game, they ask him, how do you do this?

And it came out of his mouth.

He said, I have fun.

And he meant it.

So we often think that in order to be a badass or in order to slay, we've got to be so intense and so serious all the time.

And some people are wired like that.

David Goggins, Michael Jordan.

But for every David Goggins and Michael Jordan, there's also a Steph Curry.

In the cultural conversation around the pursuit of mastery and the hustle that you have to get there and the discipline and the hard work and what are you sacrificing, etc.

It's part and parcel with a broader conversation around masculinity.

What does it mean to be a man?

And there's a lot of young males out there who are in search of direction.

And there's a lot of influential people who are available to misdirect these people in the wrong way.

And they're in my opinion, not enough voices who are modeling a healthy masculinity.

You're one of them.

Scott Galloway, in my opinion, is one of them.

This is somebody who cares deeply about what's happening with young men and kind of noticing how many are lacking opportunity and, as a consequence uh, wayward.

But one of the things that scott talks about is, you know, he's like in your 20s, like you should be working all the time, you should move to a city and work tons, and you should be in bars and you should be drinking and should be doing you know all of these things and and and i understand what he's getting at with that uh, but this also, you know is is not exactly consistent with the things that you're talking about.

So, In the context of how young men should be thinking about their lives at that stage, what say you, Brad Stolberg?

I say don't be an asshole is the first thing.

And do real things in the real world with real people.

And be very cognizant of the grift.

And the grift is this.

The grift is the influencer online that says that the reason that you are lonely and isolated and angry is because you have such a force for excellence and for greatness within you that no one else can understand.

And you're going to have to leave your friends behind and everyone's going to be jealous of your success.

And just buy my online course and then you can harness all that greatness alone in your basement while you click through my online course.

If anyone is telling you That the reason that you're alone and miserable is because you're so successful, and that's just the cost of success.

Run the other direction.

That's the grift.

And there's so many influencers that do this.

And the reason that they do it is because their mark is the lonely guy that then has no social life.

So their entire life becomes tuning into this influencer who tells them how great they're going to be.

And they do this all alone in their basement.

So be wary of that grift.

Volunteer.

Coach a youth basketball team.

Go train at a local gym.

Join a choir.

Do real things in the real world with real people, and don't be an asshole.

Those are my guiding principles.

To the particular point about going out and drinking at a bar, I think that what Scott Galloway is getting at here is that you've gotta engage socially and you've gotta put yourself out there and you've gotta be willing to get rejected by a girl.

He's got this whole thing.

You've gotta ask, I think, what is it?

Three, four girls out before one says yes, you gotta flex that muscle.

I don't think that this is necessarily the right time to have a big conversation about the role of alcohol in society.

I think that if you are someone that has a challenge with alcohol and it's interfering with your goals, then you should find other ways to engage in the real world.

If you're someone that can go have a beer or two and get on with your life, then I think that that's totally fine.

But I think the overarching point is put yourself out there and do something. do real things.

Yeah, I think the broader point is shared between the two of you, which is when you're young take your 20s, for example.

This is a moment in which you should be out in the world, having experiences and making mistakes and trying to figure out how to communicate with other human beings and just colliding with life as much as you can.

But we have a whole generation reared on these distraction machines and there's an epidemic of loneliness as a result.

And with that, a lack of confidence or a skillset for how to engage with the world.

And it's just easier to remain inside, remain in the basement, find a job that you don't have to go to the office it's virtual, etc.

And you're immunizing yourself from life and you're depriving yourself of the nourishment of life, which means, on some level, having the courage to put yourself in a position to be rejected or to have things happen that might not go your way.

But that's the only way that you're going to develop friendships. but also emotional resilience.

And this is a big piece in all of your work as well.

We need to be emotionally robust.

And in order to achieve that robustness, we have to engage with discomfort.

Yeah.

And that can all be part of your path.

I mean, I had a terrible depression at age 30.

I thought I was going to die.

I didn't think I was going to make it out.

And I was saved by a phenomenal therapist and medication.

Does that make me less of a man?

I don't think so.

If someone thinks that, that's their prerogative.

But I just think these myths about men needing to be bulletproof and never fail and never ask for help, clearly we've seen the result.

It's extremely bad for men and it's bad for all of society.

And I think the last thing is that they're There's a mismatch.

Now, thank goodness, there are people like yourself, like Scott Galloway, that are out there, that are on the Internet, that have a very honest and message full of integrity that is helpful.

However, there's also a lot of good men that are too busy coaching teams and like being pastors or rabbis who are out in the real world like doing things.

So there's a there's a mismatch of voices.

And like that's part of the reason I'm on Instagram is like I want to be a voice that says like hey, there's another route to have a good life and to be a man.

And I think it's going to take all of us continuing to beat those drums.

Yeah.

All right.

Another another quote, Brad.

You say imitation without meaning breeds fatigue.

What does this mean?

Yeah, that just means like trying to mimic what someone else is doing and doing it in a way where you know you think that so and so has status or so and so has done really well.

So I'm just going to try to imitate whatever they do.

And I'm not even going to consider if it's meaningful to me.

And if you do that, like you're just going to get fatigued. there's two kinds of burnout, right?

There's burnout from just working way too much, way too hard.

And then there's what I've come to call zombie burnout.

And zombie burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too hard.

It comes from working towards the wrong goals or working on things that don't align with your values, or working on things that don't make you feel alive.

So you can have two people and they can both work a 55, 60 hour, maybe even 65 hour work week like a big week.

And one of those people is going to completely burn out and be in shambles.

And the other one works the exact same number of hours, is going to be thriving and flourishing.

And oftentimes, the only difference is do they find their work meaningful?

Do they find their work valuable?

In some cases, it's also do they work with the right people?

So I think that there's this trap to say well, I need to go to medical school because that's what my parents want me to do, or that's what dad did, or I need to be an attorney, or whatever it might be.

Every family has different traps that people fall into.

But if we just kind of go on the default path or if we just imitate without checking in against our values, then we become much more susceptible to burning out.

I think that's correct in the context of burnout, but I think it's also a for whom and when situation, because if you're somebody who's brand new to the entire enterprise of like setting a goal and working towards it and you are somewhat disconnected from yourself, the first goal that you set for yourself probably isn't going to be the right one, but it doesn't matter actually, because the process of trying to achieve it will engender self-esteem right.

Like Self-esteem is a function of performing esteemable acts on behalf of yourself and other people right.

And so in certain cases, like imitation, might be okay, because another piece that you talk a lot about is developing the reflex to act right.

Like we're all caught up in analysis paralysis, and we want to know how things are going to work out and we never fucking do anything, right.

Um, because we're cogitating on it too much and sometimes it's better to just be like okay, i'm gonna go do this thing.

I saw this other guy do this thing.

That looked cool.

Like maybe that's what i should do right now because i can't think of anything else to do and that's better than sitting around and scrolling or waiting to be struck by lightning with some, you know, inspiration.

Yeah, it's another example of non duality where, for the right person at the right time in the right place, that kind of row imitation maybe gets them going.

And then once they get going, they figure it out.

Because you're right, it's very hard to just figure something out in your mind.

You've got to figure it out in the world for another person.

They might be imitating someone and they're scared to hop off that path of imitation and try to figure out who they really are.

And then the same kind of imitation gets in the way.

I think maybe there's some nuance here.

But rather than just think of imitating someone, I think it's helpful to ask yourself who are people that you look up to.

And not necessarily what are they doing, but what do you admire about them?

So you might admire about someone that they're a successful business owner, that they seem to be in a good marriage.

Then those kind of become your values, like caring or family then is a value.

Or for the successful business owner, maybe it's like drive or dedication.

And then you're mimicking them, but you're taking the values, and then you can start to make those values your own.

Hmm.

How do you think about trade-offs?

Because sometimes it's not always clear what to say yes to and what to say no to.

Because, especially if you have a panoply of values, maybe saying yes to this will serve one value, but it's at cross-purposes with this other value and it gets murky from there.

So what's your rubric for this?

That you just have to try and adapt and adjust and be really intentional about it.

There's a quote from Mike Joyner, who's a role model of mine, and he says in order to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist.

And what he means by that is to really pursue a couple things.

You got to say no to a lot of other things.

And I think that sometimes those are really clear or something happens in your life that hold those trade-offs in stark relief, like an illness or a death of a family member.

And it becomes really clear what you value and what you ought to be spending time on.

But in other times, there's real tension.

I know a tension that I face all the time is between family and particularly my role as a father to my kids wanting to be there for everything, wanting to coach their teams.

And also this value of craftsmanship and trying to not just write good books but promote them and sell them out in the world.

I'm constantly living that tension.

I don't think I'll ever get it perfect.

I think the key is just never to go on autopilot.

So always to be aware of here are the trade-offs I'm making them.

Here's why I'm making them.

Here's how long I'm going to do this for before I reevaluate.

And then here are the other people in my life that I need to communicate this with and get their buy-in.

The 48-hour rule.

What is this?

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things.

So the 48-hour rule essentially says that after a big victory or a tough defeat, give yourself 48 hours to celebrate the win and or 48 hours to grieve the loss, and then get back to doing the work itself.

Why 48 hours?

Completely arbitrary.

Doesn't have to be 48 hours.

Can be three to four weeks.

You win a gold medal, you better take more than 48 hours to celebrate.

You lose and you set out your whole life to, you know, make the Olympics and you fall just short.

It's going to probably take more than two days to grieve and to process.

You face a small rejection throughout the course of a day.

Maybe it's the 15-minute rule.

Give yourself 15 minutes to be frustrated.

The 48 hours is just catchy.

The timing's arbitrary.

But the principle behind it of give yourself a set amount of time to either savor and celebrate or to grieve and process, and then get back to doing the work.

That holds, because the work is the best medicine.

Now, notice I didn't just say immediately get back to the work, right?

Like you do want to make time to process and or to savor and to learn.

But you want to bound that because both success and celebration and grief and despair, they're really sticky.

And you can spend a lot of time just celebrating a success and having that get to your head and you get some ego bloat.

The work seems really hard compared to just celebrating the success and next thing you know, You've got this like hugely inflated sense of self and The best thing for your ego would have been, in the case of a writer, facing the blank page.

In the case of an athlete going back To training, the flip side is also true.

You have a really rough disappointment in that sense of despair or heartbreak that we talked about earlier and that can really linger.

And it's the best way out of despair is literally get back on the bandwagon, start doing the thing again.

No matter what, every big moment has to be followed with a refractory period of some kind, whether positive or negative.

And this gets into the broader idea of renewal.

You call it renewal, but it's really... You mentioned seasons earlier.

It's like everything... it should be properly periodized, you know, from the macro to the micro.

On the macro, you know, we have the seasons exactly, you know, like the climate seasons, right?

There's a time for everything, all the way down to during the day, like where are the breaks and the rest periods that allow you to reboot so that, when you return to the thing you're trying to be excellent at, you're in your best frame of mind, right?

And I think, for the disciplined person, it feels indulgent to acknowledge these moments or extended periods of renewal.

But the truth is, you can't grow unless you allow yourself to rest.

And in the athlete context, if you deadlift one day, you need to recover from that heavy lift immediately in order to get stronger.

And if you deprive yourself that recovery period, you're only going to dig a hole for yourself and you're going to get weaker and worse.

Yeah, stress plus rest equals growth.

It's true in sport.

It's true in life.

And stress in this case isn't the kind of stress of a challenge with your significant other or a dispute with your supervisor at work.

It's physiological or biological or psychological stress.

It is a challenge or a stimulus that, And in order to grow from any challenge or stimulus, you need to step away from it.

This is how the creative process works.

You throw yourself into the work, and then you step away.

That's why you have an aha moment on a walk, in the shower, on a drive.

It's how you grow a muscle, you train it, you step away, you recover.

It's how you grow a relationship, you take on challenges together, you step back, you reflect, you have easy periods and then you come out the other side stronger.

So it's like this fundamental principle of life that challenge or stress or stimulus has to be followed by rest, recovery or renewal.

It takes a lot of discipline to keep going, but it can also take a lot of discipline to rest, especially in a culture that says that we should be on all the time, we should constantly be pushing.

If you rest, you're gonna fall behind.

It takes a real leap of faith to step away and to create those times for rest and renewal.

However, it's often within those times of rest and renewal that you have the biggest breakthrough.

So there's this huge paradox here.

The idea for this book, The Way of Excellence, came when I was working on another book, my prior book, Master of Change.

And I distinctly remember I was like super stuck on this one problem in that book.

And I kept leaning into the keyboard, leaning into my notebook.

This is like a week and a half.

And one day I just said like, I need to practice what I preach.

Like I need to step away from this manuscript for two days and just spend a ton of time walking.

And on the second day of those walks, lightning striking.

The entire idea for this book came into my mind.

I called my literary agent from the trail.

I haven't figured out the problem in this book, but I do know what my next book is.

And then a week later, I figured out the problem.

It was simply two chapters were in the wrong order.

None of this would have happened if I would have just kept leaning in and kept pushing.

So there's two counterintuitive ideas here.

One is, Discipline isn't always what you think it is.

The discipline to rest, the discipline to let go, the discipline to not do.

Especially if you're a high-achieving, striving person, this is very uncomfortable.

This is much more uncomfortable than grinding.

You know what I mean?

But that is discipline nonetheless.

And every endurance athlete knows like So much of training and racing is the discipline to hold back, and that becomes determinative in terms of success.

The second counterintuitive idea that we haven't really gone into but I want to before we close this discussion is the courage of vulnerability, particularly in in, you know, kind of the hustle porn context.

It's like repress your emotions, just get the job done, don't complain, you know, push it all down and like move forward.

But real strength is in having a healthy relationship with your emotions and the confidence to be vulnerable with yourself and with your, you know, trusted friends or or accountability partners, and that's really the lever that is gonna, um is going to create the most growth for you, not just in the thing that you're trying to be excellent at, but actually as a human being yeah, in the pursuit of genuine excellence.

Part of what separates it from hustle culture, hustle porn, whatever we want to call it, is it requires a lot of vulnerability because you are stepping into the arena, you are making yourself raw, you are caring deeply, you are giving something your all you are signing up to fail at some point.

You are signing up for highs and lows that are going to be hard.

You are going to inevitably need to ask for help along the way.

Every great performer does this.

Every great life includes these periods.

None of that happens without vulnerability.

If you've got to repress everything and just be the tough guy that has no cracks, your life is not going to have texture like, ultimately it will crack.

It will crack and it'll be.

It'll yeah, it'll be.

It'll just explode.

Yeah, it'll be a uh yeah, a fatal fracture.

Yeah, or you'll just avoid ever like really loving or caring.

Um, not because you're tough, but because you're scared.

Um, all right, a couple like random questions before we we round this out.

Yeah um, is there anything that you and steve magnus disagree on?

Is there anything that Steve Magnus and I disagree on?

I mean, we disagree on a lot when it comes to writing style, and we're constantly butting heads.

But Steve is like my brother from a different mother.

Let's see.

What do Steve and I disagree on?

I think that one thing that we sometimes disagree on and this is going to be very performance-specific is Steve's background is really in uber uber elite runners.

And Steve, I think, feels more strongly than me that we should go by feel more often.

This is also just an area where I've changed my own mind.

I used to be like, we should go by feel, we measure too much.

Now I think that sometimes Steve projects his own level of skill onto other runners when he's like you don't need zones, just go by efforts.

Well, he's so deeply connected to his body and most people aren't.

Yeah.

But when he's speaking to elite, like elite performers know how to do that and they don't need the devices like the average human does.

Yeah.

So I think that maybe it's not even a disagreement, but maybe it's just like, based on our own experience.

I think that sometimes I'm a little bit more willing to lean into some of those devices is feedback mechanisms.

Ultimately on a path to try to be able to get, get that level of in touchness with your body.

But no, like Steve and I often think this, like we think each other's thoughts, I mean again, talk about pursuing excellence with someone else like what a joy to get to be on this path With, with someone like Steve.

Yeah, What is the bad advice that you see on the internet that drives you?

That drives you the most crazy?

I?

The bad advice that I see on the Internet that drives me the most crazy.

I think that it really comes down to this masculinity grift, where you have certain people that somehow tie success and isolation together.

And I think that that is so dangerous.

It is so false.

And it's so clearly a grift because again, if someone's isolated, they're going to just tune into you all day.

But what the grifters do is they say that the reason you're isolated is because you're just going to be so successful.

No one can understand how hard you work.

That's why you're so isolated.

There's a kernel of truth to this, by the way.

If you really want to work hard and be great at something and you're hanging out with a bunch of people that are just kind of like oh, that's not cool.

Like.

Your relationships might have to change along the way, but then you find new people who are driven and who share your values and you get into a relationship with them.

Anyone that ever says that, like, you've got to be isolated to do it.

It's just like utter nonsense.

And it is especially projected upon men.

And in this cultural moment, it is so dangerous.

Then what is the counsel for the person who is lonely or isolated and doesn't have that community of higher vibrating people to associate with?

Like, how do you get that person out of the basement and into the world?

Yeah, I think that it starts with just like small steps, no different than any other goal.

So maybe it is as simple as I'm going to walk to the coffee shop today.

I'm going to order a coffee.

You don't drink coffee.

You can get a smoothie.

Most coffee shops have something that people like.

And then you get to order from the barista.

And then you say that I'm going to go Monday, Wednesday, Friday at the same time.

And then you see that same barista again and again.

And three months later, you know that barista's name.

Like that is like a small, just manageable challenge for someone who is truly feeling that level of isolation.

I think something else that you can do is the Internet is not great as a terminal spot, an end spot, but it's great as a way station.

So you can use the Internet to connect with people and to find like minded people and then meet those people in real life.

Find affinity groups and like join them in real life.

Um, so I I think that it's just like baby steps and exposing yourself uh, to the real world um, in ways that don't have to be heroic.

Like you don't need to, uh, to, to, you know, ask five people out.

If you've never asked a woman out in one week, you can just start by like going to a coffee shop and ordering coffee and just like becoming a regular, being rooted in a place with other people.

Not to gild the lily, uh, but to the extent that maybe we haven't fully fleshed this out.

If there's somebody who's listening or watching and they're like, I like this idea of excellence.

I just don't know what I want to be excellent at.

Where do I begin this process of self-discovery and deeper self-connection, to try to figure out something that would light me up, that I could pursue and commit myself to being excellent at?

The first is, again, you can think back to when you were young.

What were you naturally inclined toward?

What were you good at?

Were you an athlete?

Were you a drama kid?

Were you into music?

Were you into art?

Were you into writing?

Were you constantly asking existential questions as an eight-year-old?

Maybe you should go do some philosophy.

That can often offer clues.

I think the second way in is to look to people, as we mentioned before, that you admire and Ask yourself what you admire about them and then go experiment with those things.

So you don't have to just decide that, hey, I'm going to be a runner or I'm going to be an artist.

But you could sign up for a 5K, and you could see, how does that go?

And maybe you fall in love with running, and you hit the home run on the first try.

But maybe you're like, ah, this isn't for me.

So maybe try CrossFit if you're inclined towards athletic things.

So I think that we have to sample.

Um, the framework that I use in the book here is, uh, quit fit, then grit.

So you got to try a lot of things and you've got to be willing to quit.

And then eventually you find something where there's fit, where like you do, kind of like it and you like how it makes you feel.

And even if you don't feel good.

Anyone that starts being an athlete for the first time like training, doesn't feel great for a long time, but there's something in you.

It's like, this is kind of cool.

Well, then you have fit.

And then once you have fit, then that's when you need grit.

That's when you need to sign up for the long haul, to be patient, to not expect an overnight breakthrough and to say I'm going to give this a couple months or maybe even a year of commitment before I decide if this is the path.

I like the idea of quit because it gives you permission to try lots of things without the whole like oh, I failed at this.

Like I think people pick things and even if it's not a fit, it's like yeah, but this is kind of what I do, or what I said I would do.

And like I feel like I'm a failure if I decide I'm not going to go anymore.

Yeah.

And we can do this when we're younger.

Um, or at least we used to be able to now there's so much pressure on kids in school.

Like you have to take these classes.

But we used to take all these classes and experiment and quit things that we didn't like until we find out what we like.

Uh, but we can do this when when we're older, and sometimes that we hang on to things for too long because they become a part of our identity, even if we're not elite.

Uh, at those things.

So I is an endurance athlete for 10 years.

I tried to get like really fast and really good. both in the marathon and long course triathlon.

And really good as relative.

So the elite runners are going to laugh when I say this, but some people who have never run a marathon are going to think I'm great.

That doesn't matter.

I really wanted to go under three hours.

And I spent like 10 years on this journey from a four hour marathon to a 301.

I never got under three hours and I kept getting injured.

And for me, I'm about six feet tall.

For me to get to like 165 170 pounds a weight that is reasonable to run a three-hour marathon at.

I felt like I was constantly starving myself.

I'm fighting against my body.

But I just kept doing it because it was a part of my identity.

And eventually, my calf kept getting hurt.

I kept getting these stress fractures.

Like it just wasn't worth it.

And I finally quit.

And then I tried strength training.

And oh my God, did I adapt to strength training fast.

And it's like, my body really wants to do this sport.

So I had much better fit.

And I didn't make that transition until I was 30.

And that's just like a great example of kind of like me having the courage, I guess, to say like all right, I've given this so much.

I didn't achieve my goal, but that's okay.

Like I still grew a lot as a runner.

I love runners.

I'm still considering myself a part of the running community.

But then I quit and I moved on to the next thing and I found something that I'm just like much better at.

Final thought before we wrap this up Brad, perhaps a word of guidance or inspiration for the person for whom the pilot light went out.

Maybe that once flickered, but they're in that space where they just can't get it up to try again.

Hmm.

It's never too late to try again.

It's never too late to start if you haven't started.

And you've got to continue your metaphor.

You have to strike the match.

The fire just doesn't start magically.

You're not going to think yourself to the flame.

You've got to strike the match.

And what I mean by that is you've got to just get going.

You just have to get started.

I think a very wise man once said that mood follows action.

And I think that that is 100% true.

Yeah, I think we're waiting to be struck with inspiration and motivation.

And what we get wrong is that that is a byproduct of taking action first.

And I think by lowering the stakes and the pressure, it's not like.

Oh, I have to set this goal and be excellent.

It's just like, hey, remember when it was fun to do this thing?

Maybe I'll do that today.

It doesn't have to be anything more than that, like giving yourself permission to do the thing that instinctually or intuitively you're drawn to and not making it about anything other than that.

And then deciding that that's worthy of a little bit of an investment of my time.

It's not about like quitting your job or making some proclamation or going on social media and announcing a goal or setting yourself up to reinvent your life.

It's really just, you know, like, this is the thing you're so good at, Brad.

It's like, It's the micro actions.

It's the atomic little things that you're doing every single day that are really what moves the needle here.

It's not the broad sweeping statements and proclamations.

Yeah.

And the goal isn't to be excellent.

You're never going to arrive.

Excellence is a process of becoming.

The goal is to become and to grow and to evolve and to learn about yourself along the way.

That is genuine, heartfelt excellence.

And for some of us, it's going to be five NBA champions.

For others, it's going to be a completed marathon.

And for others, it might be a wooden table that no one sees but us in our living room.

But the process of making that table brought us satisfaction and aliveness.

And the other people that come through our house and they eat on that table.

It brings them joy too.

I think that's a pretty good summation of the way of excellence.

But is there any further summation that you want to make about what you want people to gather from this conversation or from the book?

Yeah, I think that the world has no shortage of despair in going through the motions, in zombie burnout, in going on autopilot, in numbing ourselves to death.

And I do think there's just going to be more opportunity for this as AI slop takes over the internet, or at least encroaches on the internet.

We still have the power to unplug from this dystopia.

And we've got to think of what our future self wants and we've got to think of what's going to satisfy us.

And it's never too late to get on a different path.

And when you're on that path, you're going to fall off.

And that's OK, too.

You just get back on over and over again.

You're a good man, Brad Stolberg.

I think we did it.

Was that number five?

We've done five podcasts together now.

That was my favorite.

You crushed that.

You reminded me before we started that our first one was in a hotel in Marina Del Rey when I was a traveling salesman with a suitcase, before there was video with you and Steve.

And we've done many since.

This might be our best one.

And I love the new book.

And I'm here to celebrate and support you, my friend.

This is good stuff you're putting out into the world.

It's a real act of public service.

So thank you.

Thank you, Rich.

The feelings are mutual.

That's it for today.

Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richrollcom, where you can find the entire podcast archive.

My books Finding Ultra Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way.

And on YouTube and leave a review and or comment, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

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[The Way of Excellence: Redefining Success and Sustained Performance]-[Reclaim Your Excellence: The Path To A Meaningful & Joyous Life w/ Brad Stulberg]

📋 Summary

The Way of Excellence: Redefining Sustainable Success

The Trap of Audacious Goals

Aligning Goals with Core Values

The Power of Dualities and "Humble Badassery"

Identity as a House

Curiosity as an Antidote to Alienation

The Importance of Completion and Ritual

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Way of Excellence: Redefining Success and Sustained Performance]-[Reclaim Your Excellence: The Path To A Meaningful & Joyous Life w/ Brad Stulberg]

📋 Summary

The Way of Excellence: Redefining Sustainable Success

The Trap of Audacious Goals

Aligning Goals with Core Values

The Power of Dualities and "Humble Badassery"

Identity as a House

Curiosity as an Antidote to Alienation

The Importance of Completion and Ritual

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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