Most people chasing excellence are chasing the wrong thing entirely. Brad Stulberg argues that the 4am routines, optimization stacks, and recovery scores are just elaborate performance passed off as “excellence.” In this interview, Stulberg breaks down the biology, philosophy, and psychology behind genuine excellence and how to reach it.
About the speaker: Brad Stulberg is the author of Master of Change, The Practice of Groundedness, and The Way of Excellence. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, among many other publications. He is on faculty at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Timestamps
00:00:37 Chapter 1: What is excellence
00:02:44 Values, mastery, and mattering
00:05:00 The hidden biology driving our need to improve
00:08:55 The four phases of competence
00:11:13 What excellence is not
00:12:09 Chapter 2: The barriers to excellence
00:12:43 Barrier 1: Dysevolution
00:14:35 Barrier 2: Optimization culture
00:17:22 Barrier 3: “Shitty flow”
00:21:22 Barrier 4: Zombie burnout
00:27:05 Barrier 5: Happiness industrial complex
00:31:01 Barrier 6: Excellence as a standard
00:32:40 Chapter 3: Three key factors in the pursuit of excellence
00:33:51 How to set the right goals that actually work
00:39:20 Why consistency beats intensity
00:46:42 The long game of patience, plateaus, and breakthroughs
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Brad Stulberg. I’m author of The Way of Excellence, and I’m on faculty at the University of Michigan. Today on Big Think, we’re going to tackle three big ideas on excellence.
The first is what excellence actually is and how excellence is different from so many of the common imposters to excellence. The second are barriers and pitfalls that are very common on the path toward excellence. And then the third are going to be essential factors to help in the pursuit of genuine heartfelt excellence.
Chapter 1: What is excellence
There can be this thought that what excellence is, is waking up at 4 a.m., having a 47-step routine, taking three cold plunges, having nine supplements, tracking your sleep and your heart rate variability, and telling all your friends about how great you are. But that’s not real excellence. That is elaborate kabuki that is masquerading as the real thing.
Simply put, excellence is involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values. That simple.
Involved engagement with something worthwhile that aligns with your values.
We often assume that it has to do with what we are going to achieve. But genuine, heartfelt excellence, it’s actually less about getting to the top of the mountain and more about the person that you become on the sides.
So you could have very strong involved engagement at tapping a white wall, but that probably wouldn’t align with your values. That wouldn’t be excellence. That would just be tapping a white wall.
That would be very different than saying, I want to become a great physician because I value intellect. I value contribution. I value helping people, so on and so forth.
So we are working toward running a marathon. We are working toward starting a company. We are working toward graduating from medical school. We are working toward publishing our first book.
And while all that’s true, the things that we work on and the way in which we work on them also work on us. So we might be working on the marathon, but the marathon is working on us. We might be working on writing a book, but the process of writing a book is shaping us.
We learn about doing hard things. We learn about overcoming setbacks. We learn about resilience. We learn about the power of consistency, of discipline, of self-kindness.
So the big goals that we set, the mountains that we climb, they shape our character along the way. And if we’re climbing mountains, if we’re setting goals that are out of alignment with our values, we’re not shaping our character in a way that is concordant with who we want to be.
So when we connect this kind of involved engagement, this deep caring, with something that aligns with our personal values, we gain a sense of mastery and mattering.
Values, mastery, and mattering
Mastery is competence. It is making concrete, tangible progress. That is a very satisfying feeling.
And mattering is a sense that we belong and that there is more to life than our own teeny little ego. We are a part of something bigger.
Most people have somewhere between three and five core values. And example values are things like mastery, craft, integrity, community, spirituality, discipline, intellect, wisdom, kindness, creativity. These are just a few of truly hundreds of example values.
And when we have our values, when we select our values, and there’s a whole process for how to do this in the book, you want to not just have words on a poster on the wall that are empty and meaningless. You really need to define your values.
If one of your values is health, what does health mean to you? How do you practice health? And from that value, you essentially want to say, what can I do day in, day out, week in, week out to live in alignment with this value?
And when you have your core values, when you select goals, you can check those goals against your values. And you can say, if I pursue this goal, will the process of pursuing this goal allow me to live in alignment with my values?
If you are someone who values health and you choose a goal that is going to make you work 22 hours a day and never sleep, that’s going to be pretty discordant with your value of health.
So these values are a really good way to make sure that what you’re doing on the side of the mountain is helping you become the person that you want to be versus just staring at the peak and thinking about what it might feel like if or when you get there.
I think that quality is, to me, the overarching umbrella over all of this.
Robert Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974. And at the center of that book is this term quality, which Pirsig stylized with a capital Q.
And Pirsig’s quality was the relationship between an actor and his or her act. And when that relationship was so close, was so intimate, that the subject and object ceased to exist.
So it’s no longer Rachel playing basketball. Basketball is just happening. It’s no longer Joe on the guitar. Music is just being made.
And what Pirsig argued in this book is that quality really drives all of evolution.
