← Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger
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- [00:00]
A
New year, new systems. Right? This is the time when we all look at the messier parts of our business and think there has to be a better way. And there is. Streamlining your communications is one of the quickest and easiest upgrades you can make. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O the smarter way to run your business communications Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. And it's built for how modern teams actually work. More more than 90,000 businesses rely on Quo to stay connected, professional and consistently reachable. Your whole team can handle calls and texts from one shared business number so nothing slips through the cracks. Everyone sees the full conversation, replies faster and customers feel genuinely taken care of. And Quo's smart AI automatically logs calls, creates summaries, and highlights next steps so nothing gets lost even when you're offline. And make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com jillonmoney that's q-u.com jillonmoney quo no missed calls, no missed customers this year. Give a gift that goes far beyond the moment. An Invest529 account. Whether it's a child, grandchild or someone just starting out, you're helping them save for education that can open doors for a lifetime. Invest 529 is a tax advantaged way to save for college, trade school, or even apprenticeship programs. It's flexible, easy to start, and you can contribute any amount, big or small. And because the money can grow tax free, it's a gift that really builds value over time. So instead of giving something that gets used up or set aside, give the gift that can change a Life. Start an Invest 529 account today. Go to invest529.com to get started. Welcome to the Jill on Money show. It's Friday, January 30th and yeah, I know it's still January, so I want to bring you one more content that's gonna get you going for your year ahead. Today I have a great guest. It is bestselling author Brad Stulberg. Now he's been on the program previously and you may have seen his name. He contributes to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. He likes practical advice like we do and his newest book is called the Way of Excellence. Now before you roll your eyes and snort and excellence is very different the way that Brad talks about it. So I know you're going to really like this interview. I sure did. We'll have a link to the book in our show notes if you've got any questions and you want to follow up with us. Of course, just go to the website jillonmoney.com, click the contact Us button. Write us a note. If you want to join us live to talk about excellence or anything else in your financial life, just check the box. Mark will do everything else. Okay, Here is our interview with Brad Stolberg. Brad Stolberg, welcome back to the program. How are you, man?
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B
I am doing well, Jill. It is great to be back.
- [03:19]
A
You're so prolific because you have three books now. So Master of Change, the Practice of Groundedness, and now the Way of Excellence. How do you have time to do all this? Come on, this is insanity.
- [03:34]
B
It's my job, Jill. I'm doing my job. I'm a writer. And writers write. Shooters shoot. And writers write.
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A
Yeah, I'm a shooter. I'm a content creator. I talk. I do a lot of talking. So, Brad, after Master of Change and the Practice of Groundedness, which I think I teased you about, I was like, who needs groundedness? And then after I talked to you, I'm like, yeah, it works for me. Why do we need a book about excellence, man?
- [03:58]
B
We need a book about excellence for a number of reasons. I think. The first is people are just feeling numbed and like they're going through the motions and like they've lost a sense of aliveness and the pursuit of genuine excellence. I'm gonna get to what that means in a second. It is such a powerful antidote to this kind of zombie burnout shuffle that so many of us find ourselves in.
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A
We just had two calls from one from like a 54 year old woman, one from a 49 year old guy. People who are fried. Fried and feeling slightly not, I wouldn't say underappreciated, but not feeling like the trade off is there that, you know, I make a lot of money. I'm a type A. I work my butt off. It doesn't seem to matter whether I am really good at what I do or average or a placeholder, but that the trade off isn't there. They are fried, like to a crisp, man.
- [04:56]
B
I think about it as zombie burnout is the term that I coined in the book. And there's the kind of burnout that comes from just doing way too much. You know, if you work 100 hour weeks, you're going to burn yourself out. Even if you love what you're doing. But, but there's this other kind of burnout that I think is actually just as common, if not more in, more insidious. And that's burning out from not doing enough of what makes you feel alive. There's two people, they could both work very hard, 55, 60, 65, even 70 hour weeks and one person's gonna burn out like crazy. And that's because he or she just doesn't. They don't find what they're doing meaningful, they don't find it worthwhile, they don't find it valuable. Another person could work the same hours with the same intensity and be absolutely flourishing in their life because they feel like what they're doing is meaningful. They feel like they're contrib. I think that that's, that's like one big dichotomy. And one reason I wrote the book, the second reason that is equally important is people have come to think that excellence means waking up at 3 in the morning, filming yourself flexing your six pack abs from a cold plunge, taking 119 different supplements, having a 47 step routine and doing all this before 4:30 in the morning. And that is so far from what actual elite performers do. And I think what happened is this hustle culture greatness or pseudo excellence has gotten so popular that so many people now hear the term and they're like ah, that's not for me, I can't do that, I don't want to do that. That's not for me. And a big part of this project was reclaiming excellence for what it actually is, which is this heartfelt genuine pursuit of caring deeply about a craft, giving that craft your all in not only having external success but having internal fulfillment in really shaping yourself as a person is you pursue your own version of greatness like that is true excellence.
- [06:37]
A
But you do say excellence is not happiness, nor is it flow. And I've heard this, you know, listen, this whole idea about flow and I mean I even have the book with a guy with the incomprehensible last name. I never even read it, but it's.
- [06:51]
B
I got you chicks at me, Hallie. It is a tough one.
- [06:53]
A
Thank you very much. Why is excellence not associated with flow? Flow or happiness?
- [07:00]
B
All right, let's start with flow. There's two big differentiators between excellence and flow. The first is that flow is concerned with the acute moment. So it's that feeling of just getting in the zone. But it tends to last a couple minutes, a couple hours maybe if you're lucky, a Couple days. Excellence is much more concerned with the long game. So periods of flow might be a part of excellence, but excellence also encompasses all of the monotonous, tedious fundamentals that you do when no one's looking. That then gives birth to those moments of flow. The second big difference is excellence has to be connected to your values. So I define it as involved engagement or caring deeply in something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. So there's gotta be this alignment with meaning and with what you value and the person you wanna become. Whereas flow doesn't have any of that. So sometimes what happens is like we chase these flow experiences without asking ourselves, are they connected to our values or not?
- [07:56]
A
I am so intrigued by this because as I get deeper and deeper into my own career, I realize that by accident I understand this differentiation between excellence connected to your values because you, you know, I think that honestly, when I first got into, you know, I got out of financial planning and money management and I went into working at CBS and I felt like the excellence part was like telling the story in a way that the people could understand it. But, you know, deeper into my career, it's this show that really defines the meaning for me because it is talking to real people and with a. With not a three minute or two minute time horizon, with some space to really explore how we can help them get to wherever they want to go. That meaning, I think was really critical for me to just basically wake up one morning and say, hey, hosting Jill on Money, hosting Money Watch, hosting the radio show. These are the things that not just give me joy and happiness, but that is the meaning because of the way we touch people. And I think that that's really different than getting into the flow of doing a TV segment for evening news for two and a half minutes.
- [09:18]
B
I love that. And there's nothing wrong with getting into the flow of doing a TV segment for evening news. You're world class at that. And that's great. But what I'm hearing you say is that it's really hard to feel like that has the same level of integrity with like, what you care deeply about and what you want to accomplish. Whereas something like this show and so many of your other hustles do. And that's right. I think that that's another important misconception that we should talk about here is so often people just think about the peak of the mountain and in your craft. I have to imagine the peak of the mountain is being on national tv. Everyone's watching. And that's Great. But you don't spend. You spend two and a half minutes on the peak of the mountain. And if the weather's rough and it's a crazy news day, maybe they only give you 60 seconds. It's not much time on the peak of the mountain, you. You spent all your time and energy on the side of the mountain, climbing and working your way up there. So it's really important to ask yourself, am I climbing the right mountain? Or plural, am I climbing the right mountains in excellence? Again, it encompasses all of this. It can be a real trap to just set this big goal because you think the weather on the peak is going to be great, but the only Zen on the tops of mountains is the Zen that you're going to bring up there along the way.
- [10:31]
A
Now, I know you talk about excellence when it comes to a variety of different things, right? But this idea of your body and your mind working together seems to be a really important aspect of it. How does the physical body play into excellence?
- [10:49]
B
A big part of excellence, Jill, is a feeling. It is often pre intellectual. So when you watch Steph Curry take over a basketball game, or Serena Williams just dominate in her prime in tennis, or you taste the creation of a master chef, you don't sit there and think, oh, wow, Serena's arm angle is perfect, or Steph Curry is shooting at the apex of his jump, or the ratio of salt to sugar in this is three to one, and therefore it tastes good. Like, none of that happens. You just know it in your bones. You feel that you are in the presence of greatness, and that is a deeply visceral, embodied state. And what's fascinating is, even for more intellectual pursuits, it operates very much the same way. For this book, I reported with so many incredible, groundbreaking scientists, mathematicians, and they all told me the same thing, that when they know that they're on the right track in their science, which is arguably like the most heady, cerebral, intellectual thing there is, they feel it in their body. They're following a hunch. And that hunch isn't located in their brain, it's located in their body. So what's really interesting about the pursuit of excellence is that, yeah, we have to use our thinking minds absolutely to navigate this world. It would be very, very rough without them. But we also need to feel our way forward. And it's that feeling of rightness and something being in sync. And we can experience that as observers when we're in the presence of greatness or excellence. But we can also create that feeling in our own life as we pursue progress and the things that matter to us.
- [12:22]
A
I think what's fascinating about the Feeling is that it's. It's the feeling, but it's the culmination of all the preparation that got you there. Right. It's like you're doing all the hard stuff. You've got the discipline. You've done a lot to get you to the place where you could be prepared to feel. It's almost like I am doing yoga so that I can actually create a meditation practice. Two things I don't do anymore, just to be clear. But I think this idea of the feeling is sometimes hard for people to accept. And let me give you an example of that. Just the idea of feelings and money and feelings in life. I think that for a lot of people who are listening to this program, sometimes they'll hear someone come on the show and say, like, well, you know, I have $6 million and I'm done. What should I do? And they're like, they have $6 million. How could they not be sure about what they want to do? And what we try to say is like, the feeling around where you are in your life actually matters. And the feeling is very difficult, especially for people who are maybe more concrete. I would say it's like, well, it can't be feeling. That seems so. That doesn't seem like scientific or mathematically based. So how could feeling be a part of this? So I guess I'm wondering, how did you stumble into this idea around feeling your way into excellence?
- [13:46]
B
Yeah, across all of my reporting, and it was domain non specific. So athletes, artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, executives, teachers, coaches. I asked all of them, what are they doing when they're at their best and talk to me about it. That's all I said. And they said, well, I'm coaching my team, or I'm making an investment decision, or I'm in the surgical theater operating on a complex case, taking a jump shot, so on and so forth. And I said, tell me about it. And none of them told me what they were thinking. They all told me what they were feeling. And they all said, I feel alive, I feel energetic, I feel in harmony, I feel integrated, I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders. Nobody said, I'm thinking this, that the other. Everybody said that when they're at their best, they describe it as a feeling tone. And again, this is across all domains, including domains that we often think of as very cerebral and intellectual.
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A
I love this one part, as we get into the second part of the book, where you just have One line, I want to talk a little bit about it. It says, excellence requires intimacy. And when I read that, I was like, ah, intimacy in what way? Intimacy with yourself, intimacy with others, with your work. Like, how do I think about that? So how do you think about that, Brad?
- [15:09]
B
It's one of my favorite lines in the book. We're kindred spirits. I'm glad that you keyed in on that. People often think that intimacy is a sort of love that occurs between two people. And it absolutely can be, and it's a beautiful thing when it happens. But you can also fall in love with an activity. You can fall in love with a craft. And in many ways, to be great at something, you have to fall in love with a craft. And it's a sense of familiarity, respect and attention that helps you feel really connected both to what you're doing and to yourself. So it's being in the pocket of a deadlift, a song or a painting. It's being immersed in developing a new idea or leading a team, or learning a new skill. And you don't get intimacy without sacrifice, without making trade offs, without giving something your attention, and without caring deeply. There's no way around it. In so much of that aliveness that we're lacking and we're craving, it's because we've lost sources of intimacy in our lives. I have this story that's in the book that came when I was writing the book. I was having a really busy day. I'm shuttling my kids from one activity to the next. My phone is blowing up and I'm supposed to be working on this book. And finally I have a minute to myself because I gotta go fill up the gas in my car. And I shut the door and the kids are trapped in the car while I'm filling up the gas tank. And it's like I have a minute and a half, maybe two, to just be with myself and be with my thoughts. And you know what happens, Jill? On the freaking pump there's a screen. And on that screen is someone hawking me their product. So the entire modern culture is set up to alienate us, to create a distance and distraction between what we're doing and between ourselves. If we're not really intentional about reclaiming those moments where we can have deep connection again with other people, but also with crafts. And then we miss out on so much.
- [16:58]
A
There are so many distractions, obviously. I mean, it's like ridiculous to even say that, right? Of course there are. It feels like we've given up. It feels like Culturally, that it is dispiriting for me to listen to an interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker. He's the editor in chief of the New Yorker. And saying, like, yeah, you know what? Like, it's hard to get people to read a full New Yorker article, not just one of the long 10,000 word ones, because people don't read as much. And that we. Our attention span has really shifted. And I wonder how that starts to become like the, like the demon you have to battle as you try to connect to what you're doing, that. That you're trying to create an intimate moment to bring excellence into your life. But you're so distracted. How can we all better tune out some of the noise to get there?
- [17:54]
B
It doesn't happen automatically. The default is being interrupted at the gas pump by someone hawking you something, which means that we've got to be really intentional about creating these windows of time for deep focus play, for deep focus work ourselves. So what does that actually look like in practice? It might look like three days a week, from 1:30 to 3, blocking off an hour and a half to work on your big creative project at the office. Or it might look like Monday, Thursday, Saturday, you go to the gym in the morning and you don't take your phone with you. You leave it in the glove compartment of the car. You've got to set times, block them off. Block them off on your calendar. Like, your calendar is a moral document in many ways because it shows exactly what you're prioritizing and what you stand for. And then you have to be really explicit about removing the distractions during those periods of time and realizing that the word's not going to end if you're not completely connected to everyone and everything for an hour and a half or two hours. And then what tends to happen with people is, at first, this is very hard because our phones are like adult pacifiers. The minute that we feel resistance or boredom, like we go to our adult pacifier, we pull out our phone. It calms us down. And it's hard to wean a baby off a pacifier. We kind of have to do that to ourselves. But after a week or two, or in some cases, maybe even a month of fighting that anxiety, that impulse to just check the phone, we actually start to settle in to intimacy with whatever we're doing. And the internal reward, the feeling that we get from that is so lovely that we want to do more of it. So it's one of these behaviors that once you break through that initial Resistance, it actually becomes easier and it builds on itself.
- [19:37]
A
I also think that you, your comments about intimacy also helps, you know, kind of guide you into this idea that sometimes once you are allowing yourself that intimacy and that quiet, perhaps you are understanding also some of the things you're doing are not making you move towards excellence. You call it cultivating care and the interplay of fit and, and grit. I'd like you to talk a little bit about this because I think a lot of our listeners are type A folks who always excel. And so the idea of quitting is just horrific to them. They don't give themselves that permission. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about fit and grit and quit.
- [20:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, you gotta know when to hold them and you gotta know when to fold them like this. Wisdom is as old as time. I'm not the first person to say it and people have said it better, but, but essentially, type A pushers, we over index on grit. We tell ourselves that we've got to dig in and push through and persevere and never give up and never quit. And that can be our greatest strength. And it often is our greatest strength. But as the cliche goes, sometimes your greatest strengths are also your biggest weaknesses. And what can happen is if we don't have fit, if we don't have the right approach or the right activity or the right team and we dig in with grit, we're just going to be banging up against a wall that we're never going to get over because it's the wrong wall to climb in the first place. So the way that I have come to think about this is first you need fit. You need to find an activity, an approach, a team that you enjoy doing that you think you're reasonably good at and that you have the potential to grow in and get better at. If you don't have fit, then you should quit. You should try a bunch of things. Once you find fit, that's when it's important to tap into that grit. So an example from my own life. I had very little grit for math and science. But you know, I'm Jewish kid in the suburbs of Michigan. I was gonna be a doctor. So you gotta take the pre med classes, you gotta do math and science. And when it became very clear I wasn't gonna be a doctor, well then you gotta go into business. That lasted until I took econometrics as an undergrad and I was gonna fail the class. I'm like, this isn't for me. So you could look back at that time period. And you can say, wow, Brad was not gritty at all. He was a quitter. He quit science very early. He didn't make it through the AP classes in high school. And then, I don't know, I can't remember, but maybe my sophomore or maybe at the latest, my junior year of undergraduate school, I quit math, I quit the business school. I said, this isn't for me. So I'm a quitter, right? Contrast that with my writing career. I've been writing since the middle school newspaper and I have been rejected thousands of times. Truly thousands of times. There have been so many points in my writing career where most people would have said, like, it's over. You know, don't try to be a professional author. That's so hard. That's a one in a million thing. You can never do it. I kept going. I'm a really gritty writer. And the reason that I've chosen to be gritty as a writer is because I had fit, because I like it, I'm reasonably good at it. It matches my temperament. If I would have taken that same approach to math and science, I think I'd be miserable right now. So it's a lot of nuance here. Like grit is really important. It's an enormous quality on the path to excellence. But we've gotta make sure that we're applying it to things that we actually want to apply it to. And if we never give ourselves the grace or permission to quit, then we're never gonna find the right things.
- [23:09]
A
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- [24:08]
B
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- [24:38]
A
I love your way of talking about consistency. I will just, you know, be brutally honest that I am married to somebody who is probably like an A student and my joke with her is like, you should come down here with the B students who like just figure it out over time and like bang it out and consistently give you good enough and we don't suffer for it. And I feel like a lot of like my entire career has been about consistency. And sure, you know, like, I can get intense at times if the news cycle's crazy, but the consistency element feels like a much more important role in my own development. So can you talk a little bit about how consistency plays into excellence?
- [25:19]
B
Absolutely. It's one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they think that they've got to have these heroic efforts. You've got to pull the all nighter, you've got to train at the gym until you vomit. You, you gotta do things to write home about all the time. It's like a very intensity forward approach. What I found in my reporting, and the research also backs this up, is actually that's backwards. Uh, it's generally more important to prioritize consistency over intensity. So the goal is not a heroic day or a heroic week or even a heroic month. The goal is a heroic body of work. Those are two very different things. If I wanted to have the best week as a writer, I would just be strung out on Red Bull espresso. I don't think I'd use cocaine, but like, there are other substances. But if you had to a phenomenal writer for one week and I would crank out words, would that be sustainable over the course of a career? Absolutely not. What's sustainable over the course of a career is saying, hey, I need to get my butt in the chair on days when I'm feeling great, on days when I'm feeling not so great, and on every day in between, and I need to show up, get started, give myself a chance, 300 words at a time. If it's there, maybe I write 500 words. If it's not there, maybe I only write 100. But you just pound the stone over and over and over again and it builds up tension and then one day it breaks. And that is such a common pattern in individuals who have achieved lasting success in Whatever it is that they do is that they really, they become known for their consistency. And they're not just focused with raising the ceiling and how they perform on their great days, but they're equally as focused with raising the floor and making sure that even on their bad days, they show up and they make, you know, the littlest deposits in the bank. And you know this better than anyone, I'm sure your listeners do. The law of compounding and finance, just like keep putting those investments in, right? The same thing is true when you're talking about progress in sport, when you're talking about progress in starting a company, when you're talking about progress in music. The big heroic bets, sometimes they work, but sometimes they don't. But the people who really create wealth and progress, it's just little by little over long periods of time becomes a lot.
- [27:31]
A
One of the things that I always think about with people who have really played, not professional sports, but just in college, I'm a college athlete, is this idea that you have to rest, that you have to take a break. And I feel that way even, you know, work wise, I feel that way about my body. That you need to rest your machine so that it can perform better. And so this idea of pushing yourself to extremes is such a, it's a trap. And I think it's very difficult for people to say, I just need to rest or I need to rest my brain, I need to take a break from work and not be working all those hours and give myself some recovery time. So talk a little bit about how rest and renewal play into the way of excellence.
- [28:23]
B
The way that you grow a muscle, a physical muscle in your body is really simple. Simple doesn't mean easy, but it is simple. You stress the muscle. So you pick up a weight and you lift that weight and then you let the muscle rest and recover. And in that period of rest and recovery, it adapts and it grows stronger if you don't have enough stress. If I sit there and curled a half pound weight all day, my muscle would never grow. If you've got way too much stress, if I tried to pick up a 200 pound weight, I'd throw out my back. That wouldn't work either. So you've got to pick the right dose of stress. But even if you pick the perfect weight, if I were to show to the gym and lift that weight every single day and never rest, I wouldn't grow. My muscle would actually atrophy. It would literally burn out. So the way that you make a muscle in your body Bigger is you stress it in an appropriate dose and then you give it time to rest and recover and adapt, and then it gets stronger. What's fascinating is that research shows the exact same pattern holds for improving our emotional awareness, for improving our intellect and our cognition, for improving our creativity even. That's how teams and organizations grow. You've got to take on appropriate challenges that push yourself, that make you uncomfortable, that take you outside of your limits ever so slightly. And then you have to allow time to rest, recover, and reflect. And then you rinse and repeat. The research on creativity here is fascinating. The vast majority of breakthrough moments happen not when you're actively working on the problem you're trying to solve, but when you step away. And everybody knows this. Everyone has the experience of solving a problem on their commute home from work, or in the shower, or while taking a walk, or in the middle of the night when you wake up to pee, that's when you're going to have the breakthrough insight. And what is that? It's that cycle of stress. You threw yourself into the problem. You thought about it really hard, but then you rested, you stepped away, you did something else, you gave your brain an opportunity to shut down. And then boom. Growth. You have the aha moment, you have the insight. Anyone that's been in a long term relationship knows that this is how relationships grow. You start with a houseplant and you try to keep it alive, and then you fail. You reflect on what went wrong, you argue, and then you get another houseplant, you keep it alive, and then maybe you get a cat or a dog. And then if you're crazy, maybe you have a kid or two. The point is that relationships grow through periods of taking on challenges together and then stepping back to decompress. And then you get that growth, you get that intimacy. So this is a universal part of excellence is yes, you need to challenge yourself. And we talked a lot about the importance of that. It's a huge part of the book. It's a huge part of excellence. But if you don't have rest and renewal, you don't really grow from the challenge.
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A
I have to tell you, one of the greatest ideas that Mark ever had came about when he was flying overnight. I think it was to Europe. Mark, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but he had this idea and then like the next day there was like a PowerPoint deck in my inbox. And I'm like, what? How did he do this? It's just like he was flying overnight. What happened? And he came up with this incredible idea for our website and for the business that we, you know, are in together. And. And it did happen at that moment with just like a little bit of breathing room. I think there's this idea of excellence, though it doesn't mean that you're not going to stumble along the way, that they're, you know, I don't need to go into failure porn because I've had plenty of failure in my life. But that excellence is going to mean that there are going to be problems along the way. Like you said, like you were talking about a relationship. It's not going to be sunshine and unicorns all, you know, for 50 years. It's going to be stumbles along the way. So what is it about failing and what lessons you take away from those failures? How do you bring that into your path forward of excellence?
- [32:09]
B
Well, as you point out, Jill, failure is inevitable. If you do anything for a long enough time and you do it in a way where you're really trying to push your limits and explore what you're capable of, you're going to fail. It's just part of the deal. There's no way around it. And failure sucks. Failure hurts, as you said. Like, there's so much failure porn about failing forward and all this. Like, maybe, but in the moment, it just sucks. The way that I've come to think about failure is that you accept that it's inevitable. You let it hurt. You give yourself a set amount of time to process it. You take whatever learnings might be available to you that help you refine your process, and then you get back on the bandwagon. You don't make a big deal out of it again, that. That comes back from this expectation that it's inevitable. So it shouldn't freak you out when you fail. You should say, all right, like, I'm pushing myself. I'm on the path of excellence. Course this is going to happen. The rule that I like to use for this, I call it the 48 hour rule. And this is true for success, too. So after a big failure or a big success, give yourself 48 hours to feel all the feels, to celebrate the big win, to grieve the tough defeat, but then force yourself to get back to doing the actual work itself, because the work itself, that is the best medicine in very literal people, such as my wife. She's like, well, why 48 hours? And that's arbitrary. If you just came devastatingly close to winning an Olympic gold medal, but you missed, you might need a. You might need a Couple weeks to sit there and wallow in despair and really feel like, process that, that sucks. But cap that amount of time, like don't let yourself just perpetually wallow in despair. You have to give yourself a hard stop that says, all right, I've done enough of the feeling what this is like. And now I need to get back to the actual training. I need to get back to the work.
- [33:49]
A
You know, I love that, I love that idea because I think sometimes people do kind of get a little too comfortable on their pity pots. You know, bad things do happen to a lot of people, obviously and grief moves through you, moves through your body, moves through your life in so many different ways. But to be fully incapacitated over a period of time is often going to get you stuck in a cycle that is hard to get out of. So I like the idea that you can give yourself some time for, you know, you feel bad, you feel good, don't go too crazy. I mean, listen, I think in this world I find that the social media, the incredible arrogance of so many people who confuse their good fortune with the fact that they think they're brilliant is just so annoying to me. I liken it to saying that when you know, some, I, I meet some trader who says to me, or some investor who says, you know, I, I mean I've just killed it for the last few years. I'm like, yeah, the market has done that for you. You are not a genius. Like you stayed out of the way, you collected the money. Don't mistake that for your excellence or genius. Like part of it is also having the awareness to understand what is it you brought to the party and, and what part of this was just good fortune. Which is great, I mean it's good. But like, don't hang out there too long because I promise you that defeat is coming around the corner.
- [35:16]
B
Yeah, you don't want to get complacent after success and you don't want to get stuck after defeat. And to be clear, this isn't about like white knuckling it. I think that you need a lot of self kindness and compassion because stepping into the arena and giving something your all and caring deeply is actually really challenging to do. Why? Because when things don't go your way, you're going to get your heart broken and so you have to be kind to yourself. But it's the ability to be kind to yourself that gives you the fierce self discipline to really be a badass and to dust your shoulders off and then to get back into the arena. I Liken it to. Everyone can remember back in school, there were the popular kids that were too cool to try, right? They sat in the back of the class. They phoned it in during gym, during music. Those kids weren't cool. Those kids were just terrified. They were insecure and they were scared of failure. So it was easier not to try than to try and risk failure. And when you commit to excellence, that's part of the deal. You are going to try, you are going to care deeply, and you are going to fail, and it is going to hurt. So you need to be kind to yourself. You need to feel whatever you feel. And then you need to have the discipline to get back on the bandwagon.
- [36:18]
A
I want to finish our conversation with a part of the book that really resonated for me, which was your chapter on community. Because I feel like Mark and I have built this community of listeners that, you know, is sort of different than the mass audience of a CBS News broadcast, that there are people here who kind of care about each other. They say such lovely things to me and Mark about their own experiences. And I believe that part of my pursuit, my way of excellence, is that this community has really nurtured my soul. And I think that's been an incredibly. Just like a beautiful, unexpected experience. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how community could be a workplace community. Any community can help foster excellence.
- [37:13]
B
The people with whom you surround yourself are the people that shape you. We are all just mirrors reflecting onto each other. So to the extent that you can surround yourself with the right people for you, not only are you going to enjoy the path and the process more, but you're also going to get so much more out of yourself. I think one of the most dangerous messages of hustle culture or pseudo Internet excellence is that you've got to do it alone, right? You've got to be the alpha. You've got to be hungry. No one else can keep up with you. If you're going to try to climb Mount Everest, the actual mountain or a metaphorical Mount Everest, whatever your big goal is, your big project is for this year, you got two options, okay? You can be angry, miserable and resentful and try to climb it alone and likely fail, or you can find the right climbing partners and have a hell of a time on the way up the mountain and give yourself a better chance to succeed. Why on earth would anyone do the former when the latter is an option? So if you are trying to reach the top and you are trying to do that alone. You are missing out on the performance enhancing boost that you get from the people around you and more importantly, you are missing out on the joy and the satisfaction and the love and the camaraderie that you get from trying to do hard things, from taking on challenges with other people. It is arguably the greatest joy there is in life is taking big swings, taking on challenges and doing it with other people and building community along the way.
- [38:38]
A
I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. And if you've got any other questions about your financial life, we are here for you. Just go to our website jillonmoney.com click the contact us button, write us a note and if you would like to join us live, all you need to do is check the box. Okay, you can subscribe to us on the Odyssey app or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Of course, it is Friday so we like to do our thank yous. Our music is composed by Joel Goodman. Mark Telerso is our executive producer and the king of all things web. He is just the best at everything he does. We are distributed by the lovely folks at Odyssey. As always, we ask that you lift someone up. Change your work, change your wealth, change your life. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you on Monday.
- [39:28]
B
Hey, this is Richard Deitch, the host of the Sports Media Podcast. If you're interested in what's happening with all the places where you consume sports, the Sports Media Podcast has you covered. I've been turning down interviews all week. Hoda Copy reached out Oprah George Stephanopoulos, so I said no. I was booked on the Deitch podcast before the Taylor Swift phenomenon. I must live up to my responsibility. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.