Ready, set, go!
This is episode 446 with New York Times bestselling.
Author, executive coach and a man who can deadlift 530 pounds Brad Stolberg strength running podcast.
I'm coach jason fitzgerald and i want to help you become a better runner.
Don't miss strengthrunningcom, our home base, where you can find our training programs, our award-winning content library and our free email courses.
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Okay, my guest today is a juggernaut in the personal development space.
Brad Stolberg is the New York Times bestselling author of The Way of Excellence, which is out now.
He's also the author of The Practice of Groundedness and co-author of Peak Performance.
His work also includes co-hosting the Growth Equation podcast, as well as executive coaching for business leaders, physicians and high-level athletes.
In today's conversation, Brad is going to help us build a better relationship with running.
We discuss motivation, why we need to feel alive, the value of surrounding yourself with like-minded people, why anxiety can be a good thing and balance is a myth.
Plus, we're going to hear Brad's take on Alex Honnold's recent summit of Taipei 101 live on Netflix.
And now, please enjoy my conversation with Brad Stulberg.
All right, Brad, welcome back to the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be back.
Well, congratulations on your book, The Way of Excellence.
It has become a New York Times bestseller.
This is like a runner finally qualifying for Boston or the Olympic trials.
After a lot of hard work, you've made it.
So I got to ask you, have you arrived?
Are you finally have permission now to be happy because you're successful and you can stop writing and just ride off into the sunset?
I wish it worked like that, but no, I am of human nature, so there certainly is no arriving.
We did, however, my family ordered Thai noodles the night that it was named a bestseller.
I had a glass of wine.
I woke up the next morning, and the blank page was still the blank page.
Writing is still ridiculously hard.
I coached my son's AAU basketball team that night.
So it was right back into the swing of life.
And to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm obviously joking here.
I remember you posting something on social media about having noodles and a glass of wine and life goes on and you get back to work, which?
As a running coach and someone who's been running my entire life, this is exactly the process that every good runner uses when they have a good race.
You run a personal best.
You have some great qualifying mark.
Okay, well, that's nice.
Pat yourself on the back and then back to work.
Let's continue on with the process.
We could probably do a four hour podcast on your book, The Way of Excellence.
I think it's incredible.
I wanna do something a little bit different though.
You have talked about some of the things that are maybe a little controversial but I think are incredibly valuable and not always so common sense.
These are some lessons on living a good life that you posted on social media.
So I'd love to talk about some of the highlights for me and how you like to structure these in your own life for other people.
Because I think if we can get some of these things right, we're going to be much more happy with our training.
We're going to be more diligent and consistent with our training.
And I think just more fulfilled with the entire project of becoming a better runner.
So let's start with something interesting.
You wrote, motivation is overrated.
You don't need to feel good to get going.
You need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good.
I always thought that motivation was somewhat important.
Yeah, I think that it is somewhat important.
And it's lovely when you have motivation and when you're feeling super motivated.
But motivation is just like any other feeling, which is to say that it comes and goes, and often on its own schedule, for factors that we are unaware of or perhaps we don't even control.
The common misnomer is that you've got to feel really good to get started, when in fact it's often the opposite that is true, that you get started and then you give yourself a shot at feeling good.
As I wrote in that post, as I wrote in the book,
In the research literature this is called behavioral activation, and it simply says that right thinking and right feeling often follow right action.
So it's impossible to will yourself to be more motivated.
You can't really think yourself into more motivation, but you can act yourself into more motivation.
And I think that I am a really profound example of this.
I think that my natural temperament at this stage of my life probably runs a little bit more like depressive than excited.
So if I had to feel motivated to train, I would have trained like five days last year, you know, maybe six days.
I woke up just like rearing to go.
But the other 257 days, I didn't feel super motivated.
It was not like I can't wait to get to the gym to train.
Same thing is true with my writing.
I've just learned over time that how I'm feeling before I get started has nothing.
It's completely disconnected with how I feel when I'm done and with the performance that I'll give.
Is this a skill like a muscle that you can build over time?
Because, you know, looking back, at least from my personal experience.
When I graduated college and I kept training competitively post-collegiately, I was waking up at 5 in the morning, getting out the door at 530.
I hated every day of my existence because of that.
Because I was 23 years old and you're not usually good at getting up at that time when you're that age.
And I think if I hadn't built the discipline of training competitively pretty much every day for eight plus years before that experience, I probably would have been able to do it.
So I wonder like, how does discipline play a role in this?
It's definitely a skill, and I think it's maybe less a skill and more a muscle, because I don't necessarily think you have to really work hard at the ability to just get started.
I think we can all just get started, but maybe it's like doing a bicep curl or a tricep pushdown.
It's not a very technical exercise, but when you just start, even light weights are really hard.
And then you continue to isolate and train that muscle, and eventually you can lift more.
So I think of activation energy, which is what I call this, is a muscle.
What's nice about it is there's such a tight feedback loop between not feeling great, saying all right, I don't feel well, that's okay, I'm just going to get started and give myself a chance, getting going and then feeling better, that you very quickly learn to disconnect feelings of motivation or inspiration from the act of getting started.
This is true in so many different areas of life, but I think a really powerful and simple example is running.
I mean, how many times...
Is it like the first five to 10 minutes of a run is just lethargic.
You're creaky, things are slow, and then you get into the run and you start feeling really good.
And I think that's a wonderful example of behavioral activation.
Yeah, that's like every run for me these days a little creaky, a little sore, a little a good reminder that I probably should have done a longer warm up before I started running.
Is there a balance between Being consistent, having that muscle developed, muscle of discipline, and just kind of getting going, no matter how you feel?
But then also balancing feeling like you shouldn't be consistent.
Like maybe I shouldn't go for my workout today because something you know is not physically feeling right, or I perhaps am very tired and fatigued and I should listen to that.
You know feeling in my body, like where's that balance in your mind?
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of nuance here.
So I'm glad that you asked that question.
There are certain instances where it makes absolutely no sense to start.
So you have a serious injury or you have the flu or you have strep throat.
I don't know.
Name that illness or injury where, if you try to take it along for the ride and train because you think you're being so tough, you're not actually being tough.
What you are is being an idiot.
However, I think that the pendulum has swung, especially in the performance world so far in the opposite direction, where we track our heart rate variability and our sleep score and our recovery status and all of these things, where we can fixate on every single feeling And we can really expect that everything needs to be perfect for us to perform our best.
And that actually makes us really fragile.
In the book, I tell the story of J.J.
Spahn who, the night before the final round of the US Open, his three-year-old became violently ill and nauseous.
And Spahn's wife had to stay with his three-year-old and he went to CVS the only 24-hour CVS around.
And this is at 3 in the morning and he was essentially up from 3 in the morning on with a vomiting daughter.
And if Spahn would have listened to his wrist-worn or ring, it would have told him, like your recovery score is zero.
You should stay in bed and sleep.
But J.J.
Spahn went out and won the U.S.
Open the next day and played the best round of golf of the last decade for him.
So I just think that, yes, it doesn't make sense to be an idiot.
And yes, if J.J.
Spahn had a normal training session the next morning.
Maybe he should have slept in and started it late.
But sometimes, like you, don't have a choice and we owe it to ourselves to get going and give ourselves a chance, and we can always shut it down.
So I don't view it as all or nothing.
Again, like I think you have the flu and you have a fever and you have body aches.
You should not go out for your run.
You have a bad stress fracture.
You should not go out for your run.
Your ankle is a little bit stiff.
I think you should go out for your run and you should give it five to 10 minutes and you should see how things feel after five to 10 minutes.
And if it continues to ache or it gets worse, then you have to have discipline to shut it down.
But if it gets better, then maybe you get through your run and you're fine.
So there is nuance here.
But again, I think the pendulum has swung, outside of extreme cases, very far in the direction of needing to optimize everything which makes us more fragile than strong.
Glad you brought that up.
I do think an element of fragility has crept into the fitness space because of all the different metrics that we now have access to.
And you know just an issue like this comes across my proverbial desk almost all the time, where someone is saying well, my recovery score or my HRV was off.
So I just didn't do anything today.
And you know it, I have like a difficult relationship with that because on the one hand, I can just imagine myself with all the coaches that I've had.
They probably would not have listened to me if I was like, yeah, I'm feeling a little off today.
I'm not going to do the workout.
They'd probably say, Jason, get on the track.
We're going to do the workout no matter what.
That's what we're doing today.
But yeah, Hearing you talk about the nuance I think is really helpful for runners who want that more nuanced take on when to actually do a workout, when to maybe take it easy.
And I think there is a lot of value in that.
Like, You can maybe still go for a training session, but maybe it's not a hard workout.
Maybe it's an easy workout.
Maybe it's not a workout at all.
Maybe it's just an easy, you know, zone one, zone two type of recovery day.
And that kind of flexibility is really good with your training.
And I think it's just really important to triangulate between, if you are using this kind of biometric feedback, what the number says how you feel and then what your program says.
And you always want to be keeping those three things in mind at the same time.
And I think the mistake is sometimes when people look at the watch or the biometric data that dictates to them how they should feel.
So then they create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So I've worked with people who were using I'm not going to name the brands, but one of these wrist-worn devices and the recovery score was really low chronically, because they had two kids at home that were under the age of three.
And what was sabotaging their performance wasn't actually their lack of sleep.
It was that they were freaking out about their lack of sleep, because every morning they woke up and this thing said that you're not recovered.
So they ditched the device.
They realized that there have been many great performers who had young kids.
And they said, screw it.
During this season of life, I'm not going to sleep great.
I'm going to do the best I can to sleep, but it's not going to be perfect.
And that's OK.
And then they went on to perform extremely well.
I love it.
What a great example there.
Brad, let me ask you about doing hard things.
You posted that you should challenge yourself and do hard things.
It makes you feel alive and what we're all seeking is aliveness.
This is one that I don't necessarily think is controversial, but it's perhaps uncommon, where many of us optimize for comfort, scrolling on the phone, not challenging ourselves physically.
Can you just speak to the value in this?
I do think most runners get that.
We become better people when we work hard at a sport, even if, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if our marathon time is 258 or 358 or 458.
It's really about the process and the journey and going through that day after day.
But what does the research say?
Like, how does this tie into our life satisfaction, our happiness?
Yeah, so there's two types of friction in life.
And one type of friction is what I call involuntary and stupid friction.
And this is the kind of friction where you have to fill out 47 forms for Medicaid to get a cavity filled so that you don't get an abscess in your mouth.
That there's nothing good about that.
People shouldn't have to do that.
It should be easier to get your cavity filled and to get health care.
There are people that work three jobs and are constantly having to, you know, clock in and clock out, like that kind of friction is soul sucking.
It's not good.
We should aim to minimize that kind of friction.
However, there's another kind of friction, which is voluntarily chosen challenges that stress our mind and body.
And that friction is absolutely essential to meaning fulfillment and satisfaction in life.
And what has happened for a large portion of society is that life has become so smoothed over.
We can order food with the click of a button.
We can grocery shop with the click of a button.
We can have quote unquote friends that we don't actually have to go through the messiness of engaging with their corporal body because they're just avatars on a screen.
Artificial intelligence can increasingly think for us.
We can use all kinds of machines instead of our bodies to physically do things for us.
And pretty soon you get to a world that looks a lot like all this Huxley's book Brave New World or the movie WALL-E.
And there's a reason that those are not utopias, they're dystopias.
Because once we optimize for efficiency and we take all the friction out of our life, life becomes very empty and void of meaning.
So much of the meaning in life is self-generated.
And one of the most tried and true ways to generate meaning, according to the research, is to take on challenges, to push yourselves, to potentially come up short, to maybe fail.
And like you said, in the scheme of things, how fast you run 26.2 miles is utterly meaningless.
You know, it's even more meaningless than that.
So the runners don't get pissed.
I've gotten very into deadlifting and deadlifting on his face is the most meaningless thing ever.
You're just trying to pick up a shit ton of weight from the ground to your hips.
Like you don't even put it over your head.
Okay.
Utterly meaningless.
But what I get from five years of training my deadlift is. is I learn about discomfort.
I learn about vulnerability.
I learn about fear.
I learn about the power of community.
I learn about resilience.
I learn about setbacks.
I learn about failure.
I learn about success.
And these are all things that are shaping my character and they're shaping me as a person.
And that's the value of the sport.
And that's the value of the deadlift.
That's the value of a marathon.
It's not what happens on the top of the mountain when you make the lift or you cross the finish line.
It's really about the lessons that you learn along the way and ultimately, the person that you become.
And contrast that with a life of just passive consumption and scrolling and numbed outness.
And I'll take the deadlift or the marathon any day of the week.
I love it.
That was beautiful, Brad.
What would you say to someone who is perhaps not really into the physical challenge of running faster or lifting more weight?
Maybe they're running just for general health.
A couple times a week, there's no real structure or progression.
Is there a way that they can challenge themselves and do hard things without sport?
And maybe I'll just share a quick story.
I recently have started cooking and And not just like making dinner for my family, which I've been doing for more than a decade, but trying to get good at a specific dish, or cooking a certain cut of meat or whatever it is it really well.
And it's a challenge and I mess it up sometimes but like I, get some satisfaction out of learning this new skill, trying something I'm not good at failing, improving and it has nothing to do with sports.
Yeah, you just answered the question.
I think that sport is a wonderful place to do this because it is so visceral.
You can't help but feel it in your body.
But there are so many different ways to do something hard and challenging.
You could take up woodwork.
You could take up watercolor.
You could try to keep an orchid alive.
You could do a bonsai.
On and on and on.
I think what it comes down to is doing something real in the world, where you can either succeed or fail, and the source of that success or failure is traced back to yourself.
So it's the opposite of AI where you hit a button and it writes a song for you.
Like, no, you have to actually write the song yourself because that's where the value is.
And again, like I'm an athlete.
I know I'm talking to athletes.
So there's a special place for sport in my heart.
But sport doesn't have exclusionary domain privilege over this.
You can get this doing many things.
Yeah.
And you know, speaking of sport, one of your other points was to surround yourself with the right people.
And you did say this may be the most important of them all.
Now I like feel this viscerally in my bones.
As someone who grew up on a team, you know every season of high school football.
All my years there.
Every season during my college career, I basically surrounded myself with a whole bunch of running nerds for eight years, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But why is it so important?
And maybe how can we do this as adults?
Because it was admittedly easy for me to find two dozen other runners and hang out with them every day when I was a junior in high school or in college.
All right, so the first part of your question, why is it so important?
We are just a social species.
A huge part of why we're here as humans is because we're a species that can work together in pretty incredible ways.
So we evolve to be connected to other people, to other humans.
From a performance standpoint, there's research that shows that performance itself is contagious.
So if you surround yourself with people with the right mindsets and the right attitudes, who are working hard, you end up working harder yourself, right?
And that's true in different domains.
That's a finding that's been found for physical pursuits, but also intellectual pursuits, for creative pursuits.
And the most important reason is because you just have more fun when you're doing something cool with other people.
Some of my favorite research comes from hospice.
And when people are on their deathbeds and they're asked to reflect on their lives, they almost never talk about the accomplishment.
They don't talk about winning the medal or getting the promotion.
What they talk about are the relationships that they forged along the way and the people that they did it with.
Um, so it, it's just so fricking important to, to surround yourself with good people.
Um, how can we do this is adults.
I think that one of the biggest traps that happens is and this is not too dissimilar from what we're talking about like life getting too smoothed over.
Uh, in the name of efficiency, we deprioritize community.
So, as a runner, if you're going to join a training group well, now you've got to drive to meet up with them wherever they run.
You can't do your exact workout at the exact time and the exact pace you want, because you're doing it with other people.
So you're sacrificing these kind of personal efficiency things or optimization things.
And I think oftentimes we're hesitant to sacrifice those, but I would argue that the benefit of – community often outweighs whatever cost in efficiency or optimization we have to sacrifice.
I think a great example from running of this is Shalane Flanagan, who's a friend of mine and one of the greatest women's distance runners ever.
She had this incredible career where she led a very monastic lifestyle.
She did all of her training alone.
She was running 100 plus mile weeks.
She's an Olympian, but she never won a major marathon.
And late into her career she decided that rather than train alone, she wanted to train with a group.
So she joined this group of other women and they started training together.
And what happened is Shalane Flanagan won the New York City Marathon and every other woman in that group had PRs that year.
The writer from the New York Times dubbed it the Shalane effect.
So what Shalane gave up was the ability to do every single workout exactly as prescribed the exact time, the exact altitude, the exact space between workouts.
But what she gained was this this group of other women that just filled her with like good energy and good vibes that ultimately propelled her late in her career, to her one of her best, if not her best race.
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Now, Brad, you're admittedly preaching to the choir.
With this kind of stuff for me.
I am fully bought into this idea because I think I've experienced both sides of this coin.
And one side is clearly better for not just performance, but I'm glad that you mentioned fun.
Me hanging out with other runners and going on, especially those easy distance runs where you can just talk and tell stories and make jokes that to me is probably one of the most fun things to do.
But what would you say to the runner who says, well, I don't need to be motivated by other runners.
I prefer training alone.
On a certain perspective, I do think it's a little bit anti-human.
Like you said, we are designed to be this social species.
So if there are runners who are like I never want to run with another human being what might you say to that?
I might say a couple of things.
The first is, when was the last time that you tried?
The second is maybe this individual is super introverted or has some kind of neurodivergency where just being around other people is really hard.
And if that's the case and you know yourself, then great.
You should run alone.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
I think it's better to run alone than not to run at all.
I think the more common thing that I hear is the efficiency thing.
I've got a job.
I've got two kids.
Like I just don't have time to run with a group.
I'd rather do it alone in my garage on the treadmill or, you know, early in the morning, right out my front door.
And that's all really valid.
Like I have a craft that I care deeply about.
I've got kids.
What I would say to that is like great, you know you're not going to go back to college and train with a group six days a week.
But what if, like one day a week, you organize your long run with other people?
Or if it's not a long run, you did an easy run with other people and just like start with like one day a week or maybe even just twice a month, and just see how that goes?
And I know this firsthand.
So like we moved to Asheville about six years ago And my writing career was really taking off.
And I had one kind of requirement for the house, which is I wanted like a small gym in the basement.
So I've got a room with a rubberized floor.
It's got a squat rack, kettlebells up to 80 pounds, really nice barbell and plates.
And I almost never train there, like four times a year.
And the reason is because I found some grungy local gym and That is a 15 minute drive each way.
So it's a half an hour out of my day.
And then I have to chat with people when I'm at the gym.
So my workout takes longer, but I wouldn't trade it for the world, because whatever extra juice of efficiency I'm going to squeeze out of my career as a writer, it's just not worth having the experience and the relationships that I forge in that gym.
The only time I'll train in the basement is if I've got a sick kid home from school or like a very early flight and I just can't make it to the gym that week.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting the efficiency aspect of things, because I haven't thought about that.
I haven't thought about the fact that prioritizing community is typically less efficient.
And so that's what adults are usually optimizing for.
So we sacrifice it.
And I think...
If we can change our mindset a little bit, maybe we can optimize for a little bit more community.
I'm also glad that you mentioned knowing yourself.
And this isn't an all or nothing endeavor.
I know for me, like, yeah, I've got three kids and a lot of work.
And I can't always meet up with people every day for a run.
I know myself.
The first thing I'm going to skip is typically a long run because...
I'm left to my own devices.
And it's a very long effort.
I prefer to run in the mountains.
And that is not very efficient because you get to drive a long time from Denver to get out there.
And so I will very often try to plan a long run with friends so that I will actually get it done.
For me, it's just adherence to the weekly long run.
If I don't do that, there's a really good chance that I don't do it at all.
Yeah, I think that's another obvious benefit of community.
I'm glad that you're stating it is just like the accountability factor, especially for something like that long run, that you might otherwise skip.
And something else that you're mentioning, which is true in my own life, is like you can't do it all right.
Like there's a chapter in the book I'm making trade-offs and like part of being a mature adult is realizing you can't do it all.
So on the one hand I would argue I have like next to no social life because I don't like go out and just hang out and like drink beers and eat wings and watch football.
But I go to the gym five days a week and like that's my social life.
So like you can kind of like merge these two things.
Like I'm going to train and I know it's really important to have friendships and relationships.
So if I find the right group of people to train with, those are my friends and it's great.
And I think that like that's something else because some people can hear it.
It's like wait, Brad like wants me to.
You know, go out three nights a week with friends, go on a date night.
No, no, no.
Like you got to pick and choose.
I just think that, as athletes, the benefit that we get in performance, in motivation which, as I said, it's not always there but it's nice when it is in fun, in joy, is just enhanced by a community aspect for most people.
Yeah, there's a certain element of learning to this too, especially if you're new to weightlifting, to running, and then all of a sudden you're going to a gym and you're interacting with other weightlifters or you're talking to people at run club.
There's an element of learning more about the sport and just hearing tips and advice and stories and personal experiences from people who are more experienced than you might be.
And I think that is a wonderful opportunity to learn the culture of a sport, to learn the training mechanics of a sport and really just to get a more fleshed out understanding of whatever it is you're doing.
Whether you're taking cooking classes or you're doing a weekly track workout, it almost doesn't matter, but you're learning from other people in the community.
And I think that's an important part of this too.
Yes, 100%.
And the other side of that coin is when you get older and grumpier and more of a curmudgeon being around like youthful energy and newbies can be really motivating because, like then you get to mentor and you get to teach and you get to see that like youthful naivety and energy and that can work both ways.
Now Brad, one of the other things that you mentioned in this big post of life lessons that I found fascinating was don't stress if you aren't balanced.
And I think most of us has been taught that balance is a good thing.
And so I wonder what you mean by this.
Yeah, I think that balance, at least as it's popularly conceived, certainly as it's been portrayed by what I call the self-help industrial complex, says implicitly and sometimes explicitly that you need to be the perfect husband, the perfect wife, the perfect mom, the perfect dad, a great runner.
Stay up on all the prestige TV, read 50 books a year, go to church or synagogue, have a clean house, mow your lawn every week, cook every night and like on, and on, and on.
And what ends up happening is that, by trying to do this thing called being balanced that's supposed to make you less stressed, you end up making yourself more stressed out.
And you face all this internal resistance because you're stopping yourself from going all in on the things that really matter to you.
So what I argue for is not to try to live a life of balance, but to try to define what matters most to you in your life and to give those things your all and to be okay, leaving other things behind.
I think part of being a mature adult, as I said moments ago, it's making trade-offs and you can't do it all.
And I think that too often we're sold this story that you can do it all and you just end up miserable trying.
Um, it's not that I'm arguing for obsession and, like you know, only doing one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
Um, what I am arguing for is defining the important parts of your identity, or the important meaningful things in your life and prioritizing them, and then not feeling the pressure, uh to, to need to be perfect.
Um, and, and, and, and I think so often like balance kind of like is sold as perfection.
You know, there's this saying like make your bed every day.
And I kind of get it.
It's like the behavioral activation, right?
Like you wake up, you make your bed, like you do something, you're just getting going.
But I also like, I don't really care if my surgeon makes his or her bed.
What I care about is like, are they good at surgery?
That's the main thing.
And so many people that I've gotten to know that are really good at certain areas of life are just kind of a disaster elsewhere.
And of course they are because like it takes too much time and energy to be really good somewhere.
So if you're trying to be like a world class athlete, does your bedroom need to be clean?
Probably not.
I mean, it shouldn't have molds growing in it, but like keep the main things, the main things.
This reminds me of the line, how you do one thing is how you do everything.
And I've always really disagreed.
Okay, we're on the same page then.
Because there's some things in my life where I am a disaster in.
And if I could bring my computer upstairs, my bed is not made, Brad.
But...
I'm all in on being present in this conversation right now.
And so I'm glad that you said that, because if I had to be perfect on everything, then I don't think I'd be perfect in anything.
Yeah.
And I think, again, like there's some nuance and context needed.
I think that if you're someone whose life's kind of a mess right now and you feel like you just can't get anything right and you're really in a slump, then yeah, like the act of making your bed every morning can be an incredible like jumpstart right.
Like it's this small act of agency and you can get a little win, and like you actually just do something that is very concrete every single day.
That can be super helpful.
If you're a high performing coach or attorney or surgeon or athlete, you don't need to worry about making your bed.
Like no one cares if you make your bed.
And like if you're showing up to the operating room to do surgery like you clearly have enough discipline to have gone through medical school to got there.
I don't think that you need to make your bed.
So it really just depends on who you are and where you're at in life.
But I think what ends up happening is the kind of type A perfectionists hear this stuff and they think they have to be great at everything always.
And that causes a lot of stress and it makes them mediocre when maybe they could be great at a couple of things.
How many things can you focus on at one time?
I think most people would like to focus on their running their family, their work, and you know are you.
Are we limited to two three, four things, or or do we have a little bit more bandwidth?
There's no good research on this that I found at least.
Uh, from my own experience, I think the number is generally around three, and I think it's the three that you mentioned.
I think it can be um profession slash craft uh, family and then like one kind of hobby or pursuit.
And in this case it would be running.
Um, The metaphor that I like to use for this is to think about identity like a house.
And if a house only has one room in it and that one room catches fire or floods, you're going to have to move out of the house altogether, right?
It's going to be extremely disorienting.
But if you have a house that has more than one room and one room catches fire or floods, you can go seek refuge in the other room while you work out the fire or flood.
And I like to think about building an identity house.
So you want to have an identity house with more than one room.
So maybe one room is family.
Maybe another room is athlete.
Maybe another room is chef.
Maybe another room is podcast host.
Maybe another room is coffee lover.
Maybe another room is bookworm.
It doesn't matter what the rooms are.
You just want to have more than one.
And what I like about this metaphor is the rooms don't have to be the same size and you don't have to spend the same amount of time and energy in each room.
So you can have an identity house where there's a huge room for family and a huge room for running.
And then all the other rooms are really small.
But that's okay.
Like as long as there's more to you than just one component of your identity.
So you're telling me I don't have to learn a fancy meal to cook every night, Brad?
No, it could be a very small room.
It can be a once a month room.
But what's so beneficial about that is, you know, you blow out your calf and you tear your calf.
And now you can't run.
Well then, you're going to start spending a lot more time in the cooking room and, like it gives you another source of meaning in your life.
So you don't want to let it get moldy and you want to stay in touch with it because, like you don't know when, when you're going to actually need that room.
Yeah, that's that's a really important point.
I think it's I think it makes you better at your main thing to have more than one room.
Because like it frees up some pressure.
Like if the only room in my identity house was as a writer, then like that would be so much stress and pressure.
And like when I have inevitable failures as a writer, I would just feel like shit.
But what ends up happening is like when writing's not going well.
I like double down on training in the gym and like family time.
Because it's like oh, like.
I can still be like a full fledged human being with meaning in my life, even when my writing's not going well.
And when training's not going well, I can be like, well, I'm a great writer.
So who cares if like my deadlift's going down?
If you're just this one thing, it just makes you kind of fragile for when things go wrong.
And at some point things are going to go wrong.
Like things always go wrong.
It's just living a life.
I think a lot of your work comes down to like how to be okay with imperfection and recognizing that perfection is impossible and being okay with that and recognizing that life is messy and chaotic.
And we do have agency over many of those things, however.
And so I'm really appreciative of that.
Thank you, I like that.
Yeah, life can suck sometimes.
And I believe that your work gives us a framework for dealing with the complexities of life.
That's why I wanted to write a book about excellence in particular.
And in the introduction I spend time saying what excellence is not and what excellence is often confused, as
And the number one thing that comes up is perfectionism, or this standard where you need to get a gold star in everything.
But that's not what excellence is at all.
Excellence is actually like navigating the mess in the uncertainty of life to the best of your ability and continuing to show up and care deeply.
The people that try to like, optimize and control everything in their life.
Like those people don't ever achieve greatness or excellence because they turn themselves into like automatons.
Yeah.
And I think another good example of this idea that you're never going to reach perfection, nor should it even be the goal is, you know, you said that anxiety isn't always the enemy.
You know, just recognizing that you're going to have these feelings.
And it's not always a bad thing.
Why isn't anxiety always a bad thing?
Well, I think that there's kind of like two kinds of anxiety.
I mean, there's many kinds of anxiety, but I'll delineate between two.
And one is what I would call like generalized abnormal anxiety where everything makes you anxious.
That is not a great feeling to have.
And that is something that I strongly suggest that you seek a mental health professional for, whether it's a therapist or a psychiatrist or some combination of the two.
Then there's anxiety.
That has a very clear cause or reason and it's because you care deeply about something.
So you're really anxious before your 5K because you're trying to win a state championship, or you're really anxious before your book comes out because you spent three years writing your book, or before this public speaking engagement because you really want to nail the talk for the room.
And that anxiety is not a problem to fix or something to be concerned about.
That simply says that like you care deeply about what you're about to do.
So of course you're feeling anxious and there's no need to make that anxiety go away.
You can just sit with it.
One of my favorite studies in the book comes from elite swimmers and it looked at the difference between those on a world-class level and those that never made it beyond regional class.
And what the researchers found is that when they're on the start block before a race, they have almost the exact same physiological sensations.
So they all experience perspiration on their palms, elevated heart rate, elevated blood pressure, a little bit of a flooding of cortisol, the stress hormone.
There's no difference between the world-class athletes and those who aren't.
The difference is the ones who are not world-class.
They try to make all those feelings go away and they get really nervous about them.
Whereas the world-class swimmers, they just say all right, this is my nervous system, getting ready to go.
They don't even necessarily label it anxiety.
They're just like, I'm revved up.
Someone recently told me this was an Olympian.
Told me that they call it.
The butterflies are getting in formation.
So there's two ways to think about butterflies in your chest.
There's, oh, no, this is a problem.
I'm anxious.
I need to close my eyes and take five deep breaths to make it go away.
Or you can say, like, let's freaking go.
Like, I'm revved up.
And the only difference is how you label those same physiological sensations.
And there's some other fascinating research that I love that shows that excitement and anxiety often manifest in like the same exact way in our bodies.
So you call it anxiety.
Suddenly it's a negative.
You try to make it go away.
You call it excitement.
And suddenly it's something that you can harness.
You know, I think I experienced this recently when I think it was a little almost two years ago.
I brought my kids to Disney World and I was in line about to go on the Tron roller coaster ride.
And.
This thing rockets you to like 60 miles per hour in three seconds.
And my palms started sweating.
I started getting kind of anxious.
And I realized, I was like, I am so excited for this ride.
But if I was on the starting line of a race with these same physiological feelings, I would not say oh, I'm excited to do this.
I would say, I'm nervous to do this.
And I think a big part of this is simply reframing the feelings that we're experiencing as something related but a little different.
Excitement is so similar to anxiety, but it's a much more positive emotion.
Yeah.
And then the only other thing I'd add is just wait for the gun to go off.
I think the problem isn't those feelings on the start line of a race or in the corral.
The problem is when we freak out about them.
So, even if you don't like them and even if you can't label them as excitement, you can just say all right, I'm feeling anxious because I care deeply and because this race is going to hurt.
I just have to wait for the gun to go off, because once I start the race, I'm going to be focused on the race.
Um, and, and I think again, like so often in a performance context, the problem is not the anxiety.
It's that we freak out about it and we try to make it go away instead of just letting it be there.
And then when the gun goes off, the gun goes off.
I mean, this is what I do with public speaking.
I've.
I've been fortunate to do a lot of it, so I don't get too nervous anymore unless like, there's a really big crowd or a new venue, but that happens occasionally.
And now what I'll do is I'm just, it's like, it's no different than being a runner.
I'm just like, wait for the gun to go off.
And what that means is like I can feel all the anxiety in the world before they call me on the stage.
But once I'm on stage, I just I know what my first three slides are.
And now I'm racing like I'm not feeling anxious because I'm actually doing the thing.
I don't have the ability to worry about it because I'm doing it.
I think the same thing is true in my strength training practice.
Like before a big deadlift.
You better believe.
I'm feeling all kinds of sensations in my body, but I need to label those sensations as adrenaline and excitement, in like pound to Celsius with 200 milligrams of caffeine.
And then I'm like a bat out of hell.
Whereas if I sat there and I'm like, oh God, like I'm feeling things.
I don't know if this is good.
I'd miss every single lift.
Yeah, it's like that anxiety is a resource that you can harness to use to your advantage.
It is not something you should try to bury or ignore or move past.
It's something that you can just sit with and be like, okay, this is my fuel.
This is going to fuel my performance, whether it's a deadlift, a race or a public speaking engagement.
Now I did want to ask you specifically about one of the most anxiety-inducing things that I've seen recently, which was Alex Honnold climbing Taipei 101.
And you interviewed Alex Honnold for your book.
Now, he's a free solo climber.
He's in the Netflix show Free Solo.
If anyone wants to sweat nervously for two hours, it's a great movie.
Yeah.
Now I don't know if you actually watched him climb Taipei 101, but I was having anxiety sweats during the entire thing.
I mean, even just talking about it now, I can feel my hands and my feet have started to sweat.
I'm having a physiological reaction.
But you talked about, you shared a story about his visualization practice and how that helps him.
Can you talk about that and kind of the way that he manages anxiety?
Because this is the most extreme of extreme examples, and we could probably learn a lot from it.
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd say is Alex Honnold's an alien.
He's built different, and I don't recommend nor condone free soloing skyscrapers.
What Alex told me which is really interesting, though is that when he's preparing for a climb, he'll do just what you said.
He'll visualize how every single pitch is supposed to feel and, I guess, in the case of a building, how every floor is supposed to feel.
But what I find fascinating about that is the word feel.
So he's not visualizing to try to think about what's going to happen on the climb.
He's visualizing what it should feel like.
And what Honnold told me is that if he thinks too much on the rock face or on a wall, then something's going wrong, because he needs to just be able to feel his way in and out of certain footholds and handholds in different positions.
And when that feeling is off, that's a sign to him that then he has to start thinking and problem solving.
Um, and, and I, and I think that it's ironic.
I just said, think it's pretty interesting that so often we default to trying to think our way through problems.
Yet all of our best performances in any domains.
By definition like a flow state, you're not thinking.
You're just in the zone.
You're feeling.
So I thought that that was really interesting, that the visualization is less of an intellectual exercise and more of a simulating what something ought to feel like.
And what's cool is this is true even for intellectual pursuits.
When I have my best writing days.
I am not doing any conscious thinking about punctuation or grammar or word choice.
Like I'm just feeling my way through the page.
I'm feeling my way forward.
I talked to surgeons who said the exact same thing.
Coaches say that, like when they're like really coaching.
Well, like it's not an intellectual exercise.
Like there's just like this animalistic felt experience that takes over how they coach.
So I think that what we can all learn from that is that maybe sometimes we over-index on what's happening in our brain and under-index on kind of the lived experience in our body.
Yeah, very much reminds me of just really well-executed races and my memories of them.
I wasn't thinking to myself okay, my heart rate is under a certain level, so that means I can go and kind of intellectualizing the experience.
It was all based on very subjective feelings. that I was experiencing at the time.
Everything from how my respiration felt, the air as it moves around my body, which changes depending on how fast you're running.
And if you can take in all that data and not really analyze it from an intellectual perspective but, like you said, feel your way through the page like when you were writing.
I really love that analogy.
If you can feel your way through a running performance, I think that's when you get the most out of it.
And the other thing that I'll say too is visualizing feelings rather than thoughts.
Every sports psychologist I've ever interviewed about visualization realized will will affirm that that's the way to do.
It is to really kind of try to experience how you're going to feel at every step of you know the, the event, the race, you know whatever you're visualizing and and to make sure that you're not just thinking about what you're going to do but how you are feeling at the time, and to try to make it as multi sensory as possible.
Yeah, I love that.
And that makes so much sense because, like the ability to think in, cognition came on so late in evolution, long before nervous systems and feeling.
So for the longest longest, longest time, like all life forms, the way that they achieved their version of excellence flourishing, whatever you want to call it, survival was just feeling their way like in and out of good conditions and bad conditions.
So the hardware that we are all endowed with to feel is just so much older and so much more like integral to life than thinking in our prefrontal cortex, which was like the last thing that evolved.
So thinking is incredibly powerful.
It's incredibly important.
It's part of what separates humans from other species.
But when we're really at our best, I feel like we're tapping more into like this, like ancient feeling that has been on board for a very long time in life.
Not to mention it's almost impossible to think too hard when you're doing these things, whether you're trying for a new PR in the deadlift or you're racing a 10K.
Everyone who's run a race and has started to think about the math of their pace and splits and how much time and distance they have and what they have to average for the rest of the race to average their goal race.
They're That kind of what we used to call track.
Math is so hard when you're in oxygen debt.
You're really incredibly focused on the execution of the task at hand.
So, you know, I almost think it's a fool's errand to try to overthink your way through these things.
Yeah, if anything, it just gets in the way.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, Brad, I really appreciate your time.
And I always think of you as a modern philosopher who helps people navigate modern life and get through the difficulties of trying to think through balance and in motivation and challenging yourself and kind of being a fulfilled person when it's so easy to kind of focus on the things that aren't important in life.
So I really appreciate your work.
I hope everyone checks out your book, The Way of Excellence.
Is there anything that you wanted to add or kind of include at the end here for our audience of runners?
No, I think that this is such a lovely conversation.
So thanks for having me on.
I guess the only thing I'd say is that it feels like we're at this point in history where, like everyone's gonna have to decide for themselves, are we content to like exist in a world of automation and AI slop?
Or like do we want to feel fully alive and challenge ourselves and create and contribute and build community?
And I think that it behooves us all to try to make the latter choice.
And I think that the pursuit of excellence and running is such a great container to do it in.
So I guess it's an endorsement for running and for sport and for excellence all at once.
So keep running.
I love it.
Brad, you are pushing humanity forward to where we should be going.
So thank you so much for your work and your time today.
Thank you.
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