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- [00:00]
Brad Stalberg
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Derek Thompson
This episode is brought to you by Lincoln. Whether it's bonding digitally or exploring the world Together, the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid is built for connection with lots of smart tech that helps bring worlds together both on and off the screen. So help turn everydrive into an opportunity for discovery with the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid. Learn more at lincoln.com available connectivity features and functionality vary by model. Package pricing, trials and term lengths vary by model. Video streaming and games are only available while parked One of the themes that we've been circling the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called How Metrics Make Us Miserable. T told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life, but he discovered in grad school that everyone around him mostly just cared about numbers. The journals were ranked by status numbers, the university departments were ranked by status numbers. Individual researchers had their own H scores and other public quantifications of prestige more numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of I want to answer the world's deepest questions was replaced by the external value of make number go up. Make number go up. It might as well be the four word mantra of the modern world. If you think about it, it's actually somewhat difficult to name any corner of our lives that isn't drenched in external metrics. To take two personal examples I wear and an aura ring and I use social media. Aura quantifies how I spend my day. Social media quantifies everything I say. When I talk to the people in the office or at home or at a bar, nobody is scoring the cleverness of my repartee. But when I move talking from the physical world to the digital world, I move conversation from a realm with no real time scores to a realm that is nothing but scores. Views on TikTok, likes on Instagram, retweets and likes on Twitter upvotes on Reddit. These digital conversations take on a different character. We are different. We talk differently on the Internet because people on the Internet aren't talking just to talk. They are talking to make number go up. What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing something inside of us, our values, and replacing it with something outside of us. Something synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic. Let's call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life, but only work on the papers that you think will end up in Journals scored highly by a bureaucracy that you'll never see, that's the machine. If you're a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world, but you end up just focusing on rage bait political bullshit because that's what all the YouTube finger are clicking on. That's the machine. What is the opposite of the machine? It's something a little different than success. It's success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that are trying to crush them. Today's guest, Brad Stalberg calls it excellence. And that excellence is the subject of today's show. Derek Thompson this is planning. This episode of Plain English is presented by Audi. We all know that feeling. A change of plans, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes? With the all new Audi Q3? The answer is easy. It's made for the yes life. With the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, and that's real luxury. The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life. Learn more at audiusa.com Brad Stolberg welcome to the show, Derek.
- [04:52]
Brad Stalberg
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [04:53]
Derek Thompson
It's great to see you. So why don't you tell people who do not know you who you are and what you do?
- [04:57]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. I'm Brad and I wear three primary hats. The first hat that I wear is the Detroit Tigers. I guess I wear four primary hats. A Detroit Tiger fan. It's the first hat that I wear actually wearing the hat start of the season. The second hat I wear is as an author, a writer where I'm really interesting and exploring applied philosophy and human flourishing. I guess now I'm wearing four because the tiger's hat. The third hat that I wear is a coach. So I work with athletes, physicians, entrepreneurs on their mental skills. And then I'm also on faculty at the University of Michigan where I lecture in their Graduate School of Public Health on leadership and self coaching.
- [05:31]
Derek Thompson
Your new book is the Way of Excellence and you're arguing against two cultural forces here. One cultural force you're arguing against is alienation and the other is pseudo excellence. So let's talk about each of these enemies of your current project. What's alienation?
- [05:46]
Brad Stalberg
Alienation is a sense of remove that we feel from each other and in some instances from ourselves, from our own lives. It is a sense of distance and separation between us and what we're doing and we don't realize how alienated we've become in essentially all domains. I want to tell this story that I hadn't experienced when I was working on the book. And it was a super busy day. It was a weekend I was shuttling my kids from sports to dance to soccer to basketball. And we finally got to the gas station and the tank was almost on empty. And I get out of the car and I'm so relieved the kids are in the car that I have two minutes to myself while I fill up the gas station just to be with myself and to think my own thoughts. In 10 seconds into pumping the gas with car, a woman interrupts me on the screen who is literally telling me everything is figureoutable. And if I just listen to these five steps, I can figure out all my life's problems. So I can't even pump my gas without something getting in the way of me and what I'm doing of thinking my own thoughts and. And pumping the gas. And I think distraction has become really ubiquitous. And often we talk about distraction, but I think underneath distraction is the sense of alienation or a lack of intimacy in our lives.
- [06:54]
Derek Thompson
To a certain extent, I feel like what you are calling alienation I think of as the ability to maintain a connection with your inner values in a world that's constantly trying to pull you away and replace those values with some other value system. So, you know, we had this conversation with the philosopher C T Nguyen that you and I talked about that I thought was really interesting and so well connected to this show that was about the degree to which we come into this world with our own set of values. And constantly there are metric systems and quantification systems and external bureaucracies that are trying to replace our inner values with an external set of values. Is that close to what you are calling here, alienation? The challenge of how do I make sure that I stay in touch with my own thoughts as I make my way through life?
- [07:39]
Brad Stalberg
Yes, I think 100% there's a separateness from your values in who you really are. And then at a more practical level, there's also just a distance between you and whatever it is that you're doing. In many ways, I think that excellence is. The pursuit of excellence is pretty similar to intimacy because you get really close to something, you pay attention, you're endlessly curious about it. And we often think about intimacy with another person. But you can also have intimacy with a craft. And if we are constantly being distracted or interrupted, it's hard to find that intimacy. It's hard to get into the slipstream or the pocket of a creative project or training for a marriage marathon. You've cited this on the show. There's data that shows that Americans are having less physical intimacy, literal intimacy, because their phones are in their bedroom. So it's just this constant bombardment of external noise that separates us from our inner values and from the things that we portend to care about being present for.
- [08:28]
Derek Thompson
Another way, I think to get at this concept of alienation that I found really, really interesting from your book is there's this idea from, I believe, the Czech psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And this idea is called flow. And it's experience that people have when they're playing video games, when they're playing sports, when they're playing, you know, having a great conversation at dinner table with friends where past anxiety and future anxiety and reminiscence like it all melts away and you are entirely enmeshed in the here and now. That's what he's calling flow. And he thinks of it as one of the higher states of being. You reference this idea that was co named by, I believe the psychologist Paul Bloom of shitty flow, which is the experience of say, doom scrolling for 30 minutes or you know, being on Netflix and looking for something to watch for 20 minutes, not actually watching anything. And it's interesting because in shitty flow, time is also melting away. It's just not melting away in the direction that you would want it to melt. It's melting away from you. So maybe talk a little bit about this idea of flow versus shitty flow, because I thought it was one of the more fun ideas from the book.
- [09:35]
Brad Stalberg
Shitty flow is a subtype of flow. So as you were saying, flow has all of these hallmarks of a peak experience. So you lose a sense of self, you lose a sense of time, you're totally immersed in what you're doing. But flow is inherently values neutral. So Mihaly Csikszentmihaly didn't say that flow needs to be pointed towards something great. So you can experience flow when you're falling in love, or when you're writing a book, or if you're a transplant surgeon and you're in an eight hour case and you're just totally in the zone. Those are all flow states. To your point, you can also experience flow scrolling on Twitter. You can experience flow gambling on sports or at a slot machine. And you lose a sense of time, you lose a sense of space, your perception changes, you're completely enwrapped in what you're doing, but then you exit Shitty flow and you kind of feel like shit. Hence the name shitty flow. And I think that we experience much less flow in these days than we do. Shitty flow, shitty flow. Opportunities are all around us. We have to work extra hard to get the good kind of flow.
- [10:30]
Derek Thompson
The other idea that your book is arguing against is pseudo excellence. What is that?
- [10:34]
Brad Stalberg
Pseudo excellence is the performance of excellence or individuals that are more concerned with performing great versus actually being great. So pseudo excellence is the influencer that you see on the Internet that wakes up at 4am and has nine different breathing regimens and then they've got their nose taped or their mouth taped or maybe their ears taped. Depends on the day of the week. They cold plunge at 4:30 in the morning, they take their 47 step supplement stacks, they've got four pharmacists who aren't actually pharmacists on speed speed dial for their peptides. They meditate for 30 minutes, they do their five bullet journal. And all of this happens before 6:30am and the implicit message, sometimes also explicit, is if you want to be great, this is what you have to do. But that's not actual greatness, that is performance art. If those individuals are great at anything, what they're great at is attracting attention on the Internet. So pseudo excellence, again, in its simplest form it is a whole bunch of elaborate kabuki. Masquerading is the real thing. But it's extremely enticing because it offers people a sense of agency and a sense of control.
- [11:32]
Derek Thompson
Let's provide a really clear example. So you lift, you deadlift.
- [11:36]
Brad Stalberg
I love it.
- [11:37]
Derek Thompson
What would pseudo excellence for deadlifting look like? And why is that the wrong path?
- [11:43]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, pseudo excellence, you see it all the time. So pseudo excellence for deadlifting would be spending so much time every single day on forums just trying to hunt down the one perfect training program, it would be needing a special kind of protein powder. So not just any protein powder, but a kind with the right enzymes that break down a certain way. It would be waking up at a certain time and drinking coffee within 10 minutes of waking up and sun gazing. Because I have to get my circadian rhythm right to deadlift. It would be going into the gym and perhaps doing a cold plunge or a sauna before I lift. Because now there's some data that shows that if you do the cold plunge after it gets in the way of your adaptations, I'd spend 45 minutes on a foam roller because my fascial connections have to be completely fine tuned to deadlift. And by the time I actually get to deadlifting. I'm going to be so exhausted and wiped out that I might spend 15 minutes with the bar.
- [12:31]
Derek Thompson
Truly.
- [12:32]
Brad Stalberg
So it is an obsession on the minors. There's a difference between keeping the main things. The main things and majoring in the minors and pseudo excellence. It feels great because you're doing all this stuff and you're so dialed and you're sold this story that all the greats, they're super dialed. They have every minute of their day planned and scheduled. But that couldn't be further from the truth. That's what I found in my reporting is that most of the greats, they don't have crazy elaborate routines. They're really good at focusing on what matters. So that would be pseudo excellence. In the world of deadlifts, it would be spending all of his time and energy on the last 1% and not focusing enough on the 99%.
- [13:09]
Derek Thompson
My next question for you here is who is the audience for this approach, for the pseudo excellence approach? And I'm going to do the really bad interview thing where I'm actually going to offer an answer to the question as I ask it. As I'm thinking about the relationship between pseudo excellence and alienation. One audience that this approach is so clearly for is for young men who are profoundly alone. I won't say lonely, but alone. What you just described, those morning routine TikTok videos, the guy in those videos is always by himself. There is never another person that wakes up in a bed with him. There's never, God forbid, a child, heavens forbid, two children in the house. It's an incredibly time expensive, performative routine that can only really be done in the absence of other people and certainly in the absence of family. And that's a way in which the audience for this approach you're arguing against is both pseudo excellence and alienated. There's a way in which this performative approach of success in the world also makes it hard to be around people because it takes so damn long to check all of these stupid boxes. So that's one audience that I imagine is enamored of the pseudo excellence approach. To what extent is that the audience you had in mind? And is there another audience that you think is being suckered by this pseudo excellence approach?
- [14:41]
Brad Stalberg
I think you're spot on. That is definitely a primary audience and it's part of the. It's a strong word, remember, uses part of the grift. Because if you keep someone alone in, In. In feeling alone, then they're going to want to develop a parasocial relationship. With you, the influencer. And they're going to have six hours, eight hours a day to watch you stream whatever it is that you're doing instead of doing real things in the real world and pursuing mastery and mattering and in relationships. So yes is the short answer. That's a longer answer. I think there's another group which is. We often talk about the manosphere in young men. I think this happens with women as well. It's just a slightly different shade of color. And with women you get big wellness. So this started out with goop and crystal healing and all of these other things that are supposed to bring you success and happiness. And then you also see this notion of the trad wife or the traditional wife whose life is just so in order. And your job is to be a homemaker and to essentially serve your family. And in all of this, and it's being sold as like, that's what it means to be an excellent woman. But the women that are doing this, they, one, they have full time jobs, which is making trad wife content. And two, the people that they're appealing to that have the time and energy to watch them are inherently somewhat lonely because they're watching trad wife streaming their entire life all day. So it's this vicious cycle, you used
- [15:58]
Derek Thompson
the G word there, which is grift. And I think it's important that the pseudo excellence approach also turns viewers, turns audience into customers. It often promises that the solution can't just be worked out with good habits, it has to be bought. So maybe just go a little bit deeper into that.
- [16:19]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, a lot of this became popularized with this idea of marginal gains, which was born out of Team Sky, a British cycling team that won multiple Tour de Frances. And at the time, the theory was they had this meticulous focus on all these marginal gains. So every single calorie was measured, your lactate was measured, everything that you were doing was measured. And that's what allowed them to get to the next level. It turns out that Team sky was most likely 99.99% now we can say with confidence doping. So they actually kept the main thing. The main thing, the main thing was just performance enhancing drugs that were elicit in newsflash those work. And out of that though became this whole industry of you too can be like Team sky if you're just focused on these little micro improvements and we're gonna package them up and sell you. And what's fascinating about this is even the studies that are well done, they tend to have small sample sizes. But that aside, that are rigorous and they show you get a half a percent benefit with beetroot juice and you can take a lactic acid buffer, and that gives you a percent benefit. And then if you change your sleep a little bit, that's gonna find a 2% benefit. Well, guess what? If you were to add up all these percents, you'd be getting like 18% better. And nobody gets 18% better from doing this. So each marginal gain that promises to get you a percent or two, put them all together and you still might only get 8% better. If that. So it is this, this trying to construct a pyramid out of these small things that tend to have a price tag, when what you actually need to do is just build the foundation, which is often, as you pointed out in the example of deadlifting, there's no price for it. And then the way that this has changed over the last five to 10 years with the Internet in particular, is that now not only are we selling you products, but we're, we're selling you like the entertainment value. So we've talked a little bit about Brian Johnson, the longevity influencer. I think more than anything, forget his protocols that are completely uncontrolled and we have no idea what's actually doing what. It's just great performance art. I think a lot of people are into Brian Johnson because it's like watching a reality TV show, which is fine if that's your entertainment, but if you're really tuning into that again, you should be living your own life.
- [18:23]
Derek Thompson
So we've defined the enemies of excellence, alienation, pseudo excellence, the grift that sometimes follows from the pseudo excellence approach. I think now we should probably just define excellence itself. And I do want to set this up by saying that I think excellence is a little bit of a peculiar word in a fun way. Like there's something almost old fashioned about it. It's not happiness, it's not optimization, it's not flow, it's not pleasure, it's not comfort. Your definition of excellence exists above all of these things. So what is it?
- [19:00]
Brad Stalberg
I define excellence as involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values. That is the pursuit of excellence. And by getting on that path and falling off and then getting on again and falling off and getting on again, it lends a sense of mastery and mattering to your life. So that is the outcome that you get, that is the ultimate reward. Yes, hopefully you'll have external successes and achievements, but the real reward is intrinsic, which is that you make progress on concrete activities. That you define as important and you feel like what you're doing matters.
- [19:34]
Derek Thompson
The more examples here, the better, I think. So you could have called this idea success, right? But success, I think is indifferent to values. Correct. And that's why I'm so interested in the fact that you held the concept of values in your definition. Like if you set out to get rich by making the world a better place, but you become a billionaire by subverting the law, you're successful. You're immoral, but successful. If you set out to be a bodybuilder, but you only win that weightlifting competition with steroids, you have succeeded. You are successful, but you're successful by obliterating maybe the original value of fair competition. So tell me why excellence needs values?
- [20:16]
Brad Stalberg
I think if excellence doesn't have values in standard. Well, first off, excellence was a virtue, right? Like the term that the Greeks used was arete. So excellence developed separate from success. The Greeks define. Arete is essentially living one's full potential or expressing one's full nature. It had nothing to do with success. It's kind of like be the best that you can be and stay committed. If we wipe values away from excellence, then to your point, we might look at people who get quote, unquote excellent results or have massive successes, but who are completely values deprived along the way. So I think it's bad culturally. And then at a personal level, I think it's so important to separate the pursuit of excellence from success because the top of the mountain is so freaking narrow. Like you don't spend much time on the top of the mountain. You spend 99.9999% of your life on the sides of the mountain, you know, doing the work, climbing, digging where your feet are. And that's where you have to find the mastery and mattering. So if you're on the side of the mountain, you don't give a shit about values, then it's not going to be a very good journey to the top.
- [21:17]
Derek Thompson
Let me tell you one thing that I struggle with in terms of self help books, self improvement books and counsels to reject sort of external sources of validation. Right.
- [21:34]
Brad Stalberg
I think we're going to share this in common.
- [21:36]
Derek Thompson
Go ahead. So I read a lot of self improvement books that often say you have to find intrinsic sources of motivation and reject extrinsic sources of motivation. But then I see the authors of these books become New York Times bestsellers and what do they do? They post to the world, I'm a New York Times bestseller. The moment the external validation made itself manifest. They immediately grabbed it and said, look at me. I succeeded. And it's not just the New York Times bestseller thing. If they have a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the first thing they're going to do is post about the fact that they just met the Dalai Lama. I would love to hear from you a more sophisticated evaluation and analysis of how we should think about extrinsic success, because it has to be a part of it, of the Jambalaya.
- [22:35]
Brad Stalberg
And I'm so glad that you're asking. I don't know if you saw recently on my Twitter feed, I posted an example of someone that was giving this huge talk about how external success doesn't matter and fame doesn't matter. And he's on a podcast that gets 3.4 million downloads wearing a shirt that makes this person's bicep muscle look bigger than the planet Mars. So in my definition of excellence, there's multiple sections in this book that explicitly say that outcomes matter. Success matters. Outcomes are important. Anyone that tells you otherwise, don't listen to Outcomes often have financial repercussions. They often open you up to new opportunities. And when you set a big goal and you want to achieve it, it can be an enormous force of motivation. There's a reason that we keep score. There's a reason that we have the New York Times Bestseller list. You should want to achieve, you should want to strive. And we need to hold that at the same time as we hold what psychologists teach us about the arrival fallacy, which is real, which says that even if you get every single success that you want, if you think that by achieving that success, then you're going to be content, then you're going to be happy, then you're going to have meaning in your life. You will be rudely assuaged of that assumption in reporting for the book. One of the more interesting stories of this comes from the basketball player Ray Allen. And Ray Allen, one of the best shooters to ever play basketball. And he had done everything you could ask in your career. Multiple all star games, three point shooting championships, even starred in a Spike Lee movie. He got game. The one thing he hadn't done was won a championship. About a decade into his career, he finally won his first championship with the Boston Celtics. And Ray Allen said that the morning after winning that championship was one of the most disorienting, confusing mornings in his life because he still didn't feel fulfilled, he didn't feel content. That is the arrival fallacy. So we have to do this kind of Jedi mind trip where we can want to achieve and we can want to win, and we can give our all to winning, while at the same time, like, assuaging ourself of the expectation that winning is going to fulfill us in finding meaning and joy and satisfaction on the climb. And that, to me, is what the pursuit of excellence is all about. This is not one of those books. And this is not a case to say you should not strive, you should not try to win. You should strive, you should try to win. This just says that if you think winning is going to seal the deal and make your life, you are rudely mistaken.
- [24:43]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, you reminded me. My favorite poem of all time is Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses. And most people who know that poem know the final iambic pentameter line of Ulysses, which is this king. It's a brilliant poem where essentially, Tennyson is imagining the experience of Odysseus or Ulysses, and after he returns home, after he's a winner from the story of the Odyssey. And the whole idea is he is bored as hell. Yeah, he is so bored. And cannot wait to get back on the open sea, because that's what life is all about. And most people know the poem from the very last stanza, which is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, which is this, you know, rapturous call for, you know, successful principles. But the best line of the poem is in the middle of the poem where they say, all experience is an arc, where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever as we move, everything that we do inevitably serves as a frame for the things we haven't done. That is the arrival fallacy. There's no getting around the fact that everything that you do will eventually become not the thing that you're reaching for, but the thing that frames everything you reach for, starting now. And I love that idea, that in a poem that's basically about an old, crotchety man, you still have Tennyson, like the late 19th century, just essentially putting his fingers so beautifully on this idea that whether you're the most successful person in the world, the Ray Allens, the Kevin Garnett, Sir Kevin Durant's the world. People who have won and have famously not been made immediately and forever happy by their win or someone who doesn't succeed, Experience shapes attitudes, and it always will. And you have to maybe remember that. Remember that the peak of the mountain is so, so tiny. And the second you succeed, you're gonna be back to a climb. But that's okay. You should still try to climb.
- [26:44]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned climb. I mean, I love mountains. They're metaphors I use all the time. If we're gonna do mythology, I think of the myth of Sisyphus and how Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push this boulder up a mountain and then the boulder rolls back down, he has to push it back up, boulder rolls back down for all of eternity. And a lot of people see this as this kind of punishment. Camus comes along, the existentialist philosopher, and says, essentially, we're all Sisyphus. Life is just a series of mountains that we're pushing a boulder up. And the goal of a good life is to push the boulder up the hill with a smile on your face. Can one imagine one must be happy? Exactly. And the only thing that I'd add is can you do it with a smile on your face? And can you ideally do it with good people? And can you pick the right mountains to climb? And I think if you do those three things, that's a good life. And the reason I mention this do with a smile on your face is that's another one of these dangerous myths of pseudo excellence. You hear it the most in the manosphere, that you have to be like, angry to be great or you have to slay everyone across from you or you have to suffer. Greatness is all about suffering. You can't be happy, you can't experience joy. That is utter bullshit. I Talked to over 100, like truly world class elite performers in different domains, and every single one of them, every single one to a person, told me that yes, they struggle and yes, there is suffering and yes, there's discomfort involved, but they also experience so much joy in the totality of the pursuit. And that's not just for world beaters, that's for all of us. Like a good life requires doing hard things, taking on meaningful challenges, exerting yourself, finding your limit, pushing against it. Not every day is going to be fun, but you also have to be able to smile and enjoy, at the very least, experience satisfaction. Not happiness, but satisfaction in what you're doing. And I think those are important ingredients not only to our greatest creations and contributions to our communities and perhaps to the world, but also just to a good individual life.
- [28:29]
Derek Thompson
What are the ingredients of excellence? I hear you naming some of them. Persistence, an attitude of, if not quite optimism, then almost cheer, right? A willingness to try, even when trying is painful and hurts. What are the other key ingredients of excellence?
- [28:48]
Brad Stalberg
One that is close to this kind of Cheer. And I think potentially more potent is curiosity. So curiosity is a superpower for achievement and for the pursuit of excellence. And the reason for that is. So there's this saying, get just 1% better every day. You've probably heard it, and as a mindset, it's great. It's a nod to consistency, which I totally agree with. I'm gonna talk about consistency in a second. Maybe it says, you don't have to hit home runs. You don't have to be a hero. You don't have to train till you puke. Just show up and get a little bit better every day. And those small gains compound and you get something big. I agree with all of that. However, what happens is that when you're new to a pursuit, you actually do get 1% better every day. Hell, you might get 50% better and then 25% better and then 1% better. And in most crafts, you get 1% better every day for about a year, give or take. And then eventually you have this plateau where you stop getting 1% better every day. It's the end of the honeymoon phase. And at that point, so many people quit because this thing that was your driving, motivating force, these concrete gains that kept you coming back, they go away. And at this point, you have to shift the motivation to curiosity. Curiosity about yourself, curiosity about the process, curiosity about how the little nuances of what you're doing are going to change. And through endless curiosity, you not only get better, but that keeps you coming back. In the book, I tell the story of the powerlifter Lane Norton, who told me that when he started powerlifting, like so many young men, he was a little bit insecure. He was looking for confidence in the 1% better everyday gains. That's what drew him in. Fast forward to 10 years into his career, Lane Norton had deadlifted 600. Excuse me. Fast forward. Deep into his career, Lane Norton had deadlifted 716 pounds. Guess how long it took him to go from 716 pounds to 723 pounds, which set the world record for his weight class?
- [30:33]
Derek Thompson
Six months.
- [30:34]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. It took him eight years. Eight years. So Lane Norton got less than 1% better every year. And I asked him about it and I said, what happened? He's like, I was just endlessly curious, man. Like, what do you mean? He's like, what does it feel like if I just move my pinky toe? You know, put one half of a millimeter more space between my pinky toe and my fourth toe as I pressurize And I push the floor out, like what does that do? Just running all of these little experiments. And the curiosity, it has this intrinsic reward of discovery that keeps you coming back and it's very much linked to the joy. So I think curiosity is important. Another fascinating curiosity story from reporting on the book is Kobe Bryant, for all of his struggles off the court, was a very good basketball player on the court. And before he died, he was asked in an interview, are you the kind of player who plays not to lose or plays to win? And Kobe said, I'm neither. I play to figure things out. And what he meant by that is when he gets on the court, he's just playing to learn something. He's endlessly curious about the game because if you play not to lose, you're on your heels and you're in a defensive position and if you play to win and then you lose, it's going to be seen as a failure. But if you play to just be curious to figure things out, you're constantly growing back to your games conversation. You're turning a finite game into an infinite game in many ways. Consistency, so, so important. So often we're sold in pseudo excellence that you've got to do the monster workout or you're going to change your life in 30 days or whatever the promise is. And what that sets you up to do is just to go really hard and then to flame out or to go really hard and not see the results that you want and then to shift and pursue the next fad, whereas just showing up day in and day out, pounding the stone, like committing to consistency, so, so important. I could keep going, but let me
- [32:21]
Derek Thompson
do no, there's just something is really interesting in terms of different domains of achievement because you're a deadlifter and you write books. And there's an interesting way in which exercise and book writing are opposite achievements. You and I have both written books. When you write a book, you've written a book, you'll always have written the book. Abundance will always have been written. The way of excellence will always have been written. And so in a way the achievement cannot be denigrated or depreciated through time. But one of the things I love about exercise that makes it feel more like a metaphor for life than writing a book is that if you do that 30 day workout to get the six pack abs, if you don't work out for another week, they're gone. Everything that you did for that month is wiped away. And in that way, I remember when I initially started working out I was like, God, it's so frustrating. You have to keep doing it. That's the point. You have to. You set a new record for bench and then you have to keep doing it. Like, my God. It's not like a book where you write it and it's bound and it's shipped in the world and you're done. It's like everything else. It's like everything else where if you don't keep doing it, it just immediately disappears. And so I think there's an interesting distinction, I think, between some achievements that once achieved last forever and other achievements where the achievement never has an end point. Right. Like exercise never has, like a logical endpoint. It's something that necessarily must be maintained and re explored and made more curious day after day.
- [33:54]
Brad Stalberg
That's a fascinating observation. It's not so much a pushback, but. Yeah, pushback, yeah. It's short of a pushback, but I think that a reframe around the book is that. And this kind of gets to the difference between success and excellence. If your goal is just to get to the top of the mountain and to say you've written a book, then yeah, you wrote the book, it's done, it's never going to get denigrated. But that's very different than saying, I'm a writer. And if you start to identify or make a part of your identity being a writer, then one of every writer's biggest fears is, I've written the book and now I'm marketing it and I haven't written anything really deep in four days. When I face the blank pages, it's still going to be there. And to me that's the same thing as well. If I don't train, am I still going to be strong? The answer is no. If you don't keep reading, if you don't keep writing, you're not going to be as good of a writer. So I think that there's this interesting shift that happens in any pursuit from I did this for the achievement. Some people call it a business card book. I want to be able to say I wrote a book versus I'm a writer and I care about the craft and being values neutral. There's nothing wrong with doing certain things to say that you achieve them. But I think that the amount of satisfaction and fulfillment you get out of them is much, much different if you view it as a craft or a practice.
- [35:02]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, right. And I think, think, I don't know if this is profound or unbelievably mind smackingly obvious, but fitness is the opposite of accomplishment. An accomplishment is something that you did correct and then you did it and now you've done it forever. Fitness is the opposite. Fitness is a state. You do that 30 day crash diet, get the six pack, whatever. If you're back on a Twinkies for two weeks, it's gone and you no longer have the fitness. And so there's parts of life that are accomplishments and there's parts of life that are more like fitness, where there is no end state. Right. The practice is the end point. The practice is the practice.
- [35:41]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, yeah. The goal is the path and the path is the goal. I mean, that's how I think about fitness. I mean, you could compete at a powerlifting meet and deadlift a certain amount of weight and no one can denigrate that. But that goes away very quickly. No different than you can write a book, but if you never write again, your ability to write is going to go away.
- [35:57]
Derek Thompson
What about obsession? What role does obsession play?
- [36:00]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, so it's interesting, there's a more clinical definition of obsession and then there's a colloquial definition of obsession. So the clinical definition, I'll start there, essentially says that it is very similar to addiction where you do the thing despite negative consequences and it becomes also like a compulsion. So even if you don't want to do it, you do it. So a true example of obsession would be that you are training to get better at basketball. And even though you're over training to the point where you're getting injured, you keep training. That is like obsessive passion is what the researchers call it. It's associated with bad outcomes. That is in contrast to harmonious passion where you still care deeply. You do the thing all the time, but you control it. It doesn't control you. So in a clinical sense, obsession's bad. Now, more colloquially, when we talk about being obsessed with something, I think being obsessed with something is good to a point. And that point is you don't want your entire identity or your entire self worth to ever fuse with what you're doing, because that makes you very fragile. So the way that I think about excellence in obsession is you want to be a little bit crazy and a little bit obsessed, but you don't want to go over that edge where now this is the sole thing that you identify with, because then you're going to take unacceptable risk. You might cheat, you might engage in fraud, so on and so forth.
- [37:15]
Derek Thompson
This episode is brought to you by.
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Derek Thompson
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- [38:37]
Derek Thompson
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- [39:46]
Derek Thompson
things you work on work on you. What does that mean?
- [39:49]
Brad Stalberg
That means that if you are pursuing excellence in this values driven way, when you are aspiring toward a goal, that goal is also shaping your character. So yes, I might want to deadlift £550. That is like a big mountain that I want to climb. Very Sisyphean task. And I might think that I'm doing all these things to work on the goal. So I'm going to the gym, I'm doing my secondary lift. So on and so forth. But deadlifting £550 is also working on me. It's teaching me about setbacks, about resilience, about facing my fears, about staying curious, about the power of coaching and community, and on and on and on. And these are all character traits that not only help me in the gym, but more importantly, help me as a father, help me as a writer, help me outside of the gym. So when you work on something with deep care and intimacy, that thing can't help but work on you.
- [40:37]
Derek Thompson
And surely it can go the other way. It can be negative if you do
- [40:40]
Brad Stalberg
it the wrong way. That's why the values piece is so important.
- [40:43]
Derek Thompson
I think about this in terms of my reading that whatever I happen to be reading typically has this extraordinary way of colonizing my thought patterns. When I spend a lot of time reading Twitter, my thoughts get very short. Short epigrammatic, bumper stickers, axioms. How do I make this as short and simple as possible? And over parental leave, I was reading more fiction, and I was reading Dennis Johnson, in particular, Jesus Son. And he's an incredible. Dennis Johnson is an extraordinarily evocative writer. And I remember I was having thoughts that were in. I won't say in Dennis Johnson's voice. He's one of the great writers of the 20th century. So it's not like I suddenly picked it up, but in almost an attempt to ventriloquize Dennis Johnson's voice. And I find this happens all the time when I get really immersed in reading, that not just when I read fiction. My thoughts get longer and more textured, and I'm able to sit with ideas for a longer period of time because I haven't just been trained by the bop, bop, bop of Twitter, but also if it's a really great writer, you know, Roth, Updike, Johnson, I will start to have thoughts that almost mimic the thoughts that I'm reading all the time. And I love that. And that's what I thought of when I read the line, the things you work on work on you. The writing I read works on me and becomes the pattern of thinking that I end up employing. And I don't know, I love the fact that we're so susceptible to our work and to our passion that way.
- [42:16]
Brad Stalberg
Yes, we are entirely interdependent with our environment. So the people around us, the books that we read, the music that we listen to, the conversation that we have, even the mediums that we exist in. So part of the Twitter is not only the limitations on characters, which they've now blown up. But it's just how the whole algorithm works, which is like, it rewards velocity, it rewards rage. So if you put yourself in a very reactive environment, you're gonna be a more reactive person. If you read Middlemarch, you're gonna be a more responsive person. It's a long, slow book. So I mean, Neil Postman was obviously ahead of his time with the medium is the message.
- [42:50]
Derek Thompson
Marshall McLuhan was the medium is the message. Neil Postman is amusing ourselves to.
- [42:53]
Brad Stalberg
Amusing ourselves to death. Marshall McLuhan ahead of his time. And I think though, the same thing can happen with the goals. So back to that mountain metaphor that we both love. If you're going to spend 99.999% of your time and energy on the side of the mountain, you got to pick the right mountains to climb. And if you climb the right mountains, whether or not you reach the top, but you want to reach the top, like all hell. But whether or not you do, the effect it's going to have on your character and on your being in the world is really positive and meaningful. And that to me, at the end of the day is like what the pursuit of excellence is all about. And it's also very democratic. So an excellent result might mean getting to the top of the mountain. Like, by no standard am I excellent at a deadlift. Like, I've never won a national championship. However, I can still pursue excellence and get all the rewards of that pursuit, even though I'm never going to be world class or national class. And I think that's just like that to me is such an antidote to this alienation. It's like giving a damn, giving something, your all, doing it with intention and care, striving for the result, but then also realizing that it's going to fill your life with texture and shape you as a person. That's how the Greeks thought about this term.
- [44:00]
Derek Thompson
Everything you said is true. And also if you try really hard, if you're obsessed, if you're passionate, if you throw yourself into things, you will get disappointed. You will have disappointments. How do you deal with disappointment?
- [44:13]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, the chapter on failure in the books is the shortest chapter. It's two pages. And what I wrote is that failure sucks. It's also inevitable. Keep going. The poet David White says that the things that you care about are the things that break your heart. So I think that it's just an expectation that it's going to hurt. It's going to suck. How I personally deal with disappointments is I often think about the 48 hour rule. So this is true for success, too. I give myself 48 hours to grieve the defeat and to feel all the feelings. And then I get back to doing the work itself. Or in the case of success, I give myself 48 hours to celebrate the success, to be on the dopamine bender the high. And then it's back to the work itself. And. And there's Nothing special about 48 hours. If you just fell devastatingly short of an Olympic medal, maybe you're gonna take two weeks or a month. But eventually you've got to, with a gentle yet firm persistence, nudge yourself back into the actual training. Because it's the actual training where you are with training partners, where you're doing the work, that is gonna situate you in the actual work itself. Which, again, this is not just cliche. The satisfaction comes in the work itself. It does not come on the podium. But we experience all this disappointment because we care deeply when we don't get on the podium. So I really think that the only answer is to be kind to yourself, to realize it's gonna suck, and then to do everything you can to return to the work as soon as possible.
- [45:33]
Derek Thompson
To employ the 17,000th metaphor analogy of this podcast, in a way, what I'm hearing you say is that valleys should be as sharp as mountaintops.
- [45:44]
Brad Stalberg
Right?
- [45:44]
Derek Thompson
That when you fail, when you're in the valley, valley be there, you're bouncing right out. And it's interesting, in your example, your valleys are precisely as sharp as your mountaintops. They are as long as two days. You're in there for two days and then you move on and you're back to the side of the mountain. And I like that as a general principle that sometimes it's very easy to allow our valleys to be wide and our mountaintops to be narrow, where if we fail, we spend days, weeks, months, years wallowing in some way on that failure. But when we succeed, it's a rival fallacy in half a second. Oh, I succeeded. And now all experience is an arch where through flows that untraveled world whose margin fades forever as we move. And all my experience just shapes the things I haven't done. But if we remember the idea that our valleys can be as sharp as our mountaintops, I think that's a lovely principle to carry forward.
- [46:38]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. And just to expect it, like I said, it's the cost of carrying deeply is that eventually you're going to get your heart broken. But the alternative to self handicap and to never give something your all yeah, you protect yourself from the hurt of failure a little bit, but you also don't get nearly the satisfaction and the joy if you were to achieve this success and even if you don't, just of knowing that I gave this thing my all.
- [47:01]
Derek Thompson
Last question. How does happiness fit into this? Is happiness an important part of excellence? Is it something that. That emerges from excellence? Is it an ingredient? How do you think about it?
- [47:12]
Brad Stalberg
I am increasingly less concerned with happiness in my own life as I am with satisfaction. So to me, happiness is very ephemeral. It comes and it goes. And what I realize is the more that I try to be happy, the less happy that I am. So it feels like a butterfly. And I'm not the first person to say this or sleep. The more you try to grab the butterfly, the more it escapes. The more you try to sleep, the harder it is to sleep. However, I can pretty clearly delineate when I'm satisfied in what habits and behaviors and how I spend my time and energy lead to satisfaction. And satisfaction is the feeling of going to sleep fulfilled. Like, okay, I did what I was here to do today. I had a good day. I can rest easy. I exerted myself in meaningful ways because I think about the times in my life when I am the most satisfied and I'm not the happiest. I'm probably, to be honest, I'm like, the happiness when I'm eating Skittles. I love Skittles. They taste great, but that's not. It's kind of like shitty flow. Whereas when I'm most satisfied, it's when I'm coaching my son or my daughter's sports teams and my wife has my phone or it's in the glove compartment of the car because I don't even want that thing near me. And I'm just so locked in on all these young kids who are at an age where it's just pure fun and skill development. It's a blast. It is when I am immersed in writing a book and I am outlining and editing, and I'm just, like, deeply connected to the work project. Or when I'm on a date with my wife and we're just immersed in conversation as adults, away from our two young kids, none of those experiences would I say I'm happy. The emotion that I feel is not happiness.
- [48:47]
Derek Thompson
You're not happy on a date out with your wife?
- [48:49]
Brad Stalberg
I'm satisfied. I just feel satisfied. I feel situated. And I think that that, to me, is a more enduring feeling because I think it's hard to be happy in one's life. I think it's easier to be satisfied or situated. And you can be satisfied and situated while also experiencing negative emotions like grief. Grief can be a part of a satisfying life. It's hard to be grieving and happy at the same time. So, yeah, I think there's nothing wrong with happiness. I'm not anti happy. When I'm happy, it's great, but I feel that it comes and goes and it's much more fleeting. And I think I've just become more interesting in satisfaction or being situated. Situated in myself and situated in all the world.
- [49:28]
Derek Thompson
Greg Stalbrick, thank you very much. This is a pleasure.
- [49:31]
Brad Stalberg
Thank you.