Episode 472: Brad Stulberg The Pursuit of Excellence
Brad Stulberg researches, writes, and coaches on health, well-being, and sustainable excellence. He is the bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and co-author of Peak Performance. Stulberg regularly contributes to the New York Times, and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Outside Magazine, Forbes, and other outlets. He also serves as the co-host of The Growth Equation podcast and is on faculty at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health. In his coaching practice, he works with executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, and athletes on their mental skills and overall well-being. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Episode Highlights
00:47 Podcast Introduction and Announcements
02:39 Exploring the Concept of Excellence
04:14 The Pursuit of Excellence in Daily Life
05:15 The Value of the Process Over the Outcome
06:50 Personal Stories and Examples of Excellence
09:55 The Role of Identity in Pursuing Excellence
15:06 The Importance of Friction and Resistance
27:37 Balancing Passion and Other Life Aspects
33:12 Solo vs. Group Running: Finding the Balance
35:30 Learning from Failure: The Growth Mindset
36:33 David Goggins: Motivation vs. Mastery
42:59 Pursuing Excellence in Hobbies and Careers
54:44 Breaking Down Big Goals into Small Steps
57:46 Curiosity and the Brave New World Mindset
59:17 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Alright, Brad, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Hey, Zach. It's great to see you again and to be back. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to have you on. I think we have a fun topic to dive into today around just this idea of excellence or mastery and how it made it go about with our day within our daily lives.
And kinda that goes into what is the modern world, so to speak. That's right. It is something that I've been thinking about. You could say for my entire adult life, I built a philosophy of life around the pursuit of excellence. But particularly now in today's modern world with just ubiquitous distraction it feels challenging but we still have agency and we can exert that agency to, to build excellence into our lives.
Yeah, I think with modern day we have this almost like gluttony of options, so to speak, where we just have a lot of different things that we could be doing that in the past maybe wouldn't have had access to, just due to limitations and [00:01:00] adventures or limitations of time because things like survival or, just getting by was such a big part of the day there.
There wasn't really. A whole lot of free time to really think about anything other than that. But now we have this opportunity to do a lot more exploring, be a lot more curious. So I would like to ask, with your research and things like that, do you have a working definition of what you consider excellence to be?
That's a little more, maybe broad scope in terms of what people could think about when they think of just okay, there's this concept of pursuing excellence. Yeah, let me start by saying what excellence is not because there are so many common imposters to excellence. Excellence is not perfectionism, so it's not doing everything great all the time.
Excellence is not winning at all costs. Excellence is not a standard. It's not getting a gold star or straight A's, or running a sub two 30 marathon. Excellence is a process. I'm gonna talk more [00:02:00] about that later. Excellence is not optimization. It's not necessary to try to turn yourself into a robot that has everything so dialed in that there's no room for the messiness of life.
Excellence is not a 47 step routine. Excellence is not needing to wake up at 4:00 AM and document your morning on Instagram. All of these things are what I call pseudo excellence, and it is generally a bunch of elaborate kabuki portrayed by marketers. That is a mistake for the real thing. So a big part of why I wrote this book is I wanna reclaim genuine, true, real, heartfelt excellence.
And how I define that is caring deeply. In throwing yourself into worthwhile pursuits that align with your values. So it is as simple and as hard as that. Caring deeply and throwing yourself into worthwhile pursuits that align with your values in both parts of that definition are quite important. So caring deeply and throwing [00:03:00] yourself into that means that you have to give a damn, like you can't just go through life with this nonchalance.
You not only have to give a damn, but you also have to focus and bring intention. That's throwing your all into something and then worthwhile pursuits that align with your values. You want your work and how you are working to be an expression of yourself, and also to realize that the things that you're working on are also working on you.
So we think that our goal might be to run a marathon, or run an ultra marathon, and we're working on that goal. But the marathon and the ultra marathon is also shaping our character. It's also working on us. So that's where the values come into play, because you can be extremely competent or proficient at something, but it's not excellence unless you're expressing yourself in the work.
So there's gotta be that value element. It's a great description and I think it's really interesting when you really back up and try to digest that because it almost is the end product. The end product is really a non-issue. It's about [00:04:00] finding what within the process of trying to reach that end product.
Is gonna teach you the lessons that are gonna be fulfilling, that are gonna give you that, that genuine reward that I think we're craving for at a human level. So I remember you talking about a specific situation for yourself that I thought really highlighted this perfectly, which was your deadlift goal.
I'm trying to deadlift 600 pounds. And the way you described it was just so funny to me. 'cause it was like, yeah, there really isn't a good functional reason to be able to deadlift 600 pounds other than just. It's this thing that puts a spot on the calendar, so to speak, or to work towards. And then everything that you scaffolded around to get there was where the real purpose is.
So other people might not care about dead lifting and pick something entirely different, but that process of getting to whatever that happens to be will probably look quite similar to yours if it's truly trying to strive for excellence. Yeah, that's a great [00:05:00] example and that's a great way to put it. I would argue that deadlifting is one of the most inherently meaningless pursuits there is.
You are literally just picking up a loaded bar from the ground to your hips. You're not even putting it over your head, you're not doing it outside. So at least y'all ultra runners get like some nature in your meaningless pursuits. But these pursuits don't have inherent value. They don't have inherent meaning.
All the meaning is what we create as we go about the goal. So whether or not that weight comes up to my hips doesn't actually have any real impact in the universe, but what I learned about myself. Vulnerability and fear and resilience and setbacks and being uncomfortable and doing hard things and having failures, and then also having successes and doing it in community and wanting to quit and not quitting and needing to rest and recover.
And overshooting the target, and undershooting the target and on. That's the value. Of trying to deadlift 600 pounds. It's not that I'm working on the deadlift, it's that the deadlifts [00:06:00] are working on me. And I spoke to so many different people in different fields, athletes across different sports, runners, power sports, team sports, racket, sports, swimming, water, sports.
And they all said the same thing, that when they step back, what they're doing really has no meaning in the universe, but it's all the meaning that they ascribe it by caring deeply. In doing it in a way that aligns with their values, that's what gets you hooked on it. That's what makes you come back.
That's where you learn and grow. I heard the same thing from artists, musicians, surgeons, entrepreneurs, executives, coaches, and teachers. So I really think that I'm onto something here where genuine excellence is an aspiration. We never arrive. Because anyone who's ever deadlifted 600 pounds or hit their marathon goal or gotten into med school knows that you're content for an hour and then you're thinking about the next goal.
So it's really about shaping yourself in the process and giving a damn about something. I think you mentioned how the modern world can smooth things over and give us all these choices. I think the modern world also sometimes has this ethos where people just go [00:07:00] through the motions and they don't really care deeply about something.
And I think that the mix of caring deeply about something and doing it in a way with integrity to your values, forget excellence, that's human flourishing. That's what this book is really all about. Yeah, it was really interesting to me to read the book because I was connecting some dots with my own experiences too.
And one thing I kinda realized while going through it was, if I look at my pursuit within the endurance world from the very beginning to now. If I look at the very first endurance race I did, which was this one mile run that we did at class in middle school, I ran like a seven 30 and was faster than seven of my peers or something like that.
And it was totally inconsequential and like it produced no real value to anyone other than myself. But the idea of doing that and just having this like. In the process, at that time it was, I was exploring all these different sports. I was trying to figure out what ones I am better at?
What ones do I struggle more with? Which ones give me the most enjoyment, most [00:08:00] excitement, which do I actually care about? And for whatever reason, after that one mile run, I got that sort of sense of emotion of oh, this is something I can care deeply about. This is gonna be meaningful. I wanna continue to explore this.
And if I fast forward to the best race I've ever run, which is a hundred mile race that I did where I pr. The end result of hitting that goal. Really didn't feel any better necessarily than that first mile that I ran, that seven 30 pace. It had a lot of similarities in, it was like a quest to find something and get to it and then achieve it or find my limits to some degree.
But other than the fact that it was just more public and I got a lot of like small short-term dopamine hits from the publications and things that kind of surrounded me that often, they eventually faded. It really wasn't that much different of an experience. And then, it really does teach you that lesson of, like you nowadays you look online and you just see the best of the best and literally are disciplined.
And the average person almost needs to look at that as okay, there's some motivation there, but in [00:09:00] reality I can get that same. That same experience within myself by just, like you said, fit, finding something that you actually generally care about. Yeah. The only zen on the top of the mountain is the zen that you bring up with you along the way.
You gotta find the zen along the way. The zen is in. The process. Now, it's not a book that says we should all hold hands and sing kumbaya, and outcomes don't matter. Actually I don't believe that outcomes do matter, right? Like in your case you win those races and now instead of working a corporate job, you get to be a professional athlete and you get to have a podcast like that matters.
That shifts your life. There's often large financial reasons that outcomes matter. Yeah. Outcomes can lead to new opportunities. Like you have a book published and suddenly. Big magazines want you to write for them, and you get to work with fascinating editors. So we should want to win and we should want to get to the top of the outcome.
Sorry, not the top of the outcome. Lemme say it again. We should want to win and we should want to get to the top of the mountain and we should care deeply about it. And. Not either or, but, and at the [00:10:00] same time, we should keep in mind that if we think that getting there is gonna fix the hole inside, it's not like the only thing that fills the hole inside is the satisfaction that you get from the process.
So it's very non-dual. Yeah, try to win, get that outcome and you better find the zen along the way 'cause it's not gonna be there at the top. And then to your second point about we look online and we just see the world class beaters in every single craft.
I think that's another misconception that people think that excellence is only for those with impeccable genetics or that are the best at what they do. But excellence can be found in running your first 5K. Like it is not the standard, it is the feeling of aliveness. And the character development that you get from giving something your all in a way that aligns with your values and just pursuing it hard.
And that is one of the most generative things in the world. And when we witness it in others who are great, no doubt about it, that also leads to a feeling of aliveness. When I watch a Steph Curry Jumpshot, I feel that. Deep in [00:11:00] my soul when I sit in front of a Rothko painting, like there's something so emotional about it.
When I taste the creation of a master chef, I feel that in my bones and as a witness, excellence is beautiful. But I also feel that when I'm trying to deadlift, and I'll tell you what, I'm still not at 600 pounds and even if I hit it, you look at my age group and my weight, I'm a long way from being world class.
I'm a long way from being in the national class. I'm a long way from being all states, but I still get that feeling of aliveness. And that's what we're all after in this kind of numbed out AI slop, increasingly digital dopamine, fentanyl world. I wanna reclaim excellence because I wanna reclaim humanity.
Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I'd be curious what your thoughts are too, around like the pursuit of finding your natural or your limitations given. All the complications that can come up and essentially remove perfect perfection from the board. From even the best of the best is this idea for me [00:12:00] where someone asked me once okay, like you're you.
You continue to run these a hundred mile races. What if you never PR it yet? Are you gonna look back at that as, man, maybe you should have stopped and moved on to something else after you ran your fastest hundred miles and just focused your energy somewhere else. I, I was thinking about that for a minute, is 'cause there's definitely a lot of things that I could do if I wasn't spending 20 hours a week kind of training and prepping for training and doing all the supplementary stuff that kind of keep you upright for running and training for a hundred mile races.
But my thought was like if I had stopped then and never explored, could I go faster? Then I miss out on that piece of the journey of really knowing in my mind that I did get to that conclusion of answering that question of how fast can I do this? Given all the uniqueness to my lifestyle and the inputs of it versus, versus somebody else.
That was just another kind of piece to that puzzle for me in terms of what is the real reason for why you're doing this when you remove some of the shiny objects at the end of some of these [00:13:00] pursuits. I love that example so much. It's gonna be an inroads to talk about something else.
This is from the chapter in the book on consistency which is one of my favorite chapters in personal development. In performance books. There tends to be this very common aphorism that gets just 1% better every day. And I agree with it as a mindset, which is you don't need to hit home runs. You should just show up and put the ball in play and you just make these little incremental gains and you chip away, and then eventually you get something big, and that is wonderful.
However, at a certain point in any discipline, you get to a place where you are not going to get 1% better every day. If I were to get 1% better every day in the weight room, I'd be deadlifting 900 pounds. Like eventually the motivation has to shift from those small, tangible, concrete gains to exactly what you said, to curiosity about what am I capable of and how am I going to explore my [00:14:00] limits.
Because if you get latched on to that beginner's high of 1% better every day, you are going to flame out after the honeymoon period. And so many people do. So I think that's actually like a big mistake in all of these self-help books that say just get 1% better every day. That's great for getting to be pretty good at something, but if you wanna push your limits, and I think where all the interesting stuff happens is actually when you stop getting 1% better every day, then the drive has got to shift.
From tangible progress to just rote curiosity and self-discovery. The example that I use in the book, and I swear the book has plenty of examples, it's not a power lifting book. I'm not really a meathead, but this is just such a profound example. The World Champion Powerlifter Lay Norton, it took him 10 years, 10 years to take his deadlift from 715 pounds to 723 pounds.
So dude was getting like a half a percent better every year. And when I spoke with [00:15:00] Lane about this, I'm like, how did you, how'd you stick to it? And he's just so freaking curious. And the motivation shifts from I need to get better to I just wanna see what I'm capable of in the training session.
I wanna see if I can feel the weight move differently and I wanna make these subtle tweaks. And I wanna have a year where I actually go down in weight and be able to sit with it and feel that discomfort and the anxiety about what's happening and learn how to endure that too in the whole thing. And he's the best in the world, so the outcome matters.
He won a world championship, he's very proud of it, but the whole thing becomes about self-discovery. And I talked to the greats in all these fields, and they all get to that point because if you don't get to that point, you burn out when you stop getting 1% better every day. Yeah. That's a great story.
I think it makes a ton of sense too, because when I think about where we're actually extracting value from these things, so much of it's in. I've worked hard and I've worked hard and therefore I got this result or this sensation or this [00:16:00] feeling that is tied to some value system that I determined was important for me to find just value in life essentially.
And when you think of it through that lens, you get to this point where if I don't actually have to work for that dopamine hit. There's probably gonna be some sort of payback down the road that isn't fulfilling, where we all know the feeling of, hopping on social media, getting a quick dopamine hit, and then feeling terrible about yourself an hour later, because now all of a sudden you have really no tangible reward for doing that other than just feeling guilty at you, wasted a bunch of time.
Versus I go out and do a hard workout for an hour. I could do something else that maybe it's a little more productive that time, but afterwards, I feel great about myself. I feel accomplished, and that just feeds into the value system that I set for myself. Yeah, I love it. In the book, I call it a shitty flow.
So there's all these sources of shitty flow where like we just get into the zone and get these dopamine hits, but then afterwards we feel like we need a hot shower because it's like shitty. [00:17:00] And what separates shitty flow from real flow, good flow is that good flow often only happens if you first endure a period of resistance.
Nobody just hits a button and gets into the zone. You have to nail the fundamentals for days, for weeks, in some cases, for years before you even give yourself the chance at the transcendent moment. But the modern world has all of these sources of shitty flow. And I didn't use this in the book because it's a little bit out there, but I'll, it just popped into my mind now.
I haven't talked about this in another interview. I hope this is okay. It's an extreme example, but I think it's a really good metaphor. So you can be in an intimate relationship with another person, a husband, wife, a partner, or you can just log onto to porn hug. And the log onto the PornHub version feels great.
There's zero resistance. It's super quick, but if that is your only source of intimacy, your only source of connection, it's probably not gonna leave you feeling so good in the long haul. Whereas if you commit to an [00:18:00] intimate relationship to another person, it takes a lot more resistance. There is a lot more friction.
There are ups and downs and it is often challenging. But it's also a lot more fulfilling. This is a metaphor for just about everything in life. These days. You have a PornHub version of running, you have a genuine version of running. The PornHub version is sitting on social media, being in the rage, comments, mimicking other people's goals, photoshopping everything that you do, cheating, lying about your results, and on.
Or you can actually train hard for a race. And the latter has more resistance upfront, but is so much more fulfilling on the backend. And increasingly, I think I probably need a better metaphor in the PornHub version 'cause I don't know what that's rated, but there's just like the superficial version that feels great in the moment, but doesn't really fulfill you in the long term.
Versus the actual thing. And the actual thing always requires overcoming some resistance. It's like the difference between eating skittles and eating salmon. Skittles are [00:19:00] a lot easier to eat at first 'cause they just taste great. But eventually, if all you ate with Skittles, you feel like crap.
The first few bites of salmon probably don't taste as good as the first few bites of Skittles. But a diet of salmon is such a more nourishing, satisfying diet. I think even like the preparation of food kind of has that play into it too, where if I go and just get a really high quality nutritious meal, but it was prepared for me and it's quick and immediate delivered to my house or something like that, versus me sitting down and saying, okay, I'm gonna create this.
When I'm eating that meal, it might taste exactly the same. The quality may be, the quality may actually be worse if I'm making it to be hot. I was gonna say, it's probably better if it's delivered right? If you cook anything like me, probably. But just the idea that I created that and then that, it's that resistance piece that you were talking about there that creates that real sensation and with a lot of food and flavorful things, that's a very short term reward, but.
If there was some friction in acquiring it, I think that's probably [00:20:00] where I would see the value in that versus the better prepared quick, easy access delivery system. Yeah, 100%. And, you wanna keep the main things in your life. So I don't think that you need to do everything with friction.
I think there's a time and a place for the delivery of food. I think a lot of people rely on it for good reason. I just think the problem becomes when you don't have anything in your life that you care about, that requires some hard work and friction. Yeah, and that kind of goes into that topic of just having things in your life that you can pivot to that are meaningful, but not necessarily all meaningful on a uniform scale of being equally distributed in terms of their weight towards how you approach them.
But. We get into this idea, especially when words like, and you touched on this a little bit already, was with excellence and things that you feel like you have to go monk mode of, I need to pour everything into this and I need to remove any distraction and just really nail down. And that's just something that looks great on paper because you think [00:21:00] it goes into that perfection mindset, right?
It's putting something, a target in place that's not actually achievable. And then if anything goes wrong within that. You have zero outlets left to turn to, to reset and then go back to the drawing board and learn from the mistakes and then ultimately progress in the thing that you actually care about.
Yeah, that's a hundred percent. That's a hundred percent I'm, I am in firm agreement with you on that. I think that, again, like a big part of this is realizing that. Life without friction is never gonna be excellent because you never get the satisfaction of exerting yourself even if you fail.
Another example that I use in the book is imagine that there's a button that you could press that just composes a Grammy award-winning piece of music, and you can go win the award for it. How would that feel? And like the answer is like nothing because the satisfaction of winning the award comes from the fact that it took you decades to create that piece of music.[00:22:00]
And with ai, we're getting to a place where you can actually just put that button and have the award-winning piece of music. And I think this book is also a call to use those tools. I'm not like a Luddite, like in certain areas of your life. Yeah. Hit the button and make it efficient. But you've gotta have other areas of your life where you're willingly engaging with friction in the process and the character development.
Otherwise when life gets so smoothed over, you have this zombie burnout. You're not burnt out from working too hard, but you're burnt out from not doing enough of what lights you up. That's a really interesting example too, because it highlights the next challenge in modern civilization, which is what do we do with artificial intelligence in terms of leveraging it for good versus bad?
But I think of that as yeah. For someone who's using music as a means to an end for something else, hitting that quick. I got some high quality tunes right available for me and I didn't have to wait for some artist to spend the needed time to develop that. But then on the [00:23:00] other end, you get the artist who is not gonna find probably nearly the satisfaction of hitting that quick button versus going through that friction that we talked about.
But what does that person end up doing in terms of an outlet for their work to make that a sustainable lifestyle for them to be able to keep pursuing. I think, yeah I wonder about just the consumer side of that. If there's a, if there's enough kind of human emotion tied to just, oh, I'm listening to this song and I realize it took another human being a lot of time and energy to produce this versus I'm listening to this song and it's cool, but it took zero effort to really make Yeah.
I think it's a really interesting question. What I would argue is that. Some of the top 40 hits already just sound robotic. And I think that there's a reason that they're so popular because the masses are content with that. But you're always gonna have singer songwriters who don't have massive followings who aren't on the billboard 100.
But who is writing this [00:24:00] heartfelt, soulful music, that the quality is just different because of what went into it. I wanna come back to something that you said about pouring yourself, like all in all the time. That looks good on social media. This is a really important topic to double click on, I think in the pursuit of excellence.
So when you pursue excellence in something, let's take running as an example, and you care deeply about it and it aligns with your values, you start to identify with it, right? You say, I am a runner. And this is a very good thing. It means that you care. However, if your entire identity becomes just a runner.
Then that makes you quite fragile because if you don't perform well at running, that becomes a reflection of your entire self worth. If you get injured, then who are you? If you have to retire from the sport because of aging or injury or whatever, again, then who are you? So the way that I've come to think about building an identity that [00:25:00] is robust enough.
To withstand setbacks and pitfalls, but also obsessive enough to really care about something and give it your all is to think about identity like a house. And if a house only has one room in it and that one room catches fire, you're screwed. Like you gotta move outta your house altogether. But if a house has multiple rooms in it, in one room, catches fire, you can seek refuge in the other rooms.
You fix the fire, you fix up that room they got burnt. And it's helpful to think about our identities the same way. Like we should have an identity house with more than one room. So maybe the biggest room in your identity house is a runner or a coach or teacher or artist or writer or parents or husband or wife.
But it's important to have other rooms too. And those other rooms could be athlete, music, lover, dog lover, coffee, aficionado, bookworm. It doesn't matter what the rooms are, it's just important to have more than one. And what I like about this is I'm not arguing for balance at all because I'm not saying that the rooms [00:26:00] need to be the same size and that you need to spend the same amount of time and energy in every room.
I actually don't think that's a great prescription for an excellent life. I think what it does mean is that you just want to have more than one room. In different seasons of life, you're gonna probably spend different amounts of time and energy in each of those rooms. In your job. When you're going all in on something like running, it is just to make sure you're spending enough time in the creative room or the husband room or the wife room that those rooms don't get moldy.
And I think that is just such a healthier construct for thinking about identity than road obsession. What all the bros say, make yourself isolated, miserable, go all in all the time. Versus what the self-help industrial complex is obsessed with, which is like you can have it all just be balanced.
That's bullshit. You can't have it all. Life is full of trade offs but thinking of identity like a house with these different rooms goes such a long way because I think that to, to pursue excellence, you have to be a little bit obsessed and a little bit crazy, but if you get too obsessed or too crazy, not only does it hurt your mental health, but it actually degrades your performance too.[00:27:00]
That's perfect. And there was a recent real world example that I saw play out online that I thought was really interesting. And it just actually coincided while I was reading the book too. So it was like the universe was like lining things up for me to really appreciate what you were trying to say.
And it was, the NFL season has really been picking up the last few weeks with the playoffs and everything like that. And there was a football player who he put up on his Instagram page, a picture of him ice fishing. It was like on a, it was like on a Monday where the team had an off day, a scheduled off day.
Yeah. And he was just getting flamed. They're like, you guys just lost your last two games and you're going to, you're, you gotta be taking this seriously. What are you doing? Although you should be in the facility. I'm thinking to myself, I'm like. Just what you said is like in order for him to actually put out quality, effort, and meaningful work when he's actually at the facility, when he is supposed to, he probably does need to separate from, it's not gonna do him any good to sit there and watch a film or bang out another set.
Waves or something like that [00:28:00] on his off day when the idea of that off day is that he actually disconnects so he can come back recharged and ready to actually absorb what was about to come to him from a preparation standpoint that the team had already predetermined. Oh, I love that story. And ice fishing is probably the best thing that he can do.
There's actually some research that shows that if you wanna lower your stress response in attenuate like cortisol after a really challenging loss. The best thing to do is hang out with friends. I don't think that ice fishing is maybe the same as hanging out with friends, but I think the point is like, it's not like you're studying film and you're catastrophizing about what is wrong.
Like you're chilling, you're moving into a different room of your identity house. If he was ice fishing six days a week for three hours a day, then he probably wouldn't be an NFL football player. But having that little room in his house where he can go when the football room is burning and just take some time to chill out, makes him a better football player.
And you see this in so many of the greats, and then you see the opposite in so many people. When they only have the one room in their identity house, they can burn [00:29:00] really bright for a short period of time, but then the minute that there's some stress on the system, the whole thing explodes. Yeah. Yeah. It's another thing I've found with the same topic, with running specifically is like group running versus solo training, especially when you have a very specific goal. Whereas for me, I can motivate myself to get up and train solo for an entire training cycle if I want to, but what I find is when I interject the group runs into that schedule, even if the group run is a slight deviation from what I would do.
By myself to follow the plan. Exactly. I get more value from that experience and therefore better productivity when the real quality sessions that matter need to be done. Because I just turned what otherwise would've been an opportunity for me to sit there and maybe over obsess on a workout or stress out about if I did a good workout the time before, I'm like totally distracted 'cause I'm in conversations with other people while I'm getting done.
At least something directionally. Aligned [00:30:00] with what I should be doing if I were to do it by myself. Yeah, I think that's another great example where the efficiency of doing the workout on your own is higher. 'cause you're gonna be able to run at the exact prescribed pace at the exact time of day that you wanna do it.
You're not gonna have to coordinate schedules with someone the exact mileage on the exact terrain that you want and. There's a time and a place for that. However, what you give up in acute efficiency, when you do the group run, you might gain in long-term efficiency, which is by interjecting some of those group runs into your training cycle.
You become a more resilient, robust runner who has more joy, satisfaction, and less stress. So if you had this key, I don't know, you tell me 10 by one mile repeat workout in the group is gonna do it at six minute pace and on hills. And you're like, no, I need to be running like four fifties on a track.
Then for that key workout, you should do it alone on a track. But if you were to treat every run in the training cycle, like that key workout, that's like a lot of cognitive stress that you [00:31:00] have to carry with you when you might be more satisfied and have better long-term performance by letting go a little bit and doing some group runs.
I think that's another great example. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting when you really start to think about what there is, there's definitely a sort of what maybe feels like a one step back, two step forward approach with a lot of these things to really reaching that excellence or that mastery that we're craving at the end of the day.
Yeah. I think that you have to learn from. Life and experience. And generally we don't learn from things that go really smoothly. We learn from things that don't go so smoothly. I think that's the core of a growth mindset is when something happens, you can process the feelings, you can be frustrated, and then you can say, all right what did this teach me?
I like to call it a next play mentality. Like the play that just happened is in the past. So you analyze it, you learn from it, and then get on with the next play. The Chessmaster, Maxim la the sheer gra excuse me I, I interviewed him for the book is a really interesting interview and he has [00:32:00] this mantra that he says when he blunders in a tournament and he feels all that dread and despair, he just says, play the board in front of you.
And that's such a great metaphor for life. Play the board in front of you, not the board that you wish you were playing. Not the board that you thought would be there, not the board before you had an error, but this is the board. I moved my pond to the wrong spot. I can't believe I did it.
This is the situation I'm in. How can I just lock in on that board? Yeah. Yeah. That's excellent. I love it. I love it. I want to touch on a topic you highlighted a little bit before too, which is. We do get some of these extremes from time to time, especially with online stuff where you'll get access to somebody who is going to be really motivating in one way or the other, but not possibly not in line with what someone would want to do indefinitely.
So I think the best example of this is probably David Gawkins, because like he's in your face, he's extreme and [00:33:00] he's a kick in the pan. A lot of people because he almost certainly is doing more than you, right? So the pitfall with that is thinking, alright, I need to match Goggin's hunch for punch or stride for stride.
The value from that I see is, okay, here's a guy who is doing so much more than what he ever thought he was gonna be able to do earlier in his life, and has reached these incredible stakes of success. How do I leverage that or use that as a tool to get me out the door when I should be and I'm procrastinating and know I shouldn't versus when do I, maybe I don't pull up David Goggin's Instagram page when I know I'm supposed to be taking a rest day.
Yeah, so I've never met Goggins. I think that Goggins helps a ton of people in that former category where he's a great source of motivation. But I would just like to state facts, right? These aren't my opinions. These are facts. David Goggins [00:34:00] is a world class motivator, and he is probably world class at voluntary suffering.
He is not a world class athlete. David Goggins has not won any kind of meaningful race that I'm aware of. He's not a world class strength athlete. What he is great at is motivating people on the internet. So if you need motivation. Going to Goggins to get motivated makes a ton of sense. If your dream is to be a personality on the internet, trying to follow in the footsteps of Goggins might make a lot of sense.
If you want to be a better runner, I probably wouldn't follow in the footsteps of Goggins because there are a million better ultra-marathon runners. David Goggins, Courtney Dewal Exhibit A, who has the opposite demeanor of David Goggins actually wins races and sets records. You, Zach, probably trained very differently than Goggins.
You're not out there flexing your six six pack as hard [00:35:00] as you can and telling yourself to man the fuck up and everything is angry, always. You're a better ultra runner than Goggins. So I think that so often we mistake great motivation for a great craftsperson, and those are very different things. If you need motivation, go to Goggins, but remember that he's not actually great at running.
Yeah, it just shows you that we have all these tools available to us and really the goal at the individual level is to figure out how to leverage them in a way that's actually gonna. Produce the outcomes that you're looking for or get you to the destination you're trying to get to from a lot of it.
And it's just funny 'cause we have all that and then we also maintain a little bit of this black and white thinking, I think, where it becomes something where you have to either put David goon into this bad category or this great category and there's really no. There's not as much conversation around that middle ground that you just shared where, and that's it. He's a world class motivator. And if you are [00:36:00] some dude that's like struggling with alcoholism and can't get off the couch and get your shit together, Goggins might save your life. If you're a high functioning type, a driving person to begin with, Goggins might put you overboard into burnout, illness, injury.
So that's not Goggin's fault. That's like it's a tool in the toolkit. I even joke sometimes like you gotta pull out that Goggins. Yeah. But if I pull out that Goggins when I'm parenting my three-year-old daughter, that's not the appropriate tool for the situation. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah, it is.
It is funny when you see that too. 'cause if you get the polar end of it, pull the opposite end of it too, where it's it's all compassion and kind of comfort seeking more or less too, where you, I sometimes I think like sometimes you get like the popularity of someone like Goggins as a pendulum swing, or in the reverse you get, maybe you overextend too much from.
From engaging with the guidance type personalities, and then all of a sudden you find yourself swinging the other [00:37:00] direction and craving just the comforts and the relaxation. And then the reality is it summarizes maybe a lot of what we've been talking about here is there's this kind of middle ground there somewhere that you really wanna exist in.
Yeah. The way I write about this in the book, this is in the section on discipline, is that it is true that the world is hard and cruel and that no one is gonna do your bidding for you. And that you have agency, at least I firmly believe this, and you need to exert your agency and like taking accountability and personal responsibility.
These things matter. They matter if you wanna live a good life, they matter if you wanna contribute. And at the same time, it is true that the world is broken and cruel and it's really hard. And oftentimes you can exert your agency as best as you can. Structures and systems and shitty luck gets in the way, and you need to have your own back and be kind to yourself.
It's not either or, it's both and right? Like fierce self-discipline actually requires fierce self-kindness. Because if you can't be kind to yourself when you get unlucky, when you mess [00:38:00] up, then you're never gonna risk stepping back into the arena and laying it on the line again. So all of these elite performers that I reported on in the book, are extreme badasses.
They're also very kind to themselves. They have high degrees of self-compassion. So to your point, it's not let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya and go to the yoga retreat. It's not all Goggins, get your shit together always. It is the combination of those two qualities that help support excellence over the long haul.
Yeah I'd be curious what you think about this. So if you had somebody who liked reading your book and was like, okay, I get it. I understand the value of the pursuit of excellence and how that brings meaning. I'm currently working a job that's maybe a little boring, not something I'm necessarily excited about, but at the end of the day, we live in the real world, like you said, and bills need to be paid.
If that's their best option to do that, maybe that's a non-negotiable for them. Do you find they're better off looking for [00:39:00] trying to find or carve out some form of excellence within that career? Or is it something where in that situation they're better off exploring that pursuit of excellence on some hobby or something outside of that in order to make that job a, a supporting piece to be able to do those other things?
Yeah, I mean I can't be prescriptive without having more details on a situation, right? So I think the answer is it depends, painting in broad strokes. Some jobs are just rote boring kind of corporate jobs and they pay well and you do spreadsheets all day and you go to pointless meetings, but you get to support your kids and you get to travel and you know you have a nice house and your life is pretty good.
For those jobs, I'd say yeah, don't try to be excellent at going to pointless meetings. Start ultra running, start woodworking. Start gardening. Start playing guitar. Crochet I don't care what it is, but find something in your leisure time where you can pursue excellence. And I actually think that [00:40:00] pursuing excellence in leisure time is wonderful because you have full agency, like no one's telling you what to do.
You get to do it on your own terms. You're very fortunate and you're very lucky, and I put both of us in this category, right? Like your profession is a craft that you care about. My profession is a craft that I care about. We pursue excellence first and foremost in our craft. However, If I had a corporate job, I think this book would be, every bit is important, maybe even more important because it would set the foundation for how I'm going to strength train for me and for someone who runs not as a professional, how they're going to run.
I find this so often in woodworkers who have these, like horribly boring, tedious, go through the motions job, but they're all like nine to four jobs, so they just get home and they go to the shop. Then like they're in heaven. And that's awesome. And a lot of these people eventually, after years, end up being full-time woodworkers.
So it's a long-winded way of saying that. Another misconception maybe is that excellence has to be in a profession when it can very much be in a hobby. [00:41:00] And it can start very elementary too. And it should start very elementary if you're new to it. Yeah. I think that's also, yeah. Yeah.
And it's some the professional woodworker maybe that, especially the scenario that you described where they were on down another career path and the woodworking thing just presented itself eventually when they got to a point where their product was desirable enough to sell.
They probably never planned for that to be the case. So for that to be the end goal upfront would've been defeating the purpose of the exploration to begin with. And that's how I got into writing, to be honest. Like I had a corporate job and it was fine, but it was very clear that I wasn't gonna be excellent at it.
So I started doing long course triathlons and I was a very good high school football player, so I'm not built like an endurance athlete. And it was just a quest and I got pretty good at it. And this is late two thousands blogosphere, internet 1.0 and I had a blog and I was just writing because I had this job that wasn't very hard and I had all this time to write.
And for five years. I just pursued excellence as a hobby in writing. Then eventually I [00:42:00] got some lucky breaks and I got good enough where I started to get paid and I haven't been in the corporate world for a decade. I'm a professional writer now. So what you're describing is the exact path that I took.
I didn't go to journalism school. I didn't have elite writing training. I cared deeply about it, and I wrote in a way that aligned with my values and I got really good at it, and a boring corporate job enabled me to get good at it 'cause it paid the bills. Yeah. Yeah. It highlights something. I know you're good friends with Steve Magnus, and he has been on the podcast a couple times and he talks about just making sure that when you start something or pursue something, you compete locally.
Yeah. Absolute. And then work your way up from there. Exactly. Yeah. 'cause we live in a world where global access digitally is infinite. And it goes back to, we were talking before where, if I decided to pick a woodworking, I could go on Instagram and find some of the best woodworkers in the world, and you're just totally fed by, how could I do this?
Exactly right. Yeah. I need to go to a beginner beginners class or something. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe don't even [00:43:00] compete maybe at first, like just do compete against yourself. And what's nice though is coming back to something that we talked about earlier. When you're new, you do get 1% better every day.
You often get like 50% better every day. So you can also use that as fuel to keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder about that turn into just from the educational side of all of this too, where, how do we better expose people to, like maybe what that ends up looking like. So there's. Or maybe this part of the journey is not having this kind of laid out for you as a blueprint, but I could imagine if I looked like a world class woodworker, like a timeline of what was their first piece as it evolved and see oh, okay, I see how this scales over time.
Maybe that kind of keeps the momentum going for me. Or maybe the endurance version of this would be like, I watched the Olympics and I saw Cole Hawker win the 1500 meter and then. I can look back and be like, oh when he first started he was only running two times a week and realized maybe I shouldn't be training every day twice a day in order to get to where I wanna be with it.
Run. [00:44:00] Yeah, that's right. There's no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. And we see the stone cracking on Instagram and on the news, but what we don't see is the years of someone sitting there pounding a stone and there's no visible improvement. But like all this tension is building and then eventually it cracks.
And if we compare ourselves to someone's finished product, not their first couple days when we're a beginner, we're gonna feel completely overwhelmed. So it's drawing inspiration from someone who's much, much further down the path at the same time competing against ourselves early on and having the satisfaction not come from being better than someone else, but come from getting that 1% better.
And then after a year, five years, a decade, you stop getting 1% better and then it shifts back to curiosity and self-discovery. And maybe if, depending on the pursuit, like actual competition, you might not be getting faster, you can still show up to a race and try to win. Yeah. I think about this a lot of times with respect to how [00:45:00] we structure our education system too.
Like where are the successful models that actually introduce enough curiosity and exploration within that kind of framework or those early years where you've got this more like a large opportunity to explore, fail and find what you're good at, find what you're maybe not good at, or what you enjoy or you don't enjoy.
'cause like time, you don't have to be good at something to really enjoy it. It seems like you almost need a little bit more of a, like an open playground, so to speak, to really draw this stuff out of people. So if there's maybe a question in there. I would be curious if you were structuring something like a school system or something. What kind of frameworks would you put in place in order to really drive people into understanding?
This is something that they should be striving for with respect to excellence as they go through life and kinda learn what that's all about. Yeah. It's way outta my wheelhouse because I'm not an educator. I can give you, no one developed any curriculum here today. I can give you an example [00:46:00] from my 7-year-old son though, that I think is just awesome. He is in second grade and he and his friends are all super into Pokemon cards. Okay? They love Pokemon and in art class, they created their own Pokemon game. So they're making all their own Pokemon cards. So there's these printout cards and he's so stoked to go to art because he gets to create this Pokemon game.
I have no doubt that if he went to art and he had to do line sketches or whatever the kind of writing, this is what a second grader should be learning in art. He would not like art at all. So I think that by finding something to use my definition, that aligns with his values, age appropriate language, a 7-year-old values, Pokemon, whatever, creativity, imagination.
Then suddenly art becomes this thing that he looks forward to. That is really interesting versus just like, all right, the curriculum says you need to draw lines. Come on. Like all those kids are gonna get bored [00:47:00] I guess if I had to say it I think that again, because the pendulum can swing, right?
The problem with just free play is then, kids don't learn the basics and no one can do math. And Derek Thompson, the writers covered this really well, like people can't do math anymore because there was too much free play. So we do need some rigorous standards and criteria for education, but I think that if we can learn the things that lead to those rigorous standards and criteria.
In more interesting ways then kids will be more engaged. So my son also loves sports and he got really good at math. You know how he got really good at math, we watched a ton of football and there's all kinds of permutations of math. And I just will ask him during the game, I'll be like, Theo, if the Patriots kick two field goals and get a safety and then score a touchdown and miss the extra point, how many points would they have?
And that's how we practice math. And he loves it. He's gimme more scenarios. Yeah. Now if I told him and I said, Theo, what's six plus six plus seven plus two? He'd be like, I don't care. So I think you gotta just try to find what people value in the moment and then align things [00:48:00] with that.
Yeah. Yeah. That's spot on. I think like when I was still teaching, I was at a school that was project based and that was essentially the build out that they had where we all understood there were gonna be. Things that they needed to master in order to move on to the next level, whether that be like employment or to go off to college and things like that.
So there were the standards, but then there was like there's a million different ways to get to those standards. So the way they did it was they would make these like topic based seminars that were essentially voted on by the students in terms of interests. And then as the teachers, we would build. We would build the frameworks of how we implement math, science, reading, writing, all that other stuff into this.
And it set up, it was new and it was imperfect, but it was definitely like more aligned with kinda what you were saying, where you gave that initial pull to the student to get it, just to get excited about it and almost accidentally start doing some of those things they'd otherwise maybe resist when it was more formal.
Yeah, I love that. I think that's a great example too. [00:49:00] Cool. Awesome. Yeah. One other thing I did wanna touch on a little bit with you with respect to this topic as a whole is when we talk about just, I really like that concept of going up the side of the mountain to get to the mountaintop because I think that one really does teach us where the true value is within it.
Within the pursuit itself versus it being something of just I'm gonna be at the top of this mountain, and then that's gonna be the big payoff there. So when we're looking at something like that, one problem I sometimes will see with people is they pick that goal of the top of the mountain and they understand the work that leads to it.
Maybe the big payoff, but. There's maybe it's a little harder to get small wins along the way unless it's scaffolded out. So how important do you think that is to back up after you have that and set [00:50:00] these kinds of micro goals along the way to. That will ultimately support that end goal, but give people little short term things to keep them motivated when some of the sparkle wears off, similar to what you'd see with New Year's resolution type stuff.
Yeah, I think it's hugely important. The bigger the goal, the smaller the steps. Because if you just have the big inspirational goal, then to your point after that initial inspiration wears off, it's just overwhelming. An interesting example from the book was when I was talking to Kelly Humphreys.
Who's a five time Olympian, three time gold medalist and five time world champion in the bobsled. So she's been dominating the sport for 20 years, just insane. And I asked her about her longevity, like how she's managed this. And what she told me is that every four years she has a really simple goal, which is to be the best in the world, the Olympics.
I'm like, all right, we'll talk about simple, not easy. And then I'm like then what? And each year is broken down into these two by two year blocks, and each of those two year windows has a very specific purpose, right? There's like building the [00:51:00] base, and then there's sharpening the soft.
And then each of those two year blocks is broken down into one year. And each of those years has a. Purpose. And then each year we have an emphasis with my coach every quarter. And then each quarter gets broken down into months and each month we're moving on this micro level. And then each month gets broken down to weeks and each week has a specific emphasis and then weeks get broken down to days in the way that I think about a four year Olympic cycle by thinking about my workout today.
And I think that kind of mindset is just so important. Because it keeps us grounded and focused in the process. It keeps us patient and it gives us those small micro victories along the way. I like to think about it. As I said, the bigger the goal, the smaller the steps, but also dig where your feet are.
So the goal might be the top of the mountain, but if you're looking up, if your head's cocked up and all you're doing is looking and daydreaming about the top of the mountain, you're gonna trip and fall off the side. So the best way to get to the top of the mountain is to dig where your feet are, like to do what you have to do today.[00:52:00]
Yeah. That's so powerful. And it's similar to, I think it was Roger Federer who gave a speech or a presentation at one point. He was talking about that same idea of just winning so many majors and so many matches and so many games and all that stuff. But along the way he broke it down as my success rate within any individual volley was like 52%.
So he was failing almost as much as he was exceeding, but because he was successful when it mattered and had that mindset to be in the moment and treat that next match or that next volley as the focus at the time that just set himself up in a situation where he like just won a ton, even though he wouldn't think so by looking at those percentages.
Yeah, I love it. I think that's another good example. I know that speech, it was a commencement speech. I forgot what school he gave it at. And that's it. Like you gotta dig where your feet are. Like that's the core of consistency. [00:53:00] And if you wanna be excellent, you gotta be consistent.
Yeah, and I think that one just sums it up nicely too. 'cause it also shows the value of being comfortable with failure too. If you wanna get to be great, you have to be comfortable with failure because that's just part of the process. Yeah, that's right. It brings to mind this notion of a brave new world, which comes from the chapter and curiosity in how curiosity is like a nice antidote to fear and failure and essentially.
What it says is that when you are stepping into the arena to do something that you might fail at, telling yourself that I've got this is not gonna be helpful because you don't know if you have it right. You can't lie to yourself telling yourself, oh no, I don't know if I have. This is also not gonna be helpful because then you're freaking out.
But telling yourself Brave New World, which means this is a new horizon for me. I don't know what's gonna happen, but it's sure gonna be interesting to see that kind of curiosity. It is so associated with peak performance. And to me, [00:54:00] that is how you overcome failure. That is how you take on these big goals.
It's just a mindset of brave New World. Maybe I'll fail, maybe I won't, but let's find out. I walk up to the bar with more weight ever loaded on it. Brave New World. We have our second child in, in the delivery room. I turn to my wife. I'm just like, brave New World. I get a writing assignment for a publication I've never written for where I feel like the bar is higher than I've ever done before.
Brave new world. And I think that mindset is just so crucial to the ongoing infinite game of excellence. Yeah. Yeah. It's perfect. I think thinking of it through all those different kinds of lenses that you described is just such a valuable thing to consider when you're going in that process, whether it be starting something new or trying to actually get a little more centered around excellence with whatever pursuits you're currently on.
Yeah. I am so grateful to have been able to have this conversation with you, man. Yeah. It was great to have you back on, Brad. I'm looking forward to getting this one up. And if you don't mind, before I let you go, if you wanna share where people can find [00:55:00] you online, social media and that sort of thing, and then ultimately any details on your book, I'll put all that stuff in the show notes as well.
Great. Thank you Zach. And thank you listeners. The book is called The Way of Excellence. I think that it is the best place to start. It's the culmination of everything I've been working on really for the last 15 years. So before going onto social media, read the book, you'll have a much better experience, I promise.
If you've then read the book and you wanna find me on social media, the platform I'm most active on these days is Substack, where I'm Brad Salberg, and my Instagram is also my name at Brad Salberg. But yeah I'd be happy if you start and end with the book because it's my best work.
Awesome. And hey, if we wanna add some friction. You have to finish the book before you can go back on Instagram. That's perfect. I love it. I love it. Read the book with a pen and take notes and and in all seriousness, like the book is the artifact, but really the real, yes, there's friction in reading a book.
You have to focus. It's hard. Hopefully it's not too hard 'cause I'm a decent writer. But the real work is after you've read the book, like you try to [00:56:00] apply this stuff and like you have conversations with colleagues, with friends, with family members. Like the book is a conversation starter. But I think the conversation.
Reclaiming excellence in the genuine heartfelt excellence in our modern numbed out, pseudo hustle porn world. That's a really important conversation. So read the book and then start having that conversation and get curious about it. Yeah, it is a great book to read alongside somebody else if you have that opportunity, because there are a lot of great discussion points that I think just add a lot of flavor to it when you get to someone else's kind of thoughts around different things that you introduce.
So hopefully people will get their hands on it, read it in a group or something like that and really extract all the value out of it. But thanks again, Brad, for coming on and sharing some of your wisdom.