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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I am excited to welcome Brad Stilberg to Before Breakfast.
Brad is the author of the brand new book, The Way of Excellence.
So Brad, welcome to the show.
Laura, it's great to be here.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for joining us.
Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
So I wear a couple of hats.
One hat is an author where I'm really interested in exploring the things that make humans flourish.
I write books, I research and I report for those books.
The second hat I wear as a performance coach.
So I work with athletes executives, entrepreneurs and creatives on their own performance, applying so many of the things that I write about.
And then the third hat that I wear as a professor where I'm adjunct faculty at the University of Michigan.
And much like my writing in coaching.
I work with students there on their professional development, leadership and mental performance.
Excellent.
Well, your book is about excellence, which is a bit of a lofty topic.
And I know that your clients are people like these athletes and things like that.
Is excellence something that the rest of us should be thinking about as well?
I mean, there's same things that athletes do.
Are they applicable to the rest of us?
Absolutely.
I think that one of the biggest misconceptions about excellence is that it's only for the select few with impeccable genetics that are competing in the world championships or the Olympics.
And that just couldn't be further from the truth.
Excellence really comes down to caring deeply about projects that align with your values and goals and giving them your all.
And all of us can do that.
And it helps all of us to feel more alive, to get the best out of ourselves and to have awesome days.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I understand that some parts of the genesis of this book had to do with Robert Persig.
And Zen and the Art of Moser Michael's Maintenance is, of course, his most famous book.
But maybe you can talk a little bit about the connection between Persig's work and yours.
So Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila are Persig's two big books.
They're two of my favorite books.
They really help informs my philosophy of life.
And at the center of Persig's work is this term called quality.
And Persig defines quality as the relationship between an actor and their act.
So it's not what you are experiencing as the person dancing.
It's not what the dance floor is experiencing with your feet tapping on it.
It's the relationship between you and what you're doing.
And what Persig argued is that so much of the fulfillment and satisfaction in good stuff in life comes out of that relationship between us and the things that we care about.
And what Persig said and this is back in 1974 is that more and more of modern life alienates us from that direct experience of the things that we care about.
And again, he wrote this before social media, in some ways before the modern internet.
So imagine what he'd be thinking if he was alive now.
And that we should do everything that we can to remove those distractions so that we can experience that kind of intimacy with the things that are important to us.
And again, a big part of having an excellent life in such a chaotic and crazy world is being able to set aside time and space to get really close and focused and undistracted on the projects that we find worthwhile.
Yeah.
Well, figuring out what is worthwhile is sometimes a little bit complicated.
And you have a great phrase in your book.
I believe it is quit, fit and grit, which is memorable for sure.
So why don't you talk about what that means?
Yeah, so grit is this phenomenal term is coined by Angela Duckworth and it became all the rage and self-help and personal development really over the last decade.
And grit is really important.
Grit says that you have to have stick-to-itiveness.
You've got to be tough.
You can't let setbacks throw you off course.
You got to stick to what you're doing, commit.
And that's true, but that can also get in the way, because what if you're doing the wrong thing?
What if what you actually should do is quit and try to find something new?
So the way that I like to think about this is it's really helpful to sample a whole bunch of different pursuits.
This can be professional.
If you're young, this can be hobbies.
If you're older and you're already locked in your career and you want to quit early and often if you don't enjoy something, if it doesn't align with your values or the person that you think you want to become, then there's no need to stick it out in that thing.
However, once you found something where there is a good fit and That is when grit becomes super important.
So to make this really practical, in my own life, I was never very good at math or science.
And I constantly quit things that involved math and science.
I quit AP math in high school.
In college I thought I was going to be an economics major until I took econ 401, which had all kinds of math that I couldn't do.
So I quit math.
And the flip side is that in writing, I was extremely gritty.
I was on a school newspaper.
I got rejected more times than I can count.
Yet I kept on writing because I liked it.
I had fit.
So I was really gritty with my writing because there was good fit.
But I quit math and science very early and very often.
And imagine if I would have forced myself to say you know, my parents had this more analytic career, so therefore I need to have a career that is more analytic.
I might be miserable right now.
So I think that too often we over-index and we say that great performance is all about grit and being really tough and stick-to-itiveness.
And that's very true, but it's only true once you've found something for which you have a good fit.
Yeah.
So this is the time of year.
This is airing in January.
A lot of people have set resolutions and goals for the new year.
Are there ways we should think about setting these goals that might make them –
More workable or more in keeping with the pursuit of excellence?
Yeah, it's so important to set big challenging inspirational, motivating goals but then to largely forget about the big challenging, inspirational goal and to focus on the process, to focus on the steps that are going to help you achieve that goal.
This is at the crux of a process mindset and a process mindset is crucial for excellence.
It essentially says set your big goal, then break that big goal down into the component parts, into the small steps, and then largely forget about the big goal and just focus on nailing the steps.
Little by little becomes a lot.
One of my favorite interviews I did for the book was with Callie Humphries.
She is one of the winningest Olympians ever.
She's won three gold medals, one bronze and five world championships.
And she's about to compete in February in this upcoming Winter Olympics.
And she's a bobsled athlete.
You can do the math.
She's been at the top of the world for the last 20 years.
And I asked Kelly, I said, Kelly, talk to me about what goes into setting a goal for the Olympics.
And she says, well, my goal is simple.
I want to be the best in the world.
I want to win a gold medal every four years.
After that, I take a four-year Olympic cycle and I break it down into two by two years.
And then each of those two years has a particular focus.
The first two years are building a base.
The second two years are sharpening the saw.
Then I take each of those two years and I break them down into individual years.
And each of those years has a focus.
Each year gets broken down into quarters, each quarter to months, each month to week.
And then each week gets broken down into days.
And then what I do is I show up and I focus on the workout I need to execute today.
So she has this big goal, arguably the biggest, to be the best in the world at what she does.
But day to day, she's digging exactly where her feet are.
She's focused on the process.
And all of us can apply that mindset to our big goals.
So just focus on the process instead of the summit fever we might get at the top.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, think about it.
I love that you use summit fever in a climber.
If you're a climber and you're so fixated on getting to the peak that you're constantly looking up and staring at the top of the mountain, you're going to literally like trip and fall over your own feet.
You're going to make mistakes on the side of the mountain.
So you can't have a climb without a top.
You have to know where you're going.
But to successfully get there, you've got to focus on climbing exactly where you are.
So it's this paradox of yes, set the big goal, care deeply about it, but then also kind of forget about it, or at least don't obsess over it, so that you can focus on the small steps that are going to help you get there.
Absolutely.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Brad Stolberger.
So I am back talking with Brad Stolberg, who is the author of the brand new book The Way of Excellence.
We've been talking about breaking down big goals into small daily steps toward those big goals.
Now, when we get to sort of rubber meeting the road and day to day life, as you know, schedules get crazy.
Things come up.
People have various obstacles on any given day.
Is there, I think you had a phrase in there about raising the floor.
I mean figuring out what is the least amount you can do on certain days, even if we are eventually aiming toward these big goals.
What does that mean to do that?
So many people focus on needing to have great days.
What I have found in my research with performers of all different levels, from beginner to world class, is that what actually leads to lasting progress isn't having more great days.
It's making your bad days a little bit better.
And what I mean by that is you might have a day where everything kind of goes to crap, right?
The dog is vomiting on the floor.
Your toddler's sick.
It's like everything's a mess.
You can spiral and catastrophize and get absolutely nothing done that day.
Or you can say, all right, today's going to be very different than what I'd hoped for.
What would it look like to get 5% or 10% out of myself instead of the 100% I'd hoped for?
Or maybe you don't even get 5 or 10 of yourself.
But instead of catastrophizing and spiraling where a bad day becomes a bad week, you say all right, today's a zero.
I'm going to take a zero today, but tomorrow I'm going to get back on the bandwagon.
And really good progress requires not just those great days, not just having a high ceiling, but also raising the floor.
Because the truth is, and I bet every listener knows this, by definition, great days are rare.
We don't have our best days very often.
There's a reason they're our best days.
It's much more frequent that we're having an average day or a not so great day.
But if we can just nudge what we can get out of ourselves on those not so great and average days up over time, that makes an enormous difference.
So when you're having a bad day, instead of freaking out about it, try to disrupt that negative rumination and spiral and say, all right, for whatever reason, it's not going to happen like I thought today.
But how could I make this bad day a little bit better?
What could I get out of myself?
How could I adjust? and still work toward my goal, even if it's not in the way I'd hoped for.
I think you refer to this as the next play mentality.
Yeah, great athletes are phenomenal at this, which just says like next play mentality.
The play that just happened is in the past.
There's nothing that you can do about it.
You can learn from it if possible, but then you've got to focus on the next play.
And obviously a next play.
Mentality isn't just important in tennis or golf or soccer or basketball, it's important in life.
And so often we get caught up in thinking about what just happened instead of saying all right, what happened happened.
Take what I can and then I'm going to focus on the next play.
So I understand that you have a lot of rituals and routines in your life, things that you do repeatedly.
We are all about routines on this show, a show called Before Breakfast.
In particular, morning routines are something that a lot of people are interested in.
Do you have a particular morning routine that is part of your life right now?
I do have a particular morning routine that is part of my life, and it revolves around coffee, which is an ergogenic performance enhancer that I believe in.
Free pub for coffee on the show today.
But my morning routine is actually quite simple.
I get out of bed.
I say hi to my kids, who are generally up around the same time as me, or generally they're actually waking me up.
I have young kids, so they're my alarm clock.
And then I make a pot of coffee and I make coffee for myself and my wife and I drink that coffee.
And then, to the extent possible again, depending on what's happening with the kids, I try to sit down and do my most important high demanding cognitive work first thing in the day.
But it's really like the ritual of getting out of bed and making that pot of coffee that helps me shift from a barely waking state to a wakeful state.
And of course, the caffeine helps.
But I know that it's actually the ritual as much as the caffeine, because even before any coffee hits my digestive track, the coffee signifies like all right, it's the start of the day.
It's go time.
Something that I do when I'm working on a book is I'll also light incense.
And again there's just something about connecting like the actual physical process of getting the incense burning and then the smell of it, to writing, where my brain kind of locks in and says, all right, like it's time to write.
So I'm curious.
I mean because you said with the young kids, and this is often something that that makes people's morning routines slightly more complicated, right?
Dealing with little people.
Is it more that you're aiming to start at a particular time when they're off doing their stuff for the day?
Or is it that they're part of it?
I mean, I'm curious like you know, you sit down at a certain time when they are at school, or how does that work?
Yeah, it's a great question because it gets messy, right?
So it depends on the morning.
But generally speaking, let's say that I'm up at 630.
The kids are up at 630.
My wife is up at 630.
We both have jobs.
We co-parent.
And by co-parent, we're not divorced.
We're together.
But we both raise the kids.
It's not like a situation where she's doing all the labor and I'm not.
At least I certainly try not to do that.
So, 630 to 730 is kind of like, all right, who slept better last night?
Who's got important work to do?
Whoever doesn't is on point for the kids.
And then the other person can go do 45 minutes of work.
And then it's time to get the kids ready, get them off to school.
They're off to school by 730.
And then at that point I am just trying to lock in from 730 to 930 on my most important work for the day, before meetings start and before all these other things come into play.
Now, do you try to push meetings too later in the day?
Is that how you would schedule an ideal day?
I do.
And that's very much aligned with my chronotype, which is just the fancy word that scientists use for how the rhythms of our days go.
And that's a very individual thing.
So I'm very much a morning person.
I'm not a night owl.
I'm a morning lark.
So I know that my ability to focus deeply is, generally speaking, best before noon.
And then I know that from noon to five I struggle if I'm alone, but if I'm with other people, if I'm in meetings, if I'm having conversations, that kind of energy can help light me back up.
So it doesn't always work like this, but to the extent possible I try to put my meetings in my more extroverted social work in the afternoon and schedule my more deep focus, cognitive alone work, in the morning
Now, you had mentioned that you have a couple of weekly routines like things that you aim to do once a week, which is sort of a different unit of time than a lot of people think about with routines.
But what are some of those things?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
So I'll share the framework real quick because I think it can be really helpful, which is three daily routines, three weekly routines and three monthly routines.
So my daily routines are 45 to 60 minutes of exercise.
And I try to do this every day.
And this doesn't always mean going to the gym and killing myself.
Sometimes it means walking the dog, but moving my body for 45 to 60 minutes a day at least one and a half hours of deep focus work where I'm not running from meeting to meeting and I'm focused on a project that matters to me.
For me, usually that's writing and then going to bed when I'm tired.
So I've learned not to fight sleep.
Again, we have young kids.
They go to bed at eight.
Often my wife and I are in bed at 930.
We're not very exciting because without going to bed at 930, we wouldn't get much sleep.
Some of my weekly routines, my three weekly routines.
The first is some kind of extended time in nature.
This can just be an hour and a half walk with the dog.
So instead of the quick walk around our neighborhood, we go out on a trail.
That really helps me clear my mind, reconnect to myself.
A digital Sabbath. which is a time period where I put my phone and my computer completely away.
And when I'm doing this at my best, it's a whole day.
When I'm not at my best, it's a half a day.
But it's literally like in the attic, you know, nowhere near me, not in the other room, not turned off, but a place where I'm not even thinking about it to get away from the digital device.
And then some kind of social interaction with friends once a week.
So I can be really busy.
I'm very work driven and sometimes friendship gets crowded out.
So if I'm really cognizant of hey, I've got to make sure I'm hanging out with people at least once a week.
And then I also have these three monthly things that I do, which is try to spend a day in nature, often with the family.
Try to do something with my community.
So go to a neighborhood barbecue, go to a cleanup on one of the local trails nearby, something like that to connect with my community.
And then I also try to have some time period for contemplation and reflection.
So maybe it's meditation.
Maybe it's listening to my favorite music album, so on and so forth.
I find, especially with young kids in the chaos of life, sometimes having very elaborate routines helps people at certain phases of life.
For me right now, the more I can simplify, the better.
So I know that if I'm doing my three daily, my three weekly and my three monthly things, my physical cognitive, emotional and social health will be in a good enough spot.
Absolutely.
All right.
We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Brad Stolberg.
So I'm back talking with Brad Stolberg, who is the author of the book, The Way of Excellence.
So I have a follow up question about the digital Sabbath because I know a lot of people say well, I really would like to be off a lot of my devices and my connectivity.
However, there are other people, like even within my family or friends, that I would need to be connected to on a weekend day.
For instance, my teenager is going to be out and about and want to connect to pick up.
You know, get a ride home or, like my, my parents will need to reach me.
So I'm curious how one should thread that needle of having some of the upsides of the connectivity without getting into all the downsides that can happen.
So I can share how I did it and what worked for my family.
And that is I got a phone called a Jitterbug, which is marketed towards senior citizens.
It has no internet.
In order to text you have to like do the old texting where in order to get to like the letter C you have to hit one three times to go through A, B and C.
So functionally you're never going to text on this thing.
It is just a phone.
The other thing it is is, if I fall, there's a special button that will automatically call 911 for me.
Because again, it's marketed to senior citizens.
Right.
But I have a Jitterbug.
It has its own phone number.
And that's what I use to stay in touch with my family.
That's so my wife can reach me when we're running the kids in various places.
And that's also sometimes on these digital Sabbaths.
I want to call my brother who lives in another state, or my closest friend who lives across the country.
And that's still really meaningful.
That's the kind of technology that I want to take advantage of.
But what having the Jitterbug phone does is it keeps me off of Twitter.
It keeps me off of Instagram.
It keeps me off of email.
It keeps me from on and on and on.
Got it.
So I loved a phrase that you used in your book when you were trying something new that you haven't done or that will might be a little bit outside your comfort zones.
Brave new world.
How does this mantra work for you?
One of my favorite parts of the book Brave New World.
The genesis of this is the sport that I engage in is powerlifting.
And when you walk up to a barbell that has more weight on it than you've ever lifted before, there can be like a real sense of fear.
And not so much fear is, am I going to make the lift or not?
Because no one really cares.
I'm not a pro athlete.
But genuine fear about this is going to feel so hard.
Like, what's this going to feel like?
I'm kind of scared.
Um, And when you walk up to a bar in a state of fear, you tend not to perform very well.
But if you can shift from fear to curiosity, your performance can be incredible.
So, instead of walking up to that bar saying I don't know if I'm going to do this or yikes, I don't know what this is going to feel like,
I walk up to the bar and I say, brave new world.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but let's find out.
And that shift from, oh, this is scary to this is a whole new horizon.
Heck if I'm.
You know if I told myself I'm going to for sure make the lift.
I know because I'd be lying to myself.
I don't know if I'm going to make the lift.
But what I can say is like I'm taking on a challenge.
Brave new world.
Let's find out.
It started in the weight room.
But I can tell you that the first words I said to my wife when we had our second kid, I looked at her and I said brave new world.
When I take on a big writing assignment for an outlet I've never written for and I feel overwhelmed.
I tell myself, like brave new world.
So it's this really powerful mantra because, again, it shifts us out of fear to curiosity.
There's some fascinating neuroscience that I go into in the book that essentially shows that the circuitry in our brains that lights up when we are really scared or rageful angry is completely at odds with the circuitry that lights up when we're curious.
So anyone knows this.
It's impossible to be genuinely curious and terrified at the same time.
So i think curiosity is one of the best antidotes to fear.
So i ask all my guests a question of what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome.
I have set aside 30 minutes to have an afternoon coffee not the morning coffee and read and do deep, undistracted reading.
Nonfiction, fiction, I think that I'm a writer.
So this is my job.
And yet sometimes the time to sit down and cozy up with a book gets crowded out because life is so busy and there's so many of these short form mechanisms of communication that I've really made it a priority to reclaim reading.
And the days that I set aside that time for myself to read, I never regret it.
What time does that tend to happen for you?
So again, I'm fortunate.
I control my own schedule.
That tends to happen towards the end of the day.
So like 4.30 to 5.
Back to I know you love rituals and routines.
It also kind of acts as a nice transition out of the workday and into family time.
Yeah well, that would be a great way to end the day and to say well, my brain is moving into a different space and I can transition into a different role at this point, particularly for people who might work from home.
That's a way to create a bit of a fake commute, right?
Oh, 100%.
And I'm glad you mentioned that.
I think that is so important.
And that's a whole other conversation and topic.
But the importance of like, if you do work from home, there's so many benefits.
But one of the costs is that we used to have all these boundaries built in between work and life.
And if you work from home, you have to create those boundaries a little bit artificially.
Yeah.
Well, we try the best we can around here for sure.
So, Brad, what is something you are looking forward to right now?
I love I'm coaching my son's basketball team.
And we're we're having this conversation on a Friday and we play on Saturdays.
And I just.
Nothing brings me more joy than coaching rec sports.
Seven and eight year olds playing basketball.
I I love it.
It just lights me up more than anything.
Because they're really learning.
I mean, at this point, they're still figuring everything out.
They're learning.
They're innocent.
They're still young enough where yes, there are some crazy parents, but most of the parents are very kind.
There's none of the politics that you get in sport.
That happens when you're at the high school or college level.
They're just a bunch of kids having so much fun together.
Yes, they want to win, but they have so much fun.
And then they move on after the game so quick.
It's like it never happened.
And it's just such an innocent way to engage with sport.
And I think it's the best.
Yeah.
Well, they've got a next game mentality for sure.
So, Brad, where can people find you?
Best place to find me on the Internet is my podcast, which is Excellence Actually.
The book is called The Way of Excellence.
And then the social media platform that I'm most active on is Instagram.
And my username is just my name at Brad Stahlberg.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, Brad, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura, at lauravandercamcom.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
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