1132: How to Find Deep Satisfaction While Pursuing Excellence with Brad Stulberg

Pete Mockaitis
Brad, welcome back!

Brad Stulberg
Pete, it’s a pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about excellence. That’s one of my favorite things. And so you will share with us the way, but I’m very curious upfront. You have achieved excellence in lifting vast quantities of weight. Can you tell us a little bit of the story of this journey and what that illustrates about excellence?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I can. So, I am an armchair power lifter, I’d say armchair because I’m not actually being a national or world-class level or anything like that. But I got really into deadlifting, in particular, maybe five or six years ago, and I’ve just been working toward the craft for that period of time.

And my PR deadlift is 530 pounds. I pulled that at a body weight of about 200 pounds, so more than twice my body weight, which is a pretty, pretty significant pull.

And the way that I like to think about pursuing excellence in the process of that is, yeah, I’m working toward this goal of deadlifting a lot, but the deadlift is also working on me. So I’m learning about the power of community. I’m learning about being comfortable, being uncomfortable. I’m learning about fear. I’m learning about vulnerability. I’m learning about resilience. I’m learning about patience. I’m learning about setbacks.

So all of these things that happen in the gym are life lessons that I can carry with me into my marriage, into how I raise my kids, into how I write, into how I show up for my community members, and so on and so forth. So I think it’s actually like this really nice encapsulation of excellence because, on its face, all dead lifting is is lifting a bunch of weight from the ground to your hips.

But it can be full of meaning because of all the things that you learn in the process of trying to lift that heavy-ass weight from the ground to your hips.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe give us an example of, I imagine, there’s a lot of little learnings associated with, “Oh, place my feet like this, or grip it like that, or train according to this schedule with this many reps and weights, etc”? Can you share with us an abstraction or a carryover or a takeaway that goes beyond the deadlifting itself into other domains?

Brad Stulberg
One of my favorites that has impacted me is when you’re attempting a really heavy lift, perhaps more weight than you’ve ever lifted before, there’s often a real element of fear. And that fear is not because you’re scared that you’re going to miss the lift, I mean, unless you’re competing in the Olympics, no one really cares if you make the lift or not.

It’s a fear of what it’s going to feel like. Like, it feels genuinely uncomfortable, like death, to try to pressurize your body to lift that much weight. And a couple of years ago, I was about to attempt a PR and my training partner at the time, his name is Justin, he looked at me and he just said, “Brave new world.”

And what he meant by that is, “I don’t know if I’m going to make the lift or not, but it’s sure going to be interesting to see.” So I didn’t walk up to the bar scared because that’s not a good position to make a lift in. I didn’t walk up to the bar lying to myself and saying, “I know I’m going to hit the lift,” because I didn’t know if I was going to hit the lift. I walked up to the bar with a mindset and an attitude of curiosity.

And what I’ve learned since is that it is literally impossible to be scared and curious at the same time. So the neural circuitry that is involved in fear and that is involved in curiosity, it competes for resources. So you cannot be curious and scared at the same time.

So when we’re taking on big challenges, when we’re confronting unknown horizons, if we can go into those with a mindset of brave new world, like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s find out,” that shifts us out of fear and into a more playful state that allows us to perform our best.

You asked how that transfers outside of the gym. It’s probably self-explanatory, but one very concrete example is when my wife gave birth to our second child in the delivery room, I looked at her and I’m just, like, “Brave new world. Like, we know how to do one, but I don’t know what two’s going to be like. Brave new world.”

You take on a big writing assignment, or you get a new job, or you get a promotion and you’re feeling a little bit apprehensive, “Brave new world. Like, let’s find out what this is all about.” And it’s that mindset of curiosity that is so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
So, brave new world, well, now I’m thinking about the book and all of the dystopian things. So we’re not talking about that at all. You just mean we’re entering into a new world, a reality that is fundamentally different from the prior reality. And so we could experience fear, terror, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck is this going to be about?” or more of a sense of curiosity, wonder, fun, enchantment, like, “Oh, here’s an adventure that we’re going in on.”

Brad Stulberg
That’s 100% right. And there’s so much research in performance science that shows that that mindset of adventure, that mindset of curiosity, is associated with not only feeling better, but with performing better. There’s this incredible quote from the late basketball player, Kobe Bryant, who was asked if he’s the kind of player that plays to win or plays not to lose.

And he answered by saying, “I’m neither. I play to figure things out.” And he went on to say that if you play to win, then you become fragile because if you lose, you’re frustrated. And if you play not to lose, you’re constantly on your heels. You can never really assert yourself. You’re always in this, like, kind of preventing the worst state.

But if you just play to figure things out, if you play to learn about yourself and learn about the game, you’re going to end up playing the best that you can possibly play. And this came from Kobe Bryant. He was known for his killer mentality on the court. Yet, when he stepped onto the court, he didn’t try to be a killer. He was just really curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s just a lot of fun. And when you’re in a fun groove, a lot of things flow nicely from that just naturally.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s very much related to having fun, and having fun is one of the best competitive advantages there is. I think there’s this misnomer that you either have to be full of intensity or full of joy. But in my research for this book, what I found is that the most excellent performers, they have both intensity and joy. Intensity and joy can coexist at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I don’t remember who pointed it out, but I think they were critiquing the notion of the optimal dosage of stress in the stress response curve. And there is a theory, and it probably holds true in some contexts, like, “Oh, if you’re too low on stress, you’ll underperform because you’re sleepy. If you’re too high on stress, you’ll underperform because you’re freaking out.”

And so you want to be at just the right level of stress, or a medium level of stress. And yet, if you look at high performers doing their thing, they don’t look medium stressed. They just look like they’re having a ball.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, but I think that they are. I’m so glad you brought that up. That’s the Yerke-Dodson’s curve, I think, you’re referencing, in the optimal performance zone, which is different for everyone. But, yeah, it’s exactly what you said, that you want to have this optimal amount of stimulus or stress.

So I do think, like, when Steph Curry steps on the basketball court, or when a Grammy award-winning musician takes the stage, or when a master chef is competing on one of the Food Network competitive reality shows, I do think that they’re feeling adrenaline. I think they’re feeling nerves, but I think that they’ve learned to laugh at themselves and to smile while feeling that way.

Like, they have trained themselves to embrace that is this, like, signal of growth or of, “My body is getting ready to do its thing, and I’m going to do it with a smile on my face.” So I personally experience this. I do a fair amount of public speaking and I’ve become desensitized to it just by putting in all these reps. But every once in a while, I still get nervous out of my mind. And this happened recently.

I was speaking for this new book in New Orleans, and it was at this historic theater. And it was my first time speaking at a theater where I was down on the stage, and there were thousands of people up, and the lights were on me, and the acoustics were perfect.

Like my heart rate was through the roof, my palms were sweaty. I mean, I was feeling a lot of feels. And I remember telling myself, “Man, I got to practice what I preach.” So the first thing I said is, I’m like, “What I’m feeling, it’s not good or bad, it just is. And it’s like my nervous system getting primed to perform.”

And then the second thing I said is, “How crazy is it that I’m getting paid all this money and that they invited me to this theater to give a talk?” and I just kind of laughed at myself. And then I went on a stage and I nailed it because I didn’t go out on stage with, like, this mindset of, “I’ve got to do well,” or, “I’m terrified.” It was like, “I’m terrified but it’s kind of hilarious that I’m even in this position to begin with.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that. It’s kind of hilarious that you’re in this position as opposed to, “Oh, better not screw it up. They paid a boatload of money. I don’t want to rip them off by bombing this here.” Like, that’s a whole ‘nother zone of thought, which is the opposite of fun and will lead you to a not high-performing place.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, 100%. And what ends up happening is then you take a negative, which is you’re feeling nervous, and you turn it into a double negative, which is you’re feeling nervous and you’re freaking out about feeling nervous. Whereas, if you can just feel nervous and not turn it into a double negative, well then you’re fine.

There’s research from Olympians, and particularly swimmers, that shows that world-class athletes and non-world-class athletes, they have the exact same physiological sensations before a big race. So their heart rates are the same, their cortisol, their stress hormone is the same, their perspiration rate, so their sweat rate is the same.

The only difference is that the non-elite athletes, they freak out about those feelings and they try to make them go away. In the elite athletes, they smile at the feelings. That’s it. Same feelings. It’s just how you appraise them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Well, I also want to ask, was there a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you made while putting together The Way of Excellence?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I think that this notion of intensity and joy coexisting was something that I kind of knew but I didn’t really have these concrete examples for. And then in reporting on the book, I found, time and time again, in every elite performer, whether they were an athlete, a business person, a creative, an entrepreneur, an executive, they all have this ability to flip a switch and become very intense. And at the same time, they experience deep joy and they have a lot of fun in what they’re doing.

And I think part of the reason that’s surprising is, I think, especially in maybe more like masculine-coded spaces, there’s this kind of David Goggins approach to greatness, where, like, you always have to be pissed off, you always have to be angry, you’ve got to have a chip on your shoulder, you’re out to kind of, you know, beat everyone else and beat yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
You got to stay hard, Brad.

Brad Stulberg
You got to stay hard, that’s what he says. You got to stay hard. And I did find that a lot of excellent performers, like, they have the Goggin switch, like they can flip that switch, but it’s just that, it’s a switch and they turn it on and then they turn it off. And when they turn it off, they can be the most fun, loving, humorous, kind, soft people. And then they turn that switch on when they need it.

So it’s not that the stay-hard Goggins approach is all wrong. It’s just it’s not the only thing. Like, it’s a switch. And great performers, they know when to turn that switch on, but they also know that if they try to keep that switch on more than they need to, it’s going to actually hurt their performance and hurt their joy in life. So not intensity or joy, but intensity and joy. And, man, like, I would never bet against the person that has a lot of fun working hard toward a big goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And so you suggest in your book that the pursuit of excellence is not just for elite performers, NBA athletes, Navy SEALs, etc., but for everyone. Can you expound on this thesis?

Brad Stulberg
I define excellence as involved engagement and caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. So excellence is not winning at all cost. Excellence is not perfectionism. Excellence is not rote optimization. It’s not having a 47-step routine that starts at 4:00 in the morning that you need to broadcast for everyone on social media.

Excellence is not impeccable genetics. Excellence is not a standard. Excellence is a process of identifying something that you care about and giving it your all. And if you do that and you work really hard at it, eventually, you’re going to get some good results.

And the results matter. It’s not to say results don’t matter. The only people that say results don’t matter are people that are, like, gazillionaires because they’ve had all this conventional success. Like, winning matters. Getting a promotion matters. Achieving matters. Oftentimes there are very real financial ramifications, new opportunities you get.

So the results matter, but the results aren’t the thing. The thing is the focus and the intention and the deliberateness that you bring to the process. And that’s what, ultimately, gives you the best chance at achieving a result, and that’s what shapes you as a person.

So when you pursue heartfelt, genuine excellence, yes, you’re working towards some goal. You might want to run a marathon. You might want to get promoted to the C-suite. You might want to start a company. But that goal is also working on you. That goal is shaping you as a person. That goal is teaching you about yourself. And true excellence is this bidirectional relationship between the person and the thing that they’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Like, the deadlift, you say, you work on the deadlift and the deadlift works on you. And so it is with any number of things that you’re working on, is it is shaping you while you are pursuing that end.

Brad Stulberg
One hundred percent. The metaphor that comes up time and time again in the book that I just love is of mountain climbing. The top of the mountain is really narrow. All the life is on the sides. Like, the experience that you have isn’t on the summit of the mountain, it’s during the actual climb.

And the day that you win the medal, you’re on the podium for two minutes while they sing the national anthem. You get the promotion to the C-suite and everyone celebrates you for that day, and then the next day it’s back to doing the work.

You get the fancy house or the nice watch, well, now you got to live in the house, and guess what? You’re still five minutes late, even when you’re looking at a Rolex, it tells you you’re five minutes late. So we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy thinking about the summit of the mountain, but we’ve got to pick the right mountains to climb because all of our time and energy, it’s not spent on the top of the mountain, it’s spent on the sides. And, to me, excellence is about climbing as well as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
And can we hear your distinction between genuine excellence and pseudo-excellence?

Brad Stulberg
I define pseudo excellence as the performance of greatness or the performance of excellence, which is very different than the real thing. So pseudo excellence, in extremis, is the influencer that wakes up at 4:00 in the morning, that has their nose taped, or their mouth taped, or God knows what taped because whatever hole you’re supposed to breathe out of changes once a week.

They cold plunge and they video themselves cold-plunging because you got to give a hype speech for everyone on the internet. Then you have to eat a super restrictive breakfast or maybe your intermittent fasting. Again, depends on what month of the year that you’re in.

And you go on and on and on with all of this complex elaborate kabuki, and what you are is you’re winning a world championship of drawing attention to yourself on the internet but you’re not actually winning a world championship of anything else.

The best athletes, the best entrepreneurs, the best musicians, they don’t have elaborate 47-step routines that they film for Instagram because they don’t have time for that. They’re too busy actually doing the thing. So pseudo excellence, again, is like this performative, “Look how great I am and look at all these steps I do to be great.”

Whereas, actual excellence is, “I don’t have time for any of that. I’m a craftsperson. I show up and I write. I’ve got a team to run. I show up and I run that team. I’m an athlete. I go to practice. Like, I keep the main thing the main thing.” That’s one of the big differences.

The second big difference is pseudo excellence often feigns this attitude of nonchalance. Like, “Eh, like, I’m too cool to care, you know? Eh, maybe I’ll win, maybe I’ll lose.” It’s kind of like, “Eh, I’m too cool. Don’t bother me, I’m too cool to care.”

Whereas, genuine excellence, like there is deep caring and earnestness because you actually give a damn about what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You say that caring is essential to excellence. And I absolutely have found that people will say, when I meet them and they say, “Oh, what do you do?” “I’m a podcaster.” “Oh, fun. What’s your show?” “How to be Awesome at Your Job.” “Oh, okay. So how do I be awesome at my job?” It’s like, “Well, I’ve done a thousand plus interviews. So I don’t know how to say this succinctly, but I guess I’ll say care, because fundamentally, foundationally…”

Brad Stulberg
That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
“…that’s not the whole thing, but it’s maybe half the thing and the most foundational thing, in my belief in terms of being awesome at your job, or most things.” So I think we are aligned on this, but I want to hear you preach the gospel of caring to being essential to excellence.

Brad Stulberg
All right, Pete, you can probably remember when you were in middle school, there were popular kids and they were too cool to care. So they sat in the back of the classroom, they never tried in gym, and they made fun of all the kids that tried, right? Well, those kids weren’t cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “Trying is lame.”

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, in reality, those kids were just scared and insecure. And they were scared that if they tried and they failed, it would be embarrassing. So it was easier not to care. It was easier to feign nonchalance.

And a lot of adults have yet to outgrow this tendency because when you care, when you do something in earnest, when you really pour your all into something, you make yourself vulnerable to failure, and you don’t have an excuse.

If you sit in the back of the class and you joke around, well, when you get a C, it’s because you sat in the back of the class and you joked around. If you sit in the front of the class and you try your hardest and you get a C, it’s because you just didn’t have what it takes.

And in order to be excellent, in order to be awesome at your job, you’ve got to make yourself vulnerable. You have to care. You have to risk failure. You have to risk heartbreak. And at a certain point, it’s inevitable that you are going to fail and you’re going to get your heart broken. But the benefit, the upside of all the meaning and the satisfaction and the potential performance gains that you get from caring deeply, way outweighs the downside of occasional heartbreak and occasional failure.

So, yes, you have to care. I have this pennant that sits above my writing desk that just says, “GIVE A DAMN” in all capital letters. And I just think, like, that’s it. You only live once, and that’s a cliche, but we’re all going to die. There are things that are worth giving a damn about, and we should give a damn about those things. That’s what makes life meaningful, is figuring out the things that align with your values and giving them your best shot.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to caring, we’ve got you’re all in, committed, you’re putting yourself out there, you’re vulnerable. And then you’ve got the folks in middle school who think, “Trying is lame and not cool. And I’m not down with that.” I’m curious, is there a mushy middle when it comes to caring that perhaps many of us could find ourselves in?

Brad Stulberg
I think that there is. I mean, there’s this famous quote from T.S. Eliot that says, “Teach me to care and teach me not to care.” And I think that what he meant by that is, like, you do have to care really deeply for all the reasons that we just said, but you don’t want to become so attached to something that, if it doesn’t go your way, it ruins your entire life.

So you don’t want to be the Olympic athlete whose entire identity is wrapped up in running, and then you get injured and you no longer know who you are. So the way around this is to care deeply and to be all in, but not all the time. And to have a couple different components of your identity that you care deeply about.

So you can care deeply about your performance as an athlete, you can care deeply about your being a husband or a wife or a mom or a dad, you can care deeply about your knowledge work job. That’s okay. What you don’t want to do is fuse your entire identity to just one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. In your book, you start with the biological, psychological, and philosophical foundations of excellence. Can you share with us what are these defined? And are there any transformative practices that make all the difference within these three domains?

Brad Stulberg
The biological underpinning of excellence is really simple. All living species have this hardwired imperative to survive, to persist, and to flourish. And for the longest time, all that meant was not getting picked off by a predator and becoming old enough to pass on your DNA via reproduction.

We humans, we are really the first species that can have values and goals beyond survival to reproductive age. We want to create, we want to contribute, we want to innovate, we want to build things, we want to make art, we want to design software and make companies, and do all these incredible things. There is this innate drive towards growth in all of us.

And sometimes it gets whacked out of us by society as we become adults, we kind of can go through the motions, or we think that we don’t have what it takes. But deep inside all of us, it’s just, we’re biologically programmed. We are a striving species, right?

The ancestors of ours that became content, they didn’t pass on their DNA, they died off. Like, the apes that survived were the strivers, the ones that were never content, they kept looking for better opportunities. That is our hardwiring. So, biologically, there is this strong desire to flourish and to push toward creation and contribution that all of us have.

Psychologically, we tend to feel best not when we are chasing happiness, but when we are chasing satisfaction and meaning. And there’s this whole happiness industrial complex that says that the goal is to be happy, but happiness is kind of like a butterfly. Like, every time you try to squeeze and catch it, it just slips through your fingers.

Whereas, the pursuit of excellence, as I define it, involved engagement, caring deeply about something that aligns with your values and goals, that leads to more lasting contentment, satisfaction, and meaning. And, of course, there are periods of joy and happiness along the way.

And then, philosophically, every single philosophical tradition, East, West, prehistory, modern times, at the center of all of these is doing what you can to live into your full potential. And that’s excellence, right? It is the standard, it is the process of becoming the best person, the best performer that you can be.

And when we get down to the heart of it, we humans, from whatever way you cut it, we are programmed to pursue big goals and to care deeply about them and to try to develop ourselves along the way. Like, that is what we are made to do as a species. So we should reclaim that and we should try to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And now, when you mentioned the happiness industrial complex, could you give us some examples of how folks can get derailed by going after the stuff that doesn’t really satisfy?

Brad Stulberg
I think that one of the biggest ways that we get derailed is we think that some kind of achievement is going to make us happy, “So if I just get this promotion, if I just get that bigger house, if I just get that award or that accolade, then I’ll be content.”

Researchers call this the arrival fallacy, and it’s just that. It’s this fallacy that we think we’re going to arrive but we never actually arrive. So the trap is that we can work really hard toward a goal because we think the goal is going to make us happy. But if we don’t actually enjoy the process of working toward it, we’re going to be just as miserable as when we started.

So how do you overcome this trap? What’s the practice? The practice is to make sure that you actually want to spend time on the sides of the mountains that you’re climbing. And don’t climb someone else’s mountain. Because it’s not the summit that’s going to make you happy. It’s whether or not you can find meaning and fulfillment in the climb itself.

I think another way that we chase happiness is, sometimes, we try to avoid discomfort and we try to avoid friction at all cost, or we’ll numb discomfort and friction. We’ll do this with alcohol, with drugs, with gambling, with porn, on and on and on.

And, again, I’m not a purist, I’m not a saint, I have moral failings just like the rest of humanity, but I do think that sometimes we go too far with trying to eliminate friction because we think it’s going to make us happy, when what that does is it makes us empty in longing, and we actually can inject meaningful friction into our life.

The messiness of striving for a goal and having missteps, that imbues life with meaning. The messiness of an actual relationship with another corporal body and all their imperfections and frustrations that comes with it, that actually gives our life meaning. Having to try really hard to do something, that gives our life meaning.

In the book, I have this hypothetical, which is increasingly becoming a reality, which is I say, “Imagine that with AI, with the press of a button, you, Pete, could compose the greatest, greatest musical composition ever. It would win all the Grammy Awards.” Do you think that you’d be really satisfied winning all those awards if all you had to do was press a button?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I’d feel like a fraud and just always wonder, “How come no one else pushed the button?”

Brad Stulberg
Right. So the point is that what imbues the summit of the mountain or the Grammy with meaning is the years and, in many cases, the decades of hard work and struggle that went into it. And I think, increasingly, technology is affording us opportunities to press these buttons.

And it’s not to say that we should never press the button. DoorDash is great. Sometimes I love being able to have food delivered and I don’t have to go out and get it. Wonderful. Great technology. But if our whole life becomes pressing a button to get a result, I think that the result isn’t happiness. The result is emptiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this really gets me thinking here. A friend and guest of the podcast, Kwame Christian said, I don’t know if he made it up, but he said, “You don’t get bonus points for not using all of your resources.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because, in a way, it feels like you do because there’s something to that, the struggle and the meaning that comes with doing hard things and the effort.

And, in some ways, if you have resources, like push-button easiness, and you don’t use them, you kind of do get to feel some extra victory and meaning, like, “Hey, I did it without leaning on these pieces.” But yet, at the other side of the coin, I think there are times when it may very well be ideal for us to go ahead and use the resources.

I’m thinking about, for example, if folks struggle with attention and they think, oh, maybe seeing a psychiatrist and looking at medication for ADHD things is cheating, or, “I’m trying to lose weight and I’ve been struggling. Ozempic or Rogovia or some of these drugs, that’s cheating.”

And so I’d love your hot take on this, Excellence Master, on how we think about using our resources, the easy button. Is cheating a real thing?

Brad Stulberg
I mean, cheating is a real thing. Cheating means that there are rules to what you’re doing and you break the rules. I do not think that taking GLP-1 for weight loss is, by any means, cheating. I don’t think that taking medication for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder is in any way cheating. I think that these are all really valuable tools in the toolkit and we should do everything that we can to flourish.

What I am saying is that if one’s entire life becomes pressing that button, then the result will be emptiness. So if there was a medication that you could take that just eliminated the need for effort in anything, I would not take that medication. I don’t think that would be good.

If you have struggled with your weight and food noise your entire life, and it just absolutely hampers your ability to flourish, of course, you’re going to take that medication. You don’t get extra points, to quote Kwame, or you don’t get a trophy for white-knuckling it. What that makes you is an idiot. Take the medicine.

I think that the metaphor that I like to use is, coming back to where we started, right, like deadlifting. If I were to go into a gym, and instead of deadlifting, I were to go into the gym with a forklift, and have the forklift pick up the barbell for me and then leave the gym, I would get nothing out of that experience, right? It would defeat the purpose, even though I could deadlift more weight.

But I don’t because the whole point of that experience is to exert effort and to struggle toward a goal. However, if I go to IKEA, you better believe it, I’m using the forklift to pick up the bed. I’m not trying to pick up the bed at IKEA because the point of going to IKEA isn’t to lift weight, it’s to get the bed.

So there’s a time and a place to use the forklift. And I think that people default to this extreme, which is like using the forklift is cheating. No, that’s nonsense. It’s like kind of like the barefoot people. And, listen, I don’t want to make enemies.

For some people running barefoot is great, but like shoes are an incredible technology. You’re not tougher if you don’t wear shoes. However, if your entire life becomes cushioned and padded to keep playing the metaphor, yeah, like you might be missing out on something.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. I think that’s well said because there are so many domains of our life, like we are facing multiple challenges, sometimes it feels like too many darn challenges all at once. And so if there are tools, approaches that make results in one domain easier, there are sensible, you know, pros, cons, risks, rewards, cost, benefits, side effects, doctor advice, all the things, right? Then, yeah, have at it. That’s kind of where I’m coming out is…

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, you just don’t want to do it necessarily in the primary thing that gives your life meaning. Here’s another example, okay? My primary craft is writing, and I don’t use AI when I write because I don’t want to, and the value that I get out of writing is actually the satisfaction of struggling and working really hard.

However, I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my revenue and expenses. I don’t sit there and add up the math on a sheet of paper because that’s not my primary thing. And, like, that’s it. And I think you got to identify, like, “What are the primary things?” And then outside of those, you should absolutely use all these technologies and resources to make life easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in the domains of focus and concentration, you mentioned those are our core pillars of excellence. If folks are struggling with distractions or difficulty with focusing, do you have any top tips on prevailing amidst this environment?

Brad Stulberg
I think that the key thing is the last thing that you just said, this environment. So this environment is very much rigged against us. And I think reclaiming focus starts with trying to design these micro ecosystems around you that make it easier to focus. So what does that mean? It means that when you sit down to read a book or to do work or to have an intimate conversation, don’t bring your phone into the room with you.

Don’t have it face down and off. There’s research that shows that even a phone that is face down and on silent, like we all do, it detracts about 40% of your ability to focus because, even if you don’t reach for the phone to pick it up, the amount of willpower it takes to resist reaching for the phone and picking it up encroaches on what you’re doing.

So remove the phone, remove the digital devices, create these spaces and times throughout the day where you can really settle in and engage with depth and with full focus. So get upstream, change the environment. That’s the first thing.

The second thing I’d say is, much like the industrial revolution gave us cars and forklifts and all these things, and as a result, many people, we don’t live the same kind of active lives as our ancestors did. So you need to go to the gym to exert yourself, to be “physically healthy.” I think, increasingly, we’re going to have to do that for our mind.

So, for me, what is going to the mind gym? There’s nothing better than reading a book. And I’m biased because I’m a writer and my livelihood depends on people reading a book. But there is so much research that shows that the art of sitting with a hard copy book, and focusing and reading it and taking notes on it and having associative creative ideas, like that builds one’s ability to focus more than anything.

So I would say, much like if you want to train a muscle, you’re going to train three days a week for 30 minutes a day, you’ve got to start thinking about your brain like your cognitive muscle. And in order to train that muscle, there’s nothing better than setting aside time to read a book.

Something else that can be really helpful is just, in these small crevices throughout the day when we’d, otherwise, reach for like the adult pacifier, i.e., a phone or something to distract us, just to sit with your own thoughts.

So a great way to practice this that I do all the time, is I’m out to dinner with my wife or with a friend and they have to go to the bathroom. So instead of picking up my phone while they’re in the bathroom, I just sit in the restaurant, right? I just sit with my thoughts. It’s like three minutes.

When I am running errands, I’ll go into the grocery store, I’ll leave my phone in the glove compartment of the car so that when I’m waiting in line, I just have to sit and wait in line. So just reinserting these small moments of time when we de-habituate to the perpetual distraction.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you expand upon the research showing that simply reading a book is transformational for our capacity to focus?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, a lot of this comes out of the work of Nicholas Carr, and he began this about a decade ago. And what he found is that, when we read a hard-copy book, because it’s not hyperlinked, our brains don’t have the option to click away from it, okay?

So, like, even if you’re reading on your computer, like there’s a hyperlink, there’s a click, it’s just kind of asking your brain, like, “Ooh, there’s something more exciting, there’s something new, there’s something novel.” Whereas, when you sit down and read a book, like the whole package is in front of you.

When you read a book, you also cannot multitask. It is impossible to be both reading and doing something else at the same time. You just can’t. I mean, maybe you could, like, walk really slowly while reading, but you can’t read while you do the dishes. You can’t read while you drive a car, at least not safely. So it also is this forcing mechanism to single task.

And then the other thing that reading a book does is it builds sustained concentration and sustained focus. So if you haven’t read a book in a long time, you sit down to read, and just making it through like two pages is going to be really challenging, right? You’re going to feel the urge to check your phone, to put down the book, to entertain whatever thoughts you’re having.

And then the next day, maybe you make it three pages and then four pages, and then you get stuck on four pages for a week, but much like a muscle, you keep going back to the gym, eventually you get to eight pages. And then before you knew it, you can actually groove in and you can read 40 pages without being distracted.

That kind of progressive overload is what it’s called an exercise, but the ability to slowly build the muscle to concentrate and focus, a book is just the perfect mechanism for that because you’re literally turning pages and adding more and more focus each time you sit down to read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Brad, tell me, any final things you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Brad Stulberg
I think this was a really good conversation. We got to touch on, I think, some of the interesting ideas in the book. We scratched the surface. So if you all found this interesting and valuable, I highly recommend you go get the book for more. But as always, Pete, you do a great job teasing out some of my favorite things. Well, now I guess we’ll actually get into my favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we can start with me, of course, flattery accepted. How about a favorite quote?

Brad Stulberg
Favorite quote comes from Robert Pirsig who says that “The only Zen on the tops of mountains is the Zen that you bring up there with you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Brad Stulberg
My favorite book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written in 1974 by Robert Pirsig.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget that folks really love and quote back to you often, a Brad original?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I think there are a few, but one is this notion that consistency is more important than intensity. So instead of trying to hit home runs, you just have to put the ball in play over and over and over again, and then eventually the home runs start hitting themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Brad Stulberg
The best place is the book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. You can get it from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, pretty much wherever you get books.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Brad Stulberg
I think, identify what is worth caring deeply about and give a damn. Don’t be too cool to care. There’s actually no such thing. Caring is cool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Brad, thank you.

Brad Stulberg
It’s always a pleasure.