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RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg
01:38:59
William Green chats with Brad Stulberg to chat about his new book, The Way of Excellence.
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- [00:01]
William Green
You're listening to tip. You're listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi folks. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome today's guest, Brad Stalberg. Brad is the author of a new book titled the Way of Excellence, which is being published on January 27. The subtitle is A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world. I read a pre publication copy over the last few days and found it really helpful and deeply thought provoking. It's an extremely practical book, but I'd say it's also very humane and soulful in its view of what constitutes a truly successful life. And I've actually Already pre ordered 28 copies of the book as gifts, including a copy for everyone in my Richer, Wiser, Happier masterclass. So that gives you some sense that I think Brad is teaching things that are really valuable. He previously wrote two other excellent books, the Practice of Groundedness and Masters of Change, which is a book we discussed on the podcast in late 2024. I'd say that all three books are part of Brad's grand mission of exploring how to build a rich and meaningful life that's true to your values, which I guess is very similar to what we're exploring here on the podcast. And also in my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. In any case, today we're going to talk in depth about the principles and the qualities and the practices that will actually help you to create a life built around sustainable excellence, which is a key focus of Brad's. So welcome Brad. It's really lovely to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us, William.
- [01:51]
Brad Stalberg
It's a pleasure to be back on the show. Thank you for having me.
- [01:54]
William Green
It's great to see you. I wanted to start by asking you about your long and strange obsession with excellence because both as an author and as a performance coach, you've spoken to literally hundreds of world class performers over the years. And I'm wondering what it is about this subject of excellence and mastery and extreme high performance that fascinates you and has made it such a central focus of your life.
- [02:20]
Brad Stalberg
It's. It really has become a central focus of my life and I think it's twofold. The first is as a writer, I view my job first and foremost to find language, to find words for things that people feel and maybe they already deeply know, but they don't yet have the words that they don't yet have the language for. And Excellence just lends itself so well to this challenge because excellence is a feeling. It's not something that is intellectual. It's something that we know in our bones. And my job as an author is trying to capture that feeling that we know in our bones and explain how it got there, how we can create it, what it is and why it's so special. So it's this. It's this term that everybody knows or thinks that they know, but they don't have words for. So as a writer, it's an extremely gratifying challenge to try to find words to break this thing down. The second reason that I am just so obsessed with excellence is I've come to firmly believe that is a philosophy of life, orienting around the pursuit of genuine excellence. Not pseudo excellence, not hacks, not quick fixes, not 37 step morning routines, but actual heartfelt, soulful, caring, deeply giving something your all. Developing competence and intimacy with a craft and trying to master it is really the key to a rich, meaningful and textured life. And it's a life that I try to live. I would say that if you had to ask me, what is my philosophy of life, it would be aspiring toward excellence. And as I'm sure will come out in the conversation, you never actually reach it. There is no destination. It's just an ongoing path that you stay on as best you can.
- [03:56]
William Green
That's a relief. It's not just me then. Part of the origin story of the book and related to this whole question of building a philosophy of life, is that I think you were taking a short walk, which as we'll discuss at some point, no doubt is. Is a very good creative thing to do. And suddenly, as you were on this walk, you thought, wait a second, I can build on the ideas of Robert Persig about excellence or quality, as he tended to put it, and actually write a big book about excellence, a kind of comprehensive book about a theory of excellence, but also giving a lot of practical advice about how to build a life around excellence. Percy has had a huge influence on a lot of investors, people like Nick Sleep and Kate Sicaria and many others. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about Persig and this whole philosophy of life. Tell me why he had such a profound influence on you and what it was that suddenly hit you with this revelatory sense of, oh, my God, there's something here about Persig. This strange guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance got published in 1974 after being rejected by something like 121 publishers. What is it about his ideas that 50 years later captivated you to that extent?
- [05:09]
Brad Stalberg
I first read Robert Perseg as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, and it was really the first book that I became completely absorbed in. Since then, I've read that book easily 15 times. I've also read this sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Lila. My daughter is named Lila after Robert Persig's work. So it is not an overstatement to say that more than any other thinker, his impact on my life and my work has been immense. At the heart of it is really this quest that Persig was on to capture what he called quality. And Persig defined quality is a sense of deep caring between an actor in his or her act that essentially evaporates the space between the person doing the activity and the activity itself. So you are no longer playing basketball. It's just happening. You're no longer in a conversation. Conversation is just unfolding. The closer that we can get to what we are doing, the more quality our lives will have and the more quality our work will have. And what Persig argued, and I think did a really good job arguing, is that quality is really on the cutting edge of evolution, on the cutting edge of evolution at a species level, because survival of the fittest is really about understanding your environment and being able to move towards conditions that are conducive to one's survival. What's fascinating is when I was researching the book, I saw that just 10 years ago. So 50 years after Persig's book, biologists started to use terms like quality to talk about how evolution works. People thought Persig was crazy in the seventies for saying that. It turns out he was quite right. But it also charges personal evolution and cultural evolution and intellectual evolution. So if we can get really, really close to crafts, if we can develop a quality relationship with them, that is how we grow as people. And ultimately that's how cultures grow. And why now is I think that perhaps the greatest modern ale of any is alienation. So it's a disconnect and a distance people feel from each other, from their work, and in some cases, from their own lives. And alienation is associated with all sorts of maladies. Individually, it's associated with anxiety, depression. Culturally, it's associated with authoritarian movements. It's not good to have alienation. And if alienation is a sense of remove and distance, the opposite of alienation is quality, a sense of intimacy with what one is doing. And out of quality really came this idea that that's kind of what excellence is, too.
- [07:35]
William Green
There's so much to unpack here. And we'll. We'll come back to a lot of what you said later in more depth. But one thing that struck me was that you actually have in, in your book the exact same quote that I have from Per Sig in the chapter that I wrote in Richer, Wiser, Happier about Nick Sleep and Case Sakaria, which had a really profound effect on me. And I'll read it. It says, this is Percy in this strange sort of, you know, memoir, come novel, come philosophical treatise, talking about motorcycle maintenance as a kind of metaphor for anything we do that's worthwhile in life. And he says, the real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself the machine that appears to be out there and the person that appears to be in here are not two separate things. They grow toward quality or fall away from quality together. And that strikes me as just such a profound filter for life, like, at all times to ask yourself, like, am I growing toward quality or falling away from quality? And that sense of removing the separation between you and the thing you're working on. And so the example that I think I ripped off from him when I was writing that chapter was that whether you're mending a chair or sewing a dress or sharpening a kitchen knife, as he put it, there's an ugly way of doing it and a high quality, beautiful way of doing it. And the reason this became so profoundly important to people like Nick Sleep in the investment business is that Nick and his partner Zach started to think, well, okay, so how would you run a fund? That fund was called Nomad. How would you run a fund? So that it became a kind of metaphysical exploration of quality. And so the way you treat your. Your shareholders, the way you treat your partner, the way you communicate truthfully, your fee structure, all of these things, the kind of quality of the companies you invested in. So they would end up investing in, in Costco and Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon, these companies that were very long term, instead of investing, you know, trading stocks based on, you know, the movement over the last three seconds. And so it becomes this kind of whole philosophy of life. And so I just wanted to dwell on that because I think it's such an important idea. Does that raise any thoughts for you, Brad?
- [09:48]
Brad Stalberg
I couldn't agree more with that approach to life. I think that oftentimes we overemphasize the goal that we're working toward and underemphasize how that goal is also working on us as a person. So you can say that you want to build this fund that has this much investment from LPs, or that does this margin over the course of a decade, decade. The way that you build that fund is also going to work on you as a person. And at the end of the day, when you are on the path of mastery, when you are pursuing excellence, you are committed for the long haul. Yes, the outcomes, the external measures matter. And in investing, it would be how well your investments perform. Like, that's how you judge yourself against your peers. That is very important. But at a certain point, you're going to perform really well and you're going to realize that actually no dollar amount is going to fulfill you or satisfy you. What's going to actually fulfill you or satisfy you is the person that you became along the way, the team that you built, and your commitment to excellence. And that commitment to excellence is going to not only shape the fund, but it's also going to shape you as a person. And you're going to carry that into all domains of life. So, yes, it is highly, highly resonant to me and Persig. After he passed away, his wife and his publisher published a short series, a collection of essays called On Quality. And there were some. Some notes that he had written to colleagues, some chapters from manuscripts that didn't make it into the book. But what became really apparent in that book is what Persig was working towards is really also a theory of excellence. And then he died. And he's been my intellectual role model forever. I wrote his obituary for New York Magazine when he passed away. And I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier, but for whatever reason, on this walk a couple of years ago, I was rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. At the time, I was reading this new book on qual, and I said, you know, I think that I want to try to pick up the torch where he left it off and take this more philosophical meta theory and build on it and try to make it into something practical around the way of excellence. And that's what the book became.
- [11:52]
William Green
Yeah, it's funny, that book on quality is really, really good. And I was given it by hedge fund manager Josh Tarasoff a few years ago when I was on a retreat that we organized in the Berkshires, and. And I ended up organizing a zoom call with various great fund managers, people like Guy Spier and Brian Lawrence and Matt McLennan and Nick Sleet and Josh Tarasoff to discuss that book. So it's really interesting how these ideas of quality kind of infuse a certain type of investment philosophy. I think one of the things that strikes me that comes through very much in your writing is you talk about the importance. This is a quote from your book, of working with integrity on something concrete, doing real things in the real world with real results. And so for Percy, obviously, the great metaphor for that was working on motorcycle maintenance rather than, you know, picking good stock. You have a really lovely example from Jerry Seinfeld, from a New Yorker profile that David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, wrote. Can you talk about that? Because it's a. It's a lovely example of building skills, sort of for the sake of it.
- [13:00]
Brad Stalberg
So there's this. Yes, I can absolutely share Jerry Seinfeld, he's interviewed about what really makes him tick and why he fell in love with the craft and why he still pursues the craft. Jerry Seinfeld still does stand up. He doesn't have to do standup. And what he told David Remnick is essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, that there is no kind of satisfaction like the satisfaction that comes from gaining skill in exerting that skill. And for him, it is telling a good joke. It is seeing the audience's reaction to that good joke. And there's nothing contrived or wishy washy about it. Either the joke lands or it doesn't. And when it lands, the sense of satisfaction that he gets from all the practice that went into it, from all the times that that joke didn't land, it's enormous and it's immense. And we see this in so many different domains. For me, I get this skill every time I face the blank page, is a writer, but I also get it in the weight room because the bar is either gonna move or not. And I can trace that back to the work that I put in. So there is something that is just deeply, innately fulfilling about making concrete, tangible progress that you can trace back to yourself. And I think that that. That really is at odds with so many talking heads and people that have opinions on everything, and everything's kind of wishy washy and corporate mumbo jumbo. There's something really objective about, like, did the bar move or not? Are the words on the page or aren't they? Did the fund make money or did it lose money? And I think that we often overlook the satisfaction that comes from that. And I think that when people don't have that kind of concrete, objective sources of competence in their life. They can feel a little bit empty or long for it. So it's become instrumental to my philosophy of life is to make sure that you have at least one domain in your life where you are pursuing something with a very concrete, tangible result that can be traced back to your effort. And you're going to fail sometimes too, right? It's not always just about winning and succeeding, but it's better to fail at something concrete than to kind of just wander in subjective, wishy washy no man's land.
- [15:04]
William Green
There's also something really interesting that goes beyond this sense of concrete results and objectivity because as you mention in the book, there is this pre intellectual experience guided by an inner knowing, as you put it, where when we see excellence, we know it. And this is something, this is something that Percy wrote a lot about, like just pre intellectual knowing. And you quote people like Mark Roscoe, the painter, saying that the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And so there's something, there's something in great art, there's something in great writing, but I would say also maybe in a great business that we sort of know. I, I have this friend, Francois Rochon, who's great Canadian investor who's been on the podcast before, who, who's also building a, an art museum and a wonderful art collection. And I said to him once, do you see a kind of beautiful symmetry in certain companies? And he said, yeah, when you look at something like Starbucks, this is years ago, maybe eight years ago, we were talking about this first. He said, yeah, there's something just really beautiful and harmonious about it. And he said when Buffett talked about this particular Israeli company, iscar, he kind of teared up, you know, or choked up. There's like a beauty that you sense in all of these things. Can you talk about that? Sense that we, we somehow are drawn to excellence or quality without quite knowing why. Like there's some innate ability that we have to sense whether something is beautiful and high quality and good.
- [16:34]
Brad Stalberg
That's right. And that innate ability to sense when something is beautiful and high quality and good is, is built into our d. So long before we had nervous systems or consciousness all the way to the very beginning of life. Single cell species, bacteria, they rely on this ability called sensing and responding to survive, flourish and proliferate. And it means exactly what it sounds like. A bacteria can sense when an environment is conducive to its survival and it can move towards those environments that's what biologists now call a high quality environment. Or it can sense when an environment is not conducive to its survival. And move away from single cell bacteria, from bacteria evolved multicellular creatures, from multicellular creatures evolved nervous systems. And eventually, long down the chain came us. But that innate sensing and responding ability to be drawn to things that help us survive, persist and flourish hasn't gone away. And up until humans, for just about every other species, survive, persistent flourish really only meant one or two things. It meant avoid getting hunted by an apex predator and passing on your DNA. And quality guides us very well towards those two objectives. However, us humans, we outlive reproductive age. We have these long, beautiful lives. But that innate drive to flourish hasn't gone away. So we need to find other outlets for that innate drive to flourish. And that is where this life force to create, to contribute, to produce comes from. And it's also why we're so attracted to excellence in other people. When you are in front of a Rothko painting, you don't think intellectually it's beautiful because the lines and the colors, no, you feel it in your heart. When you watch Steph Curry hit a jump shot, you don't say, well, the arc of the ball is a perfect parabola, and his elbows at 90% and his feet are exactly 18 inches off the ground at the release point. You just know it's beautiful. And it sounds like that's the experience that a skilled investor might have as they walk the halls or they look at the documents of a company. There's just this innate feeling that we are so deeply drawn to, and we're drawn to it as witnesses when we are observing and witnessing excellence in someone else. And we're also drawn to it in ourselves when we're creating it. That is why just about every high performer, when you ask them to talk about when they enter a groove when they're having a good day, they never give you an intellectual answer. The first word out of their mouth is always, here's what it felt like. It's a feeling. It's a feeling tone. And it's so satisfying and so powerful. And it can help us understand when we're on the right track. And as I argue in the book, it's a big part of what makes life worth living is appreciating that feeling when we witness it and doing everything we can to generate that sense of aliveness and energy in our own lives through our own pursuits.
- [19:17]
William Green
You quote in the book from your conversations with an amazing array of great Performers from a lot of different fields and a lot of them are kind of unlikely. For example, there's a. There's a world champion mountain biker called Kate Courtney. A Grammy Award winning violinist Hilary Hahn. There's a world champion powerlifter called Lane Norton, who I gather did a deadlift of 723 pounds, which makes me want to pass out just reading about it. The legendary free climber Alex Honnold, who was in that amazing movie Free Solo. Also Chelsea Sodaro, who's an Ironman world champion. And Kaylee Humphreys, who dominated the sport of bobsled for two decades, won three gold medals and, and also this, this French chess player Maxime Vacher, who I think is a chess grandmaster with the seventh highest rating of any player in history. So when you think about all of these different people you've interviewed from such different disciplines, how do they actually embody your definition of excellence in so many ways?
- [20:18]
Brad Stalberg
Let's start with my definition of excellence. Excellence is involved engagement. It's caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. And I really think of this definition as having two integral parts. So the first is involved engagement or caring deeply. There has to be a sense of commitment, a sense of focus and intention that I want to give my all to this craft. The second part, something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals, that is going to live in the eye of the beholder. But it can't just be mimicry. You can't be pursuing something because you think it's what you should be doing or what other people think you should be doing. You can't just be pursuing it for some external results that you think you're going to get at the top of the mountain. No, you have to be pursuing it because it is in alignment with your values, with the person that you want to become. It gets back to this paradox that we think that we're working on something, but what we're working on is also working on us. So what I've realized is across fields and across domains, people that are really in the pursuit of excellence, they master both parts of that definition. So they create the conditions for deep focus and concentration and commitment and intimacy pairing with what they do. And they're constantly making sure that the way that they're going about it aligns with their values and the person that they want to become. And the caring part is worth double clicking on because everybody can remember in school, maybe in university and high school, there were always those kids that were too cool to try and they sat at the back of the classroom. They always horsed around. They never tried in gym class. They phoned it in, right? Those kids weren't cool, what they actually were. They were insecure and they were scared of failing. Because when you give something your all, when you care deeply, when you step into the arena, you open yourself up to vulnerability because things might not go your way. And if they don't go your way, if you fail, if you come up short, then you have no excuse. You put your heart into it and it didn't work out. So to care deeply requires guts and it requires vulnerability, because there's no self handicapping. There's nothing to hide behind if things don't go your way. And I think that that is just a prerequisite. It's a precondition to excellence, is having that vulnerability and saying, all right, I want to give this project my all, I want to give this fund my all. I want to give this relationship my all, all the while knowing that it might break my heart, but that's okay. That's just the price that I have to pay to have that kind of involved engagement, that kind of intimacy. So there's this deep level of caring and really putting yourself on the line that is necessary for performance at the top level and for excellence. And then it also has to be bounded in a way that has integrity with the person that you are and with your values. And once you have that, then the rest of the book is essentially, well, what's the execution? Right? The rituals, the routines, the consistency, the gumption, the sense of patience, the joy, the curiosity, all of these other factors. But it all starts from a place of commitment, caring, deeply involved engagement, and then ensuring that there's good values, alignment.
- [23:19]
William Green
So we'll go into that process of execution of how you actually do this in some detail in a. In a few minutes. Maybe if first you could just go back to this sense that you alluded to quickly before about this kind of current malaise that makes the book so timeless, this sense that most of us are so disconnected and alienated in certain ways. And you, you say at one point in the. Early in the book, alienation describes the disconnect people experience from their own lives. And it's a defining problem of our time. And you talk about living in an increasingly numbed out world, and can you give us a sense of some of the barriers that are making it so difficult for us actually to live this kind of excellent life, like some of the things like technology or like the kind of bad Advice that we're getting from a lot of the life hacking gurus who you tend to be somewhat disdainful of.
- [24:13]
Brad Stalberg
So I think the biggest real challenge here is just distraction is utterly ubiquitous. We walk around with these powerful digital slot machines in our pockets and the reward is actually greater than money. It's existential validation. It's an email, a text message, a like a comment. It says that you exist in the world and you matter. And it's very, very tempting to just constantly pull down on that lever and try to get that reward. And that can be extremely alienating from whatever it is that you're trying to do. I'll share an example from my own life. It came in the process of writing this book. It was an extremely busy day. I was shuttling my kids from sports that I coach to my daughter's dance class and so on. And they're both in the back of the car, it's extremely loud. They're young, they're, they're, you know, arguing over what music we're going to listen to. And the car needs gas. So I get to a gas station and I start to fill up the pump and they're in the car and I finally think to myself, I'm going to have two and a half minutes of silence, just a moment to just be with myself, to reconnect with myself. And on the pump, on the screen, there's this woman that starts jabbering about how every problem that you have is figureoutable, trying to sell me her masterclass. And I sat there and I thought to myself, I can't even connect with myself to fill up my car with gaps. We're just constantly bombarded with distraction and noise, which really gets in the way of intimacy, of knowing ourselves and of intimacy with a craft. So that's one broad bucket is what I'll call the ubiquitous distraction. In the book I call it algorithmic mass distraction because it's very much engineered to keep us hooked. The second big bucket is exactly what you alluded to. And I call this pseudo excellence or hustle culture greatness. And this is the entire industrial complex of hacks and quick fixes and 10 day programs and diets and fads and on and on and on. They all have this illusory promise that if you just do this one thing, if you just do this new hack, this new trick, then my friend, you'll be happy, you'll be strong, you'll be calm, you'll be more intellectually wise. And it's very tempting to fall for that. I mean, Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of youth in the 1500s, so the longevity Influencers. There's nothing new about this. This is a tale as old as time and it is extremely tempting. But what can happen is we can cycle from fad to fad, kind of trying to chase this quick fix which actually gets in the way of the kind of commitment and consistency and intimacy that is required to truly experience the joys and satisfaction of excellence. And you put those two things together, ubiquitous distraction in the grift of pseudo excellence, and it's the perfect storm for alienation. Especially for someone that in good faith really wants to live a good life and wants to be good at a craft and master a craft and have that sense of satisfaction. It's very challenging because this is the environment that we live in. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [27:02]
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- [28:09]
Brad Stalberg
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- [29:26]
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- [30:41]
William Green
It seems to me when I look at the great investors who are this, this kind of microcosm that I've studied in the same way that you study so many great athletes and physicians and surgeons and, you know, corporate leaders and the like, I see among the best investors this ability, I think I call it intentional disconnection in my book. This, this willingness to disconnect and create a kind of countercultural lifestyle that's a little bit ornery, where you're just saying, no, I'm not taking in any of that ephemeral nonsense. And I'm just going to focus on reading books, studying businesses traveling to see companies reading their annual reports. And it seems to me that it requires almost a, you know, Conscious decision not to buy into what Nick Sleep would just say, you know the bollocks, you know all of the nonsense. And you have this lovely phrase in your book, you quote someone using the word dis. Evolution. All these new technologies that prey on our primal instincts of food and sex and status and connection. And you write, you write about ultra processed food, ultra processed entertainment and ultra processed connection. So it seems like your whole philosophy of designing a life built around excellence is really a very conscious rejection of this kind of bombardment of superficial short term dopamine hits that's being sort of foisted on us kind of unwillingly, whether we're at the gas pump or on our phone.
- [32:10]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, that's right. You need to try to engineer an ecosystem around you that is supportive of your values and goals and the pursuit of excellence. And in many ways it does require intentional design of one's environment, one's physical space, intentional design of one's technology, and to some extent, intentional design of the people with whom you surround yourself. Because that's also an enormous impact in part of your environment. Another way to think about it, William, is that all of these objects around us, they have a gravity, a sense of gravity. And that gravity can either pull us toward our goals and toward our values and toward the person we want to become and toward our craft, or it can pull us away from our craft. And the default, in many ways, is just to be pulled in 19 different directions at once in a very frantic and frenetic way. And trying to move against that gravity is extremely hard. But if you can step back and you can say, here's. Here are the. Here are the limited things I care deeply about. I want to be a great fund manager, I want to be a great investor, I want to be a great athlete, I want to be a great husband, I want to be a great wife. I want to be a great mom, I want to be a great dad, I want to be a great community member, I want to be a great musician, I want to be a great consultant. Well then you can say, what does it take to do that? And outside of all of this, how do I eliminate all the noise around that to the best of my ability and really focus? And it's simple. But simple doesn't make it easy. But it's simple and it's attainable. And all those people from across domains that you mentioned, they all do this. When you look in at their lives, their lives, they don't look very ordinary. They're extraordinary lives, but not because they're genetically you know, such an incredible next level. No, it's because they're willing to say no to a lot of the default to craft a life around the couple things that really matter to them. There's this wonderful quote in the book that came from my mentor, Mike Joyner, and he says that if you want to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist. And what he meant by that is, if you want to live a full maximal life and get your all out of yourself in a couple of domains, you've got to be willing to forego a lot of the bullocks. To quote your friend.
- [34:15]
William Green
Yeah, I once interviewed Michael Joyner for a book that I was ghostwriting. He was a remarkable guy. I also loved There's a line towards the end of your book where you say the best performers in the world are focused, determined, a little bit crazy at times, obsessive, and live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring. I thought that was really interesting, like that willingness actually to construct a lifestyle that from the outside, like, seems pretty boring. Can you talk a little bit about that? It seemed to be a really nice observation. Yeah.
- [34:47]
Brad Stalberg
What I mean by that is, you know, you can choose to have an extravagant social life, you can choose to really pursue status in being at all the current cultural events, but there's only so many hours in the day. And if you really want to master your craft, a lot of the hours in the day have to be devoted towards things that are going to help you master your craft. And if you want to have good relationships, which I believe is a. And I know you feel the same way, is a core part to living a good life. You also have to spend a lot of hours towards maintaining those relationships, and that requires foregoing a lot of the bright and shiny objects on the side. And what looks boring from the outside is actually incredibly exciting and interesting from the inside. Because the deeper that you get on the path of excellence, the more curious you get about what you're doing and about who you're becoming, the more intrinsically rewarding it is. And it's the kind of reward that no fancy car or fancy watch or sense of status will ever give you. It's the Jerry Seinfeld quote about, you work that joke and you put hours, in some cases months, in some cases years into it, and you get it just right and it lands. The satisfaction that comes from that is just so immense.
- [35:55]
William Green
Yeah, you.
- [35:55]
Brad Stalberg
But it's boring. I mean, think about how boring it is to work the same joke for a year. Like a lot of people would find that very boring.
- [36:02]
William Green
There's a very nice word that you use where you. You say that excellence requires intimacy, which you define somewhat differently. This sense of. Of being very intimate with your craft or your activity, sort of in a way that Persig was talking about motorcycle maintenance. So there's no separation between you and the activity or the thing you're working on. And there's a nice. A nice line from this violinist we mentioned before, Hilary Hahn, who said that you have to be completely in the note, or you end up overlooking things that, as she puts it, are happening too fast. For thinking. I really love that. Like this. It's kind of this removal of separation. But there is something kind of very spiritual about it, right? It's like you're one. You're one with the thing that you're doing.
- [36:44]
Brad Stalberg
I get chills down my spine just hearing you read that quote. Hilary Hahn is, I think, the greatest of all time. International violin soloist, three time Grammy winner, does things that no one else has done before. And she says that when she is up there on stage, there is zero thinking happening. Now, there was a lot of thinking before she gets up on stage, and there's a lot of deliberate effort during her practice sessions. But all of that is to prepare her for this moment when she just feels her way through the note and she's totally present and she's totally connected to it. And I write in the book that when I use these terms, the other word that comes up is love. And I actually think that excellence is a lot like love, because what is caring deeply in repeated practice, in commitment, in consistency, in showing up, in closeness, in falling off the path and then getting back on the path? Like, what is that if not describing love? It's describing love. It's describing excellence. And some of the greatest thinkers on this topic have said that quality and excellence is a lot like love. The founder. It's a short aside, but I think it's an interesting one. The founder of the quality movement in healthcare is a gentleman named Avitus Donabaden. So before Avitus Donabaden, there were no quality metrics for hospitals, okay? They didn't track infections, they didn't track outcomes. It was the wild West. This is some decades ago. And Donna Beta came along and he said, this is crazy. You know, we. We track supply chains in the corporate world, but we're not tracking infection rates after surgery. Like, we need a quality movement. And he engineered the beginning of. Of quality in healthcare. And now it's a. It's a gazillion dollar industry how we measure quality. And it's very meticulous, it's very rigorous, it's very analytical. All good hospitals, they have dashboards and quality metrics, and it's updated in real time. I've. I've been in these hospitals. It's remarkable the level of analytic rigor they bring to this. On his deathbed, Avadis Donovan was interviewed by a prestigious medical journal. And the interviewer asked him, after all these years, you know, what do you have to say about quality? And you know what he said? He said, quality is love. And I just think that that's so beautiful. It's because, yeah, we need those dashboards, we need those metrics, we need all of those things to keep us on the path. But at the end of the day, the same kind of that, that giving it your all, that caring, that's what love is all about. And love is really satisfying, and the pursuit of excellence is really satisfying. And whether it is raising a family together or an intimate relationship or Steph Curry hitting a jump shot or building the perfect investment team, in your eyes, that is all love.
- [39:20]
William Green
Well, Buffett talked about Berkshire, which he just retired from after 60 years, as, you know, being lovingly built. If I, if I'm not misquoting. I mean, it was his canvas that he painted over 60 years and very lovingly. And he's like, if you want to paint your canvas, you go do it, but don't mess with mine. You know, he was very kind of ornery about painting it in the way that. That he felt was beautiful. And I, I had a really interesting conversation a few weeks ago with a brilliant young investor who's very. He's. He, you know, he never really talks publicly. So there's a wonderful investor called Will Barker, who is very close to Nick Sleep, and it's sort of mentored by Nick. And so Will works very closely with people like Jeff Bezos, who's invested in one of his businesses. And, you know, he knows people like Jim Sinegal, who is this legendary CEO of, of Costco, who is also a mentor of Will's. And Will was saying to me that when he looks at people like Jeff Bezos or Jim Sinegal or Nick Sleep, it's always motivated by love. Like, it all comes down to love. Like, and it sounds. It sounds sort of so soft, you know, but there, there is something about that. It's like, if. I mean, you, you write about this in the book, that when it's really just about, as you Put it our small, separate and protective ego that is normally worried about failure. It's a real problem. And so in some way this idea of, of transcending the ego and pursuing something with excellence and quality, it sort of sounds nebulous and vague and a little highfalutin, but I guess we, I mean, you, you write about this in the book, about how this has, this has been something that goes through Chinese philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, it's, it's, it's not a new idea, right?
- [41:08]
Brad Stalberg
No, it's at the core of, of every ancient wisdom philosophy. The Greeks called this arete, and it was held up as, as maybe the, the utmost value in ancient Greece. In China, this was called wu wei in, in Warring States China, which was this burgeoning philosophical epoch. And wu wei was essentially the, the sense of mastery that you gain by caring deeply about a craft and pursuing it. The Buddhists call this right effort. And it is a way of going about what you're doing with full intention, in, in full focus. So, like, like, like so many things, I think that the ancient wisdom traditions were well ahead of the science. And now in science we call this flourishing. And now there's a whole performance science, you know, around, around how do you perform your best? But at the core of it is really the sense of deep care and love, which again, all comes back to this dichotomy. Well, what is the opposite of alienation and remove and going through the motions? It's deep care and love. And to build their life around deep care and love is, is a good life. And to, to have an alienated life is not a good life. And you're not going to create quality, you're not going to contribute that way.
- [42:14]
William Green
So let's talk in very practical terms in some depth about how actually to cultivate excellence, because the second half of your book is entirely devoted to building the mindsets, the practices, the habits, the routines, these core factors of excellence. And so I wanted to go through a lot of them in some detail if we can, so that our listeners and viewers leave this with a kind of tangible sense of things that they can do. Though they'll also definitely want to buy all three of these books to bed this stuff down. This conversation is not a replacement for buying your books. So obviously, as you've said, developing a real sense of your core values and building a career around your core values is important. And you write at one point, true success is living a life that is in alignment with your values, full stop. Can you give us a sense of how actually we should go about figuring out what our guiding principles are, deciding whether the project we're engaged in or the career that we're embarking on supports our values. Because so many people feel kind of misaligned. And partly it's just because they're trying to make a living and they're just hustling to get by.
- [43:26]
Brad Stalberg
The way that I've come to think about values, and a lot of this is based on clinical psychology research, is they're most powerful when you have between two and five, any more than five, and none of them are really, really as meaningful and any less than two, you're kind of just all focused on one thing and you never have to deal with the tension of trade offs. There's a couple inroads to the values, and all of these are outlined in detail in the book. The one that I like is you just start with a list of a hundred commonly held values and you pick out whatever ones resonate with you. Most people end up with somewhere between 15 and 30, and then you take those 15 to 38 terms and you group like terms together. And then most people end up with somewhere between three and seven groups. And then if you've got more than five groups, you take those groups and you say, all right, which of these groups are like really core to the person that I want to be, that I aspire toward, that I want in my eulogy, I want these things mentioned and you've got these five groups. Then you take these five groups of terms and you say, well, what's really at the essence, like what's the word? That to me is going to capture this and that becomes your value and then you have to define it. So it's easy to say you value presence or wisdom or intellect or health or reputation or family or spirituality, all these buzzwords, but they can't just be, you know, on a little 3 by 5 note card on your desk. You actually have to understand what they mean. Because when the rubber meets the road, when you have to make decisions in your life, you can ask yourself, does this align with my value? That's the very methodical way into your values. Now a couple of people hear this and they say, that's great, I can't wait to go through that program. Some people say, I don't even know where to begin. You can show me a hundred words, I have no idea which ones to pick out. And there, what I would say is that if you think about some people that you really admire, and then ask yourself what you admire about those people? What is it that you admire about them? That tends to be another pretty good inroads to qualities that you value. You could also imagine yourself a decade down the road or maybe even longer, maybe 20, 30, 40 years down the road. And you could say, if older you was looking back on current you, what would older you be proud of? What kind of person would older you want current you to be? Another good inroads to your values. And I think that if you triangulate between those three things, most people can come up with a nice set of values and then spend some time really defining what each of those terms mean and then putting them to the litmus test of is the way that I'm living my life in alignment with those values? And what ends up happening is you get a very lofty term, such as I want to be presence. So your value is presence. And then in making this up on the fly, let's say that someone defines presence is being fully there for the people and activities I care about. Well, if you've got your cell phone in your pocket during dinner with your family and you're constantly peeking under the table to check your email, that is in dissonance with your stated value of presence. So if you want to live a values aligned life, then during dinner your phone's got to go in the living room, in a drawer somewhere where it's not on your person. So you go all the way from this high volition value of presence down to where is my phone going to be during dinner? And that's how you begin to design a values aligned life.
- [46:36]
William Green
You talked before about Michael Joyner and his idea that you have to be a minimalist to be a maximalist. And he said to master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you need to say no to many others, which is something Buffett always would say that, you know, the most successful people say no to almost everything. And when you think about this whole subject of trade offs that you write about in the book, you talk a lot about the idea of balance being an illusion that a lot of us kind of fantasize about having a balanced life. And I talk about this a lot. I mean, I'm. I'm constantly feeling totally misaligned and imbalanced and then guilty about it. And I feel like I'm sort of failing on multiple fronts. I'm sort of falling short and disappointing everyone on multiple fronts. And can you talk about this sense that as you put it, by trying to be balanced, we end up driving ourselves crazy? And what maybe a better paradigm for.
- [47:34]
Brad Stalberg
This might look like balance is, it's popularly conceived, tends to mean you're going to devote equal proportion of time and energy to equal things. So you're going to be the best husband and wife, the best parents, the best friends, you're going to master a craft, you're going to be a great employee or a great manager, or a great CEO. You're going to stay up on all the latest pop culture, you're going to have a fantasy football team, you're going to cook dinner, you're going to have a clean house, you're going to coach the kids sports teams and on and on and on. And it's sold to us as the self help idea, but it just makes you miserable because nobody can do all those things. And as a result of trying, you stretch yourself way too thin and you end up mediocre at best across the board. Now that is no way to live a deeply meaningful, rich and fulfilling life. So I think that the antidote to that is to step back and to say, hey, I'm going to have to be an adult here and I'm going to have to realize that unlike my 8 year old who wants to do everything, you can't do everything. You have to pick and choose, you have to make trade offs. Then you can go back to your values and you can say, all right, of the the areas of my life where I can devote time and energy right now, what are the areas that align with my values? What are the areas that I want to go all in on? And most people can be highly focused on somewhere between two and three things at max at any given point of time. Now it's fascinating in my reporting of highly successful high performers who aren't jerks, who aren't assholes like, who are also good people who are deep into their career, in some cases long retired from their professional life. When you zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don't look balanced at all. They appear to be going all in on one or two things. But when you zoom out and you look across the totality of their life, they actually seem quite balanced. So they have different seasons of life for emphasizing different parts of their life. Now that's a beautiful intellectual concept. How do you actually put this into practice? And the framework that I introduce in the book is to think about identity like a house. So if you have a house and the house only has one single room in it, and that room catches fire or floods, it's extremely dislocated. You're going to have to move out of the house. You're not going to know where you live. You're going to have to find a new house. But if you have a house that has multiple rooms in it and one room catches fire or floods, you can go seek refuge in the other rooms while you work on resolving the fire or flood. And it's so helpful to think of our identities the same way. So do you have an identity house with only one room? Only room in your identity house is fund manager. Well, then when things get chaotic or something goes wrong at the fund, it's going to be extremely unmooring. But if you have a room in your identity house for husband, wife, or for parent, or for athlete or for religious member, community member, for coffee lover, for book nerd, whatever the things may be, then you start to diversify your sense of self a little bit, which makes you much less fragile to rupture in any one room. Now, what I like about this analogy, and some listeners might be thinking, well, Brad, you just said don't be balanced, but now you're talking about a house with different rooms. The rooms don't have to be the same sizes. You don't have to spend the same amount of time in each room. If you're pursuing excellence, you won't, you'll be spending a lot of time in one room. You just want to make sure that none of the important rooms get moldy because you don't know what season of life you're going to need to rely on those rooms in. So rather than think about perfect balance, doing everything always, I think about, what are the rooms in my identity house? What room do, am I, do I want to be spending the most time in right now? And how can I make sure that the other rooms don't get multi? And if you do that, it allows you to zero in and have these, these seasons of deep intensity and focus on one or two things without losing a sense of who you are in the process.
- [51:11]
William Green
I like the fact that in the acknowledgment section of the book at the end, you, when you were thanking your wife and kids, you said that they are the biggest room in my identity house, which only for a nerd like you or me would be the highest praise to say you're. You're the biggest room in my identity house. The, the other thing I thought you said that was really helpful in connection to this idea of moving beyond balance was you talked about, yes, focusing on your main pursuit, but also establishing what you call clear, minimum effective doses can you talk a little bit about that? Why this idea of having minimum effective doses? What do you mean by it?
- [51:50]
Brad Stalberg
What I mean by it is, if you're in a season of disharmony because you're going all in on something. So let's say that you're, you're trying to raise a fund that's bigger than you've ever raised before. Maybe you're trying to start a business. Well, you're going to spend the vast majority of your time and energy in the fund or the business room of your identity house, the entrepreneur room of your identity house. So then the question that you have to ask yourself is, well, how do I stay in touch with the marriage room, with the parent room, with the health room, enough so that those things don't blow up on me and fall apart? And this is where the concept of a minimum effective dose comes in. So what's the minimum effective dose to keep a healthy marriage? While you go all in on being an entrepreneur? It's going to look different for everyone. For some people, it's one date night a week. For some people, it's one date night a month. For some people, it's three family dinners a week. For some people, it's five family dinners a week. For some people, it's two family dinners a week. For health. We all should take our health extremely seriously. Even if you don't give a damn about what your body looks like, all the evidence shows that if you care about your brain and your cognition, then the number one thing you can do is stay relatively fit. So maybe Instead of exercising five days a week for 45 minutes during that season, you're only going to exercise three days a week for 30 minutes. But you're never going to leave it completely behind. So the minimum effective dose is just that. It's whatever allows you to, to make sure that nothing important in your identity house completely goes moldy. You know, you gotta, you gotta tend the room just enough so that you can come back to it. Because one of the ultimate laws, I think of anything, I got this from fitness, but it's true in anything, is that it's easier to maintain than to build. So once you've built something, it's not that hard to maintain. You know, you can just check in every now and then and keep a quality, keep a capacity strong, but once you let it go completely, it takes a long time to build it back.
- [53:36]
William Green
You've thought a lot about how obsessive or maniacal we have to be to perform well in these super competitive Pursuits, whether it's being a world class athlete or being a world class investor or leader of a company. And you warn against reckless, maniacal obsession. And at the same time, and some of this is semantic and linguistic, but there's a real issue here because when I, when I look at a lot of the great investors I've written about over the years, most of most, if not certainly a goodly proportion, ended up divorced. There are people like, like Howard Marks or Charlie Munger who had a lot of other interests who were very, were sort of broader in their reading and their thinking. Can you talk about this idea of, of chronic obsession as a kind of recipe for disaster? Because I'm, I'm sort of convinced and sort of unconvinced by your claim, if you know what I mean.
- [54:35]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, this is a great, a great tension and I'm glad that you're asking this question. So I think that there are different flavors of obsession and reckless obsession to me is when you cannot stop doing what you're doing, even when you want to stop. So it's very much like an addiction. Okay. So you cannot stop thinking about the work or doing the work even when you want to, even when you think actually stepping away from it would be good because it would allow you to renew, to recover, to take on new perspectives. But you're just, you're just so freaking addicted to that feeling of tightening the screwdriver. It's like this compulsion to keep going. That kind of obsession in, in, in not just in my reporting or my opinion, in the research, that kind of obsession is, is not associated with high performance. It's actually associated with a degradation in performance. So that's reckless obsession. I think a healthier obsession is you care extremely deeply about what you're doing, right? That's at the forefront of excellence. It does take an outsized amount of your cognition, of your energy, of your time, but you still control it. It doesn't control you. And what I mean by that is that if you've got a kid that really needs you or that is sick and in the hospital and you need to step away for two hours, you can step away for those two hours. Well, you can realize when you're in so deep that you are no longer thinking clearly because you're just fatigued and you actually need to step outside of your domain, read outside of your domain, go walk the halls of companies that are outside of your, your industry to get these new perspectives. You can do that. Another very helpful way to think about it is that in order to Be excellent. You have to be all in. But it's very dangerous if you're all in all the time. So how do you have enough structure in your life where you can be all in? Maybe it's a 10 hour day, maybe it's a 12 hour day, maybe it's a 15 hour day, but it can't be 24, 7 all the time because you're just going to burn yourself out. And I think that what ends up happening is sometimes we have these stories of reckless obsession in documentaries that get made. But if you really follow the long arc of these people's careers, they tend not to end so well, or they tend to accomplish a lot of what they did in spite of their reckless obsession, not because of it. And I think most very successful high performers, somewhere along the way they figure out that their obsession is trending towards the reckless variety and they figure out how to control it so it doesn't control them. So you're right, it is a little bit of just linguistical difference, but there's an important nuance which is not don't be obsessed, but it's do you control your obsession or does your obsession control you? And that's a fine line for high performers. And it's very hard to stay on the right side of that line. And the stakes are extremely high because you cross over it. And the research shows that it's associated with anxiety, depression and unethical behavior. I mean, Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos was like fully obsessed with her company and it did not take her to great places.
- [57:33]
William Green
You write quite a bit about the importance of having periods of rest and renewal as kind of a key part of being very successful. What have you found in terms of your study of all of these hugely successful people, but also in terms of the science about what works best when we're trying to step away and get some rest and renewal.
- [57:57]
Brad Stalberg
I think that if you're a highly driven pusher and if you have these obsessive qualities, you have to stop thinking of rest as something that is separate from the work and start thinking of rest as an integral part of the work. So it has to be built into your program. Athletes know this extremely well. Athletes have recovery days, they have rest days. They are built into the program. So they're not separate from the training, They're a part of their training and they're strategically placed so that they can adapt to the hard work. And I think for cognitive and intellectual pursuits, we need to build in the equivalent of rest breaks and rest days. Now, again, it's going to look very different depending on the person, their phase of life and what they're trying to do. I have come to believe that it's best to work a six day week for me. So five days, I'm too obsessed. I got it. You know, there's not enough hours in the day. But if I start working seven days a week, what I gain in additional working time, I lose about twofold in the quality of my work. Because for me, having one day where I really step away, it allows me to come back so much more refreshed with so much more creativity and intensity and insights throughout the day. We can take these short micro breaks. It might be a 10 minute walk. There's fascinating research out of Stanford that shows that just after a 10 minute walk, creativity improves by between 40 and 60%. So when you're feeling stuck, there's this tendency to lean in and try to solve the problem. Often the best thing that you can do is step away and take a walk. We inherently know this because everyone has had the experience of being stuck on a problem and then the answer pops into their mind in the shower or on their commute home, or while they're walking the dog or in the gym, or so on and so forth. Because it's only when you finally step away that your subconscious mind can come online and do the work of solving some of those thorny problems. So it's a long winded way to the ultimate answer, which is, I think that you cannot think of rest and renewal as something that you do at expense of being a great performer. You have to think of it as part of being a great performer. My long meandering walks are not something I do at the expense of being a writer. That is an integral part of me being a good writer. And I know this because 40% of my best sentences I didn't write at the keyboard. I wrote on walks. I carry a notebook with me. I jot that stuff down so I don't lose it. And then I get back to the walk.
- [60:08]
William Green
And the idea of this book came on a walk.
- [60:10]
Brad Stalberg
It did. And the funny thing is I was working on my prior book, Master of Change. I was working on the promotional plans, so the book had been written, but it was before that book came out and I was stuck. I was working on an OP ed for the New York Times, an adaptation from the book, and I was wholly stuck on the OP ed. So I said, I'm going to practice what I preach. I'm going to go take a walk. And on that walk. I didn't solve the op ed problem, but I had the idea for this book and here we are having the conversation. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [60:37]
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- [64:15]
Brad Stalberg
All right, back to the show.
- [64:17]
William Green
I thought it was interesting that you, you look at some of the science of this and I no doubt gobble this, but I think you were saying that when you do things like walking or a light swim or light yoga or something requires enough coordination that it occupies the parts of the brain that are responsible for the kind of effortful thinking that we use when we're writing or, you know, analyzing stocks or whatever it might be. So, so it allows your mind to wander. I thought that was really interesting.
- [64:46]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. For the longest time the researchers thought this was a blood flow issue and that by, by taking a walk or swimming or exercising, you had increased blood flow. That that helped with the creativity and problem solving, but the mechanics, the physiology of that just never really made sense. And it also doesn't explain the phenomenon of why we have these thoughts when we're driving or in the shower. Because you're not having increased blood flow when you're sitting still or standing still in the shower or certainly not in a car. But what all these activities have in common is just what you said. They're fairly implicit. So you don't have to think too hard about walking or showering or driving, but you have to think just enough about what you're doing to occupy those effortful thinking parts of your brain without stressing them too much. And it's that perfect mix that allows your default mode network, which is just a fancy way of saying your subconscious mind, to come online and have those breakthrough aha moments. You see this in a micro sense when you take a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute shower or you're on the subway home from work. But you also see this in more macro cycles. One of my favorite stories from the book is Lin Manuel Miranda, the Playwright in the Heights in Hamilton, the smash Broadway hit. The idea for Hamilton came to him on a vacation. He credits taking a vacation, stepping away from work, reading Chernow's biography of Hamilton, not reading it because he was doing research for a play, reading it because it was a biography that was recommended to him from a friend. And on vacation, it just clicked that, oh, I should, I should reenact Hamilton as a Broadway musical. Imagine if Miranda wouldn't have allowed himself to take a break because he would have said, I need to push. I want to be a world class, I want to be a world class musical director and playwright. I can't take two weeks off. But by taking those two weeks off, he had the biggest breakthrough of his career. And I'm sure investors that are listening to this show have all had the experience of just having that rainmaking idea that came when you finally took a break.
- [66:38]
William Green
Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. I remember a friend of mine who's very good hedge fund manager saying to me at one point, yeah, I'm planning to go on this 23 day meditation retreat. So, yeah, I mean there's a lot of, there's a lot of meditation, there's a lot of walking in nature. There's, yeah, it's, it's, I, I, I think that's one reason why I find investors the best investors so interesting is that they're, they're so pragmatic in basically taking advantage of anything that works. They don't really care about dogma. They're like, okay, if, if the science shows that this will help, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take it. One of the things I, I was also struck by in your book in terms of different tools that we can use to become successful. It also something that, that investors use a great deal is this whole idea of small steps that you take regularly that lead to big gains, which is obviously something that is very, very much about the law of compounding, as you explain in the book. Can you talk about this sense of, of the importance of consistency, the importance of breaking down big goals into smaller steps?
- [67:41]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah, I mean, this, this will be easy for your audience, I think, because if you want to generate wealth and you want to, you know, let's say you want to go from 1 million to $10 million, you can make one enormous bet and hope for the best, or you could make a bunch of small investments over time and have those small, smart investments with a high probability of return compound. And maybe you've got a couple listeners that have made that one big bet. But my guess is most people would say no. You take the compounding route, like that's how you generate wealth. That's how you make progress in your portfolio. That same law applies to making progress in anything. I think that we all too often fall for, like having a heroic day or a heroic week or being super intense, when what leads to sustainable, lasting excellence is really a resolute, relentless consistency. So it's showing up day in and day out and making deposits into the bank. And a part and parcel of this is what you do on your bad days. I call it raising the floor. I think what you do on your bad days is arguably more important than what you do on your great days, because great days are magical. For all that we know about human performance, it's very hard to engineer a great day. If you commit to the fundamentals and you show up day in and day out, they're just going to happen. And when they do, you enjoy them and you ride the wave. But bad days, we have a lot of agency over. So when we're not performing our best, when we're not feeling great, how can we make those bad days just a little bit better? Instead of spiraling and catastrophizing, how can we nip those bad days in the bud? Or how can we prevent a bad day from turning into a bad week? How can we prevent a bad week from turning into a bad month? In investment terms, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's kind of like in a really rough market, you're going to lose, but how can you lose less than the competition? Or how can you minimize your losses? And over time, the fund that can minimize their losses in rough markets performs just as well as the fund that crushes a good market. Anyone can crush a good market. Anyone can perform great on their great days. But a part of excellence is also getting a little bit more out of your bad days. And that's all wrapped up in this notion of consistency. Little by little becomes a lot. You just constantly chip away. And the day to day work can seem mundane and the day to day progress sometimes isn't even measurable. But the compounding effect gets you to something huge.
- [69:53]
William Green
Yeah, I wrote a chapter on high performance habits among great investors in Richer, wiser, happier. And the emblem of it, in many ways is Tom Gaynor, who runs Markel Corporation, has about 20,000 employees. And I always remember calling him during COVID to fact check the book and ask him how he was handling it, what he was doing, and very characteristically he was going into the office every day. There were only something like nine people in the office, I think in their headquarters. But he. He felt he needed to show up because they had lots of people who were, you know, out in their businesses, exposed, you know, in difficult situations. And I said, so how are you handling it? He said, one foot in front of the other. And I said, can you. Can you explain that? Can you unpack that? And he said, no. He said, that is what I'm doing. One foot in front of the other. And he was very insistent on it. And he's a very lovely guy. And there was something kind of. It was like he was not going to play my game. He was like, no, no, this is what I'm doing. And there was something about that indomitable persistence just sort of showing up again and again, which I think I see in all of the great investors. But also, you know, it seems to run through your personal philosophy. Like, I. I feel like when you're writing about this, you're not writing about this kind of showing up day in, day out in an intellectual way. I feel like there's blood on the page. When you're writing this, you're writing it from personal experience.
- [71:17]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. I'm glad that comes through, because I think that I want to become known for my consistency in all facets of life as a writer, as an athlete, as a father, and as a husband. More than anything, I want to be known for my consistency. And what that means is you just show up. There's no negotiation. You show up and you get what you have to get out of yourself on the day, and then you sleep at night, and then you rinse and repeat, and you just do that for a decade, and you're gonna be great. Everyone wants the secret to greatness, but the secret is there is no secret. Like, you have a process, you have a system. You pick a thing, you do that thing for a decade, you learn from the greats, you read a lot of books, you know, you stay endlessly curious, and then a decade later, you start to get pretty dang good at that thing. And so few people do it, because they're all chasing the secret. But consistency and patience, like that is the secret.
- [72:09]
William Green
Yeah. Tom Gaynor said at a certain point, he said, I was never number one at anything, but he said, at a certain point, you become number one. Ish. Because so many people have fallen by the wayside, and if you just keep plugging away. But I liked it. You had something on. You posted something on Instagram recently where you said, in hindsight, the year of my life I'm most proud of, in a very odd way, is the year I was pretty severely depressed and made it through. And you talk about the importance of showing up when you are in a hole and the current is going against you. And I think we talked about this last time you came on the podcast that like, you know, when you went through a period of depression and you just kept plugging away.
- [72:48]
Brad Stalberg
That's right. And it wasn't a white knuckling plugging away necessarily. Like, I, I had a wonderful therapist that was holding my hand as I kept plugging away. But at a certain point I realized that there, there wasn't going to be any quick fix to this. I was just going to have to show up in refuse to quit. And when you're depressed, refusing to quit means like, you just, you value your life more than the loss of your life and you show up as best as you can and you trust the process of therapy and of time and of making these little tweaks that in hindsight seem so small, but when you're in the thick of a depression seem major. And it's just this, it's a commitment to show up even when it feels hard and when it feels impossible. And I wouldn't wish a clinical depression on my worst enemy. Wouldn't wish it on anyone. There are no silver linings. I don't like that term because it's just pain and suffering. However, if you're fortunate enough to get to the other side of that, it certainly makes showing up on a normal bad day a lot easier.
- [73:43]
William Green
Yeah, you talk. Also, I, I think this is one reason why I, I, I like the book so much, is that, you know, as you, as you said in an email to me once, it's, in a way, it's a, it's a humane manifesto. There's something, it's like, yes, you want us to do really well and to push hard and be disciplined and driven, but there is an emphasis on kindness. And I, I was struck by a very nice line where you talked about fierce self discipline benefits from fierce self kindness. Can you talk about the importance of combining self discipline and self kindness? Because I think people, I mean, I drive myself very hard and I'm kind of tormented by it a lot of the time. And I thought I was joking to a friend of mine who I share an office with. I came in and he said, well, it's good that you'll be in your office so we can say rude things, bad things about you and I was like, nothing you can say about me is going to be as bad as what I would say about myself. And so talk about apologists for being so self referential, but talk about the importance that you've discovered of, of infusing fierce self kindness in this process of, of trying to become the best version of ourselves.
- [74:52]
Brad Stalberg
All right, so you go to a bookstore and you see these two shelves. And one shelf is the self discipline shelf. And these are books that are written by Navy SEALs and Marines and football coaches. And they say you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps, you have to take accountability. The world is a cruel, unforgiving place and you have to exert your agency in it. There's another shelf that is the meditation yoga teacher self. In those books, I'll say you have to be really kind to yourself. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, which is all the more reason that you have to be kind to yourself. And let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. And these are pitted against each other as opposites. But in my study of excellence, what I found is that the people who really embody excellence and get the best out of themselves, they take those two qualities and they combine them. So it is true that no one is going to do your bidding for you. And it is true that you need to have personal responsibility and you have to take accountability. And sometimes you do have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. All of that is true. To be excellent requires fierce self discipline. But the only way you're going to be able to sustain that level of self discipline is by also learning to be kind to yourself and have your own back. Because pushing yourself hard, doing hard things, being someone who cares deeply. We talked about the vulnerability involved caring deeply about starting a company or a fund or being an Olympic athlete and feeling like you're letting down your wife or your kids at the same time, or vice versa, feeling like you're letting down your colleagues and your coach, like it's really, really hard. It is extremely hard to try to be excellent. And if you can't acknowledge that and be kind to yourself, then you're never going to last. Because if every time you step into the arena and fail or make a misstep or come up short, you judge yourself, then you beat yourself up, eventually you're going to stop. It's not fun. You're going to stop stepping into the arena altogether. So the biggest badasses I know, like ultra marathon champions, head of Marine battalions, like just true badasses in every sense of the word. When you peel back the onion, these people also have immense self kindness and immense compassion for themselves because they realize that what they are trying to do is hard and they've learned to have their own back. So it's not a self kindness or self compassion that lets go of accountability and says anything goes. It's a self kindness and self compassion that realizes that doing hard things is hard and that you can have your own back as you try to do those hard things.
- [77:20]
William Green
Going back through this kind of list of different ways in which we can develop excellence, another thing that was very striking to me is to have clarity about what you call the main things and keeping the main things. The main things. When you look at, you know, people like, I guess it was Kaylee Humphreys, the bobsled champion, or any, any of these other great athletes, can you talk about this sort of, this ability to kind of take, take a few central things that are key and then break them down into kind of micro, micro steps. And so, so the sort of process becomes the dominant part of what they're focusing on.
- [78:05]
Brad Stalberg
So I think that excellence requires a process mindset. And what that means is, yes, you pick a big goal, and once you pick that big goal, then the next step is immediately to ask yourself, what are the levers that will help me accomplish that big goal? What are the things I need to do and what are the things that I actually need to do versus what are the things that everyone else is doing? And those can look very different. But once you define the things that actually bend the needle for each of those, you want to ask yourself, all right, well, how do I break it down into these incremental steps? So in the case of the bobsledder Kelly Humphries, she's training for an Olympic cycle every four years. And what she told me is that, well, you break that four years down into two by two year blocks, and each of those two years has a purpose. The first two years is foundation building. The second two years is sharpening the knife. Then you take each of those two year blocks and you break it down into a year, and each year has a purpose. Then you take each year and you break it down to a quarter, and each quarter has an emphasis. And then you take each quarter, you break it down to a month, and each month has a goal. And then each month gets broken down to a week, and each week has an objective. And then each week gets broken down to a day, and each day has a workout. And how do I become the best bobsledder in the world. It's by executing the workout in front of me today that is the core of a process mindset. So yes, you need that big goal, but then, man, you have to break it down into these small component chunks that you actually can execute on day in and day out. Keep the main things, the main things in today's world. We talked about this a little bit earlier. There are so many distractions in bright and shiny objects and hacks and secrets and quick fixes and supplements and on and on and on that you can spend 99% of your time and energy chasing all of these answering things and not actually focusing on the fundamentals when it's the fundamentals that are going to move you towards excellence. This expression first came to me from an old time throwing coach named Dan John. He's coached a whole bunch of world class discus, shot put and hammer throwers. And he said about 10 years ago in the gym he started to notice something really interesting, which is he'd go to the gym and all these people, they'd be spending 30 minutes foam rolling and stretching and mobilizing and doing breath work and all these elaborate warmups. And then when it came time to train, they trained for 15 minutes and they wouldn't even train that hard. And then they'd go home because they had to do all their recovery. They had to take their supplements and put on their normatech compression stockings and on and take their cold plunge and on and on and on. And he said that they were majoring in the minors. They were doing all this stuff that's supposed to support the training at the expense of the actual training. And it's just really important not to fall into that trap. You never want to invert the period. Like some of this stuff actually does make a difference at the margin, but it only makes a difference if you're actually spending 99.99% of time on the fundamentals. And this is true for every craft. Every craft has tried and true fundamentals. And then every craft has a whole bunch of kabuki that people tried to sell you to make a buck. And you gotta tune out the kabuki that people sell you to try to make a buck and nail your fundamentals.
- [80:59]
William Green
Yeah, there's a, there's a lovely, I wrote a chapter on simplicity and there's a lovely thing from Joe Greenblatt, one of the great investors who said, yeah, value a business and buy it for less. And he's like, that's the whole thing.
- [81:10]
Brad Stalberg
That's It, Right. That's the, I mean, but within that there's probably tons of complexity to do that, correct? Yeah, but that's it. That's, that is the whole thing. And once you lose sight of that, then again you start, you start to run into all sorts of problems.
- [81:23]
William Green
You have a very structured framework to your own routines that I would love you to explain where you, you divided into three daily, three weekly and three monthly practices. Can you talk about this is it. You said, I think at one point in the book that you found that everyone who's adopted this framework has found it incredibly helpful, if not life changing. Can you take us through what you do and how, how you kind of work back from what the big things are that, that are the main things in your life to then structuring this framework of three daily, weekly and monthly practices?
- [82:01]
Brad Stalberg
Yeah. First, let's talk about the problem I'm trying to overcome here, which is I think that we're, we're in this moment where everyone wants to find the perfect routine. And what ends up happening is people build these truly, these like 19 step morning routines where they, you know, you have to do 19 things before I am. And the goal is not to be the world champion of having an elaborate routine. The goal is to be a great athlete, a great parent, a great fund manager, a great physician, a great musician, a great leader, great coach, so on and so forth. So your routine shouldn't stress you out. Like you shouldn't work for your routine, your routine should work for you. That's the first thing. So the goal is not an elaborate routine. The goal is to get yourself ready to do what you need to do. In my case, that's really simple. Like, I want to be the best writer I can be, I want to be the best coach I can be, and I want to be the best family man I can be. Like, those are the big main things in my life. So rather than have all these routines that I drive myself nuts trying to adhere to, I simply say, well, what are the three things I need to do every day that will put me in a position to do that? Whatever three things I need to do once a week and then whatever three things I need to do once a month. And for me, if it's helpful to go through to get really concrete, those three things every day, pretty simple. It's an hour to an hour and a half of deep focus work. So distraction, free phone in the other room, making effortful, tangible progress on a project I care about. It's at least 45 minutes of movement. Sometimes that's going to the gym and having a formal training session. But that can also be taking a walk. And then it's not fighting evening sleepiness. So we've got young kids. The kids are tired, they're in bed by 8. Often I get tired at 9. I don't fight the sleepiness. I just, I go to bed. Sleep is really important. That's it. If I exercise for 45 minutes, not even exercise. If I move my body for 45 minutes, if I make sure to block off an hour to 90 minutes of deep focus work on good days, I get more, but that's the minimum. And if I don't fight evening sleepiness, and I do that 70 to 80% of the time, day to day, I'm really good. Then I zoom out and I ask myself, what are my three weekly practices? And these for me are a digital Sabbath, which is an idea I stole from Brad Feld, which essentially says once a week I'm not going to have access to my phone or my computer for somewhere between 12 and 24 hours. And that's my time for rest and renewal. It is one longer walk outside, ideally two or three, but over an hour, where I can really let that creative engine start to churn and reconnect with my creativity in that way. And then it's planned with friends. Is someone that has a tendency to become obsessed and a little bit of a workaholic. Something that goes by the wayside is social life. And I don't need to hang out with friends every night. I don't need to be the star of the party. But like once a week it's good to get together with friends. Doesn't need to be an elaborate social outing. It can be training with my buddy at the gym, it can be going to dinner with another couple. But just some social interaction is good for me once a week. And then I have these three monthly practices. And those monthly practices are some way to reconnect with myself in a spiritual way. For me, that's often listening to music, engaging in my neighborhood or my community. So going to a community event, something like that, and then longer than an hour out in nature. So maybe at the half a day hike or going camping or just something to get out in nature to really reset. And if I just do those things, then I tend to be in a pretty good spot. So rather than try to have all this elaborate, complex stuff, it's like, what are the basics? And honestly, the, the, the, the monthly stuff, I don't always hit that. But if I can hit the daily and the weekly stuff, I know that I'm going to have a strong foundation from which to perform my best.
- [85:37]
William Green
You talked about this idea of these blocks of deep focus, and obviously this is inspired by the book Deep Work by Cal Newport and who you credit in a footnote? He wrote this great book in 2016.
- [85:52]
Brad Stalberg
One of my best friends, too, so I have to credit him.
- [85:54]
William Green
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about, because I know that you're great friends. What have you learned from being friends with Cal? A. About why he's so successful and why he's so productive, given that he also writes to the New Yorker and he writes these excellent books. And he's also a professor. Professor. And a very successful guy. Like you've had this unusual access to the guy who sort of, you know, is at the. Is at the forefront of writing about deep focus. And at the same time, I think you mentioned in your footnote about the book that when he first published that book, distraction was mostly in the workplace, and now it's in every corner of our lives. So can you just give us a sense of how you've taken these ideas from Cal, who also read the manuscript of your book, and how you've kind of applied it in your own life to figure out how to do deep work?
- [86:43]
Brad Stalberg
So it's something that Kel and I obviously talk about all the time. And that's right. When Cal wrote Deep Work, it was predominantly a book. Not predominantly. It was exclusively a book about knowledge workers and how to start to deal with. At the time, it was email wasn't even really slack. But how to deal with email and all the ubiquitous distraction and knowledge work and carve out times for this deep, effortful, undistracted work to make progress on big projects? And since then, and what I've realized and in conversation with Cal is that it's no longer deep work. It's really deep living. And Cal's actually working on a book that'll come out, I think, a year, a year and a half from now called the Deep Life, which is very similar to pursuing an excellent life. Like, there's a lot of complimentary nature between our ideas. Unsurprisingly, we talk for hours and hours every week about these ideas, but I think that deep work is important. But it's really like just deep connection, deep effort. It's that lack of alienation. It's saying no to distraction. What Cal did really well is he just made it so concrete. He said, put it on your calendar, block off an hour, two hours, one day a week, two days a week, three days a week, every day, whatever it is. And during that time, have a goal that you want to work toward and work toward that goal and expect the first 10 to 15 minutes to feel a little bit rough and edgy and face some resistance and just be disciplined, stick to it, get through that resistance, and that's how you actually make progress. It's so important because I can pull up my email and see I'm behind a hundred emails, but responding to emails is not the main thing of my job. I can pull up social media and say that, oh, I'm not posting enough. But posting on social media is not the main thing of my job. The main thing of my job is to read and write. But if I don't block off time, undistracted time to read and write, I'm never going to read and write because all this other stuff is going to encroach on it. So it's completely twisted and inverted to try to fit reading and writing in. That's the main thing. Everything should fit in around reading and writing. But if I don't block off deep work time to read and write, it's not going to happen the way that I. This is from the practice of groundedness. A prior book that I wrote, I wrote that. Like, your calendar is a moral document. Don't tell me about what you value. Show me your calendar. Show me how you spend your time. So the things that are important to us, we need to create time for undistracted focus on those things.
- [88:57]
William Green
And how do you structure your, your physical environment so that it supports this? Because I know that, that you, you know, for example, the way that you put things on your desk has significance to you or, you know, the photos you have, the memorabilia, the sculptures and the like, like, what are you doing in terms of your physical environment to support these good habits? And so, and also to keep the technology at bay so that it doesn't just push you into a very superficial life.
- [89:28]
Brad Stalberg
The most important thing I'm doing is what you said last, is keeping the technology at bay. So right now, the room that I'm recording in my email client is completely closed. You're on my full screen in my phone. I'd have to go through my garage and down a floor to get to my phone. So there's no temptation, there's no urge to check the phone. And even if I don't check it, the phone's not there to remind me of all the emails that are undoubtedly stacking up because I want to be here fully focused with you, I write the same way. So when I sit down to write, when I sit down to read in the library, in my office, there's no digital device in there. Because even if I don't check it, the amount of cognition and willpower it requires not to check would encroach on what I'm doing and how I'm thinking. So that's the most important is what is there an absence of? There's an absence of digital distraction. Then what do I surround myself with is essentially, like you said, objects and artifacts that bring out quality. It's art from my favorite sculptor who's a close friend, Emil Al Zamora. It's a picture of Robert Persig in a first edition copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Because I'm inspired by that book and I want to carry that torch. I have a banner that sits above my desk that says give a damn. And it reminds me that I need to care deeply about what I'm doing. I've got another banner from my favorite recording artist, Jason Ispel. It says Lucky to have the work. So whenever I get frustrated about those emails I have to respond to, I can remind myself I'm actually very lucky to have this work. And the way that we set up our physical environment can really have an impact on our ability to settle into work and to continue to work in a values aligned way. It's back to something we talked about earlier, is we live, the default ecosystem is very discordant with excellence and our values. So what I try to do is I try to set up a micro ecosystem that I work in that has that gravitational pull toward excellence and toward my values.
- [91:11]
William Green
I, I love this. I, I see this again and again with really successful investors, the way they structure their physical environment. Like I, I have this friend, Arnold Vandenberg, that, who's a much older investor who I often talk about is great role model to me. And he would have photos of everybody who's inspired him. And you know, then, then if you kind of invert that, Brian Lawrence, I remember once telling me this is a terrific hedge fund manager in all of his four different offices, in various houses and, and offices where he works. He has a sculpture of, of Lenin I think to remind him of the dangers of dogma, you know, to, to remind him to kind of think more, more open mindedly. So I think this whole idea of how you structure your environment is really important. I was also really struck when you were talking just then about reminding yourself to appreciate the work that you do and your good fortune in doing this. And I, I battle with this a lot and I, I was very, I, I came in and talked to my wife about this last night after I was reading your book. But I feel like so much of my time I'm doing my work through gritted teeth, even though I actually love the work and I'm incredibly lucky to do it and I managed to make it, you know, often because I'm over scheduled and too busy as, as you would put it, I think a joyless grind. Can you talk about the importance of injecting a sense of joy in the process? Because my sense is that this is something you see really in all of the most successful people that you've interviewed and studied over the years.
- [92:44]
Brad Stalberg
That's right. Not every day has to be joyful, not every moment has to be joyful. But the totality of the pursuit should be full of joy. If it's not fun, you're not gonna last and you're not gonna perform your best. So you better learn how to have fun. What ends up happening is that there's all these joy killing vampires. And it's exactly what you said. It tends to be when we're over scheduled or when we let the minor cannibalize the majors, we stop keeping the main thing. The main thing and we start to become resentful. Got all these emails, I'm over scheduled, I'm busy, I'm tight, I'm pressured, and no one works well from that. So I actually think that a loss of joy is a really good first sign to evaluate how are you spending your time and energy. And when you do this, what you're inevitably going to find is you're spending too much time and energy on superfluous bullshit and not enough time on the main thing. Now, if you're not finding joy when you're doing the main thing, then there's some more serious questions to ask. Are you doing the main thing in the right way? Are you doing it with the right people? So on and so forth. But another one of these misnomers, kind of like fear self discipline and fear self kindness going together, is that intensity and joy can't coexist. And that's utter bullshit. There is so much joy to be found in working intensely toward a meaningful goal. There's a famous coach, Mark Wetmore. He coached the Colorado Buffaloes cross country team during their heyday and he said to be serious is one of the greatest Joys there is. And what I get out of that is again, to care deeply about something, to give something your all, to try to master a craft like it's an extremely joyful thing if it aligns with your values. Again, if you're mimicking someone else. These are constant themes. If you're alienated from what you're doing, then it's not going to be very joyful. But if it aligns with your values, you should love it. There's this influencer that people like. His name's David Goggins. He gives a great hype speech, but he's always angry and he's always suffering. And I just think that is the wrong approach to greatness. And to his credit, David Goggins is a great social media marketer. He's got an enormous following, but he's not world class at anything. He's never won a race. The people that are actually winning races, they're not always angry and suffering. They love what they do, they love the craft, they find joy in it. That doesn't mean that they're not intense, doesn't mean they're not fierce. It doesn't mean that sometimes they can't put a chip on their shoulder. But they have reverence for what they do and they find it fun and joyful. And once we lose that again, that's a sign to reevaluate how we're spending our time and energy and the people around us.
- [95:00]
William Green
I thought it was interesting you had an example of Gregg Popovich. I think it was the coach of the San Antonio spurs organizing these very elaborate dinners as a way to kind of celebrate when there were big wins, but also when there were tough losses actually to get together. Can you talk about that? Like how actually in some ways celebrating completion or having these rituals or having these get togethers is kind of an important part of building a life that goes beyond it just being an empty grind.
- [95:30]
Brad Stalberg
So I love that you ask about this. There's a chapter in the book on rituals and completion and excellence is a never ending path. When you get to the top of one mountain, there's another mountain to climb. But that doesn't mean that it's not important to inject milestones and points of completion along the way. Because without those milestones and points of completion, it can very much feel like we're just kind of floating amorphously and every accomplishment bleeds into the next and we never get to step back and take stock of the effort that we exerted and the person that we're becoming and the success or failure that we had. So Gregg Popovich is the coach of the San Antonio spurs, like you mentioned. And the NBA season is long. It is a grind to 82 games. And if you're lucky, you make the playoffs, it's more. And what ends up happening is this thing that should be the most joyful thing in the world. Coaching and playing on the biggest stage at the highest level in the planet becomes this joyless grind. You're just on the road, you're going from city to city, you're constantly playing. And Popovich realized this, and he's one of the greatest coaches, I would argue probably the greatest coach across any sport, the most winning basketball coach ever that we can say definitively. And what Popovich said is like, no, no, no, I got to break this season up. Like, we need some. We need some completion rituals because otherwise we're just gonna wait till the end of the season and then we're already gonna start training camp for the next season. So he'd schedule these, as you mentioned, these elaborate team dinners. And the point of the team dinners was to just mark time to step back from the grind and to reflect on the relationships that the teammates were forging and how the team was playing and where they were going. And what I take out of this is that we can all do this in our own life. Like if we are type A pushers, we're gonna go, go, go in a blind spot, is that we go, go, go so fast that we never step back, to pause, to celebrate, to savor, to grieve, to learn, to reflect. And much like we need to think about rest as a part of the work, I also think if the goal is to not just be great for a year, but to be great for a career, we need to think about having these completion rituals as a part of the work. And what's nice about them is we get to define our own completion. It can be the day that you finish raising the fund. It can be the next big hire that you make. It can be one year of being in business. It doesn't matter what it is per se. What matters is that you pick something with meaningful and then you step back out of the normal day to day grind to really reflect on it and to celebrate it.
- [97:44]
William Green
There was one last thing I wanted to ask you before I let you go, Brad, because you've been very generous with your time here, which is you talk a lot about this idea from Persig of the person we're becoming as we work on this task as we work on the process of becoming excellent at something. And you write at one point this reminder that as we're focusing on becoming better, you say better is also about becoming stronger, kinder and wiser. And there's an aspect of the book that is a sort of spiritual quest, I would say, where there's a part of you that's trying to build a more soulful life that includes. Includes not just lifting, you know, 500 pounds as you do when you go to the gym, but. But also, you know, becoming kinder and wiser as well as stronger. Can you give us your thoughts on that? Because I feel like there's a kind of unspoken aspect of this book and the practice of groundedness and Masters of Change, where you are working your way through these books and through your coaching and through your interviews towards becoming the sort of person you want to be.
- [98:47]
Brad Stalberg
I mean, what's the point of it all? Like, we're all going to die one day. And I think the point of it all is to try to love deeply and make a contribution. And I think that if you go about what you're doing with care and intention and you make yourself vulnerable in the process of doing it, you can't help but become stronger, kinder and wiser. Because life is hard, and trying to do big things is hard. And in the process, it's going to make you softer. It makes you into a humble badass. Like, you can't help but be a humble badass because you realize that it's really tough, and you realize that other people that are stepping in the arena are going through the same challenges. So, on the one hand, you become very hardened by the pursuit of excellence, but on the other hand, it softens you quite a bit, and you get to live in that paradox of being a humble badass. And I think that if we're not working towards those qualities, those more intrinsic characteristics, then what's the point of it all? I mean, you could tell me that I could write 10 bestselling books, but if I'm a miserable asshole, I don't really care. Want to be a good person.
- [99:53]
William Green
And when you think of this kind of ideal of being a humble badass or a good person who's also a great writer or whatever, like, is there someone among the hundreds of people you've interviewed over the years who you look at and you think, yeah, let me be more like them?
- [100:08]
Brad Stalberg
George Saunders. Don't even have to finish the sentence. George Saunders is. And I've never actually met him. I've just studied his work. And I've heard him in other interviews, we've exchanged emails. George Saunders is the best at what he does. He is the best short story writer and I think the best living novelist. If you haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo, read it. Just make sure you read my book first. Because if you read his book first and then read mine, I'm in trouble. He's just the ultimate craftsperson. And there's nothing romantic about how he works. He lays brick by brick. That's how he teaches writing. He is the opposite of the Shakespearean lightning strikes passion idea. He is a craftsperson, right? He chisels away. It is an extremely hardened, meticulous process. But he is the warmest, just most kind, softest person. And I am utterly convinced that is because his work is so hard. And the fact that his work is so hard has made him so soft and so kind. And he combines these two qualities. He is the master craftsperson, the best in the world at the short story format in whatever the opposite of arrogant is just like humble beyond belief and kind and warm and giving. So when I think about how I would like to be perceived back to core values, bringing some of these themes together, I often think about George Saunders. He's also been happily married for 30 plus years. He lives, you know, off in nature. He's not really one for the scene. He cares deeply about his craft and being a good person. So he's, he's an enormous role model to me.
- [101:37]
William Green
That's beautiful. That's a lovely note on which to end. I feel guilty now cause I did finish your book, but I didn't finish Lincoln in the Bardo cause I got distracted and so I read a chunk of it and then forgot I was.
- [101:47]
Brad Stalberg
Oh no. There you go. Well then maybe that's a plug for my book. I think you might be the first person ever to have said that. So I'll take it.
- [101:54]
William Green
I sometimes look on Amazon and you know, the ratings for my book would be better than like some book by Tolstoy. And you're like, yes, I'm better than Warren Heath or so you know, so yeah, I wouldn't take too seriously these ratings, but I really enjoyed your book. The, in all three of your books. And it's, it's clear that you're taking a great deal of care with them and that you're, you, you are in some sense carrying the torch for these, these role models of yours, like, like Robert Hersig. And so I, I wish you much continued strength or as my daughter Madeleine would say soft strength, which is a sort of nice combination of these, these qualities. So thank you so much, Brad. It's been a real treat chatting with you again.
- [102:36]
Brad Stalberg
Thank you William. It's been a pleasure.
- [102:39]
William Green
Thanks. Thanks for listening to tip. Follow Richer, Wiser, Happier on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, tax or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third party products, services or advertisers do not constitute endorsements and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network. All rights reserved.