In this solo episode of Philosopher's Notes TV, host Brian Johnson delivers an enthusiastic, practice‑oriented overview of Brad Stulberg’s book The Way of Excellence. He begins by defining excellence as the combination of mastery (being your best in any activity) and mattering (aligning with values and contributing to something larger). Johnson then explores the three foundational layers of excellence: a biological impulse that dates back to single‑celled organisms, philosophical traditions from ancient Greece (Arete) and China (wu‑wei) that equate excellence with virtue and effortless right action, and modern positive‑psychology concepts like flow, contrasting true flow with “junk flow.” The core mindset Johnson highlights is the “courage to care,” linking love, courage, and the hero’s role as protector, and explaining why caring deeply requires repeated bravery despite pain. He moves to goal‑setting, using the mountain metaphor and warning against the “arrival fallacy,” urging listeners to prioritize process over outcomes. Finally, he stresses consistency over intensity, citing James Clear’s atomic habits and the idea that true, heroic greatness is measured over decades through tiny, compounded actions. Throughout, Johnson references thinkers such as Cal Newport, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Tal Ben‑Shahar, and James Clear, and repeatedly invites listeners to apply these ideas, grab the free Philosopher’s Note, and explore his heroic.us platform for deeper resources.
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This is one of my all-time favorite books. Now, I might be a little biased as a guy with the Greek word for excellence tattooed to my right forearm, arete. In whatever it is you do, whether it's a craft or a relationship or parenting or a deadlift, he says, but approaching life with a desire to create mastery, to be your best in that experience. So our intention is to move from theory to practice to mastery so you can embody more excellence, not someday, But today. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we have a great book, The Way of Excellence by Brad Stolberg, subtitle, A Guide to True Greatness versus Performative Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. This is one of my all-time favorite books. Now, I might be a little biased as a guy with the Greek word for excellence tattooed to my right forearm, Arete. I named my book Arete, so I'm all about excellence. But, uh, this book is phenomenal. Absolutely love it. Highly recommend it. As always, we've got the Philosopher's Note. You can click below to get the note for free where I pull out some of my favorite big ideas. We're going to talk about 5 of them. Let's get to work. Now, Brad Stenberg has written a number of other great books. We featured Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox. You can check out those Philosopher's Notes in our archive, and I think I've done PNTV episodes on those as well back in the day. After reading this book, I got his 2 other books, um, The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change. They're both awesome. Notes coming soon, TV episode coming soon. So huge fan of Brad. And, uh, actually, I'll read Cal Newport. Cal Newport connected the 2 of us And thank you for that, Cal. Here's what he has to say about the book, sums it up perfectly. In a chaotic world filled with shallow distraction and performative busyness, Stolberg offers a path towards something deeper, the disciplined pursuit of mastery, competence, and mattering. Well said, Cal. All right, we got 5 ideas I'm excited to share with you. Remember, life-changing ideas are only life-changing if you live them. So our intention is to move from theory To practice to mastery so you can embody more excellence, not someday, but today. We're gonna talk about what excellence is. We're gonna talk about the foundations of excellence. We're gonna talk about the number one. Brad has 16 different mindsets and practices you can engage in. The number one is care, love. Then we're gonna talk about goals. You wanna emphasize process over outcomes. And we're gonna talk about the power of consistency. Then we're gonna talk about plus one, let's go. Where you actually engage this wisdom in your life today. So be thinking about how you can apply this wisdom to your life today as we go through this. So we're going to start by defining what excellence is. I'm actually going to read straight from the note where I quote Brad from the book. What is excellence? It's a combination of 2 things: mastery and mattering. Here's how Brad puts it. He says excellence is an ongoing process of growth and becoming that imbues life with meaning and vigor. It emerges from involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals. Excellence combines mastery and mattering. It is not something that is out of reach, but rather it is your birthright, a core part of your nature. So again, excellence, as Brad defines it, combines 2 things: mastery, the pursuit of you being your best self in whatever it is you do, whether it's a craft or a relationship or parenting or a deadlift, he says, but approaching life with a desire to create mastery, to be your best in that experience. And then mattering, where your values are aligned, you're doing something that matters in the world, you're contributing to something bigger than yourself. That's his definition of excellence. He talks about the foundations— check— he talks about the foundations of excellence, and this chapter blew my mind. He talks about the biological foundations of excellence, the psychological, and the philosophical. Each has its own little section in the chapter on foundations. Now, the biological part of it, he talks about the fact that excellence in its highest sense is billions of years old. Single-celled bacteria, when life first emerged on our planet, had a primitive moral instinct toward excellence. Even bacteria, a single-celled organism, billions of years ago moved toward that which was good for it and away from that which wasn't. It almost had like this moral impulse. Brad quotes a philosopher talking about that. Billions of years, a biological foundation for you to express your best self. Then we have the philosophical— take the billions of years ago. Now let's go to 2,500 years ago. Brad talks about both ancient Greek philosophy and ancient Chinese philosophy. In ancient Greek philosophy, they had a word for excellence. It was Arete. Again, tattooed my body with it. The name of my book is Arete: Activate Your Heroic Potential. In ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics—if you asked them how to live a good life, they would have answered you in a single word. They would have said, "Live with arete." We translate arete into English roughly as excellence or virtue, but it means something closer to being your best self. If in any given moment you're capable of being this, and you're actually being this, and there's a gap, it's in that gap in which regret, anxiety, disillusionment exists. You close that gap. You live with excellence, and you experience the summum bonum—is what Aristotle called it—the summum bonum—the greatest good of life, the ultimate purpose of life—which is what the Greeks called eudaimonia—to have a good soul. So by living with excellence, by living with virtuarete, you experience that highest good of life—eudaimonia—which we translate into English as flourishing. Way more than just happiness—a sense of joy and meaning and purpose. That you get through living with excellence. Now go east 2,500 years ago. That's what the ancient Greeks said. Go east to China, and this is what the ancient Chinese philosophers said. Whether it was Laozi or Confucius, they had different approaches, but they arrived at the same point. They wanted to help the individuals they counseled to live with excellence. When you live with excellence, you enter what they called wu wei, which is effortless. Right action, where you effortlessly do that which is best for you. And that was the ultimate game that they were playing 2,500 years ago. Again, ancient China, ancient Greece, same basic ideas. Excellence has deep philosophical roots. Then you go to psychology, and the modern positive psychology movement is founded essentially on the study of excellence or virtue. This is how we flourish. He talks about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. his ideas of flow and how we, when we engage in excellence, we feel that deep sense of presence, we're pushing ourselves just right, etc., etc., etc. And he juxtaposes that true flow with junk flow. So many of us spend so much time these days with junk flow. We're engaged, but it's scrolling. It's whether it's doom scrolling or Netflix binging or whatever, right? So these are the foundations of excellence. Biological, billions of years old, philosophical, and psychological. Powerful stuff. Then we move into— there's kind of the theoretical intellectual framing of what excellence is. Then we get into the practices. 16 different mindsets from discipline and being willing to fail and community, etc. The number one mindset, the number one thing we need Is the courage to care. We need the courage to go all in on creating a life of deep meaning and purpose and fulfillment if we want to live the way of excellence. Now, as I said in the note, when I read this section, I thought of one thing. I thought of the hero's secret weapon. I tattooed my body with the word heroic. When you live with excellence, in my mind, moment to moment to moment, you are heroic. We'll talk about that. A little bit more in our last idea on consistency. It's not about heroic days, it's about heroic decades showing up. But the word hero etymologically means protector. In ancient Greece, when they came up with the word for hero, they didn't pick a word that meant tough guy or killer of bad guys, they picked a word that meant protector. The hero has strength for 2. The victim complains about everything going on in the world, the hero does their best, lives with excellence to go serve and protect those that they love. The hero's secret weapon, the ancients told us, was love. It's love that gives us the wisdom, the discipline, the courage to go do what needs to get done, whether we feel like it or not. It's the first thing I thought about here. Then Brad connected the word courage and love together— care in his context— the word courage and love together via the ancient Latin etymology of the 2 words. As you may know, and I talk about this all the time, The word courage comes from the same Latin root as the word heart. So just as your heart pumps blood to your arms and legs and vital organs, courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. And love is the ultimate superpower for heroes. That's the essence of how we're going to live, or the core mindset we need to embrace, number one, if we want to live with excellence and show up as our best self consistently. The other thing you need to know is why you need courage to care is it hurts when you fail. When you go all in and you go for it and you don't succeed, it hurts, right? Stress goes with meaning. You don't get stressed about things you don't care about. So oftentimes, if you find yourself failing, you just give up. You quit caring. It takes courage to care, to put yourself on the line over and over And over again. I talk about Phil Stutz, who's got a great quote on timidity and the price of timidity when you don't have the courage to care and to go all in. That is mindset number 1. Then Brad has a great section on goals that is one of my favorite parts of the book as well. He talks about Tal Ben-Shahar, and Tal and Brad both use the same metaphor of a mountain So when you're setting a goal, you want to set the goal and have that mountain peak in sight, but then you want to remember to enjoy the journey. You want to enjoy the process. And Brad talks about the importance of prioritizing process over outcomes. Yes, you need a target. Yeah, you want to know that mountain peak you want to hit, but then you want to identify who you need to be and what specifically you need to do in order to hit That outcome, in order to, to reach the top of the mountain. Tolle coined a phrase called the arrival fallacy. It's the idea that you will be happy when you arrive at a certain spot. The problem with that is it's a fallacy. It's not true. You need to enjoy the process knowing that, yeah, yeah, you'll celebrate when you get there, but then there's that next peak, and you better be enjoying the process of getting to that peak. That's how we want to approach goals Again, consistency over intensity, which is actually our next idea, which was related to the same thing. Focus on the process to hit the outcomes and enjoy the journey. Our next idea and final idea for today is consistency. Brad throws some shade at performative greatness. The subtitle again is True Greatness. So how do we create true greatness in the world? True greatness isn't performative. We're not showing up and going all in for a day or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. True heroic greatness is measured over decades, not days. There's a great— this is actually funny, this little thing could also be a line. You want to see your trajectory in life? It's the consistent aggregation, compounding and aggregation over time of your little habits that's going to dictate where you wind up. I quote James Clear in Atomic Habits. He talks about atomic habits. Little, little things that you do over an extended period of time are gonna create your destiny. If you're living with excellence, if you're consistently closing the gap between who you're capable of being and who you're actually being, moment to moment to moment to moment, you have an opportunity to create a life of deep meaning, deep excellence, deep mastery and mattering, to go back to the definition of what it is. We talked about the biological, philosophical, psychological underpinnings. Arete Uwe. We talked about the number 1 mindset, the courage to care. We talked about goals, process over outcome. Now we've got consistency. Heroic greatness, true greatness is about decades vis-à-vis days. What was the number 1 thing that jumped out for you from this great book? Think about that. Think about how you can apply it to your life. And, uh, if this resonated with you, I think you will absolutely love the book. Go get it today. You will thank me. And don't forget to pick up your Philosopher's Note. Click on the link to get more on that. I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Brad, thanks again. You rock. Hope you have a great day. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us. That's heroic.us, where you'll find the full library of wisdom I've created over the last 20 years, as well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day 1. We are all in. Let's go.
