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Mar 05
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1134: Creating the Moments that Make Work Come Alive with Daniel Coyle

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Daniel Coyle shares how to infuse ordinary work moments with greater meaning, joy, and fulfillment.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why shared improvement beats self-improvement
  2. The three minute visualization that liberates tremendous clarity
  3. Why vulnerability comes before trust–not after

About Daniel

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code, which was named Best Business Book of the Year by Bloomberg, BookPal, and Business Insider. Coyle has served as an advisor to many high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. His other books include The Talent Code, The Secret Race, The Little Book of Talent, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects, which was made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves. 

Coyle was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and now lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife, Jenny, and their four children.

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Daniel Coyle Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, welcome back!

Daniel Coyle
Hey, it’s good to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about flourishing. You’ve done some great work here with your book and a lot of research. Could you kick us off by sharing what’s perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and workers and flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Two of them. One is that it’s still happening. It feels like we’re living in this dystopia sometimes, but, man, there’s a lot of good stories of human flourishing. And by flourishing, we should kind of define it, I guess, which is joyful, meaningful growth. Joyful, meaningful growth, like the highlights of our lives, the thing we all want for ourselves and our kids and our work and our colleagues.

And the biggest surprise of it, when I went into this sort of researching, finding people who were flourishing, I had the assumption that I had learned, which was that kind of you flourish alone, like it’s up to you, right? We’re in this individualistic culture. It’s like my deal.

And what I found over and over again was that’s not how it works. That’s just not how it works. There’s no hermits in caves in Switzerland who are like kicking ass flourishing. We require other people to bring out the best version of ourselves. It’s we are pre-wired for this. You can try all you want and grind all you want and try to be the solo mountain climber but, in the end, flourishing is a human ecosystem and it’s interdependent.

And if we think back on the times in our lives where we’ve grown the most, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts, as they say, that you weren’t by yourself. You were surrounded by people. When we look at stories of great success, the narratives we receive are often stories of the solo hero. But scratch that just a little bit, just look half an inch beneath and you will find ecosystems of support. And that’s what those places are building.

They’re building community. It’s the power of community. And where that gets really interesting is applying it to our workplace because a lot of times our workplace are built under that similar assumption that everybody’s you’re on your own, man. You get promoted by yourself, you get reviewed by yourself, but the places that I visited were really good at creating that kind of connective energy and that group brain that makes one plus one equal ten.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that so much, and it’s funny that I think I’m coming around to realizing something that has been on my mind for 28-ish years. And it was this, back in high school, I participated in a marching band. I was in alto sax, if you’re curious. And I was amazed at marching band camp.

So here in the summer for about two weeks, like 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.-ish, we just played music and tried to move to different spots on the football field over and over and over again. And so, yeah, and so we’re talking about seven hours, day after day after day to put together a little marching band show.

And so I always thought, “You know, this is fun.” I was there. I liked meeting people, you know, it was a thing to do, my brother did it, and I just had a good time just hanging out with people and playing some music, doing a show.

But I always thought, during marching band camp and many times afterwards, “Boy, if I could just buckle down by myself and put that kind of energy and attention and time into an endeavor, the way we do in marching band camp to do a little music show on a football field, what kind of incredible things would I be able to achieve? What kind of flourishing and growth could I encounter?”

And, well, you know what, Daniel, it may not surprise you, you’ve done the research, 28 years later, I still can’t do that by myself.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, right. It’s true. That’s how we’re wired. It goes deep. Think, let’s just move the camera back a few hundred thousand years, right? Who’s going to survive? The group that can cooperate and do their marching band, call it killing a mammoth or whatever, or the lonely, strong, courageous lone wolf guy? I mean, there’s no question.

So when we play a game, let’s say we’re trying to do something and we’re both wired up to some machine that measures our overall happiness and energy and our brain waves, our shared success lights us up way more than our individual success.

Like, if you want to tap in, if you see your life as like a journey where you need a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, don’t do it alone, right? Really finding these ways to connect, finding these communities. And the power of community, that’s a word that I always thought was such a boring word, like you’d see community meeting on a sign and it would kind of be like, “Oh, snooze,” you know?

But what I’ve realized in looking at these flourishing places is that they don’t see community as a noun, they see it as a verb, as a set of actions. If you’re going to form a community, it’s not just, “Oh, yeah, we swim in the same area at the same time.”

Super intentional about creating these little pauses where people come together in the workplace. Super intentional about creating spaces where people can explore questions, simple questions like, “How should we march across this football field? Like, how should we play this song?” The workplace version of that.

And they’re not operating as lone wolves. They’re creating spaces where they can come together and explore that mystery, and all their brains are lighting up and they’re growing and changing and they’re creating these little, I don’t know, like little gardens, right? And like what happened with you.

And I think everybody has their own marching band camp experience back there where you come out of it and you say, “I’m kind of different now. Like, I grew and I helped other people grow.” And that’s like the most core human energy.

And what’s interesting is that we’ve kind of like hollowed it out of the workplace. Like, all the fun and energy that is possible for humans when they come together to do projects, our workplace has been really good about, like, eliminating that in some ways. There are a lot of works that feels very hollow.

I’ve heard it called the emptiness epidemic where it’s like, “Oh, man, I know exactly what I have to do. I have all the information. I have exactly my markers, you know, my KPOs. I’ve got everything that I need, but I just don’t have any meaning and I don’t feel like that energy and I don’t feel that connection.”

And so these places are kind of the antidote to the emptiness epidemic that I think a lot of us are feeling around the workplace right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there are so many places to go there. So if you find yourself in that spot, exactly as you described, you’ve got all the marching orders, the clear KPIs for evaluation, and it’s just kind of lifeless, what’s to be done?

Daniel Coyle
Well, you know, what’s to be done? What’s to be done? It’d be great if I could be like, “Here’s a silver bullet that will solve all the problems.” That doesn’t exist. Two things I would say, though. First of all, reflect on where you are getting a sense of aliveness.

There’s a little litmus test that you can give in terms of flourishing, which is, “Who do I feel most alive with? Is there anybody in this? Who do I feel most alive with?” And the second is, what are you growing together? What are you making together? What are you growing? So ask that.

Find locations in your life. Find the spaces, the conversations, the relationships where you feel that energy in that sense. That’s the first thing. And then start experimenting a little bit. Your culture, your community is the 15 feet around you all the time.

And these little moments, I call them yellow doors, little moments that maybe green doors, for sure we go through them, red doors we don’t. Yellow doors are kind of this where you’re not sure whether you should go through it or not.

And what I saw in these places is that they had the habit of reaching out and, you know, we talk about relationships like they’re a machine, like, “I’m going to go build relationships.” Relationships grow. They grow in tiny moments of warmth, eye contact. And they grow in questions, just asking questions, “What’s energizing you about this podcast right now, Pete? Like, what are you responding to?”

Like, questions that are in the moment where it actually makes people come alive and respond. And, all of sudden, you’re on a different depth with them. You’re on a different level. And the third thing I would say is get good at pausing. Like, our workplace life these days resembles a race, right, an information race and a project race.

And the places that I visited and the people that I visited were exceptionally good at stopping and zooming out a little bit. And when they zoom out, they’re asking questions like, “What does this mean? Like, where is this headed? Who might help me here? What is this going to look like?”

And I really began to see pausing as like the ultimate ninja skill. Anybody can work harder and faster. And in the age of, obviously AI, we’ve got all the answers are right here. We can just go, go, go, go, go and sprint. Every day is a sprint.

But the places that I visited had this ability to say, like before a team would go out on a project, they wouldn’t reflect. They would preflect, like do a pre-flection where it might be like, “Oh, what do we want this to, what’s the ideal outcome? What’s the end state we’re going for? Let’s talk about that for a second. Let’s talk about what’s energizing us about this project. Like, what are you most curious to learn? Where are you curious? And then let’s talk about like, what if everything goes sideways? What does that look like? Like, how will we know we’re screwing up?”

And then afterwards they would do an AAR, similarly, a pause. It feels like a waste of time. The project’s already done, right? But the pause afterwards where you say, “Okay, what went right? We all share. What went wrong? We all share. And what are we going to do differently next time?” It takes like five minutes. Navy SEALs do it. A lot of high-performing organizations do it. Do a preflection and then an AAR.

And they’re just these moments that inject meaning and relationships to what could be just cold, hard KPIs projects. And if you don’t get good at investing at creating those moments, which just take a short amount of time to put some, like, life and oxygen and curiosity and realness and authenticity into them. And that happens in a pause. That happens by everything I just did, was a series of questions, right, “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn? What could go wrong?”

Like, I think we’re so good in our culture as being as worshiping at the altar of the answer, like, “Oh, that guy’s got all the answers. She’s got all the answers. That’s great. They’re so good.” That’s cheap. Like, I’m sorry, but the world has always changed and the answers are going to be different tomorrow than they are today. So having an answer is less valuable than it ever has been in the history of the world. You can get answers a lot of places.

Having great questions, however, is becoming more and more and more valuable. And those questions don’t just exist as informational questions. They exist as spaces for people to come together and explore those questions together to say, “What’s really going on?” so that they can actually build shared mental models and build shared relationships.

Those relationships are the energy source that powers you in your career, in your personal life. You could take all the studies of long-term adult development and they’d add up to one thing – relationships, relationships, relationships. That’s all that makes us happy. That’s all that makes us fulfilled. And so if we approach everything as transaction, we end up kind of hollowed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. It’s like, Well, yes, that was the top thing. I remember we had Robert Waldinger on that very long-term study of Harvard graduates, and that was the thing. It’s like all about love and relationships. Also watch out for alcoholism.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, don’t drink too much and don’t worry about much else. Like, it’s more powerful than genetics, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Okay. So that’s a lovely piece in terms of it doesn’t take a ton of time to inject meaning and relationship human bits into efforts. And I’m thinking about that ritual of always checking in how it went. And I remember I was stunned by, we had a mega church pastor, it might’ve been Clay Scroggins or someone on the show – we’ll put in the show notes – who said that that was a thing that they did after every Sunday worship day, like on Monday, that was just like, “Hey, how did that go?”

And I remember I was so struck by that because it’s so beautiful in that you can really create some cool compounding results in terms of, “Oh, man,” like I’m thinking about this James Clear Atomic Habits type stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Oh, shucks, if we get 2% better at putting this thing together each time, then, my goodness, I guess that’s how churches could become mega. This is a pretty amazing experience.”

Daniel Coyle
That’s how everything becomes mega, isn’t it? It’s like everything is a spiral, Pete, you know. This shape, it’s a natural shape. It’s not a machine, but all natural learning, like your learning, my learning, your listeners’ learnings.

If you really think about it, they’re doing just what that pastor did, which was like, you have an experience, and then you got to go back and get a little feedback about it, and that elevates you a little bit, and then you do another one, and then you get a little feedback, and that elevates you a little bit. And that spiral upward is what we’re all seeking.

And the problem is that we mistake it for a ladder. We mistake it for like a straight line thing and it’s never straight because there’s going to be some wrong turns, there’s going to be some failures. And one of the most useful concepts, there’s been a concept that I learned during this book that just blew me away and I keep thinking about it all the time as a parent, as kind of an entrepreneur, as a writer, and that’s the distinction between complicated and complex. Is that a familiar distinction to you?

Like, I always thought that was the same, like you. I thought they were like similar, like it’s complicated, it’s complex, same thing. It turns out that’s deeply wrong. Like, complicated things come together the same way every single time. Like it’s building a Ferrari, right? If I give you all the parts of a Ferrari and I give you the instructions and you put them together in that way, you will get a Ferrari every time.

Complex things change. Complex things, when you interact with them, they move and they respond. And so the mental model is like, “Is this more like building a machine or is it more like raising a teen? Like, there’s no instruction book. Everything I do changes the dynamic.”

And so our lives, our careers, our learning is way more complex than it is complicated. And so adapting it, knowing that our path is going to be curving, knowing that we’re going to fail, knowing that failure is going to teach us something, knowing that the only way you can figure things out is to kind of act your way into them.

Actions and experiments are incredibly powerful for that reason. That’s why science is so strong. It’s actually trying to figure out what’s there, probing, and then learning, and then probing again, and learning, and probing again.

And when we take that kind of stance toward the learning in our career development, it puts you in the front seat more, like it’s a more active thing and you start to see failure not as a verdict but as a learning process where it’s like, “Oh, totally, that conversation went off the rails, but guess what? I’m never going to make that mistake again, you know?” That was powerful.

And change in that stance can be, I’ve just seen that over and over again in my career of hanging around with high-performing organizations, that learning bit, you know, we kind of always tip our hat to it. It’s good to be a learner, but, man, this world changes fast. It’s not just like morally good to be the learner. It is, by far, the most powerful stance you can take toward reality.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also love that notion that if teams are regularly having these exchanges with one another, that goes miles in terms of – well, I guess growing, not building – growing the relationships.

Well, so as I think about these relationships growing and getting stronger and having these kinds of exchanges, I think that’s also just going to do loads for psychological safety. Amy Edmondson was on the show talking about that, and we’ve had others who put it very simply.

People see stuff that’s dumb all the time but they’re probably not going to mention it unless you’ve got some sort of relationship or belief that that’s going to go somewhere.

Daniel Coyle
That’s so deep, isn’t it? And that word safety is a tricky one a little bit because it implies that we’re going to make everyone feel very secure. But, in fact, it’s about courage. Like, the courage to say, “Oh, I noticed that was off and we can fix it.”

And so what I’ve seen leaders do over and over again, because we’re naturally like hierarchical, right? So for all the young leaders out there, the most important words you can say are like, “Hey, I screwed that up before,” or, “Hey, what do you think?”

If you could change one thing to actually go kind of overboard in taking off your crown of power and inviting people into, again, let’s go back into question space, where they can explore it together, that’s where relationships are built in that exploration when we’re stepping into that uncertainty.

And the deeper level of that is really all about how vulnerability works. Like, I think our story in our head about trust and vulnerability, we’ve got it deeply wrong. Like, we normally think, “Okay, Pete, I’ve got to trust you before I can be vulnerable. So I’m kind of looking to see if you can earn that, right?”

We’ve got it backwards. Moments of vulnerability are what create trust. It’s called a vulnerability loop. When you’re vulnerable, that gives me permission to be vulnerable, and now we’re closer. And think about your best friends in the world. Are they people that you earned the trust of? Or are they people that you were, like, thrown into struggle with and people that you were very vulnerable with?

Those are our best friends because that’s how vulnerability works. It doesn’t come after trust. It comes before.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could you share perhaps a story with us of folks who were not so much flourishing and then they incorporated some of your pro moves here and saw a real increase in that flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Pro moves, I like that. So there’s one story, I guess this might resonate. I’ve been consulting with the Cleveland Guardians baseball team for the last 13 years. And when we started, they had just started a large organizational effort to build the organization around the general, and basically, back context here. They’re one of the poorest teams in baseball.

In baseball, there’s no salary cap, so the Yankees can spend four times as much money on their players every year. So the Guardians can’t buy players. They have to make players, grow players. And like every baseball team, they’ve got a sort of a school system of there’s minor league teams, single A, double A, triple A. And it’s like a giant baseball school. And so we have to figure out, “How can the Guardians compete in such an unfair game?”

And so we created a generative question, which was, “How do we help every player improve?” And we oriented all the departments around it. And we quickly realized, “Man, if players are going to improve, we need to really improve our coaches. Our coaches need to be learning fast.”

And so our first move, we said, “Well, let’s bring in expert coaches. We’ll tell them how to coach.” We brought in Michael Phelps as coach. We brought in NFL coaches, Navy SEAL guys, and it felt good. It felt like it was a really smart thing to do.

But then as we watched it, the coaches did what everybody does, which is they kind of resisted. Nobody likes being coerced from the top down. Nobody. Nobody likes that. Go tell your kid to clean their room and see how fast they clean their room. It doesn’t work.

So we flipped it. We flipped it around. We created a question space. We put the coaches in small groups and said, “Okay, guys, who is the best coach you ever saw? And what did they do?” That was it. All of a sudden, at these tables, the conversation starts to bubble like champagne. All of a sudden, they’re throwing out stories and ideas and concepts.

And we went from like top down saying, “Do this expert stuff to…” “You guys, we’re going to value you. You’re really smart. Let’s bring those out.” We turned that into our model of excellent coaching, which we still use to this day.

And there were a million other little programs like that, whereby, sort of flipping the polarity from “Here are the experts. Here’s best practices. Follow these instructions,” from coercion to, “Whoom! Let’s explore this together. What energizes you right now?” and aligning that with what the academic studies and what works with coaching.

And over the last 13 years, we’ve made the playoff eight times. We’ve won as many games as the Yankees and spent $1.3 billion less. We’re adding up to more. We’re growing. We’re getting a little better at growing players. It’s not easy, and we haven’t won the World Series yet, but it has been alive. It’s been energized. It’s been challenging, but it’s been really joyful.

And so that’s kind of the piece where I see it happening. And when I see that happening at the highest level of sport, where everything is quantified and where things are extremely difficult, it gives me some hope that it can happen where the places that are maybe away from the bright spotlight.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I love, though, the notion of we flip it and then you ask the question. So can you share with us, you’ve given us a couple fabulous questions, can you give us a few more of your faves that unlock some cool flourishing action?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, no, I really like flight checks. It’s a concept out of IDEO. Flight checks is you do with your team. And all of these are all social, right? You can do it by yourself if you want to, but it’s always better to do with other people.

Pre-flight, you know, “We’re about to do a project, let’s do a pre-flight, let’s do a mid-flight, and let’s do a post-flight.” And the questions are always really basic, it’s like, “What’s been the biggest positive? What’s been the biggest negative? Are you still energized by where we started out? What did you learn?” These basic sort of check-ins.

There’s one question that I really like before a team gets together because, you know, lot of times you’re coming together, you don’t know each other. And there’s an exercise called the 4HS that’s really powerful.

And it’s kind of a relationship builder or relationship grower, rather. Let’s use our language correctly here, Pete. 4HS, you get to a small group and everybody shares their history, just a little bit about their history, “Where are you from? Where is your family from?”; their heartbreak, “What’s something that broke your heart?”; their hero and their hope for the coming year. Super simple. Take a couple minutes. You go around the horn.

But what’s happening is you’re turning off your narrow attention system and you’re opening up your relational attention system. You’re creating connective energy in that moment. So that’s one that I really like. It’s really basic.

And there’s one more that is more for individuals. It was taught to me by a Columbia University psychologist, Lisa Miller. It’s called the Counsel Exercise, and I’ll just describe it or we could actually do it if you want. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to walk through it?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s walk through it.

Daniel Coyle
All right, let’s walk through it. Close your eyes, picture a wooden table, just a simple wooden table, and around that table, picture people living or deceased who truly have your best interest in mind, who are truly deeply on your side. And let them come and take a seat.

And now picture yourself walking in and taking a seat. And now ask them if they love you and listen to their response. And now ask them, what is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed? What is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed, and listen to their answer?

And now you can open your eyes. And that’s it. It’s a little grounding exercise. How did it go for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, I bet people cry when you do this.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, I’m tearing up a little here. And it’s so funny, it’s, like, that’s always inside of us. And yet, unless you pause and really go there, because in some ways it’s, like, we like to rush. We like to get their answers, like, “Do I really have to visualize the table? And now I’ve got to visualize people. And now I to visualize me walking in the room, you know?” As opposed to just, “What’s the answer?” And yet it makes all the difference in terms of it hitting home.

Daniel Coyle
It makes all the difference. It hits home, right? I love how you said that. Those people are always with you and yet we don’t sort of stop and turn and listen to them. And so a lot of this stuff is about getting in deeper touch with what we really value, what’s really beautiful in our lives, what’s really true in our lives, and creating space in our work, in our home life where we can stop and do that.

And our ancestors stopped a lot more than we did, right? Old-time life was filled with moments like that, rituals where you’d think about the people who came before and think about what they meant, and look at treasured objects and symbols. And our life has been like kind of ruthlessly stripped of a lot of those pauses.

And so it’s up to us to smuggle them back into our life, to take a second and feel that powerful stuff that’s, like you say, it’s waiting for you. It’s not something you had to build. We all have got, that’s called your counsel. We’ve all got a counsel. They’re with us all the time.

And listening to them at those moments can, it’s not just comfort. For me, the powerful part of it is the clarity that you get from that because you get a new sense of what matters and what doesn’t matter. And that’s actually incredibly stabilizing in this world where it feels like we’re always chasing something, chasing shiny objects.

It is incredibly stabilizing to have a moment where you can stop and activate what you’re born to do, you know, let go of control, and connect to what’s really there. It’s just like the most powerful skill and it’s half an inch beneath the surface waiting to come out.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I love so much about this is, you know, I’ve had guests and they say things like, “Oh, form a personal advisory board.” I was  like, “Okay, that’s good advice. Yeah, sure. Good thinking, uh-huh.” And then we’ve had Tara Mohr on the show who did some great thoughts about thinking about sort of like an inner mentor, a wiser, maybe older version of you who cares about you, and you do a visualization, you speak with them. And that’s cool and powerful as well.

What I like here is you kind of, wooh, merge those in a groovy way. And, well, for me, just to share, it was sort of a notion of having some worries, concerns, anxieties associated about the future state of some things. And then to feel the reassurance from these people that, you know, my capabilities are vast. In one way or another, we’re going to figure this thing out and there’s really no need to to get all worried about all this stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I know. It’s a good feeling, right? It’s just stabilizing. I just love that. Grounding, right? It’s grounding.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Daniel Coyle
So you got that for a big one, and then you’ve got all kinds of other little ones. Like, there’s a little deli in Michigan that has grown into a $90 million community of businesses that does a nice job of teaching this stuff. And he talks about, Ari Weinzweig, who’s the CEO, he talks about SBA, which is stop, breathe, appreciate. Like, to have a minute where you stop, breathe, and appreciate – SBA.

It’s another good one, but it’s just like, I think most of us could use three or four of these things in our holster, you know, some to do in a team context, some to do in an individual context, some to do in kind of a more, “I’m going to retreat and think about things” context. But, yeah, the world wants to lift us off the ground, and so we have to have our own tools for grounding ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you also have a turn of phrase, nurturing beautiful messes. What does that consist of and how and why should we do that?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, when I visited these places, I thought when I’d visit them, they’d be tidy. I thought that these flourishing places would like have all the answers. And as we’ve said, what they had was a lot of questions. And then what they would do is explore those questions in a messy way.

Like, to go back to the Guardians and the coaches gathered around trying to come up what the best coaches did. That was not a nice, neat process. There was a ton of slack in it. There was a ton of little rabbit holes that people chased down because that’s actually how growth works.

Think about a time where you grew the most. Was it a time where you didn’t fail? No, it was probably a time where you failed a decent percentage of the time, right? Was it a time where you understood or you could execute every single plan that you came up with? No, it was a time where you were probably forced to improvise a little bit.

And so with these flourishing places and these flourishing people and this flourishing community, what there was was this kind of self-organizing around obstacles that was invariably messy. Because if it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right. If it’s not messy, you’re not giving people the freedom to self-organize and take a role.

We had a moment over Thanksgiving where my wife and I were putting on a dinner for our family and maybe 25 people. And turkey was about to come out of the oven and nothing was ready. The table wasn’t set, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I kind of looked around, you know, sort of did the father thing, like kind of skeptical, like, “Is this going to come together?” And then, you know, all of the kids and all their friends, it was like one of those Walt Disney, like fast motion things.

Everything’s perfect. Candles are lit in a tiny amount of time, way more than if somebody had said, “You do this, and you do that, and you do this.” It was a little messy and that’s what gave it the energy. Mess isn’t actually mess. Mess is agency. And when you give people agency in a space, you end up with a much better result than if you kill agency.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of good sense. Okay. Daniel, as people think about this flourishing stuff and we’re getting excited and, like, “Yes, that’s cool. I want that more. Yes, please,” what would you say are your top do’s and don’ts for professionals who maybe don’t have leadership, managerial authority, but want some more flourishing and they want to get it going and want to avoid any missteps?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. Well, the do would be get a three-by-five card and make a mark on it for every day, and start paying attention to where you feel most alive and where you feel you’re contributing to stuff, to something that’s kind of alive and growing. Just notice that. That’s all. That’s the first step.

Like, if anybody gives you like a set of instructions on how to flourish, then that means it’s not actually a good set of instructions, because it is up to you. It is not something, but that’s a guidepost. Look at what’s already happening in your life. Where are you feeling that energy?

And as far as a don’t goes, I think the biggest don’t would be to don’t do it alone. Like, share your story with other people, and share your journey with other people, and share your struggles with other people. That is the thing that will create the energy that will allow you to get through. We live in a world of self-improvement, but shared improvement is way more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally resonate with that. And I’m thinking about, I’ve had times with accountability groups, some men’s groups, my podcast mastermind group, and it’s been transformational. And what’s really cool is you don’t necessarily have to have these humans in your own workplace.

Ideally, you could, if you have some great fun team experiences and, hopefully, you can move in those directions if that’s not currently happening. But even if nobody wants to play ball, you can tap into some of this goodness with your other communities and relationships around you.

Daniel Coyle
Exactly. It’s a whole ecosystem, so explore it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Daniel Coyle
I love, I always go back to, I think it was William Faulkner who said, “Only connect.” Only connect. The clarity of that and that has always made, at the end of the day, what’s it about? It’s about that.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Daniel Coyle
You know, I keep getting taken with this, it was a priming one. A lot of the priming experiments have been a little bit debunked, but the difference between when you’re approaching a task, the difference between saying “I’m nervous” and “I’m excited.”

Like, I feel that in my body. When I say I’m nervous, it just gets worse and when I say I’m excited, it’s a reframing of that. And some of that reframing stuff I find to be like personally super applicable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Daniel Coyle
The Right Stuff. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer. There’s a feeling when you’re reading some books where it just feels like you can feel the top of your head coming off. And I don’t know if you ever felt that with a book or a song or anything, but it’s like that, that knocked me out. Tom Wolfe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Daniel Coyle
I like a great pencil, a great mechanical pencil.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I have the same one!

Daniel Coyle
Come on, dude.

Pete Mockaitis
I got multiples.

Daniel Coyle
Check it out. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a Graph Gear by Pentel, for our listeners.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, for our sponsors. But it’s great, right? Like, I really get a lot of joy out of that. You know, it’s like that stuff matters. It’s a little sacred.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Daniel Coyle
I think I got to say, like trying to get it, I don’t do it every day, but when I do have a workout, like a hard workout, that is like, makes me feel so much better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear it quoted back to you often?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, you know, culture isn’t something that you say or something you are. It’s something that you do. It’s a set of relationships moving toward a goal.

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

Daniel Coyle
DanielCoyle.com

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

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I would say that the call to action would be to make one random reach out to somebody who you haven’t connected with in a long time for no reason. Just reach out, an old friend or something like that, and see what happens. That would be the challenge. It’s like renewing those acquaintances ends up just being the highlight of a day.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to dig into that a little bit because I think that folks naturally can feel some emotional resistance, like, “Ooh, that’s kind of weird. We haven’t talked in like three years. They’re going to think I’m trying to rope them into a multi-level marketing scam. How do I say it?” You know? What do you say to folks who are having a little bit of emotional resistance to this thing?

Daniel Coyle
You know, try it. I mean, everything good is on the other side of fear, period. So that you’re feeling fear is absolutely appropriate, right? But I would also turn them to the work of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, who has people do this at scale.

And you can see the numbers where it’s like the people who are asked to talk to other people on the train are really pessimistic about it. They think, “Oh, this is going to suck.” Guess what? Highlight of their day. People who are asked to, “Just stay by yourself on the train. Just prepare for your work. Focus on yourself,” they end up enjoying it a lot less than they thought they would.

So there’s this flip. We think we’re not going to enjoy these interactions, but we are built, you are pre-wired to enjoy and appreciate and be energized by them. We can’t help it.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Daniel, thank you. So much good stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Super fun, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Mar 02
0

1133: The Philosophy of Scores: How to Measure What Truly Matters and Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game with C. Thi Nguyen

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Thi Nguyen draws on the philosophy of games to explain how scores and metrics impact our lives—and what we can do to use them more meaningfully.

You’ll Learn

  1. How metrics can coopt our values and behavior
  2. The hidden costs of the desire to quantify everything
  3. Why the wrong people often seem to get ahead

About Thi

Thi Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value.

A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Thi Nguyen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Thi, welcome!

Thi Nguyen
Hello. Hello.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited we have a learned philosopher here that, I think, the first time we’ve had a full-blown, legit, credentialed philosopher on the show, and I’m stoked.

Thi Nguyen
I’m sorry, I’m about to under-meet your expectations.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll see. Well, your book, The Score, I found absolutely riveting, fantastic, plowed through it. And I’ve got one burning question I want to address right away, which was, you mentioned you loved just about every game you’ve played, or rather, more pointedly, the one game you regret playing was the computer game Civilization. What’s the story here?

Thi Nguyen
I think one thing I realized, one of the, actually, origin points about thinking about this, about what kinds of things that we did in our lives are worthwhile and not, is that, I don’t know, I spent a whole summer playing Civilization and I just have this memory of a vague anxiety sweat blur of like nothingness.

And when I think about other times I’ve spent with other games, like everything from rock climbing to Go to like really interesting video games, like, Baba Is You, I have this thick memory of how many interesting things happened, how many things I did. And Civilization is just, I don’t know, that time is just gone.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So this kind of reminds me of the distinction between liking and wanting. It sounds like if your whole summer went away, you had a whole lot of wanting, you had to get back to it, see what happened with your trade routes or your armies or your whatever. But there wasn’t a rich memory that felt uplifting afterwards.

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, I also think, one of the things that exposed to me is something that I think we can be wrong about whether we’re having fun or having a good time. And I’ve had this in relationships, friendships, and games.

And I think my favorite example of this is my experience with the first Star Wars prequel movie, which I was so excited for at the time, in which I convinced myself that I had a great time at. And I spent a week being like, “That was awesome.”

And it took me a week to realize that I was talking myself into thinking that it was valuable, that I kind of overwritten the actual experience with my need to think of it as a valuable experience. And I think that’s actually something that can happen in a lot of places.

And I think when I play Civilization, I tell myself, “This is fun, I can tell. Like, it’s a good game, I’m into it.” But, actually, afterwards the time seems valueless.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I think that’s so true that we can talk ourselves into it. For any number of reasons, we want to think we haven’t been duped, we want to justify the money, the time we’ve invested. And, yeah, I think we totally have the capacity, a great capacity for self-deception.

Well, let’s get into things a little bit with regard to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Could you maybe tell us a little bit of the backstory for how these ideas got swirling around your head and seemed like a worthwhile thing to spend years researching and putting together some great writings on?

Thi Nguyen
So, a bunch of this comes, I’ve spent a lot of the years of my life working kind of an insane path through philosophy. I’ve been obsessed with a part of philosophy that I think isn’t even supposed to be part of my field, which is the philosophy of games.

I’ve been trying to figure out what games are and why they’re valuable. And this started way back when, because I was reading a bunch of stuff with some students about video games. They wanted to know whether video games were art, and we read about, you know, a bunch of articles about it.

And most people were trying to say that video games were art because they were like a movie. And I was like, “Yeah, some games are like a movie. Some games have cool cutscenes.” But, actually, the thing that I really care about is how it feels to be playing, the fact that I get to make interesting decisions or interesting movements.

And when I was trying to figure this out, I found this moment from my favorite game designer, Reiner Knizia, he’s a German board game designer. And in one of his talks, he says that the most important part of his game design toolbox is the scoring system because it tells the players what to care about. It sets their desires.

And that, I think, is the moment where I was like, “Oh, this is so interesting. This is even more interesting than I realized.” Because games, I think they don’t just create worlds, they create alternate selves for us to plunge into.

And so I wrote an entire book about the beauty of games and how game designers use scoring systems to push around our motivations, to give us alternate ways of caring, and to create all this incredibly beautiful, rich action.

And then I started worrying about gamification because I think a lot of people were saying like, “Oh, you love games. You must love gamification. Let’s gamify the classroom and let’s gamify the workplace.” And I thought that if we actually understood what made games really valuable, we would understand why most gamification was rotten and why it sucked out what was really valuable.

And so I ended up telling a story about what is wrong with gamification, and what is wrong with thin metrics in the workplace, especially when they start to capture our values and change our sense about what’s valuable in our life.

And I got to this point where I realized I had an entire story where scoring systems in games turned out to be beautiful, delightful, the seat of joy. And then I had this story about how scoring systems in bureaucracy, government, and corporations, seemed to suck the life out of people, and I wanted to understand why.

And that’s basically why I wrote this book. I was obsessed with why scoring systems were basically responsible for my favorite parts of life and my least favorite parts of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think you do a masterful job in the book, as you say, that it hits different when we’re scoring in a game versus when we’re being scored at work or with the KPIs and the metrics associated with performance there.

Can you maybe tell us a cautionary tale for professionals of why should this be on our radar? Why should we have our antenna up to these philosophically concepts in terms of our real-world life, happiness, flourishing career implications?

Thi Nguyen
Let me tell two stories. One is personal and one is institutional, and I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from both. So the personal story, I mean, I went into philosophy because I thought, I mean, philosophy is a terrible career decision, right? Like, jobs are hard, pay is terrible, work is hard.

The only reason you do it is because you love it, because it’s this weird, fascinating thing. And there are particular kinds of questions and ways of asking about the world that I loved. And then I got plunged into the world of philosophy.

And philosophy, just like every other world, is a profession that has its internal metrics and indicators. There is a status ranking of journals and a status ranking of universities. And I, like a lot of other people, were brought up to aim intensely at getting articles published in the highest status journals. Let me really clear how we did that.

What you did was that you had to write a very specific, very narrow, very technical kind of philosophy on very specific kinds of topics. And it was really boring. And I, basically, spent five years in this field that I was supposed to love, working on things that were more and more boring to me, precisely because I’d come to be guided by a system that represented, not like my sense of what was important, but some kind of like external redigestion and like vomiting back of what people in general thought was important. There’s one story.

I think another one, one thing that I’ve started to think about is not just like the external metrics are external, that they’re somebody else’s, but there’s a particular flavor to them. And I think most people know what I’m talking about. They feel inhumane, in a way. They feel distant, they feel rigid, they feel like they don’t capture what’s actually important. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

And there’s all these examples that I find really interesting. So here’s one. Sally Engle Merry is an anthropologist who studied human rights work, and she got really interested in the ranking of, so the US State Department issued something called the Trafficking in Persons Report. It’s their sex trafficking report. And they’re rating countries on various countries’ ability to combat sex trafficking.

And the primary metric is conviction rates of sex traffickers. And what Merry points out is that this is actually a terrible metric because a lot of sex trafficking is highly correlated with ambient poverty. So if a country manages to decrease general poverty, uplift the economic status of its poor citizens, actual sex trafficking evaporates.

But since it’s evaporated, there are no sex traffickers to convict. So, by the metric, an actual successful lifting of general citizen well-being, and an actual reduction in sex trafficking, counts as a failure because the thing that the metric is picking up on, it’s not actual sex trafficking, but a very rough proxy of when that kind of activity enters into the government site via a particular kind of interaction, the arrest of a sex trafficker.

I think one of her reasons she says why this happens is because actual sex trafficking is actually incredibly hard to track partially because, by its nature, it occurs out of view and because it’s really, like what counts as a sex trafficking victim and an actual sex trafficker is really, really fuzzy on the edges.

She has this incredible example. She says, imagine someone who’s starving, a woman who’s starving, who crosses an international boundary to work in a brothel. And then the next year, they bring their friend, who’s also starving, across the boundary to work in the same brothel. Is the first woman now an international sex trafficker, right?

Really hard to answer those questions. You don’t have to answer them if you go to conviction rate, right? It’s so easy. It’s so bright. It’s right in front of us. Another example nearby is the example of Charity Navigator. Do you know Charity Navigator?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there many times.

Thi Nguyen
So Charity Navigator is supposed to be a nonprofit watchdog that watches on other nonprofits and rates them for how good they are at charity. And for a really long time, it’s changed recently due to these exact criticisms, but for a long time, over a decade, I think, their primary metric for rating nonprofits was a throughput ratio.

It was a ratio of how many donations were given versus how many of those domain donations emerged on the other side, and were given as resources or money to the other place, to whatever the target is.

It turns out, this is, again, a terrible metric. And the reason it’s terrible is because by that metric anything spent internal to the nonprofit counts as waste. The metric depends on this image that nonprofits are just kind of pipelines for money. And, say, any money that a nonprofit wants to spend on an internal expert, will make it plunge in the rankings.

This example is so interesting to me, because the reason that we seize on that metric is because, in order to actually rate nonprofits, we would actually have to know a huge amount about their very specific domain.

So we would have to understand, like, about the housing crisis in one particular part of the world, and the lack of doctors in another part of the world. And we would somehow have to figure out how to compare those in a clear way. That’s really hard.

Accounting, on the other hand, is really stable and nonprofits do it in a similar way. And so if you focus on that layer, right, the accounting layer, you can find a kind of similar-enough quality that automatically outputs a kind of quantitative measure.

So you can generate an objective ranking, but you’ve generated that objective ranking by shifting the target over from what actually matters to a topic matter that has been chosen precisely because it can create an easy ranking.

There’s more kind of large-scale explanation to unpack, but I think these are really interesting examples of how the process of measuring things at scale seizes on certain kinds of parts of the world and has a lot of trouble coping with the parts of the world that actually might matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I hope, I know the way some people’s brains just fire off. They see implications right away. And sometimes you need a little bit of a bridge. And so, as you’re saying these, and I’m hearing it, and I thought like, “Whoa, this is actually epically high-stakes transformational stuff.”

Because when you say what counts as a sex trafficker, I mean, like you bring it into a business, like, “What counts as revenue? What counts as a customer? What counts as customer satisfaction?” And then, “What is the underlying view?” Like, nonprofits are pipelines for money. You make a point here that metrics are not neutral and objective. They’re values-laden.

Like, a person decided, “This is the metric we’re going for and this is what counts and this is what doesn’t,” based upon what they were trying to accomplish. And that has major downstream amplifications or ramifications for everyone that’s engaging with these numbers.

Thi Nguyen
So I’m not a philosopher of science, but I hang out with lot of philosophers of science, and there’s philosophy of science in this other field nearby called science and technology studies.

One of the primary themes that emerges from this work is that a lot of people tend to think that a lot of scientific tools, a lot of measurement tools, and a lot of data collection systems are value-neutral. They just represent the world in a kind of neutral way, but actually these tools are value-laden. This means they represent a particular point of view with particular interests. And they often do that by what they put in and what they leave out.

One of the places this becomes really clear to me is just thinking about maps. So maps are a kind of representation. You might think that a map is neutral, but a map, by definition, deletes most of the world, right? What a map is doing is something that highlights certain parts of the world. Who chose what to highlight, right?

Maps are good for certain kinds of things and not good for others based on decisions we made in the background. So most of the maps I look at are very good for telling you how to find a business or how to drive there. They’re not really good at telling you where the places that sound pleasant are, where the friendly neighborhoods are.

And they could do that, right? You could create a map that represents where nightlife is or represents where nature is. And people do make those maps, but the standard maps leave that out. They represent an interest.

The data system, I think about this a lot, so at my school, the administration is interested in lifting student success, which sounds awesome. But student success is largely defined in terms of graduation rate and graduation speed, and it’s not defined in terms of things like reflectiveness or thoughtfulness or creativity or ethics, right?

So, for example, if your primary measure for student success is graduation speed, and I meet a student who is bored, their major isn’t doing well for them, they’re not that good at it, they’re kind of frustrated. And I convinced them that the major is the wrong one for them.

And we talk and we’re like, “Oh, that’s what they’re really interested in,” and we help them find another major that’s better fit for them, that makes them happier, that fits their skill set more, but it’s going to take another year, that counts as a failure.

Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher, I think a lot of people might know that he said that morality comes down to political power, and political power comes from the tyrant, whoever has the ability to, like, get people to do what they want.

And Hobbes actually says that the real source of political power, the ultimate form of political power is not military strength or might, or even economic strength. It’s power over language. Because if you can dictate to them what success and failure mean, then you can control them from the inside. And these are the stakes, I think.

What metrics actually are, are a way of fixing what counts as success and fixing what we should all be moving towards. And if there’s some systematic slippage between what actually matters and the kinds of things that it’s easy to build metrics about, then our entire internal guidance system is going to be deeply rewritten at its core based on somebody else’s values, right, some particular person that made the measurement system.

So I was reading this paper from a philosopher named Philippi about values and measurement systems. And he was pointing out how value-laden the idea of intelligence is, right? So intelligence testing is a very value-laden measure.

So you might know that IQ tests are racially and gender-biased. That might be true, but that’s not the center of what he’s talking about. Here’s the value-laden system inside our intelligence tests. The intelligence tests we have right now all encode into them the view that mathematical and logical ability is more important than emotional sensitivity, right?

There is such a thing as emotional intelligence. But think about the fact that our intelligence tests either don’t test it or, if they test it, it’s barely weighted, right? That is a particular set of interests and a representation of how people should be that’s baked into a measurement system that then looks objective once it’s become like a kind of standard use measurement system.

People just think that’s the way the world is, “Of course, that’s what intelligence is,” But it’s a decision that somebody made to weight things that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking about, so we missed the emotional intelligence, but we also missed some of the creativity-type intelligences, or I’ve got a posse of craftsmen who are fixing some water damage right now and doing some amazing things, and that’s a different kind of intelligence than what shows up on the ACT.

Thi Nguyen
Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t use that system. You could start to think about people as having hundreds of different capacities, each of which you could think about in a different way. Some people are good at drawing, some people are good at sensitivity, some people are good at telling stories, some people are good at logical and mathematical ability.

But instead, what we’ve done is we’ve created something that says, “No, all of these boil down to one thing.” And the idea that there’s one thing that is intelligence is a worldview that’s subtly been baked into a kind of metric.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s so interesting when you talked about scoring sets their desires, and it’s true. I think about strategy games. You probably know the name for this. There’s a principle at which, if there is a dominant strategy, folks are going to do it. And so a great game, they say, is one in which there’s not a clear cut, overpowered strategy, but rather a variety that you can choose from.

And I found myself doing this. Like, I’m playing this game, ostensibly, to have fun. And yet, if I find there’s a winning thing I can do, even if it’s not fun, I do it. And I wanted to hear your take on values capture. I remember back when I was consulting at Bain, we had what’s called a sell weekend or offeree weekend, in which the folks who had received offers to work at this consulting firm come out and we try to show them a great time, and how cool it is to work at Bain and all that.

And this one person, I remember, she also had an offer from McKinsey & Co., a rival consulting firm. And she was torn, you know, between this. And then she said, “I feel like I’m choosing between happiness…” which was Bain, “…and prestige or pleasing my parents,” which was apparently Mackenzie, is what these things represent to her.

I don’t know if that’s really a fair summary, but that’s how she saw the world. But she did, she went with McKinsey. And so the scoring, in terms of like the rankings of prestige, kind of like the philosophy schools, whether they’re consulting firms or whatever, does, in fact, have the ability to set our desires, and we can just kind of default to stuff without even thinking about it.

Can you expand upon your concept of values capture? How does it happen and how do we guard against it?

Thi Nguyen
So value capture is a term I came up with to describe something I was feeling all the time, and I think a lot of people were, which is that your values are rich and subtle or they’re developing, and then you get put in some kind of institutional or social setting that presents a simplified, typically quantified version, and then the simplified or quantified version takes over in your heart.

I want to be clear that value capture is not the same as being incentivized. So I think a lot of people know Goodhart’s law, right? When a measure becomes an incentive, it stops being a good measure. And Goodhart’s law is gesturing at the same thing. It’s gesturing at this idea that incentives don’t capture what’s important.

But I think there’s a big difference between the first stage, when a metric incentivizes us, right, when we think like, “Oh, if I go to the higher-ranked thing, I’m more likely to get a job. I’m more likely to get more money.” And the second-stage thing of when the metric intrudes into you and starts to become how you conceive of the point of everything.

I think is that different? For me, like, here’s an example. I think that’s a big thing to ike, “Oh, you know, I’m on Twitter. I need to build a bigger following in order to get my message across.” But if you understand that you’re doing it just to get the kind of power to do the thing you really want, you’re not going to sacrifice your message just to get a bigger following.

But if your soul gets redefined and you start thinking like, “No, the thing that I care about in the end is just having the most followers and likes,” then that’s going to transform your entire way of interacting with that system. I’m not sure about your case.

I think there’s a big difference between a student, for example, who thinks, “I’m more likely to get a job if I go to a higher-status university,” versus a student that thinks, “Success in life is going to the highest-ranked university.”

Because once you go to the second thing, you no longer have a standpoint to reflect on whether or not the metric is working for you. If it’s the first thing, if it hasn’t gone all the way to your core, you can always think to yourself, like, “Well, I know this is important for money or resources or whatever, but is it really worth it to me? Is it really making me happy?”

And you can step back. People can step back from high-paying jobs and high-status jobs because it’s making them less happy. But if you’ve redefined in yourself that that’s what success is, then you’re no longer going to think to yourself, “I should stop doing this because it doesn’t make me happy.”

And I think that’s actually one of the cases I’m most interested in. Like, what happens when you forget to listen to your own sense of happiness or your own sense of value? And it’s gotten overwritten by this easy, clear, outside meter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think the easy, clear, outside meter is what’s so darn tricky about it. Like, money or compensation is, I think you call it, the most fungible of scores in terms of, yeah, you could turn that into a lot of different things, and we all understand it, and it is compared across many different opportunities.

And yet, it could be a lot harder to evaluate two options, like, “Well, one is clearly more money. Cool. But the other makes my heart come alive more, I think, but I can’t quantify heart coming aliveness on it as quite nearly as readily and directly as I can money.”

Thi Nguyen
Yeah. I mean, this is one way to put it. In many cases, I’m not saying that the metric is bad or even that it doesn’t track something real and something important. I’m interested in the fact that easily measured things tend to win out in justification fights against less easily measured things.

Like, should you eat rich cheeses high in saturated fats? On the one hand, there’s data about correlations with lifespan and heart attack rate. And on the other side, there’s the fact that it’s delicious and it makes you happy.

And it’s really hard to hang onto that in the face of those other numbers, especially when you have to have a public fight, right? This is the weird thing. Like, before I say this next thing, I just want to say I’m not anti-science. I believe science gets real truths.

But the world in which all our policies need to be evidence-based and data-based is a world in which we can only target things that are easy to count and easy to data-fy, and we lose our grip in things that are hard to data-fy. And I think, if you think that everything in the world that matters, can be counted by bureaucratic processes, then you have no problem.

But I think we have a really good reason to think that much of what’s really important tends to elude the specific institutional character of large-scale counting processes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, absolutely. And when you mentioned there, when there’s a slippage in metrics between what we’re going for and what actually is captured in the cut and dry definitional metrics, all kinds of implications can ensue. I think, perhaps the most terrifying part of your book was when you described five conditions that, when they’re present, folks who game the system will prosper or rise. And so could you just lay this out for us?

Thi Nguyen
So this is based on an article from Paul Smaldino and Richard McElrath, who are scientists, anthropologists, and computer modelers, and they have a paper called “The Cultural Evolution of Bad Science.”

And they do a computer model of a scientific community where the following is true. One, status is connected to publication rate. Two, if you use the most rigorous, most careful method, you’re going to publish more slowly.

So the people that will gain the most status and power are the people that are going to game the system and use the least rigorous method that will get them just barely over the finish line of publication.

And then if you assume, the last assumption of the model is that if young scientists imitate people with higher-status jobs and their methodologies, then we should expect science to turn pretty crappy pretty fast. And I thought this argument generalized.

The general version is, first, if you think there’s a gap between what’s important and what’s easy to measure, and then you think that the institutions we have tend to reward people with power and resources for hitting the easy-to-measure metric, then you should think, “Look, then there’ll be two populations.”

There’ll be the people who still care about what they care about and are aware of the importance of the metric, but trade off between them. And then they’re the fully value-captured people, the people that are just going to go all out and just game the system and ignore what’s really important and just aim at the metric. And we should expect that the latter population, the narrow hyper gamers, are going to be the people that win out, right?

And if they win out and they, in particular, if they re-tune their institutions once they gain power to make the metrics even more powerful, then you should expect a terrifying feedback loop where, over time, the systems will tend to sort for the people that are willing to ignore the quiet whisper of what’s really important, and just target hell or high water the thin metric that is written, and that kind of narrowness will systematically gather all the social power. That’s the model. Then you can decide for yourself about whether it fits reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s spooky and it’s partially explanatory for all kinds of things, you know, why the rich get richer, why we have corrupt politicians, why that idiot is the boss, you know, in terms of, “Oh, well, they were rewarded not so much based upon their inspirational leadership. They were rewarded because they hit a number,” or, “The board thought they really liked that guy and he seemed sharp.”

And so, like, there was a gap between what was readily measurable or observable versus what we would hope is the fundamental thing. And the first thing that came to mind when I was reading this was just about politicians and votes.

Like, we would hope in, like, in a representative democratic republic situation, “Well, yeah, votes are kind of the measure by which we have, and which we feel someone’s doing a good job of representing us or should represent us.”

And yet, that is a tremendously gameable metric via monies that can just blast enough advertising to, apparently, get enough votes, as well as polarizing messaging, “What gets people mad enough to actually show up at the polls instead of just sitting on the sidelines?”

And then you could just imagine this in all kinds of scenarios, like, “It seems like this person is at the top, but they don’t deserve to be?” Head scratch, “What’s behind that?” Well, I think, a decent amount of the time, it’s exactly this underlying dynamic that you’ve spelled out.

Thi Nguyen
I think a big part of the background is that I think a lot of metrics are extremely usable if used with care, if we know that they’re just a rough approximate proxy. It’s only when we treat them as all important.

I think there’s an important piece of the background puzzle, of the background picture to put in right now, which is why metrics have this character, right? I mean, one response you might have to all of this is, “Let’s just fix them. Let’s just get better metrics. And then the people that are all hell-or-high water gaming the metric, will just do what’s good.”

But I think that’s not going to work. I had this intuition that it wouldn’t work. And I think the best explanation came from a bunch of historians. So, Theodore Porter, I think, helped me understand a lot of what was going on. He’s a historian of quantification culture.

And he’s trying to explain why he thinks that bureaucrats and politicians compulsively reach for quantificative reasoning even when the metric they know is bad, right, even when it’s just a blatantly terrible metric.

His explanation was that qualitative and quantitative reasoning were different styles of thinking and justification that were good at different things. So qualitative reasoning, he said, is rich and subtle and context-sensitive and dynamic, and can capture all kinds of complexity, but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand. And it doesn’t aggregate.

And part of why it doesn’t aggregate is specifically because it’s working on so many different dimensions, right? When I’m writing qualitative descriptions to my students about their philosophy essays, I’ll talk about their originality, their rigor, their carefulness, their curiosity, all along different dimensions. And then somebody else might write in their qualitative assessment a bunch of different dimensions. How do you aggregate those?

To make quantitative data, says Porter, we identify a context-invariant kernel and we stabilize it across context. So we make it rigid. And to make it work across context, we have to figure out the bit that everybody understands the same way, which means that bit cannot depend on specific context, specific background, or specific sensitivities.

So, for me, this is like letter grades, like A, B, C, and D. There’s not a lot of information there. But what information there is, is thin enough and simple enough that everyone can understand it the same way. And so that message travels, right? And it aggregates instantly.

So Porter’s insight is that quantitative measures communicate well and are an incredibly good way to connect people and coordinate people because they’ve been designed to communicate, right? His claim is that quantitative data is portable, it travels well between contexts. But portability is a design achievement achieved at the cost of high context, and it’s not just accidental.

Removing context is the thing that makes it extremely accessible and extremely cross-cutting across contexts. And that vision, I think, is really terrifying to me. Because, for me, this shows me that this is not a trap we can get out of, right?

The essential thing that gives metrics their juice and makes them so powerful is that they are narrow by design, and that narrowness is precisely what makes them so usable and so dangerous.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I guess, maybe to have some hope in here, I think just having a bright light of awareness, which you are providing here, can work wonders for ourselves and our own spheres of influence, and leadership, and families, and organizations, and communities, and careers, to know, “Okay, a narrow, dogged, ferocious, focus on a metric or two or three will necessarily be incomplete and comes with some major downsides. So we got to really check ourselves and note, ‘Okay, this is a rough gauge and it gets an approximation of a thing and it can’t be the whole thing.”

Thi Nguyen
And yet, we also see why it’s so tempting to treat it as the whole thing. But, yeah, there’s not a world in which we can have our institutions work without metrics and without measures that we coordinate over, but they’re so dangerously thin, and it’s so easy to forget. And part of why it’s easy to forget is, if you use them, you’re instantly comprehensible to everybody. And I think that’s very tempting.

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Well, Thi, tell me, as you think about this domain of knowledge, and when it comes to individual professionals navigating their work lives, their careers, do you have any top do’s and don’ts you think that come to light or emerge out of this rich set of ideas?

Thi Nguyen
I have a goofy idea I want to run by you and see what you think. So a lot of the problem of metrics comes from their being established very distantly at scale and being rigidified, right? They’re distant measures of our success.

I’ve been trying to think about various solutions. And, for me, games are an inspiration. And one of the ways they’re an inspiration is that game scoring systems aren’t distant. They’re modifiable in a few ways. You can move between them. You can change them. You can house-rule them. You can design your own.

And so I’ve been wondering if this can be applied to institutions, too. So here’s something I tried. In the age of trying to figure out how to grade students in the era of ChatGPT, in my last class, I let the students design their own grading system.

I let them design, as part of the class through a conversation, what the assignments would be and how they would be graded on them, given what their goals were and what the limits were, and how the world was changing.

So here’s one thought. Maybe in the workplace, if you’re a manager, what you can do is constantly redesign your metrics in conversation with the people that are being measured about to capture what is a value. Is this goofy and insane? Part of the problem is that you’re not going to be able to export them readily, and you’re not going to be able to take off the shelf a pre-established form of measurement, but roll your own. What do you think?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I like it a lot. And I’m thinking about how I’m on the board of a nonprofit. And so the board always says, “Hey, Pete, so you’re going to run the performance review for the executive director, right?” And I’ll say, “I guess I’m the How to be Awesome at Your Job guy, so, okay, I’ll take that on.”

And what I think is cool is that, well, each year she has her goals, and each year the goals are different in terms of what is needed at the time. And, thusly, each year, the metrics can change. And I think, because we’re, well, it is, it’s context rich, you know.

Like, I’m in it. I understand it, like what we’re doing, what we’re trying to achieve and how these numbers are incomplete and they’re are means to an end, but also like they do have value and give us a gauge in terms of, “Does this look more or less like a win, or like a loss, or something in between?”

And so, if the numbers are way, way low when they should be higher, it’s like, “Well, yeah, that looks like a loss, even though they’re imprecise and imperfect, that will show up accordingly in the performance review.” So I think that it is, it’s very much doable. And, in a way, kind of fun, keeps it fresh and relevant. But it does, it takes a heightened level of commitment, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all, “Here’s your production goal. Make sure you hit it each quarter. Boom!”

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, and you won’t be able to compare between groups. The whole point is that it’s not that metrics are bad in and of themselves. It’s that the thing that makes them insensitive is their fixity at scale. And that’s also what lets them aggregate easily.

And so the proposal here is just at a different point in the trade-off scale. Now you’re going to be thinking in a context-sensitive way about what you care about at particular moment, and you might set up a metric for a period of time and then change it.

But you won’t be able to auto-compare teams, you won’t be able to auto-compare one person’s performance over a huge amount of time, but you will be able to generate metrics that are responsive to the details of what matters in the case. But, again, it’s a massive trade-off.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Can we hear a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Thi Nguyen
William James, philosopher, pragmatist, says, “When you’re seeking truth, there are two totally different goals that people confuse. One is to get the most truths in the end, and the other is to avoid error. And they’re totally different and they suggest different strategies.”

If what you want is a lot of truths, you might actually want to be really risky and take a lot of risks and make a lot of mistakes. Because if you take a lot of risks and try a lot of things and make a lot of mistakes, you will move more quickly towards the truth.

If you want to avoid mistakes, you should be very careful and conservative with what you try out. And these are two totally different strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s exciting. And I’m imagining, I don’t know who said it, but I thought there was some wisdom to it. Like, most great thinkers, a fair critique to just about all of them is, “Nice idea, but you took it too far.” And that really sounds like the first group that’s trying to maximize truths. It’s like, “Ooh, yeah, you made some mistakes, and there was some mess and dirt along the way there. But you did, you really advanced some stuff, and all of mankind is enriched as a result of having done so.”

And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Thi Nguyen
I think one of the most interesting studies and a huge inspiration for this book was James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. And this is a book about how, you’ll recognize the themes, but it’s a book about states.

And by states he means governments and corporations, and about how they can only see the parts of the world that are processable through large-scale bureaucratic means, exactly what we’ve been talking about so far.

And then the second part of the study is an argument that states, “In order to make the world more processable, tend to reorder it to make it easier to count.” So they tend to want to even things out to make things easier to count. And it’s a study that crosses about 50 different historical case studies, and it’s extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Thi Nguyen
Well, it’s in a book, it’s a paper. It’s by Annette Baier. It’s called “Trust and Antitrust.” And it’s a paper that taught me, I think about the most important ingredient in social life. She thinks that the center of human life is trust. And what trust is, is making ourselves vulnerable to some external power by putting something of ours in their power.

And that we have to do this to extend ourselves and to cooperate, but that human life is, essentially, one where we are constantly at risk because we constantly are so entangled that we’re entrusting ourselves to other people. And this, I found, just incredibly explanatory of the state of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Thi Nguyen
I think my favorite tool is walking away. I think, sometimes, the right answer to being stuck, for me, is to put everything I’m stuck, write everything I’m stuck, on a whiteboard so I don’t forget it, and then just walk away. Leave the office. Leave the desk. Leave that problem. Go work on something else for days, weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with students or readers that really seems to connect and resonate, they retweet, they Kindle book highlight, they say, “Professor, this was amazing”?

Thi Nguyen
I often give students the argument that Bernard Suits, this philosopher of games that I was really inspired by, that he gives the end of his book. And he says at the end of his book, “Imagine utopia where we’ve solved all our practical problems. What would we do if we cured all medical problems and all technological problems?”

He says, “We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life.” And, you know, it’s kind of a goofy argument, but what he’s really saying is he’s restating an old nugget from Aristotle, which is that the meaning of human activity can’t come from stuff we make or the outcomes of our actions. It has to come from the action itself. It has to come from the process of doing.

And if we drain out all the interesting processes of doing just to make a ton of stuff, then we’ve accidentally leaked away a meaningful life.

Pete Mockaitis
Thi, if folks want to learn more and get in touch, where would you point them?

Thi Nguyen
My website is Objectionable.net. I’m on Bluesky @add-hawk, A-D-D, underscore H-A-W-K.

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

Thi Nguyen
Every time you look at a metric, be suspicious and ask what values it’s imposing on you.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Thi, thank you. This was a treat. I wish you many, many high scores of the most meaningful sort.

Thi Nguyen
Thanks, man.

Feb 26
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Brad Stulberg shares foundational principles for making the process of self-development more fun and fulfilling.

You’ll Learn

  1. What true excellence looks and feels like
  2. Why to stop chasing happiness—and what to focus on instead
  3. The best tool for building focus and concentration

About Brad 

Brad Stulberg researches, writes, and coaches on performance, well-being, and sustainable excellence. He is the bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change, and coauthor of Peak Performance. 

Stulberg regularly contributes to the New York Times and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, among many other outlets. He serves as the co-host of the podcast “excellence, actually” and is on faculty at the University of Michigan. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Resources Mentioned

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Brad Stulberg Interview Transcript

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.