Brad Stulberg on the Way of Excellence, Involved Engagement, and Compounding Consistency

Brad Stulberg

William, it's a pleasure to be back on the show. Thank you for having me.

Brad Stulberg

It really has become a central focus of my life, and I think it's twofold. The first is that as a writer I view my job to find language for things that people feel and maybe already deeply know but don't yet have words for. Excellence just lends itself so well to this challenge because excellence is a feeling. It's not something intellectual. It's something we know in our bones. My job as an author is trying to capture that feeling and explain how it got there, how we can create it, and what makes it so special.

The second reason I'm so obsessed with excellence is that I've come to firmly believe that orienting around its pursuit — not pseudo-excellence, not hacks, not quick fixes, not 37-step morning routines, but actual heartfelt, soulful, caring deeply — is really the key to a rich, meaningful, and textured life. If you had to ask me what my philosophy of life is, it would be aspiring toward excellence. And as we'll discuss, you never actually reach it. There is no destination. It's just an ongoing path that you stay on as best you can.

Brad Stulberg

I first read Robert Persig as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and it was really the first book I became completely absorbed in. Since then I've read it easily 15 times. I've also read the sequel, Lila. My daughter is named Lila after Persig's work. It's not an overstatement to say that more than any other thinker, his impact on my life and work has been immense.

At the heart of it is Persig's quest to capture what he called quality — a sense of deep caring between an actor and his or her act that essentially evaporates the space between the person doing the activity and the activity itself. You are no longer playing basketball; basketball is just happening. You are no longer in a conversation; conversation is just unfolding. The closer we can get to what we are doing, the more quality our lives and our work will have.

Persig argued that quality is on the cutting edge of evolution — at a species level, because survival of the fittest is really about understanding your environment and moving towards conditions conducive to one's survival. Just ten years ago, biologists started to use terms like quality to describe how evolution works. People thought Persig was crazy in the 1970s for saying that. It turns out he was quite right.

Why does this matter now? I think the greatest modern ailment is alienation — a disconnect and distance people feel from each other, from their work, and in some cases from their own lives. Alienation is associated with anxiety, depression, and culturally with authoritarian movements. If alienation is a sense of remove and distance, the opposite of alienation is quality: a sense of intimacy with what one is doing.

Brad Stulberg

I couldn't agree more with that approach to life. We often overemphasise the goal we're working toward and underemphasise how that goal is also working on us as a person. When you are on the path of mastery, yes, the external outcomes matter — in investing, how well your investments perform is how you judge yourself against your peers, and that is very important. But at a certain point you're going to perform really well and realise that no dollar amount is going to fulfil you. What will actually fulfil you is the person you became along the way, the team you built, and your commitment to excellence.

After Persig passed away, his wife and publisher released a short collection called On Quality — some notes he'd written to colleagues and chapters from manuscripts that didn't make the books. What became really apparent is that Persig was working toward a theory of excellence. Then he died. He's been my intellectual role model forever; I wrote his obituary for New York magazine when he passed. For whatever reason, on a walk a couple of years ago, rereading Zen and reading that new book, I said: I want to try to pick up the torch where he left it off, take this philosophical meta-theory, build on it, and make it into something practical around the way of excellence. And that's what the book became.

Brad Stulberg

Jerry Seinfeld is interviewed about what really makes him tick, and he says — I'm paraphrasing — that there is no satisfaction like the satisfaction that comes from gaining skill and then exerting that skill. For him it is telling a good joke. Either the joke lands or it doesn't. When it lands, the sense of satisfaction from all the practice that went into it, from all the times that joke didn't land, is enormous.

We see this across domains. For me I get this feeling every time I face the blank page as a writer, but also in the weight room, because the bar is either going to move or not. There is something deeply, innately fulfilling about making concrete, tangible progress that you can trace back to yourself. When people don't have that kind of concrete, objective source of competence in their life, they can feel a little empty and long for it. It's become instrumental to my philosophy: make sure you have at least one domain where you are pursuing something with a very concrete, tangible result traceable to your effort. It's better to fail at something concrete than to wander in subjective, wishy-washy no man's land.

Brad Stulberg

Let me start with my definition. Excellence is involved engagement. It's caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. I think of this as having two integral parts. The first is involved engagement, or caring deeply — a sense of commitment, focus, and intention to give your all to the craft. The second part, something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals, lives in the eye of the beholder. But it can't just be mimicry. You can't pursue something because you think it's what you should be doing, or what other people think you should be doing, or purely for some external result at the top of the mountain. You have to pursue it because it aligns with your values and with the person you want to become.

What I've realised is that across fields and domains, people truly in pursuit of excellence master both parts. They create conditions for deep focus, concentration, commitment, and caring with what they do. And they constantly ensure that how they're going about it aligns with their values and the person they want to become.

The caring part is worth dwelling on. Everyone can remember those kids at school who were too cool to try — sitting at the back, horsing around, phoning it in. Those kids weren't cool. What they actually were was insecure and scared of failing. Because when you give something your all, when you care deeply, when you step into the arena, you open yourself up to vulnerability. Things might not go your way. If they don't and you fail, you have no excuse — you put your heart into it and it didn't work out. To care deeply requires guts and vulnerability. There's no self-handicapping, nothing to hide behind if things go wrong. That is a precondition of excellence.

Brad Stulberg

The biggest real challenge is that distraction is utterly ubiquitous. We walk around with these powerful digital slot machines in our pockets, and the reward is actually greater than money — it's existential validation. An email, a text, a like, a comment that says you exist in the world and you matter. It's very tempting to constantly pull down on that lever. I'll share an example from my own life. On an extremely busy day, shuttling kids around, I finally get to a petrol station and think I'm going to have two and a half minutes of silence. On the pump screen, there's a woman jabbering about how every problem is figure-outable, trying to sell me her masterclass. I thought: I can't even connect with myself to fill up my car with gas.

The second big bucket is what I call pseudo-excellence or hustle-culture greatness — the entire industrial complex of hacks, quick fixes, ten-day programmes, diets, and fads, all with the illusory promise that if you just do this one thing, you'll be happy, strong, calm, and intellectually wise. Ponce de León searched for the fountain of youth in the 1500s, so there's nothing new about this. But cycling from fad to fad gets in the way of the commitment, consistency, and intimacy required to truly experience the joys and satisfaction of excellence. Put those two things together — ubiquitous distraction and the grift of pseudo-excellence — and it's the perfect storm for alienation.

Brad Stulberg

That's right. You need to try to engineer an ecosystem around you that is supportive of your values and goals. In many ways it requires intentional design of your physical space, your technology, and to some extent the people with whom you surround yourself — because that's also an enormous part of your environment.

Another way to think about it: all of these objects around us have a gravity. That gravity can either pull us toward our goals, our values, and our craft, or it can pull us away. The default is to be pulled in 19 different directions at once in a very frantic, frenetic way. Moving against that gravity is extremely hard. But if you can step back and say, "Here are the limited things I care deeply about," then you can ask: what does it take to do that? How do I eliminate all the noise around that to the best of my ability and really focus? It's simple, but simple doesn't make it easy.

All those high performers I mentioned — when you look at their lives, they're not extraordinary because of extraordinary genetics. It's because they're willing to say no to a lot of the defaults to craft a life around the couple of things that really matter to them. My mentor Mike Joiner used to say: if you want to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist.

Brad Stulberg

Balance as popularly conceived tends to mean you're going to devote equal proportion of time and energy to everything: be the best spouse, the best parent, the best friend, master a craft, be a great employee, stay up on all the latest pop culture, have a fantasy football team, cook dinner, have a clean house, coach the kids' sports teams, and on and on. It's sold as self-help, but it just makes you miserable, because nobody can do all those things, and as a result of trying you stretch yourself way too thin and end up mediocre at best across the board.

The antidote is to step back and say: I'm going to have to be an adult here and realise that unlike my eight-year-old who wants to do everything, I can't. You have to make trade-offs. Then you go back to your values and ask: of the areas of my life where I can devote time and energy right now, which align with my values? Most people can be highly focused on somewhere between two and three things at max at any given point.

What's fascinating is that when you zoom in on any one moment in the lives of highly successful people who are also good people, they don't look balanced at all — they appear to be going all in on one or two things. But when you zoom out and look across the totality of their lives, they actually seem quite balanced. They have different seasons of life for emphasising different parts of their life.

The framework I introduce in the book is to think about identity like a house. If your house has only one room and that room catches fire, you're extremely dislocated — you don't know where you live. But if your house has multiple rooms and one room catches fire, you can seek refuge in the other rooms while you resolve the problem. If your only identity room is "fund manager," then when things go wrong at the fund it's extremely unsettling. But if you have a room for spouse, for parent, for athlete, for community member, for book nerd — you start to diversify your sense of self, which makes you far less fragile.

The rooms don't have to be the same size. If you're pursuing excellence, you'll be spending a lot of time in one room. You just want to make sure that none of the important rooms get mouldy, because you never know which season of life will call on them. Rather than perfect balance, ask: what are the rooms in my identity house, which room do I want to spend the most time in right now, and how can I make sure the other rooms don't go mouldy?

Brad Stulberg

If you're in a season of going all in on something — say, trying to raise a fund bigger than you've ever raised before — you'll spend the vast majority of your time in that room. The question you have to ask is: how do I stay in touch with the marriage room, the parent room, the health room just enough so that those things don't blow up?

That's where the concept of a minimum effective dose comes in. What's the minimum effective dose to keep a healthy marriage while you go all in on being an entrepreneur? It looks different for everyone — for some it's one date night a week, for others it's three family dinners a week. For health, maybe instead of exercising five days a week for 45 minutes, you're only going to exercise three days a week for 30 minutes during that season. But you're never going to leave it completely behind.

One of the ultimate laws of anything, which I got from fitness, is that it's easier to maintain than to build. Once you've built something, it's not that hard to maintain — you just check in every now and then. But once you let it go completely, it takes a long time to build it back.

Brad Stulberg

If you're a highly driven pusher with obsessive qualities, you have to stop thinking of rest as something separate from the work and start thinking of it as an integral part of the work. Athletes know this extremely well — recovery days are built into the programme. They're not separate from training; they're a part of it, strategically placed so that athletes can adapt to the hard work. For cognitive and intellectual pursuits, we need to build in the equivalent.

I've come to believe it's best for me to work a six-day week. Five days I'm too obsessed — there aren't enough hours. But if I work seven days a week, what I gain in additional time I lose twofold in quality, because having one full day to step away allows me to come back so much more refreshed, with so much more creativity, intensity, and insight.

Throughout the day, short micro-breaks help enormously. There's fascinating research from Stanford showing that just after a 10-minute walk, creativity improves by between 40 and 60%. When you're feeling stuck, there's a tendency to lean in and try to solve the problem. Often the best thing you can do is step away. We all know this — everyone has had the experience of being stuck on a problem and then the answer pops into their mind in the shower or on the commute home or whilst walking the dog. It's only when you finally step away that your subconscious mind can come online and do the work of solving those thorny problems.

The ultimate answer is: you cannot think of rest and renewal as something you do at the expense of being a great performer. You have to think of it as part of being a great performer. My long meandering walks are not something I do at the expense of being a writer. Forty per cent of my best sentences I didn't write at the keyboard — I wrote them on walks. I carry a notebook.

Brad Stulberg

It did. I was actually working on the promotional plans for my prior book, Masters of Change, and I was wholly stuck on an op-ed for the New York Times. So I said, I'll practise what I preach, I'll go take a walk. On that walk I didn't solve the op-ed problem, but I had the idea for this book.

For the longest time researchers thought this was a blood-flow issue — that walking or swimming increased blood flow and helped with creativity. But the physiology never really made sense, and it doesn't explain the phenomenon of why we have these thoughts when driving or in the shower. What all these activities have in common is that they're fairly implicit. You don't have to think too hard about walking or showering or driving, but you do have to think just enough to occupy those effortful-thinking parts of your brain without stressing them too much. That perfect mix allows your default mode network — your subconscious mind — to come online and have those breakthrough moments. Lin-Manuel Miranda had the idea for Hamilton on vacation, reading Chernow's biography, not as research but as a recommendation from a friend. Imagine if he hadn't allowed himself to take a break.

Brad Stulberg

This will be easy for your audience, I think. If you want to go from one million to ten million dollars, you can make one enormous bet and hope for the best, or you can make a bunch of small smart investments over time and have those compound. Most people would say: take the compounding route. That same law applies to making progress in anything.

We all too often fall for having a heroic day or a heroic week or being super intense, when what leads to sustainable lasting excellence is really a resolute, relentless consistency. It's showing up day in and day out and making deposits in the bank.

Part and parcel of this is what you do on your bad days. I call it raising the floor. What you do on your bad days is arguably more important than what you do on your great days. Great days are magical, and it's very hard to engineer one — if you commit to the fundamentals and show up, they're just going to happen. But bad days — we have a lot of agency over those. When we're not performing our best, how can we make those bad days just a little bit better? How can we nip a bad day in the bud? How can we prevent a bad day from turning into a bad week? In investment terms, it's kind of like: in a rough market, you're going to lose, but how can you lose less than the competition? Over time, the fund that minimises its losses in rough markets performs just as well as the fund that crushes a good market. Anyone can perform great on their great days. A part of excellence is getting a little bit more out of your bad days.

The day-to-day progress sometimes isn't even measurable. But the compounding effect gets you to something huge.

Brad Stulberg

I'm glad that comes through, because I want to become known for my consistency in all facets of life — as a writer, as an athlete, as a father, and as a husband. What that means is you just show up. There's no negotiation. You show up and you get what you have to get out of yourself on the day, and then you sleep and rinse and repeat. You just do that for a decade and you're going to be great.

Everyone wants the secret to greatness, but the secret is there is no secret. You have a process, you have a system, you pick a thing, you do that thing for a decade, you learn from the greats, you read a lot of books, you stay endlessly curious, and then a decade later you start to get pretty good at that thing. So few people do it because they're all chasing the secret. Consistency and patience — that is the secret.

The year of my life I'm most proud of in a very odd way is the year I was pretty severely depressed and made it through. It wasn't white-knuckled persistence — I had a wonderful therapist. But at a certain point I realised there wasn't going to be any quick fix. I was just going to have to show up and refuse to quit. When you're depressed, refusing to quit means you value your life more than the loss of your life. You show up as best you can, you trust the process of therapy and of time and of making these little tweaks that in hindsight seem small but in the thick of depression seem major. I wouldn't wish clinical depression on anyone. There are no silver linings — it's just pain and suffering. But if you're fortunate enough to get to the other side, it certainly makes showing up on a normal bad day a lot easier.

Brad Stulberg

Go to a bookstore and you see two shelves. One is the self-discipline shelf — books by Navy Seals and Marines and football coaches telling you to take accountability, to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. The other is the meditation-yoga shelf, which says you have to be really kind to yourself and hold hands and sing kumbaya. These are pitted against each other as opposites. But in my study of excellence, the people who really embody it and get the best out of themselves take those two qualities and combine them.

It is true that no one is going to do your bidding for you, and that you need personal responsibility and accountability. To be excellent requires fierce self-discipline. But the only way you're going to sustain that level of self-discipline is by also learning to be kind to yourself and have your own back. Because pushing yourself hard and doing hard things is extremely hard. Caring deeply about starting a company or a fund or being an Olympic athlete, feeling like you're letting down your family or your colleagues — it's really, really hard. If you can't acknowledge that and be kind to yourself, you're never going to last. Every time you step into the arena and fail or come up short, if you beat yourself up, eventually you're going to stop stepping into the arena altogether.

The biggest badasses I know — ultramarathon champions, heads of marine battalions — when you peel back the onion, these people also have immense self-kindness and compassion for themselves, because they realise that what they are trying to do is hard and they've learned to have their own back. It's not a self-kindness that lets go of accountability and says anything goes. It's a self-kindness that realises that doing hard things is hard and that you can have your own back as you try to do those hard things.

Brad Stulberg

Let's start with the problem I'm trying to overcome. People build these 19-step morning routines where you have to do 19 things before 7:00 a.m. The goal is not to be the world champion of having an elaborate routine. The goal is to be a great athlete, a great parent, a great fund manager, a great musician — whatever you're going for. Your routine shouldn't stress you out. You shouldn't work for your routine. Your routine should work for you.

My main things are simple: be the best writer I can be, the best coach I can be, and the best family man I can be. Rather than driving myself nuts with elaborate routines, I ask: what are the three things I need to do every day to put me in a position to do those? And what are three things I need to do once a week, and three things once a month?

For me, the three daily things are: an hour to an hour and a half of deep focus work — distraction-free, phone in another room, making effortful tangible progress on a project I care about; at least 45 minutes of movement; and not fighting evening sleepiness. If I do those things 70 to 80% of the time, I'm really good day-to-day.

My three weekly practices are: a digital Sabbath — once a week, no phone or computer for somewhere between 12 and 24 hours, stolen from Brad Feld — which is my time for rest and renewal; a longer walk outside, ideally over an hour, where I can let the creative engine churn; and plans with friends, because as someone with a tendency to become obsessed and a little bit of a workaholic, what goes by the wayside is social life. I don't need to hang out with friends every night. Once a week is good — it can be training with a buddy at the gym or going to dinner with another couple.

My three monthly practices are: some way to reconnect with myself in a spiritual way, often through music; engaging with my neighbourhood or community; and longer than an hour out in nature — maybe a half-day hike, going camping, something to really reset. I don't always hit those monthly practices, but if I can hit the daily and the weekly, I know I'll have a strong foundation from which to perform my best.

Brad Stulberg

The most important thing is keeping technology at bay. Right now, recording this, my email client is completely closed and my phone is a floor away. There's no temptation to check it, and even if I don't, the phone isn't there to remind me of all the emails stacking up. I write the same way — when I sit down to write or read in my library, there's no digital device in the room, because even if I don't check it, the cognition and willpower required not to check encroaches on what I'm doing and how I'm thinking.

Then there's what I do surround myself with — objects and artefacts that bring out quality. Art from my favourite sculptor, a picture of Robert Persig and a first edition of Zen because I want to carry that torch. A banner above my desk that says "give a damn," reminding me to care deeply about what I'm doing. Another banner from my favourite recording artist, Jason Isbell, that says "lucky to have the work," so whenever I get frustrated about emails to respond to, I can remind myself that I'm actually very lucky to have this work.

The default ecosystem is very discordant with excellence and our values. What I try to do is set up a micro ecosystem that has a gravitational pull toward excellence and toward my values.

Brad Stulberg

Not every day has to be joyful. Not every moment has to be joyful. But the totality of the pursuit should be full of joy. If it's not fun, you're not going to last and you're not going to perform your best. So you better learn how to have fun.

A loss of joy is a really good first sign to evaluate how you're spending your time and energy. When you do this, you'll inevitably find that you're spending too much time on the superfluous and not enough on the main thing. Another misnomer — like the one about self-discipline and self-kindness being opposites — is that intensity and joy can't coexist. That's utter nonsense. There is so much joy to be found in working intensely toward a meaningful goal. The famous coach Mark Wetmore said: to be serious is one of the greatest joys there is. To care deeply about something, to give it your all, to try to master a craft — it's an extremely joyful thing, if it aligns with your values.

There's an influencer people know named David Goggins. He gives a great hype speech, but he's always angry and always suffering. That is the wrong approach to greatness. The people actually winning races — they love what they do. They love the craft. They find joy in it. That doesn't mean they're not intense or fierce, but they have reverence for what they do and they find it fun.

Brad Stulberg

Excellence is a never-ending path — when you get to the top of one mountain, there's another to climb. But that doesn't mean it's not important to inject milestones and points of completion along the way, because without those, it can feel like we're just floating amorphously, every accomplishment bleeding into the next, and we never get to step back and take stock of the effort we exerted and the person we're becoming.

Gregg Popovich is one of the greatest coaches, I'd argue probably the greatest across any sport — the most winning basketball coach in history. The NBA season is 82 games, and if you're lucky, you make the playoffs for more. What should be the most joyful thing in the world — coaching and playing at the highest level on the planet — can become a joyless grind. You're on the road, going from city to city, constantly playing. Popovich realised this and said: we need some completion rituals. So he scheduled these elaborate team dinners, not for a win, but just to mark time, to step back from the grind and reflect on the relationships the teammates were forging, on how the team was playing, on where they were going.

We can all do this in our own lives. If we are type-A pushers, we go and go so fast that we never step back to pause, to celebrate, to savour, to grieve, to learn, to reflect. If the goal is to be great not just for a year but for a career, we need to think about completion rituals as part of the work. And we get to define our own completion — it can be the day you finish raising the fund, the next big hire you make, one year of being in business. What matters is that you pick something meaningful and then step back from the normal day-to-day grind to reflect on it and celebrate it.

Brad Stulberg

I think the point of it all is to try to love deeply and make a contribution. If you go about what you're doing with care and intention, and make yourself vulnerable in the process, you can't help but become stronger, kinder, and wiser, because life is hard. Trying to do big things is hard. In the process, it's going to make you softer. It makes you into a humble badass — you can't help but be one, because you realise that it's really tough, and you realise that other people stepping into the arena are going through the same challenges. On the one hand, the pursuit of excellence hardens you. On the other, it softens you considerably. You get to live in that paradox.

If we're not working towards those more intrinsic characteristics, what's the point? You could tell me I could write ten bestselling books, but if I'm a miserable person, I don't really care. I want to be a good person.

Brad Stulberg

George Saunders — I don't even have to finish the sentence. George Saunders is the best short-story writer and, I think, the best living novelist. If you haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo, read it — just make sure you read my book first. He's the ultimate craftsperson. There's nothing romantic about how he works. He lays brick by brick. That's how he teaches writing. He is the opposite of the Shakespearean "lightning strikes" idea. He chisels away. It is an extremely hard and meticulous process.

And yet he is the warmest, most kind, softest person. I am utterly convinced that is because his work is so hard, and that the fact that his work is so hard has made him so soft and so kind. He combines these two qualities: master craftsperson, the best in the world at the short story, and the opposite of arrogant — humble beyond belief, kind, warm, and giving. He's also been happily married for over 30 years. He lives off in nature. He's not one for the scene. He just cares deeply about his craft and about being a good person. He's an enormous role model to me.

Brad Stulberg

Thank you, William. It's been a pleasure.