RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg

23:48And you talk about living in an increasingly numbed out world. And can you give us a sense of some of the barriers that are making it so difficult for us actually to live this kind of excellent life? Like some of the things like technology or like the kind of bad advice that we're getting from a lot of the life hacking gurus who you tend to be somewhat disdainful of.

24:12Brad Stulberg:So I think the biggest real challenge here is just distraction is utterly ubiquitous. We walk around with these powerful digital slot machines in our pockets, and the reward is actually greater than money. It's existential validation. It's an email, a text message, a like, a comment. It says that you exist in the world and you matter. And it's very, very tempting to just constantly pull down on that lever and try to get that reward. And that can be extremely alienating from whatever it is that you're trying to do. I'll share an example from my own life. If it came in the process of writing this book, it was an extremely busy day.

24:49Brad Stulberg:I was shuttling my kids from sports that I coach to my daughter's dance class and so on. And they're both in the back of the car. It's extremely loud. They're young. They're arguing over what music we're going to listen to. And the car needs gas. So I get to a gas station and I start to fill up the pump and they're in the car. And I finally think to myself, I'm going to have two and a half minutes of silence. Just a moment to just be with myself, to reconnect with myself. And on the pump, on the screen, there's this woman that starts jabbering about how every problem that you have is figureoutable trying to sell me her masterclass.

25:23Brad Stulberg:And I sat there and I thought to myself, I can't even connect with myself to fill up my car with gaps. We're just constantly bombarded with distraction and noise, which really gets in the way of intimacy, of knowing ourselves and of intimacy with a craft. So that's one broad bucket is what I'll call the ubiquitous distraction. In the book, I call it algorithmic mass distraction because it's very much engineered to keep us hooked. The second big bucket is exactly what you alluded to. And I call this pseudo excellence or hustle culture greatness. And this is the entire industrial complex of hacks and quick fixes and 10-day programs and diets and fads and on and on and on that all have this illusory promise that if you just do this one thing, if you just do this new hack, this new trick, then my friend, you'll be happy, you'll be strong, you'll be calm, you'll be more intellectually wise.

26:14Brad Stulberg:And it's very tempting to fall for that. I mean, Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth in the 1500s. So the longevity influencers, there's nothing new about this. This is a tale as old as time. And it is extremely tempting. But what can happen is we can cycle from fad to fad, kind of trying to chase this quick fix, which actually gets in the way of the kind of commitment and consistency and intimacy that is required to truly experience the joys and satisfaction of excellence. And you put those two things together, ubiquitous distraction in the grift of pseudo excellence, and it's the perfect storm for alienation, especially for someone that in good faith really wants to live a good life and wants to be good at a craft and master a craft and have that sense of satisfaction.

26:55Brad Stulberg:It's very challenging because this is the environment that we live in. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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31:51There's this willingness to disconnect and create a kind of countercultural lifestyle that's a little bit ornery, where you're just saying, no, I'm not taking in any of that ephemeral nonsense. And I'm just going to focus on reading books, studying businesses, traveling to see companies, reading their annual reports. And it seems to me that it requires almost a conscious decision not to buy into what Nick Seek would just say, the bollocks, all of the nonsense. And you have this lovely phrase in your book, you quote someone using the word disevolution, all these new technologies that prey on our primal instincts of food and sex and status and connection.

32:34And you write about ultra-processed food, ultra-processed entertainment, an ultra-processed connection. So it seems like your whole philosophy of designing a life built around excellence is really a very conscious rejection of this kind of bombardment of superficial short-term dopamine hits that's being sort of foisted on us kind of unwillingly, whether we're at the gas pump or on our phone.

33:00Brad Stulberg:Yeah, that's right. You need to try to engineer and ecosystem around you that is supportive of your values and goals and the pursuit of excellence. And in many ways, it does require intentional design of one's environment, one's physical space, intentional design of one's technology, and to some extent, intentional design of the people with whom you surround yourself, because that's also an enormous impact in part of your environment. Another way to think about it, William, is that all of these objects around us, they have a gravity, a sense of gravity. And that gravity can either pull us toward our goals and toward our values and toward the person we want to become and toward our craft, or it can pull us away from our craft.

33:42Brad Stulberg:And the default in many ways is just to be pulled in 19 different directions at once in a very frantic and frenetic way. And trying to move against that gravity is extremely hard. But if you can step back and you can say, here are the limited things I care deeply about. I want to be a great fund manager. I want to be a great investor. I want to be a great athlete. I want to be a great husband. I want to be a great wife. I want to be a great mom. I want to be a great dad. I want to be a great community member. I want to be a great musician. I want to be a great consultant. Well, then you can say, what does it take to do that?

34:14Brad Stulberg:And outside of all of this, how do I eliminate all the noise around that to the best of my ability and really focus? And it's simple, but simple doesn't make it easy, but it's simple and it's attainable. And all those people from across domains that you mentioned, they all do this. when you look in at their lives, their lives, they don't look very ordinary. They're extraordinary lives, but not because they're genetically, you know, it's such an incredible next level. No, it's because they're willing to say no to a lot of the default to craft a life around the couple of things that really matter to them.

34:46Brad Stulberg:There's this wonderful quote in the book that came from my mentor, Mike Joyner. And he says that if you want to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist. And what he meant by that is if you want to live a full maximal life and get your all out of yourself in a couple of domains, you've got to be willing to forego a lot of the bullocks, to quote your friend. Yeah. I once interviewed Michael Joyner for a book that I was ghostwriting. He was a remarkable guy. I also love there's a line towards the end of your book where you say the best performers in the world are focused, determined, a little bit crazy, at times obsessive, and live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring.

35:25I thought that was really interesting, like that willingness actually to construct a lifestyle that from the outside, like seems pretty boring. Can you talk a little bit about that? It seemed to be a really nice observation. Yeah.

35:37Brad Stulberg:What I mean by that is, you know, you can choose to have an extravagant social life. You can choose to really pursue status and be in on all the current cultural events, but there's only so many hours in the day. And if you really want to master your craft, a lot of the hours in the day have to be devoted towards things that are going to help you master your craft. And if you want to have good relationships, which I believe is a, and I know you feel the same way as a core part to living a good life, you also have to spend a lot of hours towards maintaining those relationships. And that requires foregoing a lot of the bright and shiny objects on the side.

36:10Brad Stulberg:And what looks boring from the outside is actually incredibly exciting and interesting from the inside. Because the deeper that you get on the path of excellence, the more curious you get about what you're doing and about who you're becoming, the more intrinsically rewarding it is and it's the kind of reward that no fancy car or fancy watch or a sense of status will ever give you it's the Jerry Seinfeld quote about you know you work that joke and you put hours in some cases months in some cases years into it and you get it just right and it lands that the satisfaction that comes from that is just so immense yeah you but it's boring I mean think about how boring it is to work the same joke for a year like a lot of people would find that very boring.

36:52There's a very nice word that you use where you say that excellence requires intimacy, which you define somewhat differently. This sense of being very intimate with your craft or your activity, sort of in a way that Persig was talking about, motorcycle maintenance. So there's no separation between you and the activity or the thing you're working on. And there's a nice line from this violinist we mentioned before, Hilary Hahn, who said that you have to be completely in the note or you end up overlooking things that, as she puts it, are happening too fast for thinking. I really love that. Like this, it's kind of this removal of separation.

37:27But there is something kind of very spiritual about it, right? It's like you're one, you're one with the thing that you're doing.

37:34Brad Stulberg:I get chills down my spine just hearing you read that quote. Hilary Hahn is, I think, the greatest of all time international violin soloist, three-time Grammy winner, does things that no one else has done before. And she says that when she is up there on stage, there is zero thinking happening. Now, there's a lot of thinking before she gets up on stage, and there's a lot of deliberate effort during her practice sessions. But all of that is to prepare her for this moment when she just feels her way through the note, and she's totally present, and she's totally connected to it. And I write in the book that when I use these terms, the other word that comes up is love.

38:12Brad Stulberg:And I actually think that excellence is a lot like love because what is caring deeply in repeated practice, in commitment, in consistency, in showing up, in closeness, in falling off the path and then getting back on the path. What is that if not describing love? It's describing love, it's describing excellence. And some of the greatest thinkers on this topic have said that quality and excellence is a lot like love. The founder, it's a short aside, but I think it's an interesting one. The founder of the quality movement in healthcare is a gentleman named Avedis Donabaden. So before Avedis Donabaden, there were no quality metrics for hospitals.

38:51Brad Stulberg:They didn't track infections. They didn't track outcomes. It was the Wild West. This is some decades ago. And Donabaden came along and he said, this is crazy. We track supply chains in the corporate world, but we're not tracking infection rates after surgery, we need a quality movement. And he engineered the beginning of quality in healthcare. And now it's a gazillion dollar industry, how we measure quality. And it's very meticulous. It's very rigorous. It's very analytical. All good hospitals, they have dashboards and quality metrics, and it's updated in real time. I've been in these hospitals.

39:21Brad Stulberg:It's remarkable the level of analytic rigor they bring to this. Oning his deathbed, Avedis Donovan was interviewed by a prestigious medical journal. and the interviewer asked him, after all these years, what do you have to say about quality? And you know what he said? He said, quality is love. And I just think that that's so beautiful. It's because, yeah, we need those dashboards. We need those metrics. We need all of those things to keep us on the path. But at the end of the day, the same kind of that giving it your all, that caring, that's what love is all about. And love is really satisfying and the pursuit of excellence is really satisfying.

40:00Brad Stulberg:And whether it is raising a family together or an intimate relationship or Steph Curry hitting a jump shot or building the perfect investment team in your eyes, that is all love. Well, Buffett talked about Berkshire, which he just retired from after 60 years as, you know, being lovingly built. If I'm not misquoting, I mean, it was his canvas that he painted over 60 years. And very lovingly. And he's like, if you want to paint your canvas, you go do it. But don't mess with mine. He was very kind of ornery about painting it in the way that he felt was beautiful. And I had a really interesting conversation a few weeks ago with a brilliant young investor who's very, he never really talks publicly.

40:43So there's a wonderful investor called Will Barker, who is very close to Nick Sleep and is sort of mentored by Nick. And so Will works very closely with people like Jeff Bezos, who's invested in one of his businesses. And, you know, he knows people like Jim Sinigal, who is this legendary CEO of Costco, who is also a mentor of Will's. And Will was saying to me that when he looks at people like Jeff Bezos or Jim Sinigal or Nick Sleep, it's always motivated by love. Like it all comes down to love. And it sounds sort of so soft, but there is something about that. You write about this in the book that when it's really just about, as you put it, our small, separate and protective ego that is normally worried about failure, it's a real problem.

41:34And so in some way, this idea of transcending the ego and pursuing something with excellence and quality, it sort of sounds nebulous and vague and a little highfalutin. But I guess we, I mean, you write about this in the book about how this has been something that goes through Chinese philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, it's not a new idea, right?

41:59Brad Stulberg:No, it's at the core of every ancient wisdom philosophy. The Greeks called this arete. and it was held up as maybe the utmost value in ancient Greece. In China, this was called Wu Wei in Warring States China, which was this burgeoning philosophical epoch. And Wu Wei was essentially the sense of mastery that you gain by caring deeply about a craft and pursuing it. The Buddhists call this right effort, and it is a way of going about what you're doing with full intention and in full focus. So like so many things, I think that the ancient wisdom traditions were well ahead of the science. And now in science, we call this flourishing.

42:37Brad Stulberg:And now there's a whole performance science around how do you perform your best? But at the core of it is really the sense of deep care and love, which again, all comes back to this dichotomy. Well, what is the opposite of alienation and remove and going through the motions? It's deep care and love. And to build a life around deep care and love is a good life. And to have an alienated life is not a good life and you're not going to create quality. You're not going to contribute that way. So let's talk in very practical terms in some depth about how actually to cultivate excellence, because the second half of your book is entirely devoted to building the mindsets, the practices, the habits, the routines, these core factors of excellence.

43:20And so I wanted to go through a lot of them in some detail if we can, so that our listeners and viewers leave this with a kind of tangible sense of things that they can do. Though they'll also definitely want to buy all three of these books to bed their stuff down. This conversation is not a replacement for buying your books. So obviously, as you've said, developing a real sense of your core values and building a career around your core values is important. And you write at one point, true success is living a life that is in alignment with your values, full stop. Can you give us a sense of how actually we should go about figuring out what our guiding principles are, deciding whether the project we're engaged in or the career that we're embarking on supports our values?

44:08Because so many people feel kind of misaligned and partly it's just because they're trying to make a living and they're just hustling to get by.

44:16Brad Stulberg:The way that I've come to think about values, and a lot of this is based on clinical psychology research, is they're most powerful when you have between two and five, any more than five, and none of them are really as meaningful. And any less than two, you're kind of just all focused on one thing and you never have to deal with the tension of trade-offs. There's a couple inroads to the values, and all of these are outlined in detail in the book. The one that I like is you just start with a list of 100 commonly held values and you pick out whatever ones resonate with you. Most people end up with somewhere between 15 and 30.

44:51Brad Stulberg:And then you take those 15 to 30 terms and you group like terms together. And then most people end up with somewhere between three and seven groups. And then if you've got more than five groups, you take those groups and you say, all right, which of these groups are like really core to the person that I want to be, that I aspire toward, that I want, you know, in my eulogy, I want these things mentioned. And you've got these five groups. Then you take these five groups of terms and you say, well, what's really the essence? Like what's the word that to me is going to capture this? And that becomes your value.

45:22Brad Stulberg:And then you have to define it. So it's easy to say you value presence or wisdom or intellect or health or reputation or family or spirituality, all these buzzwords. But they can't just be, you know, on a little three by five note card on your desk. You actually have to understand what they mean. because when the rubber meets the road, when you have to make decisions in your life, you can ask yourself, does this align with my value? That's the very methodical way into your values. Now, a couple of people hear this and they say, that's great. I can't wait to go through that program. Some people say, I don't even know where to begin.

45:53Brad Stulberg:Like I, you can show me a hundred words. I have no idea which ones to pick out. And there, what I would say is that if you think about some people that you really admire and then ask yourself what you admire about those people, like what is it that you admire about them. That tends to be another pretty good inroads to qualities that you value. You could also imagine yourself a decade down the road, or maybe even longer, maybe 20, 30, 40 years down the road. And you could say, if older you was looking back on current you, what would older you be proud of? What kind of person would older you want current you to be?

46:26Brad Stulberg:Another good inroads to your values. And I think that if you triangulate between those three things, most people can come up with a nice set of values and then spend some time really defining what each of those terms mean and then putting them to the litmus test of is the way that I'm living my life in alignment with those values. And what ends up happening is you get a very lofty term such as I want to be present. So your value is presence. And then making this up on the fly, let's say that someone defines presence is being fully there for the people and activities I care about. Well, if you've got your cell phone in your pocket during dinner with your family and you're constantly peeking under the table to check your email, that is in dissonance with your stated value of presence.

47:11Brad Stulberg:So if you want to live a values-aligned life, then during dinner, your phone's got to go in the living room in a drawer somewhere where it's not on your person. So you go all the way from this high-folution value of presence down to where is my phone going to be during dinner? And that's how you begin to design a values-aligned life. You talked before about Michael Joyner and his idea that you have to be a minimalist to be a maximalist. And he said to master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you need to say no to many others, which is something that Buffett always would say that, you know, the most successful people say no to almost everything.

47:43And when you think about this whole subject of trade-offs that you write about in the book, you talk a lot about the idea of balance being an illusion that a lot of us kind of fantasize about having a balanced life. And I talk about this a lot. I mean, I'm constantly feeling totally misaligned and imbalanced and then guilty about it. And I feel like I'm sort of failing on multiple fronts. I'm sort of falling short and disappointing everyone on multiple fronts. And can you talk about like this sense that as you put it, by trying to be balanced, we end up driving ourselves crazy and what maybe a better paradigm for this might look like?

48:26Brad Stulberg:balance is it's popularly conceived tends to mean you're going to devote equal proportion of time and energy to equal things. So you're going to be the best husband and wife, the best parents, the best friends. You're going to master a craft. You're going to be a great employee or a great manager or a great CEO. You're going to stay up on all the latest pop culture. You're going to have a fantasy football team. You're going to cook dinner. You're going to have a clean house. You're going to coach the kids sports teams and on and on and on. And it's sold to us as this self-help idea, but it just makes you miserable because nobody can do all those things.

48:58Brad Stulberg:And as a result of trying, you stretch yourself way too thin and you end up mediocre at best across the board. Now, that is no way to live a deeply meaningful, rich, and fulfilling life. So I think that the antidote to that is to step back and to say, hey, I'm going to have to be an adult here. And I'm going to have to realize that unlike my eight-year-old who wants to do everything, you can't do everything. You have to pick and choose. You have to make trade-offs. then you can go back to your values and you can say all right of the the areas of my life where I can devote time and energy right now what are the areas that align with my values what are the areas that I want to go all in on and most people can be highly focused on somewhere between two and three things at max at any given point of time now it's fascinating in my reporting of highly successful high performers who aren't jerks who aren't assholes like who are also good people who are deep into their career in some cases long retired from their professional life when you zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don't look balanced at all.

49:54Brad Stulberg:They appear to be going all in on one or two things. But when you zoom out and you look across the totality of their life, they actually seem quite balanced. So they have different seasons of life for emphasizing different parts of their life. Now, that's a beautiful intellectual concept. How do you actually put this into practice? And the framework that I introduce in the book is to think about identity like a house. So if you have a house and the house only has one single room in it, and that room catches fire or floods, it's extremely dislocated. You're going to have to move out of the house.

50:27Brad Stulberg:You're not going to know where you live. You're going to have to find a new house. But if you have a house that has multiple rooms in it, and one room catches fire or floods, you can go seek refuge in the other rooms while you work on resolving the fire or flood. And it's so helpful to think of our identities the same way. So if you have an identity house with only one room, only room in your identity house is fund manager, well, then when things get chaotic or something goes wrong at the fund, it's going to be extremely unmooring. But if you have a room in your identity house for husband, wife, or for parent, or for athlete, or for religious member, community member, for coffee lover, for book nerd, whatever the things may be, then you start to diversify your sense of self a little bit, which makes you much less fragile to rupture in any one room.

51:13Brad Stulberg:Now, what I like about this analogy, and some listeners might be thinking, well, Brad, you just said don't be balanced, but now you're talking about a house with different rooms. The rooms don't have to be the same sizes. You don't have to spend the same amount of time in each room. If you're pursuing excellence, you won't. You'll be spending a lot of time in one room. You just want to make sure that none of the important rooms get moldy because you don't know what season of life you're going to need to rely on those rooms in. So rather than think about perfect balance, doing everything always, I think about what are the rooms in my identity house?

51:44Brad Stulberg:What room do I want to be spending the most time in right now? And how can I make sure that the other rooms don't get moldy? And if you do that, it allows you to zero in and have these seasons of deep intensity and focus on one or two things without losing a sense of who you are in the process. I like the fact that in the acknowledgement section of the book at the end, when you were thanking your wife and kids, you said that they are the biggest room in my identity house, which only for a nerd like you or me would be the highest praise to say you're the biggest room in my identity house. the um the other thing i thought you said that was really helpful in connection to this idea of moving beyond balance was you talked about yes focusing on your main pursuit but also establishing what you call clear minimum effective doses can you talk a little bit about that why this idea of having minimum effective doses what what you mean by it what i mean by it is if you're in a season of disharmony because you're going all in on something so let's say that you're you're trying to raise a fund that's bigger than you've ever raised before.

52:49Brad Stulberg:Maybe you're trying to start a business. Well, you're going to spend the vast majority of your time and energy in the fund or the business room of your identity house, the entrepreneur room of your identity house. So then the question that you have to ask yourself is, well, how do I stay in touch with the marriage room, with the parent room, with the health room enough so that those things don't blow up on me and fall apart? And this is where the concept of a minimum effective dose comes in. So what's the minimum effective dose to keep a healthy marriage while you go all in on being an entrepreneur.

53:20Brad Stulberg:It's going to look different for everyone. For some people, it's one date night a week. For some people, it's one date night a month. For some people, it's three family dinners a week. For some people, it's five family dinners a week. For some people, it's two family dinners a week. For health, we all should take our health extremely seriously. Even if you don't give a damn about what your body looks like, all the evidence shows that if you care about your brain and your cognition, then the number one thing you can do is stay relatively fit. So maybe instead of exercising five days a week for 45 minutes during that season, you're only going to exercise three days a week for 30 minutes, but you're never going to leave it completely behind.

53:53Brad Stulberg:So the minimum effective dose is just that. It's whatever allows you to make sure that nothing important in your identity house completely goes moldy. You got to tend the room just enough so that you can come back to it. Because one of the ultimate laws, I think, of anything, I got this from fitness, but it's true in anything, is that it's easier to maintain than to build. So once you've built something, it's not that hard to maintain. You know, you can just check in every now and then and keep a quality, keep a capacity strong. But once you let it go completely, it takes a long time to build it back.

54:27You've thought a lot about how obsessive or maniacal we have to be to perform well in these super competitive pursuits, whether it's, you know, being a world-class athlete or being a world-class investor or leader of a company. And you warn against reckless, maniacal obsession. And at the same time, and some of this is semantic and linguistic, but there's a real issue here because when I look at a lot of the great investors I've written about over the years, most if not certainly a goodly proportion ended up divorced. there are people like like howard marx or charlie munger who had a lot of other interests who were very sort of broader in their reading and their thinking can you talk about this idea of of chronic obsession as a kind of recipe for disaster because i'm i'm sort of i'm sort of convinced and sort of unconvinced by your claim if you know what i mean yeah this is this is a great a great

55:27Brad Stulberg:tension and I'm glad that you're asking this question. So I think that there are different flavors of obsession. And reckless obsession to me is when you cannot stop doing what you're doing even when you want to stop. So it's very much like an addiction. So you cannot stop thinking about the work or doing the work even when you want to, even when you think actually stepping away from it would be good because it would allow you to renew, to recover, to take on new perspectives, but you're just so freaking addicted to that feeling of tightening the screwdriver. It's like this compulsion to keep going.

56:03Brad Stulberg:That kind of obsession, and not just in my reporting or my opinion in the research, that kind of obsession is not associated with high performance. It's actually associated with a degradation in performance. So that's reckless obsession. I think a healthier obsession is you care extremely deeply about what you're doing, That's at the forefront of excellence. It does take an outsized amount of your cognition, of your energy, of your time, but you still control it. It doesn't control you. And what I mean by that is that if you've got a kid that really needs you or that is sick and in the hospital and you need to step away for two hours, you can step away for those two hours.

56:42Brad Stulberg:Well, you can realize when you're in so deep that you are no longer thinking clearly because you're just fatigued and you actually need to step outside of your domain, read outside of your domain, go walk the halls of companies that are outside of your industry to get these new perspectives, you can do that. Another very helpful way to think about it is that in order to be excellent, you have to be all in. But it's very dangerous if you're all in all the time. So how do you have enough structure in your life where you can be all in? Maybe it's a 10 hour day, maybe it's a 12 hour day, maybe it's a 15 hour day, but it can't be 24 seven all the time because you're just going to burn yourself out.

57:20Brad Stulberg:and I think that what ends up happening is sometimes we have these stories of reckless obsession in documentaries that get made but if you really follow like the long arc of these people's careers they tend not to end so well or they tend to accomplish a lot of what they did in spite of their reckless obsession not because of it and I think most very successful high performers somewhere along the way they figure out that their obsession is trending towards the reckless variety and they figure out how to control it so it doesn't control them. So you're right. It is a little bit of just linguistical difference, but there's an important nuance, which is not don't be obsessed, but it's do you control your obsession or does your obsession control you?

58:03Brad Stulberg:And that's a fine line for high performers. And it's very hard to stay on the right side of that line. And the stakes are extremely high because you cross over it. And the research shows that it's associated with anxiety, depression, and unethical behavior. I mean, Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos was like fully obsessed with her company and it did not take her to great places. You write quite a bit about the importance of having periods of rest and renewal as kind of a key part of being very successful. What have you found in terms of your study of all of these hugely successful people, but also in terms of the science about what works best when we're trying to step away and get some rest and renewal.

58:47Brad Stulberg:I think that if you're a highly driven pusher, and if you have these obsessive qualities, you have to stop thinking of rest as something that is separate from the work and start thinking of rest as an integral part of the work. So it has to be built into your program. Athletes know this extremely well. Athletes have recovery days. they have rest days they are built into the program so they're not separate from the training they're a part of their training and they're strategically placed so that they can adapt to the hard work and i think for cognitive and intellectual pursuits we need to build in the equivalent of rest breaks and rest days now again it's going to look very different depending on the person their phase of life and what they're trying to do i have come to believe that it's best to work a six-day week for me so five days i'm too obsessed i got it you know there's not enough hours in the day.

59:34Brad Stulberg:But if I start working seven days a week, what I gain in additional working time, I lose about twofold in the quality of my work because for me having one day where I really step away, it allows me to come back so much more refreshed with so much more creativity and intensity and insight. Throughout the day, we can take these short micro breaks. It might be a 10-minute walk. There's fascinating research out of Stanford that shows that just after a 10-minute walk, creativity improves by between 40 and 60%. So when you're feeling stuck, there's this tendency to lean in and try to solve the problem.

1:00:07Brad Stulberg:Often the best thing that you can do is step away and take a walk. We inherently know this because everyone has had the experience of being stuck on a problem and then the answer pops into their mind in the shower or on their commute home or while they're walking the dog or in the gym, so on and so forth, because it's only when you finally step away that your subconscious mind can come online and do the work of solving some of those thorny problems. So it's a long window to the ultimate answer, which is I think that you cannot think of rest and renewal as something that you do at expense of being a great performer.

1:00:37Brad Stulberg:You have to think of it as part of being a great performer. My long meandering walks are not something I do at the expense of being a writer. That is an integral part of me being a good writer. And I know this because 40 % of my best sentences, I didn't write at the keyboard. I wrote on walks. I carry a notebook with me. I jot that stuff down so I don't lose it. And then idea if this book came on a walk. It did. And the funny thing is, I was actually, I was working on my prior book, Master of Change. I was working on the promotional plans. So the book had been written, but it was before that book came out.

1:01:10Brad Stulberg:And I was stuck. I was working on an op-ed for the New York Times, an adaptation from the book, and I was wholly stuck on the op-ed. So I said, I'm going to practice what I preach. I'm going to go take a walk. And on that walk, I didn't solve the op-ed problem, but I had the idea for this book. And here we are having the conversation. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform.

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1:04:28Brad Stulberg:Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify and start hearing. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash WSB. Go to shopify.com slash WSB. That's shopify.com slash WSB. All right, back to the show. I thought it was interesting that you look at some of the science of this and I'll no doubt gobble this, but I think you were saying that when you do things like walking or a light swim or light yoga or something, it requires enough coordination that it occupies the parts of the brain that are responsible for the kind of effortful thinking that we use when we're writing or, you know, analyzing stocks or whatever it might be.

1:05:18So it allows your mind to wander. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah.

1:05:22Brad Stulberg:For the longest time, the researchers thought this was a blood flow issue and that by taking a walk or swimming or exercising, you had increased blood flow that helped with the creativity and problem solving. But the mechanics, the physiology of that just never really made sense. And it also doesn't explain the phenomenon of why we have these thoughts when we're driving or in the shower. Because you're not having increased blood flow when you're sitting still or standing still in the shower or certainly not in a car. But what all these activities have in common is just what you said. They're fairly implicit.

1:05:52Brad Stulberg:So you don't have to think too hard about walking or showering or driving, but you have to think just enough about what you're doing to occupy those effortful thinking parts of your brain without stressing them too much. And it's that perfect mix that allows your default mode network, which is just a fancy way of saying your subconscious mind to come online and have those breakthrough aha moments. You see this in a micro sense when you take a 10 minute walk or a five minute shower or you're on the subway home from work, but you also see this in more macro cycles. One of my favorite stories from the book is Lin-Manuel Miranda, the playwright in The Heights in Hamilton, the smash Broadway hit.

1:06:28Brad Stulberg:The idea for Hamilton came to him on a vacation. He credits taking a vacation, stepping away from work, reading Chernow's biography of Hamilton, not reading it because he was doing research for a play, reading it because it was a biography that was recommended to him from a friend. And on vacation, it just clicked that, oh, I should reenact Hamilton as a Broadway musical. Imagine if Miranda wouldn't have allowed himself to take a break because he would have said, I need to push. I want to be a world-class musical director and playwright. I can't take two weeks off. But by taking those two weeks off, he had the biggest breakthrough of his career.

1:07:04Brad Stulberg:And I'm sure investors that are listening to this show have all had the experience of just having that rain-making idea that came when you finally took a break. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember a friend of mine who's a very good hedge fund manager saying to me at one point, yeah, I'm planning to go on this 23-day meditation retreat. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of meditation. There's a lot of walking in nature. Yeah, I think that's one reason why I find investors, the best investors, so interesting is that they're so pragmatic in basically taking advantage of anything that works. They don't really care about dogma.

1:07:39They're like, okay, if the science shows that this will help, I'm just going to take it. But one of the things I was also struck by in your book in terms of different tools that we can use to become successful, that also is something that investors use a great deal, is this whole idea of small steps that you take regularly that lead to big gains, which is obviously something that is very much about the law of compounding, as you explain in the book. Can you talk about this sense of the importance of consistency, the importance of breaking down big goals into smaller steps? Yeah.

1:08:18Brad Stulberg:I mean, this will be easy for your audience, I think, because if you want to generate wealth and you want to, you know, let's say you want to go from 1 million to$10 million, you can make one enormous bet and hope for the best, or you could make a bunch of small investments over time and have those small, smart investments with a high probability of return compound. And maybe you've got a couple of listeners that have made that one big bet, but my guess is most people would say, no, you take the compounding route. Like that's how you generate wealth. That's how you make progress in your portfolio.

1:08:51Brad Stulberg:That same law applies to making progress in anything. I think that we all too often fall for like having a heroic day or a heroic week or being super intense when what leads to sustainable lasting excellence is really a resolute, relentless consistency. So it's showing up day in and day out and making deposits in the bank. And part and parcel of this is what you do on your bad days. I call it raising the floor. I think what you do on your bad days is arguably more important than what you do on your great days. Because great days are magical. For all that we know about human performance, it's very hard to engineer a great day.

1:09:25Brad Stulberg:You know, if you commit to the fundamentals and you show up day in and day out, they're just going to happen. And when they do, you enjoy them and you ride the wave. But bad days, we have a lot of agency over. So when we're not performing our best, when we're not feeling great, how can we make those bad days just a little bit better? Instead of spiraling and catastrophizing, how can we nip those bad days in the bud? Or how can we prevent a bad day from turning into a bad week? How can we prevent a bad week from turning into a bad month? In investment terms, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's kind of like in a really rough market, you're going to lose.

1:09:55Brad Stulberg:But how can you lose less than the competition? Or how can you minimize your losses? And over time, the fun that can minimize their losses in rough markets performs just as well as the fun that crushes a good market. Anyone can crush a good market. Anyone can perform great on their great days. But a part of excellence is also getting a little bit more out of your bad days. And that's all wrapped up in this notion of consistency little by little becomes a lot. You just constantly chip away. And the day-to-day work can seem mundane. And the day-to-day progress sometimes isn't even measurable. But the compounding effect gets you to something huge.

1:10:29Yeah, I wrote a chapter on high performance habits among great investors in Rich or Wiser, Happier. And the emblem of it, in many ways, is Tom Gaynor, who runs the Markel Corporation, has about 20 ,000 employees. And I always remember calling him during COVID to fact check the book and asking him how he was handling it, what he was doing. And very characteristically, he was going into the office every day. There were only something like nine people in the office, I think in their headquarters, but he felt he needed to show up because they had lots of people who were out in their businesses, exposed in difficult situations.

1:11:05And I said, so how are you handling it? He said, one foot in front of the other. And I said, can you explain that? Can you unpack that? And he said, no. He said, that is what I'm doing. One foot in front of the other. And he was very insistent on it. And he's a very lovely guy. And there was something kind of, it was like he was not going to play my game. He was like, no, no, this is what I'm doing. And there was something about that indomitable persistence, just sort of showing up again and again, which I think I see in all of the great investors, but also, you know, it seems to run through your personal philosophy.

1:11:39Like I feel like when you're writing about this, you're not writing about this kind of showing up day in, day out in an intellectual way. I feel like there's blood on the page when you're writing this. You're writing it from personal

1:11:52Brad Stulberg:experience. Yeah. I'm glad that comes through because I think that I want to become known for my consistency in all facets of life. As a writer, as an athlete, as a father and as a husband, more than anything, I want to be known for my consistency. And what that means is you just show up. There's no negotiation. You show up and you get what you have to get out of yourself on the day and then you sleep at night and then you rinse and repeat and you just do that for a decade and you're going to be great. Everyone wants the secret to greatness, but the secret is there is no secret. Like you have a process, you have a system, you pick a thing, you do that thing for a decade, you learn from the greats, you read a lot of books, you know, you stay endlessly curious and then a decade later, you start to get pretty dang good at that thing.

1:12:38Brad Stulberg:And so few people do it because they're all chasing the secret, but consistency and patience, like that is the secret. Yeah. Tom Gaynor said at a certain point, he said he, I was never number one at anything, but he said at some point you become number one ish because so many people have fallen by the wayside. And if you just keep plugging away, but I liked it. You had something on, you posted something on Instagram recently where you said in hindsight, the year of my life I'm most proud of in a very odd way is the year I was pretty severely depressed and made it through. And you talk about the importance of showing up when you are in a hole and the current is going against you.

1:13:15And I think we talked about this last time you came on the podcast that like, you know, when you went through a period of depression and you just kept plugging away.

1:13:24Brad Stulberg:That's right. And it wasn't a white knuckling plugging away necessarily. Like I had a wonderful therapist that was holding my hand as I kept plugging away. But at a certain point, I realized that there wasn't going to be any quick fix to this. I was just going to have to show up and refuse to quit. And when you're depressed, refusing to quit means like you just, you value your life more than the loss of your life and you show up as best as you can and you trust the process of therapy and of time and of making these little tweaks that in hindsight seems so small, but when you're in the thick of a depression seem major and it's just this, it's a commitment to show up even when it feels hard and when it feels impossible.

1:14:03Brad Stulberg:And I wouldn't wish a clinical depression on my worst enemy. Wouldn't wish it on anyone. There are no silver linings. I don't like that term because it's just pain and suffering. However, if you're fortunate enough to get to the other side of that, it certainly makes showing up on a normal bad day a lot easier. Yeah. You talk also, I think this is one reason why I like the book so much is that, you know, as you said in an email to me once, in a way, it's a humane manifesto. There's something, it's like, yes, you want us to do really well and to push hard and be disciplined and driven. but there is an emphasis on kindness.

1:14:39And I was struck by a very nice line where you talked about fierce self-discipline benefits from fierce self-kindness. Can you talk about the importance of combining self-discipline and self-kindness? Because I think people, I mean, I drive myself very hard and I'm kind of tormented by it a lot of the time. And I was joking to a friend of mine who I share an office with. I came in and he said, well, it's good that you'll be in your office so we can say rude things, bad things about you. And I was like, nothing you can say about me is going to be as bad as what I would say about myself. And so talk about, apologies for being so self referential, but talk about the importance that you've discovered of infusing fierce self-kindness in this process of trying to become the best version of ourselves.

1:15:27All right.

1:15:28Brad Stulberg:So you go to a bookstore and you see these two shelves. And one shelf is the self-discipline shelf. And these are books that are written by Navy SEALs and Marines and football coaches. And they say, you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. You have to take accountability. The world is a cruel, unforgiving place, and you have to exert your agency in it. There's another shelf that is the meditation yoga teacher self. And those books all say, you have to be really kind to yourself. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, which is all the more reason that you have to be kind to yourself and let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya.

1:16:05Brad Stulberg:And these are pitted against each other as opposites. But in my study of excellence, what I found is that the people who really embody excellence and get the best out of themselves, they take those two qualities and they combine them. So it is true that no one is going to do your bidding for you. And it is true that you need to have personal responsibility and you have to take accountability. And sometimes you do have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. All of that is true. To be excellent requires fierce self-discipline. But the only way you're going to be able to sustain that level of self-discipline is by also learning to be kind to yourself and have your own back.

1:16:41Brad Stulberg:Because pushing yourself hard, doing hard things, being someone who cares deeply, we talked about the vulnerability involved, caring deeply about starting a company or a fund or being an Olympic athlete and feeling like you're letting down your wife or your kids at the same time, or vice versa, feeling like you're letting down your colleagues and your coach. like it's really really hard it is extremely hard to try to be excellent and if you can't acknowledge that and be kind to yourself then you're never going to last because if every time you step into the arena and fail or make a misstep or come up short you judge yourself then you beat yourself up eventually you're going to stop it's not fun you're going to stop stepping into the arena altogether so the biggest badasses i know like ultra marathon champions head of marine battalions, like just true badasses in every sense of the word.

1:17:31Brad Stulberg:When you peel back the onion, these people also have immense self-kindness and immense compassion for themselves because they realize that what they are trying to do is hard and they've learned to have their own back. So it's not a self-kindness or self-compassion that lets go of accountability and says anything goes. It's the self-kindness and self-compassion that realizes that doing hard things is hard and that you can have your own back as you try to do those hard things. going back through this kind of list of different ways in which in which we can develop excellence another thing that was very striking to me is to have clarity about what you call the main things and keeping the main things the main things when you look at you know people like um i i guess it was um kaylee humphries the bobsled champion or any any of these other great athletes can you talk about this ability to take a few central things that are key and then break them down into micro steps.

1:18:33And so the process becomes the dominant part of what they're focusing on.

1:18:40Brad Stulberg:So I think that excellence requires a process mindset. And what that means is, yes, you pick a big goal. And once you pick that big goal, then the next step is immediately to ask yourself, what are the levers that will help me accomplish that big goal? What are the things I need to do? And what are the things that I actually need to do versus what are the things that everyone else is doing? And those can look very different. And once you define the things that actually bend the needle, for each of those, you want to ask yourself, like, all right, well, how do I break it down into these incremental steps?

1:19:10Brad Stulberg:So in the case of the bobsledder, Callie Humphreys, she's training for an Olympic cycle every four years. And what she told me is that, well, you break that four years down into two by two year blocks. And each of those two years has a purpose. The first two years is foundation building. The second two years is sharpening the knife. Then you take each of those two-year blocks and you break it down into a year. And each year has a purpose. Then you take each year and you break it down to a quarter. And each quarter has an emphasis. And then you take each quarter, you break it down to a month. And each month has a goal.

1:19:35Brad Stulberg:And then each month gets broken down to a week. And each week has an objective. And then each week gets broken down to a day. And each day has a workout. And how do I become the best bobsledder in the world? It's by executing the workout in front of me today. That is the core of a process mindset. So yes, you need that big goal, but then man, you have to break it down into these small component chunks that you actually can execute on day in and day out. Keep the main things the main things. In today's world, we talked about this a little bit earlier. There are so many distractions and bright and shiny objects and hacks and secrets and quick fixes and supplements and on and on and on that you can spend 99 % of your time and energy chasing all of these answery things and not actually focusing on the fundamentals when it's the fundamentals that are going to move you towards excellence.

1:20:21Brad Stulberg:This expression first came to me from an old-time throwing coach named Dan John. He's coached a whole bunch of world-class discus, shot put, and hammer throwers. And he said about 10 years ago in the gym, he started to notice something really interesting, which is he'd go to the gym and all these people, they'd be spending 30 minutes foam rolling and stretching and mobilizing and doing breath work and all these elaborate warm-ups. And then when it came time to train, they trained for 15 minutes and they wouldn't even train that hard. And then they'd go home because they had to do all their recovery.

1:20:53Brad Stulberg:They had to take their supplements and put on their Norma Tech compression stockings and on and take their cold plunge and on and on and on. And he said that they were majoring in the minors. They were doing all this stuff that's supposed to support the training at the expense of the actual training. And it's just really important not to fall into that trap. You never want to invert the period. Like some of this stuff actually does make a difference at the margin, but it only makes a difference if you're actually spending 99.99 % of the time on the fundamentals. And this is true for every craft.

1:21:21Brad Stulberg:Every craft has tried and true fundamentals. And then every craft has a whole bunch of kabuki that people try to sell you to make a buck. And you got to tune out the kabuki that people sell you to try to make a buck and nail your fundamentals. Yeah, there's a lovely, I wrote a chapter on simplicity and there's a lovely thing from Joel Greenblatt, one of the great investors who said, yeah, value a business and buy it for less. And he's like, that's the whole thing. That's it, right? But within that, there's probably tons of complexity to do that correct. Yeah. But that's it. That is the whole thing.

1:21:54Brad Stulberg:And once you lose sight of that, then again, you start to run into all sorts of problems. You have a very structured framework to your own routines that I would love you to explain where you divided into three daily, three weekly, and three monthly practices. Can you talk about this? You said, I think at one point in the book that you found that everyone who's adopted this framework has found it incredibly helpful, if not life-changing. Can you take us through what you do and how you kind of work back from what the big things are that are the main things in your life to then structuring this framework of three daily, weekly, and monthly practices?

1:22:37Yeah.

1:22:37Brad Stulberg:First, let's talk about the problem I'm trying to overcome here, which is I think that we're in this moment where everyone wants to find the perfect routine. And what ends up happening is people build these truly, these like 19 step morning routines where you have to do 19 things before 7am. And the goal is not to be the world champion of having an elaborate routine. The goal is to be a great athlete, a great parent, a great fund manager, a great physician, a great musician, a great leader, a great coach, so on and so forth. So your routine shouldn't stress you out. Like you shouldn't work for your routine.

1:23:09Brad Stulberg:Your routine should work for you. That's the first thing. So the goal is not an elaborate routine. The goal is to get yourself ready to do what you need to do. In my case, that's really simple. Like I want to be the best writer I can be. I want to be the best coach I can be. And I want to be the best family man I can be. Like those are the big main things in my life. So rather than have all these routines that I drive myself nuts trying to adhere to, I simply say, well, what are the three things I need to do every day that will put me in a position to do that? What are the three things I need to do once a week?

1:23:39Brad Stulberg:And then what are the three things I need to do once a month? And for me, if it's helpful to go through to get really concrete, those three things every day, pretty simple. It's an hour to an hour and a half of deep focus work. So distraction-free, phone in the other room, making effortful, tangible progress on a project I care about. It's at least 45 minutes of movement. Sometimes that's going to the gym and having a formal training session, but that can also be taking a walk. And then it's not fighting evening sleepiness. So we've got young kids. The kids are tired. They're in bed by eight. Often I get tired at nine.

1:24:13Brad Stulberg:I don't fight the sleepiness. I just, I go to bed. Sleep is really important. That's it. If I exercise for 45 minutes, not even exercise, if I move my body for 45 minutes, if I make sure to block off an hour to 90 minutes of deep focus work, on good days, I get more, but that's the minimum. And if I don't fight evening sleepiness and I do that 70 to 80 % of the time, day to day, I'm really good. Then I zoom out and I ask myself, what are my three weekly practices? And these for me are a digital Sabbath, which is an idea I stole from Brad Feld. which essentially says once a week, I'm not going to have access to my phone or my computer for somewhere between 12 and 24 hours.

1:24:52Brad Stulberg:And that's my time for rest and renewal. It is one longer walk outside, ideally two or three, but over an hour where I can really let that creative engine start to churn and reconnect with my creativity in that way. And then it's plans with friends. Is someone that has a tendency to become obsessed and a little bit of a workaholic, something that goes by the wayside is social life. And I don't need to hang out with friends every night. I don't need to be the star of the party, but like once a week, it's good to get together with friends. Doesn't need to be an elaborate social outing. It can be training with my buddy at the gym.

1:25:23Brad Stulberg:It can be going to dinner with another couple, but just some social interaction is good for me once a week. And then I have these three monthly practices. And those monthly practices are some way to reconnect with myself in a spiritual way. For me, that's often listening to music, engaging in my neighborhood or my community. So going to a community event, something like that and then longer than an hour out in nature so maybe it's a half a day hike or going camping or just something to get out in nature to really reset again if i just do those things then i tend to be in a pretty good spot so rather than try to have all this elaborate complex stuff it's like what are the basics and honestly the the the monthly stuff i don't always hit that but if i can hit the daily and the weekly stuff i know that i'm going to have a strong foundation from which to perform my best.

1:26:13You talked about this idea of these blocks of deep focus. And obviously this is inspired by the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, who you credit in a footnote. He wrote this great book in 2016. One of my best friends too, so I have to credit him. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about, because I know that you're great friends. Like, what have you learned from being friends with Cal, A, about why he's so successful and why he's so productive, given that he also writes to The New Yorker and he writes these excellent books and he's also a professor and a very successful guy. Like, you've had this unusual access to the guy who sort of, you know, is at the forefront of writing about deep focus.

1:26:56And at the same time, I think you mentioned in your footnote about the book that when he first published that book, distraction was mostly in the workplace and now it's in every corner of our lives. So can you just give us a sense of how you've taken these ideas from Cal, who also read the manuscript of your book, and how you've kind of applied it in your own life to figure out how to do deep work.

1:27:19Brad Stulberg:So it's something that Cal and I obviously talk about all the time. And that's right. When Cal wrote Deep Work, it was predominantly a book, not predominantly, it was exclusively a book about knowledge workers and how to start to deal with, at the time it was email. It wasn't even really Slack, but how to deal with email and all the ubiquitous distraction in knowledge work and carve out times for this deep, effortful, undistracted work to make progress on big projects. And since then, what I've realized in conversation with Cal is that it's no longer deep work, it's really deep living. And Cal's actually working on a book that'll come out, I think, a year or a year and a half from now called The Deep Life, which is very similar to Pursuing an Excellent Life.

1:27:55Brad Stulberg:There's a lot of complementary nature between our ideas. Unsurprisingly, we talk for hours and hours every week about these ideas. But I think that deep work is important, but it's really just deep connection, deep effort. it's that lack of alienation. It's saying no to distraction. What Cal did really well is he just made it so concrete. He said, put it on your calendar, block off an hour, two hours, one day a week, two days a week, three days a week, every day, whatever it is. And during that time, have a goal that you want to work toward and work toward that goal. And expect the first 10 to 15 minutes to feel a little bit rough and edgy and face some resistance.

1:28:34Brad Stulberg:And just be disciplined, stick to it, get through that resistance. And that's how you actually make progress. It's so important because I can pull up my email and see I'm behind 100 emails. But responding to emails is not the main thing of my job. I can pull up social media and say that, oh, I'm not posting enough. But posting on social media is not the main thing of my job. The main thing of my job is to read and write. But if I don't block off time, undistracted time to read and write, I'm never going to read and write because all this other stuff is going to encroach on it. So it's completely twisted and inverted to try to fit reading and writing in, that's the main thing.

1:29:09Brad Stulberg:Everything should fit in around reading and writing. But if I don't block off deep work time to read and write, it's not going to happen. This is from the practice of groundedness, a prior book that I wrote. I wrote that your calendar is a moral document. Don't tell me about what you value. Show me your calendar. Show me how you spend your time. So the things that are important to us, we need to create time for undistracted focus on those things. And how do you structure your physical environment so that it supports this? Because I know that, for example, the way that you put things on your desk has significance to you or the photos you have, the memorabilia, the sculptures and the like.

1:29:49What are you doing in terms of your physical environment to support these good habits and And also to keep the technology at bay so that it doesn't just push you into a very superficial life.

1:30:04Brad Stulberg:The most important thing I'm doing is what you said last, is keeping the technology at bay. So right now, the room that I'm recording in, my email client is completely closed. You're on my full screen. And my phone, I'd have to go through my garage and down a floor to get to my phone. So there's no temptation. There's no urge to check the phone. And even if I don't check it, the phone's not there to remind me of all the emails that are undoubtedly stacking up because I want to be here fully focused with you. I write the same way. So when I sit down to write, when I sit down to read in the library in my office, there's no digital device in there.

1:30:36Brad Stulberg:Because even if I don't check it, the amount of cognition and willpower it requires not to check would encroach on what I'm doing and how I'm thinking. So that's the most important is what is there an absence of? There's an absence of digital distraction. Then what do I surround myself with is essentially, like you said, objects and artifacts that bring out quality. It's art from my favorite sculptor, who's a close friend, Emil Alzamora. It's a picture of Robert Persig in a first edition copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because I'm inspired by that book and I want to carry that torch.

1:31:06Brad Stulberg:I have a banner that sits above my desk that says, give a damn. And it reminds me that I need to care deeply about what I'm doing. I've got another banner from my favorite recording artist, Jason Isboe. of it says lucky to have the work. So whenever I get frustrated about those emails I have to respond to, I can remind myself, I'm actually very lucky to have this work. And the way that we set up our physical environment can really have an impact on our ability to settle into work and to continue to work in a values aligned way. It's back to something we talked about earlier is we live, the default ecosystem is very discordant with excellence in our values.

1:31:38Brad Stulberg:So what I try to do is I try to set up a micro ecosystem that I work in that has that gravitational pull toward excellence and toward my values. I love this. I see this again and again with really successful investors, the way they structure their physical environment. Like I have this friend, Arnold Vandenberg, who's a much older investor who I often talk about. He's a great role model to me. And he would have photos of everybody who's inspired him. And then if you kind of invert that, Brian Lawrence, I remember once telling me, is a terrific hedge fund manager in all of his four different offices in various houses and offices where he works.

1:32:17He has a sculpture of Lenin, I think, to remind him of the dangers of dogma, to remind him to kind of think more open-mindedly. So I think this whole idea of how you structure your environment is really important. I was also really struck when you were talking just then about reminding yourself to appreciate the work that you do and you're good fortune in doing this. And I battle with this a lot. And I came and talked to my wife about this last night after I was reading your book, but I feel like so much of my time, I'm doing my work through gritted teeth, even though I actually love the work and I'm incredibly lucky to do it.

1:32:53And I managed to make it, you know, often because I'm overscheduled and too busy, as you would put it, I think a joyless grind. Can you talk about the importance of injecting a sense of joy in the process? Because my sense is that this is something you see really in all of the most successful people that you've interviewed and studied over the years.

1:33:19Brad Stulberg:That's right. Not every day has to be joyful. Not every moment has to be joyful, but the totality of the pursuit should be full of joy. If it's not fun, you're not going to last and you're not going to perform your best. So you better learn how to have fun. What ends up happening is that there's all these joy-killing vampires. And it's exactly what you said. It tends to be when we're overscheduled or when we let the minor cannibalize the majors. We stop keeping the main thing the main thing and we start to become resentful. It's got all these emails. I'm overscheduled. I'm busy. I'm tight. I'm pressured.

1:33:51Brad Stulberg:And no one works well from that. So I actually think that a loss of joy is a really good first sign to evaluate how are you spending your time and energy. And when you do this, what you're inevitably going to find is you're spending too much time and energy on superfluous bullshit and not enough time on the main thing. Now, if you're not finding joy when you're doing the main thing, then there's some more serious questions to ask. Are you doing the main thing in the right way? Are you doing it with the right people? So on and so forth. But another one of these misnomers, kind of like fear, self-discipline and fear, self-kindness going together is that intensity and joy can't coexist.

1:34:22Brad Stulberg:And that's utter bullshit. There is so much joy to be found in working intensely toward a meaningful goal. There's a a famous coach, Mark Wetmore, he coached the Colorado Buffaloes cross-country team during their heyday. And he said to be serious is one of the greatest joys there is. And what I get out of that is, again, to care deeply about something, to give something your all, to try to master a craft, like it's an extremely joyful thing. If it aligns with your values, again, if you're mimicking someone else, these are constant themes. If you're alienated from what you're doing, then it's not going to be very joyful.

1:34:52Brad Stulberg:But if it aligns with your values, you should love it. There's this influencer that people like. His name's David Goggins. He gives a great hype speech, but he's always angry and he's always suffering. And I just think that is the wrong approach to greatness. And to his credit, David Goggins is a great social media marketer. He's got an enormous following. But he's not world-class at anything. He's never won a race. The people that are actually winning races, they're not always angry and suffering. They love what they do. They love the craft. They find joy in it. That doesn't mean that they're not intense.

1:35:21Brad Stulberg:It doesn't mean they're not fierce. It doesn't mean that sometimes they can't put a chip on their shoulder, but they have reverence for what they do and they find it fun and joyful. And once we lose that, that's again, that's a sign to reevaluate how we're spending our time and energy and the people around us. I thought it was interesting you had an example of Greg Popovich. I think it was the coach of the San Antonio Spurs organizing these very elaborate dinners as a way to kind of celebrate when there were big wins, but also when there were tough losses actually to get together. Can you talk about that?

1:35:53Like how actually in some ways celebrating completion or having these rituals or having these get togethers is kind of an important part of building a life that goes beyond it just being an empty grind.

1:36:05Brad Stulberg:So I love that you ask about this. There's a chapter in the book on rituals and completion. And excellence is a never ending path. When you get to the top of one mountain, there's another mountain to climb. But that doesn't mean that it's not important to inject milestones and points of completion along the way. Because without those milestones and points of completion, it can very much feel like we're just kind of floating amorphously and every accomplishment bleeds into the next. And we never get to step back and take stock of the effort that we exerted and the person that we're becoming and the success or failure that we had.

1:36:39Brad Stulberg:So Greg Popovich is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, like you mentioned, and the NBA season is long. It is a grind to 82 games. And if you're lucky, you make the playoffs, it's more. And what ends up happening is this thing that should be the most joyful thing in the world, coaching and playing on the biggest stage at the highest level in the planet becomes this joyless grind. You're just on the road. You're going from city to city or you're constantly playing. And Popovich realized this and he's one of the greatest coaches. I would argue probably the greatest coach across any sport, the most winning basketball coach ever that we can say definitively in what Popovich said is like, no, no, no.

1:37:11Brad Stulberg:I got to break this season up. Like we need some, we need some completion rituals because otherwise we're just going to wait till the end of the season. And then we're already schedule these, as you mentioned, these elaborate team dinners. And the point of the team dinners was to just mark time to step back from the grind and to reflect on the relationships that the teammates were forging and how the team was playing and where they were going. And what I take out of this is that we can all do this in our own life. Like if we are type A pushers, we're going to go, go, go. And a blind spot is that we go, go, go so fast that we never step back, to pause, to celebrate, to savor, to grieve, to learn, to reflect.

1:37:47Brad Stulberg:And much like we need to think about rest as a part of the work, I also think if the goal is to not just be great for a year, but to be great for a career, we need to think about having these completion rituals as a part of the work. And what's nice about them is we get to define our own completion. It can be the day that you finish raising the fund. It can be the next big hire that you make. It can be one year of being in business. It doesn't matter what it is per se. what matters is that you pick something with meaningful and then you step back out of the normal day-to-day grind to really reflect on it and to celebrate it.

1:38:20There was one last thing I wanted to ask you before I let you go, Brad, because you've been very generous with your time here, which is you talk a lot about this idea from Persig of the person we're becoming as we work on this task, as we work on the process of becoming excellent at something. And you write at one point this reminder that as we're focusing on becoming better, you say better is also about becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser. And there's an aspect of the book that is a sort of spiritual quest, I would say, where there's a part of you that's trying to build a more soulful life that includes not just lifting 500 pounds as you do when you go to the gym, but also becoming kinder and wiser as well as stronger.

1:39:03Can you give us your thoughts on that? Because I feel like there's a kind of unspoken aspect to this book and the practice of groundedness and masters of change where you're working your way through these books and through your coaching and through your interviews towards becoming the sort of person you want to be?

1:39:23Brad Stulberg:I mean, what's the point of it all? Like we're all going to die one day. And I think the point of it all is to try to love deeply and make a contribution. And I think that if you go about what you're doing with care and intention and you make yourself vulnerable in the process of doing it, you can't help but become stronger, kinder, and wiser. Because life is hard. And trying to do big things is hard. And in the process, it's going to make you softer. It makes you into a humble badass. You can't help but be a humble badass because you realize that it's really tough. And you realize that other people that are stepping in the arena are going through the same challenges.

1:40:03Brad Stulberg:So on the one hand, you become very hardened by the pursuit of excellence. But on the other hand, it softens you quite a bit. And you get to live in that paradox of being a humble badass. And I think that if we're not working towards those qualities, those more intrinsic characteristics, then what's the point of it all? I mean, you could tell me that I could write 10 bestselling books, but if I'm a miserable asshole, I don't really care. I want to be a good person. And when you think of this kind of ideal of being a humble badass or a good person who's also a great writer or whatever. Like, is there someone among the hundreds of people you've interviewed over the years who you look at and you think, yeah, let me be more like them?

1:40:44George Saunders.

1:40:45Brad Stulberg:Don't even have to finish the sentence. George Saunders is, and I've never actually met him. I've just studied his work and I've heard him in other interviews. We've exchanged emails. George Saunders is the best at what he does. He is the best short story writer and I think the best living novelist. If you haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo, read it. Just make sure you read my book first, because if you read his book first, then read mine, I'm in trouble. He's just the ultimate craftsperson. And there's nothing romantic about how he works. He lays brick by brick. That's how he teaches writing. He is the opposite of the Shakespearean lightning strikes passion idea.

1:41:20Brad Stulberg:He is a craftsperson, right? He chisels away. It is extremely hard and meticulous process. But he is the warmest, just most kind softest person and i am utterly convinced that is because his work is so hard and the fact that his work is so hard has made him so soft and so kind and he combines these two qualities he is the master crafts person the best in the world at the short story format and whatever the opposite of arrogant is just like humble beyond belief and kind and warm and giving so when i think about how i would like to be perceived back to core values bringing some of these themes together, I often think about George Saunders.

1:42:00Brad Stulberg:He's also been happily married for 30 plus years. He lives off in nature. He's not really one for the scene. He just cares deeply about his craft and being a good person. So he's an enormous role model to me. That's beautiful. That's a lovely note on which to end. I feel guilty now because I did finish your book, but I didn't finish Lincoln in the Bardo because I got distracted. And so I read a chunk of it and then forgot I was - Oh no, there you go. Well, then maybe that's a plug for my book i think you might be the first person ever to have said that so i'll take it i sometimes look on amazon and you know the ratings for my book would be better than like some book by tulsa and you're like yes i'm better than warren he's also you know so yeah i wouldn't take too seriously uh these ratings but i but i really enjoyed your book the um all three of your books and it's it's clear that you're taking a great deal of care with them and that you're you you are in I'm carrying the torch for these role models of yours, like Robert Persig.

1:42:59And so I wish you much continued strength, or as my daughter Madeline would say, soft strength, which is a sort of nice combination of these qualities. So thank you so much, Brad. It's been a real treat chatting with you again. Thank you, William. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.

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