We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

William Green welcomes back bestselling author Brad Stulberg to chat about his new book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness & Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. IN THIS EPISODE YOU��LL LEARN: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:27 - How Brad Stulberg became obsessed with the pursuit of excellence 00:18:49 - Why excellence requires a combination of guts & vulnerability 00:22:51 - How “algorithmic mass distraction” blocks us from a life of excellence 00:30:10 - Why the best performers lead lives that often look mundane & boring 00:38:00 - How to identify your core values & align your career with them 00:42:22 - How we drive ourselves crazy pursuing the illusion of balance 00:53:18 - Why periods of rest & renewal are integral to success & creativity 01:07:30 - Why the key to greatness is consistency—especially on bad days 01:13:43 - Why excelling at hard things requires “fierce self-kindness” 01:21:19 - How Brad structures his daily, weekly & monthly routines 01:25:33 - What he’s learned about deep work from his friend Cal Newport 01:28:51 - How to create a physical environment that supports good habits 01:37:36 - How to work with intensity & joy & to become a “humble badass” Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIP Mastermind Community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Inquire about William Green’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Richer, Wiser, Happier Masterclass⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Brad’s website.  Brad’s podcast. Brad's The Way of Excellence. Brad's Master of Change & The Practice of Groundedness. Robert Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Lila & On Quality. Cal Newport's Deep Work. George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo. William Green’s previous podcast with Brad Stulberg. William Green’s book, ⁠Richer, Wiser, Happier⁠. Follow William Green on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Related ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Premium Feed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Intrinsic Value Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Check out our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠We Study Billionaires Starter Packs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow our official social media accounts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Browse through all our episodes here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIP Finance Tool⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Enjoy exclusive perks from our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠favorite Apps and Services⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠best business podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our ⁠sponsors⁠: HardBlock Linkedin Talent Solutions Human Rights Foundation Simple Mining Masterworks Vanta Fundrise Netsuite Shopify 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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 27th. The subtitle is A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. world. I read a pre-publication copy over the last few days and found it really helpful and deeply thought-provoking. It's a 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-wise, a 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, Rich or Wies are 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, it's a pleasure to be back on the show. Thank you for having me. Ah, 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. 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 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-excellance, not hacks, not quick fixes, not 37-step morning routines, but actual heartfelt, soulful, caring deeply,

giving something you're 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 we'll 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. 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 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. Persig has had a huge influence on a lot of investors, people like Nick Sleep and Kay Sakaria 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 Zan in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

what 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? I first read Robert Persegas 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 in 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 of her 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. In 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 as 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

in being able to move towards conditions that are conducive to one 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 70s 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 is people. And ultimately, that's how cultures grow. And why now is I think that perhaps the greatest modern nail 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. There's so much to unpack here, and we'll come back to a lot of what you said later and more depth. But one thing that struck me was that you actually have in your book, the exact same quote that I have from Persig in the chapter that I wrote in Richard Wise

Happier about Nick Sleep and Kay Sakaria, which had a really profound effect on me and I'll read it. It says, this is Persig in this strange sort of, you know, memoir come novel, come philosophical treaties 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's 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 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 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? I couldn't agree more with that approach to life. I think that oftentimes we over-emphasize the goal that we're working toward and under-emphasize 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, 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 investing, it would be how well your investments perform. 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 of collection of essays called On Quality. And there were 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 in the Art of Motorcycle Minutes at the time. I was reading this new book on quality. 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. Yeah, it's funny. That book on quality is really, really good. And I was given it by a hedge fund manager, Josh Tarasoff, a few years ago when I was on a retreat that we organized in the book shows. And I ended up organizing a Zoom call with various great fund managers, people like Guy Spear and Brian Lawrence and Matt McClellan and Nick Sleet and Josh Tarasov 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 Persig, obviously, the great metaphor for that was working on motorcycle maintenance

rather than 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 lovely example of building skills sort of for the sake of it. So there's this, yes, I can absolutely share.

Jerry Seinfeld, he's interviewed about what really makes him tick in 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 stand-up. 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 sentence 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.

I get this skill every time I face the blank page is a writer, but I also get it in the wait room because the bar is either going to 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 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. There's also something really interesting that goes beyond this sense of concrete results

and objectivity, because as you mentioned 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 that Persig 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 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 have this friend Francois Rochon, who's great Canadian invest, who's been on the podcast before,

who's also building 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, Iskar, 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 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. That's right. And that innate ability to sense when something is beautiful and high quality and good is built into our DNA.

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. Single-celled 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, persist, and 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. No, you just know it's beautiful.

And it sounds like that's the experience that a skilled investor might have is 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 in doing everything we can to generate that sense of aliveness and energy in our own lives through our own pursuits. You quote in the book from your conversations with an amazing array of great performance 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, Hillary 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 also this French chess player, Maxime Vachier, 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. 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 an 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 pursuits 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 of it 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 you're 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 shorts, 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 funds 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, 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. So we'll go into that process of execution of how you actually do this in some detail 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 say at one point 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? 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 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 figure out a bull trying to sell me her master class. And I sat there and I thought to myself, I can't even connect with my 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-excellance or hustle

culture greatness. And this is the entire industrial complex of hacks and quick fixes and 10-day programs in 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-excellance, 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. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom

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All right. Back to the show. It seems to me when I look at the great investors who are this kind of, you know, microcosm that I've studied in the same way that you study so many great athletes and physicians and surgeons and corporate leaders and the like. I see among the best investors this ability, I think I call it intentional disconnection in my book, 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 conscious decision not to buy into what Nickseek 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 disevolution, all these new technologies that prey on our primal instincts of food and sex and status and connection. And you. write about ultra-processed food, ultra-processed entertainment, an 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. 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 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, it's 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 of 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. Yeah, I once interviewed Michael Joyner for a book that I was ghost writing. 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 seems pretty boring. Can you talk a little bit about that? It seemed to be a really nice

observation. Yeah, 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 on 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 as 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 a kind of reward that no fancy car or fancy watch or a sense of status will ever give you. It's the Jerry Seinfeld quote about, you know, you work that joke and you put hours, in some cases, months, and some cases years into it, and you get it just right and it lands. That, the satisfaction that comes from that is just so immense. Yeah, you have 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.

There's a very nice word that you use where you say that excellence. requires intimacy, which you define somewhat differently, this sense 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 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 at, 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. I get chills out my spine just hearing you read that quote. Hillary Hahn is, I think, the greatest of all time international violin soloists, 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's 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 health care is a job. gentleman named Avidus Donabaden. So before Evita's Donabaden, there were no quality metrics for hospitals. They didn't track infections. They didn't track outcomes. It was the Wild West.

This is some decades ago. And Donabeda came along and he said, this is crazy. You know, 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 quality and health care. And now 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 been in these hospitals. It's remarkable the level of analytic rigor they bring to this. On his deathbed, Avadis Donabin 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. 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 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. Well, Buffett talked about Berkshire, which he just retired from after 60 years, as, you know, being

lovingly built, if I'm not misquoting. I mean, it was his canvas that he painted over 60 years. I'm 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 he felt was beautiful. And I had a really interesting conversation a few weeks ago with a brilliant young investor who's very, 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 Beezos, who's invested in one of his businesses. And, you know, he knows people like Jim Sinigal, who is this legendary CEO 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 Synegal or Nick Sleep, it's always motivated by love. Like, it all comes down to love. And it sounds, it sounds sort of so soft, you know, but there is something about that. It's like if, I mean, 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 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 write about this in the book about how this has been something

that goes through Chinese philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, it's not a new idea, right? No, it's at the core of every ancient wisdom philosophy. The Greeks called this Arete, and it was held the up. is maybe the utmost value in ancient Greece. In China, this was called Wu Wei in warring states China, which was this burgeoning philosophical epoch, and Wu Wei was essentially the sense of mastery that you gain by caring deeply about a craft in pursuing it. The Buddhists call this right effort, and it is a way of going about what you're doing with full intention in full focus.

So 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, around how do you perform your best? But at the core of it is really this 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 a life around deep care and love is a good life. And 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. 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. 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 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 100 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 30 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, you know, in my eulogy, I want these things mentioned. Then 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 three by five 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. Like, you can show me 100 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. Like, 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 present. 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 activity. 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-folution 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. 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 tradeoffs 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 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 like 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 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 sold to us is this 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 eight-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 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 introduced 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, in 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 own? identity house, what room do I want to be spending the most time in right now? And how can I make sure

of it the other rooms don't get multi? And if you do that, it allows you to zero in and have these seasons of deep intensity and focus on one or two things without losing a sense of who you are in the process. I like the fact that in the acknowledgement section of the book at the end, 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 the biggest room in my identity has. 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? 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 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 make sure that nothing important in your identity house completely goes moldy. You know, you got to 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. 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 look at a lot of the great investors I've written about over the years, most if not, certainly a goodly proportion ended up divorced. There are people like Howard Marks, or Charlie Munger who had a lot of other interests who were sort of broader in their reading and their thinking.

Can you talk about this idea of chronic obsession as a kind of recipe for disaster? Because I'm sort of convinced and sort of unconvinced by your claim, if you know what I mean. Yeah, this is 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, and not just in my reporting or my opinion in the research, that kind of obsession 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 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 and documentaries that get made. But if you really follow like the long arc of this. 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 linguistic 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. 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? 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 to, 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 insight. Throughout the day, we can take these short micro breaks. It might be a 10-minute walk.

There's fascinating research at a Stanford that shows that just after a 10-minute walk, creativity improves by between 40 and 60 percent. 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, 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 wind of wait to the ultimate answer, which is I think that you cannot think of rest and renewal is 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 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. And the idea of this book came on a walk. It did. And the funny thing is, I was actually, 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. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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All right. Back to the show. I thought it was interesting that you look at some of the science of this and I'll no doubt gobblerless, but I think you were saying that when you do things like walking or a light swim or light yoga or something, it 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 it allows your mind to wonder. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, for the longest time, the researchers thought this was a blood flow issue.

And that by taking a walk or swimming or exercising, you had increased blood flow 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 dry finger 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 five-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 Lynn Manuel Miranda, the playwriter 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, 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 rain-making idea that came when you finally took a break. 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 meditation. There's a lot of walking in nature. There's, yeah, it's, 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. like, okay, if the science shows that this will help, I'm just going to, I'm just going to take it. One of the things I was also struck by in your book in terms of different tools that we can use to become successful, that also is something 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? Yeah, I mean, this will be easy for your audience, I think, because if you want to generate wealth and you want to, 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 bat, 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 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. You know, 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 performance, 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 butt? 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 fun that can minimize their losses in rough markets performs just as well is 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. Yeah, I wrote a chapter on high-performance habits among great investors in ritual-wise a happier. And the emblem of it, in many ways, is Tom Gaynor, who runs the Markell 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 what he was doing. And he 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 felt he needed to show up because they had lots of people who were 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, 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 feel like when you're writing about this, you're not writing about this kind of showing up day and 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.

Yeah. I'm glad that comes through because I think that like I want to become known for my consistency in all facets of life. a writer, is an athlete, is 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. Like, 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 going to 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. Yeah, Tom Gaynor said at a certain point, he said, I was never number one 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're 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. That's right. And it wasn't a white knuckling plugging away necessarily. Like I had a wonderful therapist that was holding my hand as I kept plugging away. But at a certain point, I realized that there wasn't going to be any quick fix to this. I was just going to have to show up and 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 seems so small. But when you're in the thick of a depression seem major. And it's just, 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. Yeah. You talk also, I think this is one reason why I like the book so much is that, you know, as you, as you said in an email to me once,

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 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? 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 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, um, apologies to being so self-referential, but talk about the importance that you've discovered of, of infusing things. fierce self-kindness in this process of trying to become the best version of ourselves. All right. So you go to a bookstore and you see these two shelves. And one shelf is the self-disciplined 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, is a cruel, unforgiving place. And you have to exert your agency

in it. There's another shelf that is the meditation yoga teach yourself. And those books all 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 in 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 talks 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 ultramarathon 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. At the 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. 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 Humphrey's the bobsled champion or any of these other great athletes, can you talk about this sort of this ability to kind of take a few central things that are

key and then break them down into kind of micro steps. And so the sort of process becomes the dominant part of what they're focusing on. 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, whatever things I need to do?

And whatever things that I actually need to do versus whatever things that everyone else is doing. And those can look very different. And once you define the things that actually bend the needle, for each of those, you want to ask yourself, like, all right, well, how do I break it down into these incremental steps? So in the case of the Bob Sletter, Kelly Humphrey, is 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 answery 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 just, he'd go to the gym, then all these people, they'd be spending 30 minutes, foam rolling, and stretching, and mobilizing, and doing breath work, and all these elaborate warm-ups. And then when it came time to train, they'd train 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, that they had to take their supplements and put on their Norma-tech compression stockings and on and take their coal plunge and on and on and on. And he said that they were majoring in the miners.

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 different 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've got to tune out the kibuki that people saw you to try to make a buck and nail your fundamentals. Yeah, 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. 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 is the whole thing. And once you lose sight of that, then again, you start, you start to run into all sorts of problems. 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? You said, I think, at one point in the book that you found that everyone who's adopted this

framework has found an incredibly helpful, if not life-changing. Can you take us through what you do and how you kind of work back from what the big things are that are the main things in your life to then structuring this framework of three daily, weekly, and monthly practices. Yeah, first let's talk about the problem I'm trying to overcome here, which is I think that 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 you have to do 19 things before 7 a.m.

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 I have all these routines that I drive myself nuts trying to do it here to, I simply say, well, whatever 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 taken 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 eight. Often I get tired at nine. I don't fight the sleepiness. I just, I go to bad. Sleep is really important. That's it. If I exercise for 45 minutes, not even exercise, if I'm moving 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 Bradfeld, 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 plans 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 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 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. You talked about this idea of these blocks of deep focus. And obviously this is inspired by the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport,

who you credit in a footnote. You wrote this great book in 2016. One of my best friends, too, so I have to credit him. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about because I know that you're great friends. Like, 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 and a very successful guy.

Like, you've had this unusual access to the guy who sort of, you know, 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? years 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. So it's something that Cal and I obviously talk about all the time. And that's right. When Kyle wrote deep work, it was predominantly a book, not predominantly, it was 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 in all the ubiquitous distraction in knowledge work and carve out times for this deep, effortful, undistracted work to make progress on big projects. And since then, 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 or 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 complementary 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 is 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 100 emails.

But responding to emails is not the main thing of my job. I can pull up social media and say that, 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 your calendar is a moral document.

Like, 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. And how do you structure your physical environment so that it supports this? because I know that, for example, the way that you put things on your desk has significance to you or the photos you have, the memorabilia, the sculptures and the like.

What are you doing in terms of your physical environment to support these good habits? And also to keep the technology at bay so that it doesn't just push you into a very superficial life. 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. And 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 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 and a first edition copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because I'm inspired by that book and I want to. I 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 Isbell, 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 in 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. I love this. I see this again and again with really successful investors, the way they structure their physical environment. Like I have this friend Arnold Van derbynberg, who's a much older investor, who I often talk about, this great role model to me.

And he would have photos of everybody who's inspired him. And 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 offices where he works. He has a sculpture of Lenin, I think, to remind him of the dangers of dogma, you know, to remind him to kind of think 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 battle with this a lot. And I was very, 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 loved 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 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. 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 going to last and you're not going to 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. Like we stop keeping the main thing the main thing and we start to become resentful. It's 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 you get 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. Or 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 misnomer is 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 Buffalo's 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 you're 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, like, that is the wrong approach to greatness.

And to his credit, David Gagans is a great social media marketer. He's got an enormous following. But he hasn't, 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. It 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, that's, again, that's a sign to re-evaluate how we're spending our time and energy and the people around us. I thought it was interesting you had an example of Greg 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 or having these rituals or having these get-together. This is kind of an important part of building a life that goes beyond it, just being an empty grind. 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 in 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 Greg Popovich is the coach of Stantonyspurs, 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. 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 going to wait until the end of the season, and then we're already going to start training camp for the next season. So he'd scheduled 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 going to go, 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 is 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 data a grind to really reflect on it and to celebrate it. 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 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're working your way through these books and through your coaching and through your interviews towards becoming

the sort of person you want to be. And 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. I want to be a good person. 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. 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 storywriter and I think the best living novelist. If you haven't read Lincoln and 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. And whatever the opposite of arrogant is, just like humble beyond belief in 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 off in nature. He's not really one for the scene. He just cares deeply about his craft and being a good person. So he's an enormous role model to me.

That's beautiful. That's a lovely note on which to end. I feel guilty now because I did finish your book, but I didn't finish Lincoln in the Bardo because I got distracted. And so I read a chunk of it and then forgot I was. Oh, no, there you go. 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. I sometimes look on Amazon and, you know, their ratings for my book would be better than like the sub book by Tulsa. And you're like, yes, I'm better than Warren He's or so. You know, so yeah, I wouldn't take too seriously these ratings. But I really enjoyed your book, all three of your books. And it's clear that you're taking a great deal of care with them. And you are in some sense carrying the torch for these role models of yours,

like Robert Persig. And so I wish you much continued strength, or as my daughter, Madeline would say, soft strength, which is a sort of nice combination of these qualities. So thank you so much, Brad. It's been a real treat chatting with you again. Thank you, William. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for listening to TIP. Follow richer, wiser, happier on your favorite podcast app and visit the investorspodcast.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

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