The Passion Paradox with Brad Stulberg

Hi, guys, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Brad Stolberg about his great new book, the Passion Paradox. We featured Brad's first book that he wrote with Steve Magnus called Peak Performance on a pntv. And I didn't know about this book until Brad reached out and said, hey, I think you might enjoy it. I immediately got it. Literally got it on Friday, read it on Saturday, did a note on it on Sunday, Monday. We're filming this on a Tuesday. Or is today Tuesday or Wednesday?

My sense of it is Wednesday. Wednesday, Wednesday. It felt like Tuesday. As you were. I had to like double calibrate myself there.

That's how great this week has been so far. I've already lost track of the day. Here we are on Wednesday. Absolutely love the book. Brad again loved Peak Performance, where you talked about how to avoid burnout by training our recovery. And then I love how you guys pulled the thread even further and said, look, if we want to live a life of passion, which is the source of meaning, but can also be the source of a lot of challenging emotional experiences, then we've got to master the paradox. So thanks for taking the time and thanks for writing a couple of great books.

Yeah, thank you, Brian. I really like what you do, so I'm glad to be chatting with you.

Right on, man. All right, well, let's start at the top. I always love to chat with our authors about where we came up with the title. So the Passion Paradox. Tell us about that.

So I think the best way to get to the title of the book is to go back to the genesis of the book itself. So, as you mentioned, my collaborative partner, Steve Magnus and I, we had written our first book, which was called Peak Performance, quite quickly, and we had sent the draft manuscript to our editor. And Steve lives in Houston, I live in Oakland, So we don't often get to be shoulder to shoulder. We had planned out time to be together shoulder to shoulder, to go through edits to finalize the manuscript. And Steve came down to Oakland for a 10 day stretch. Our editor had some stuff come up and was running behind and wasn't able to get us the edits. He wrote us a pretty brief note saying that something came up. The manuscript looks great. There's not much I'm going to need to do, but I'm not going to have the edits for you. Our first time, Steve and I, working with a major publisher, basically just got the green light on our book. Was told there's not going to be much to do instead of like taking a 10 day vacation. We were happy for about 30 minutes. And then we looked at ourselves and we're like, well, crap, what are we going to do? We've got this time. And then we stepped back and we asked ourselves, well, why do we feel the need to keep driving? Like, why can't we just relax and enjoy the fact that our first book has been accepted and take this time to really just kick back? And that got us reflecting on our childhoods and in young adulthoods and how growing up in both of our respective lives, we were always told how driven we were, how passionate we were, how we can't be content, and how we push, push, push. And to us this was just another example of that urge to push, push, push. Now we're a little bit older and perhaps a little bit wiser. So we stepped back and we asked ourselves, well, is this a good thing that we can't just be content and that we want to just push, push, push? Is it a bad thing? Is it a little bit of both? Does it depend on the day? Does it depend on what it's aimed towards? And we had our cake and ate it too. So like, the genesis of the book was really exploring our own drive and passion, realizing that it's not always a good thing, but it can be a great thing. Hence the passion paradox. That passion is a gift or a curse, and it really depends on how well you master that paradox.

Hmm, that's awesome. I love the frame there. Then I love how you guys walk us through the etymology of the word and how it was originally used from the place of suffering to the place that we understand it today. Can you give us a quick overview of there and then we'll kind of drill into some of the practical ideas.

Yeah, totally. So neither Steve nor I is super religious, so we both heard of the Passion of the Christ, but mainly from Mel Gibson's movie. We didn't really know the detail there. So we went back and like you said, we looked at the history of the word and passion came comes from the Latin root passio, which means to suffer. And for the first about 1300 years of the Word's existence, passion was exclusively tied up with suffering. In the 14, 15, 1600s, it started to be used more in a romantic sense still at first tied up in suffering, like the suffering of longing for someone. But then it became more of an erotic passion. So I really desire something. It wasn't until the 1960s, 70s, 80s that passion started to be used as this more globally word, excuse me, more broadly used word for work, for activities. You're passionate about your career, you're passionate about your work. So what's interesting is this word that for 95% of its life was associated with suffering. Suddenly we're using in this really positive sense all the time. But there still is an element of passion. I'm sure we'll get to this, that if you don't control your passion, it can control you and lead to suffering.

Yeah, I love that. Well, that brings us perfectly to the distinction you make between the healthy and less healthy versions of passion. Can you give us the overview on that?

For sure. So two kinds of passion. The first kind is what we call harmonious passion, and that is when you love an activity because you love doing the thing. So you are an athlete, you run. You love running for the sake of running. You are a writer, you love to write. You are a parent, you love to parent. There is a dark side of passion, which is called obsessive passion, where you become more passionate about the external results of what you're doing than the thing itself. So you become more passionate about winning gold medals than running. You become more passionate about having your book be a best seller than writing. This has been in the news lately. You become more passionate about your kid getting into a great school than about parenting. There is a strong association with harmonious passion, the good kind of passion in peak performance, fulfillment, meaning in life. There's an equally strong association with obsessive passion, the bad kind of passion in depression, anxiety, and cheating. Some really notable examples, as I mentioned, it's been in the news is these parents that committed pretty massive fraud to get their kids into great colleges. That's such an example of obsessive passion. You're no longer passionate about being a good parent. You're passionate about having the external validation of your kid going to an Ivy League school. Lance Armstrong is another great example of this. Someone that started out with tons of harmonious, passionate, loved the sport of cycling, but over time became so passionate about winning and external validation that he ended up cheating.

Yeah, again, so good. And I love the fact that there is a new research field on the psychology of passion. You guys walk us through that wonderfully. Again, obsessive passion vis a vis the harmonious passion. I also love the way you connect the. What is it, 78% of the people think that there's a fit kind of mindset.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's actually to destiny. I love how you connected that to the love side of Things as well.

Totally. And so I like to say that there's three areas where what we think we know about passion or what the countervailing wisdom is, is not correct. So the first is that, like, passion is always a good thing. And as I just said, passion can be a great thing if it's harmonious, but passion can be a pretty negative force if it's obsessive. The second big misnomer on passion is that you find a passion that you magically just stumble onto this career or this activity that feels perfect from the get go. Something like 78% of people believe that you just should find your passion, you should settle into this career that just feels perfect. What the research shows is the total opposite. Very, very few people find a passion like that. You actually have to develop a passion over time. One of the foremost things that gets in the way of people being passionate is they have this expectation that they're going to find something that's perfect. So they get stuck in this seeking mode where they're just searching for this perfect thing and perfect doesn't exist right away. You have to develop perfect. And as you were saying, this parallels the research on love almost to a t. Something like 80% of people believe that they have a soulmate. But the research shows that if you think you have a soulmate, you're less likely to end up in a happy relationship than if you don't. Because the same thing, like you have this illusory bar of something being perfect from the get go, so you keep on searching for this thing that doesn't exist instead of building. And the same thing is very much true with passion. And then the third misnomer, and maybe we'll get into it. I'll just state all three right now. Is if you look over the kind of optimization personal growth literature of the last 20 years, you'd be hard pressed to find two more popular themes. Then find and follow your passion on the one hand and be balanced on the other hand. But if the definition of passion is the relentless pursuit of something and the definition of balance is kind of all things in equal proportion, how do you reconcile balance with passion? And the answer is, you don't.

Yep. Yeah. And you have a chapter dedicated to that on balance is an illusion you, which we'll briefly talk about. And then to go back to the. What do we call it? The fit mindset.

Yeah, the fit mindset is that mindset that I'm just going to find something that's a perfect fit, whereas the development mindset is I'M going to follow my interests and I'm going to let good enough be good enough and try to build something out over time that then becomes great.

Yeah, I love it. And one of the big reasons why we want to lean away from the fit mindset in either passion or the destiny equivalent in relationships is the moment it becomes hard or challenging or things don't go right. We use that as evidence that, well, this must not be the thing or this must not be the one for me. And then we give up and hop from relationship to relationship or from quote, passion to passion. And I just love that distinction you made because I've certainly experienced both relationships and in my.

Absolutely. And it's such a breath of fresh air, especially for younger people and younger professionals. A lot of the feedback I've gotten from readers is that they just feel validated, that they're tired of seeking this perfect thing, whether it's in love or in an activity. And just the ability to say, hey, it doesn't have to be perfect all the time, and that's okay, allows people to have the patience to weather those tough times. Because I'm more interested in what's perfect over 30 years.

Yep.

Not what's perfect in this very moment.

Yeah. You talk a lot about feelings and how we get misguided by that immediate emotional rush of it feels right. Then we give up when it gets hard. We don't actually experience the true eudaimonic joy that comes from flourishing by sticking with something. It's funny because one of the frames we use in our work with our general community and with the coaches we're working with to certify in our optimized approach is to see those challenges as not only are they not signs that something's wrong, a little awkward there, but they're actually indicators, reverse indicators that something's right. That you're willing to lean into something pretty big. Right. And then you're willing to give your life to it over an extended period of time. And it doesn't make you want to jump out and go to the next thing. It makes you want to dig in even deeper and give yourself in a meaningful way. So I love the way you juxtapose the fit mindset with what we'll talk about in a moment, which is really the mastery mindset. Right. Where process and action consistently becomes more important than the fleeting emotional highs we may experience.

Totally. And I think it's important to mention to have good intellectual integrity here, that there is a risk of sticking in things for too long. That you should quit. I think the vast majority of people don't make that mistake. They make the mistake of quitting too soon.

Yeah. And of course. Yeah. And you make that point as well, that quitting is again, longer discussion, intellectual credibility there of. Yes. And to everything. Right, right. For the sake of brevity, then moving to the fit mindset, what do we juxtapose that with? If we want to create the harmonious passion, what do we need to be thinking about?

Yeah. So it's two things. The first is what I would call or not what I would call what the researchers call a development mindset of passion. And that simply means that you lower the bar from love at first sight. This is the perfect fit to. This interests me. I'm curious about this. I'm going to pursue my interests. Just that initial act of lowering the bar allows you to stick in something because you're not holding it to being perfect all the time. Steve, my co author and I, we build on this to something that we call the mastery mindset. And the mastery mindset is a way to approach the things that one is passionate about in a way that is sustainable, keeps them towards harmonious passion and keeps them away from burnout. And the mastery mindset has a couple of core components. Does it make sense to go through those right now?

Oh, let's do it. I was going to ask you six of them from my recollection and then I was going to ask you to share some of your favorites. This is my favorite part. I love the book. This is my favorite part of the book of really drilling into the mastery orientation and mindset.

Okay. For sure. So the first. And I'll even combine some of these for brevity's sake. So the first is this notion of having your drive come from within, focusing on the process over results. So what that means is that you want to be motivated to do your craft or do your activity because you love the joy that you get from doing it, not just because you want that carrot or that medal or that promotion. Now, no one I've met is 100% process, like all humans care about results. It's totally normal to feel good after you succeed. It's totally normal to want to succeed externally. Where I come out on this is you just want the majority of your drive to be coming from within. Even if it's just 51%, it's probably okay. Ideally it's 60, 70, 80. Now, this is so much easier to talk about than to actually do. So the golden rule. And in the book we write the 24 hour rule. I actually prefer the 48 hour rule. The actual time limit is kind of arbitrary. It's the concept that matters. And the concept is this. After you have either a really tough defeat or a huge success, you should give yourself 24 to 48 hours to really celebrate the win, if you win, and to feel the joy that comes with it and to feel good. Or if you lose, give yourself 24 to 48 hours to feel like crap and to kind of moan and oh, how could this happen to me? But then after 48 hours, get back to doing the work itself. There's something about doing the work itself that is so pure, that is so much more connected with that eudaimonic form of happiness and meaning that it literally doesn't give the neural connections in your brain time to wire in a way that makes you so connected to this external outcome. So it's, oh, my book's a best seller. I'm going to have a party. I'm going to go out, have a beer, order a pizza, whatever it is. Feel like I'm on top of the world, feel like I'm the man, feel like I'm the woman. But then tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to start writing again. Because the more time I spend clicking to look at all the reviews in my book, the more I'm going to get hooked on that feedback. Same thing. In the opposite case, my book's not a best seller. I'm super bummed out. I'm not going to repress the negative emotions. I'm going to feel them. But I'm only going to do it for a day and then I'm going to get back to work. Same thing. You don't want that inertia of external result to really pick up.

I love it. And I love your distinction because it's funny, I actually, in the book, you didn't say the 51%. And in my note reflecting on your book, I actually shared 51% in my work with my coach, a guy named Phil Stutts. He says we need to maintain a 51% at least to 49% relationship between what he calls spirituality and material.

Very similar.

So same basic idea. So I just loved your perspective on that and how you just reflected on it now.

Cause it's hard. Like again, it gets back to this searching for perfect. You know, if you live in a monastery setting where you're in this beautiful setting in nature and there is nothing to crave because there are no external results. You're not reading the newspaper. You're not doing work that is necessarily being evaluated outside of the monastery. It's a little bit easier to get to 90% dry from within. Harmonious. But if you live in the world where you've got social media, you've got dashboards at work, you've got people commenting on your work, you've got friends that you want to please, of course you're going to care about that stuff. You just don't want that stuff to be like, you know, like the collar and the leash that's pulling you around. You want to be in control. And I love the 51, 49% because I think it's attainable. And I even say most of the time, like, I'm an author, when I have a book come out, there's times when I'm like, 80% external. I get the dopamine rush. I want to know how the sales rank is going to. But I realize that that's happening, and I kind of force myself back to the work because that gets me back on track.

Yeah, that's awesome. And that brings us back to the process. I'd love to hear your reflections on that a little bit more. It was funny because I was reading the book and I'm like, oh, yeah. And I'm thinking of George Leonard. And then you start talking about George Leonard in Mastery, you know, So I just love that. Bring some of his wisdom to.

I'm so glad you're saying that. So if I were to try to embody any writer in my own work, someone that I look up to, it's George Leonard. Him and Robert Persig, who wrote Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. So anyways, that's a little tangent. So I'm on the same page with you, man. I have the utmost respect for George Leonard.

Well, so, you know, literally, I'm reading your book, and I'm thinking. And I'm like, I'm literally thinking of George Leonard before you got to it. So you're channeling him in some way.

I love that. I'm so happy to hear that. Oh, that's great.

That's so cool.

Seriously, in six months of doing interviews like this, that makes me feel better than anything I've heard. Right on. Yeah, me too. Okay. So the process. So the focus on the process. This is really. Again, this is something that intellectually and spiritually sounds great but is very hard to do. So I think it's worth making that distinction. And maybe we'll spend A minute talking about what it is and what sounds so great and then actually how you do it. So this notion of focusing on the process over results, it means being present for what you're doing, controlling the things that you can control, giving them your all, and judging yourself based on the effort that you give to those things. Which is very different than being super focused on achieving a goal, judging yourself whether or not you achieve that goal. Because there are so many things that can impact an external outcome that if you were to say, my favorite example is a marathon runner, you could do all this perfect training and you could be hell bent. I'm breaking three hours for the marathon. And on the day of your race, there could be 30 mile per hour winds. There's no way you're going to run three hours because the conditions, if you are so focused on that outcome, you would try to crush yourself, get the goal, blow up in the race, and then maybe you go back and say, my training didn't work. That's not true. It was just windy. And that's a real extreme example. But this happens all the time in the workplace. There's politics, in relationships, people have their own stuff that comes up in creativity. Like, you don't know. When Steve and I released our first book, the President Donald Trump had just like struck down health care. Guess what? Like, not that many people were interested in reading our book that week because there was huge national news happening. So all that stuff's outside of our control. So if we had an outcomes mindset, we would have been on a crazy emotional roller coaster and would have probably given up this craft. But because we really tried to hold ourselves to practice what we preach and focus on the process, on the things we control, on doing the work itself, on deriving happiness and joy from doing the work itself, not only are we able to stick to it, but we're a lot more happy and emotionally stable now. It kind of gets back to what I was saying with that drive from within. So that sounds great. Everyone that I ever talk about this can nod their head and say, that makes sense. But then you go out in this world where you've got notifications on your phone saying, oh, hey, look at me. Comment, retweet, like external validation. You've got all this various measurement across the board. So it's like, how do you maintain a process focus in a world that is so oriented towards outcomes? And that's a real big challenge.

Yeah. And the first step is recognizing the challenge of it. Seeing the intrinsic vis a vis extrinsic. Motivating factors. And then again, one of the things that we do a lot in our work is cultivating what we call emotional stamina via a consistent protocol. So we're really big on AM bookends, PM bookends and energizing yourself so you can show up. And then we actually go even further and say the worse you feel, the more committed you are to the protocol.

Yeah.

And of course, the better you feel. To your point on the 24 hour. I don't even give us 24 hours. Yeah, celebrate it. But let's see where we are.

And I love it. Something that we write about in the book is this notion that mood follows action. So that's like where I love like what you're talking about. I think we're on the same exact page. Like these bookend protocols is again, in a world that is so externally outcome driven, it's really hard to feel your way into this mindset or to think your way into it. Sometimes you just have to know the actions that are good for you and.

Then take those actions so consistently without even thinking about it. You just do it.

So a prime example back to your like 51% spirituality, 49% material is every morning for most people that are wired with normal human brains, it is a lot more exciting and the drive is there to check your social media or to check your email before Maybe you spend 10 minutes meditating or 10 minutes in contemplative practice or 10 minutes being totally present for your child, 10 minutes walking your dog, whatever it is. You don't have to want to meditate or walk your dog or be present for your child. You just show up and you force yourself to do it over and over again. And then what happens is the mood follows action and over time that's what you actually want to do. I think the same thing is true for the process. As a writer, I use the example of social media because I have to be on social media to share my work. If I were just to go with what my short term brain was telling me, I'd spend all day just refreshing my Twitter. But I know that's not good for me. I take actions that are separate and then my mood follows those actions.

Yeah, I love it. Everything about that. And we are on the exact same page in all of these regards. We talk about pre input wins in the morning. So encouraging meditation, encouraging the deep work. To go to Cal Newport and talk about him in the note because his so good they can't ignore you reflects some of the themes that you Came to with the passion vis a vis craftsman mindset of just show up and be a master craftsman. But this idea of showing up and doing work that is meaningful on our craft before we have inputs. But then we also talk about the fact that your day started the night before when you have the discipline to do what we call a digital sunset. The sun goes down, your electronics go off and you're more inspired to get up and live with eudaimonic joy than you are to hedonically please yourself via whatever continued input stream, et cetera. So anyway, I love the.

Yeah, man. Another great analogy is like junk food. So if you surround yourself with junk food all the time, you're going to eat junk food and feel of shit. Sometimes what you need to do is like not buy the junk food. And if you surround yourself with wholesome foods the first day or two, you might be craving junk food, but by the end of the first week you're gonna be like, I feel so good. Why would I ever want to have junk food in my house? It's the same thing with inputs.

Yeah, exactly. Then we go to Seneca who said how much better to go on a course and have the discipline such that what is best for you is what you most enjoy. Right. And that just takes time. But it's exactly what you guys talk about. I love it all. Talk to us about the importance of failure. It was another really big part of your mastery process.

Yeah. So this notion of embracing acute failure for chronic gains. So again, if you take a George Leonard type focus on the process view, you are not concerned with your. I shouldn't say you're not concerned. You are not so concerned with your performance today, tomorrow, this week, this month, maybe even this year. Your concerns with your performance over your lifetime. And the definition of performance being growth, improvement, becoming stronger, becoming wiser, not selling books. Nowhere in the mastery mindset is there going to be some super external goal. It's about mastering a craft. All right, so you fail two ways to look at failure. The first way is, shit, I failed. My self worth is not good. I'm not good at this thing. It's a reflection on me. I'm going to quit. That's like one extreme. The other extreme is failure doesn't matter at all. Like, whatever, I'm just going to get back to work. Neither of those extremes are good. The way that you want to look at failure in the mastery mindset is not as this like ego diminishing self worth destroying event, but more so just as information and the information being huh? Like something went wrong. Let me evaluate this. Was it something in the external conditions that I couldn't have controlled? If so, no need to change my approach. Was it something with my approach? If so, then I should change my approach again. I think that the clearest example of this is from an athletics context. If you're a weightlifter and you miss a set of squats, well, you don't say, oh, I'm a terrible weightlifter, I should never weightlift again. You say, huh? Like I wasn't ready for that stress load yet. Let me go evaluate my training and see how to tweak it. We should be doing the same thing in our relationships, in our intellectual work and our creative pursuits, really across the board. We shouldn't be looking at failure as these like, yes, no positive, negative events, but we should be looking at them more as milestones or markers along a longer path.

I love it. And then ultimately as data. So it's just data coming in. And one of the phrases we use a lot is Alani Basham, the mental toughness rifle shooter, gold medal winning rifle shooter, who wrote a book called With Winning in Mind. And he says when you hit the target, and for him it's literal target, you know, as a rifle shooter, then you celebrate and say, that's like me, you feast on your win. In the event that you miss the target dramatically, then it's a needs work what within my process needed work such that I can hit the target with more, you know, higher likelihood next time. So then it's just neutral data. We don't need to run the emotional algorithms of something's wrong with me fixed mindset style, which you kind of allude to Carol Dweck's work as well. And that, that power of just it's all data. Let's have an experimental master's mindset get a little better each step.

Totally. Because it's like. So I approach this, I'm much more of like a fulfillment first guy performance second. Even though my first book is called Peak Performance because I think when you're fulfilled, your long term performance is the best. So these two things that are like, they're not juxtaposed, but where I was going with this is like, we're all going to die anyways. And if you fail at some short point in time, the last thing you're going to want to do is spend any more time than you need to commiserating about it because you're going to die anyway. So you might as well move on from it. And get back on the horse towards mastery and growth. Because, like, that's the ultimate goal is in the amount of time you have here. How can you grow? How can you have mastery? How can you have fulfillment? How can you positively impact other people? And nothing about, like, being down about a failure works in service of any of that.

Yeah, it's so good. And then you talk a lot about eudaimonia, which is another parallel we have. This is the first lesson in everything we do is eudaimonology. And we jokingly say that they actually misnamed psychology, which is the study of the soul.

But.

But what it should have been called is eudaimonology, the study of a good soul, Literally, etymologically. So I love your emphasis on, look, the summum bonum, the highest good, is actualizing our potential. And then in that context, it's literally just all data, like, okay, this worked. Let me do that again. This didn't. What about my behavior is instructive such that I can achieve the ultimate goal, and then there's no positive and negative. And then we come to memento mori, remembering death as one of the cornerstone practices of the next idea I wanted to chat about, which is self awareness. So the importance of. I jokingly say that your secret sauce for harmonious passion, you guys, is, number one, mastery mindset, and number two secret sauce is self awareness. So talk to us about the importance of that. Then we can talk about some of the practices.

Yeah. Love it. I think that you're spot on, and I would completely agree with you. All right. So anyone that's ever been really passionate about something, whether it's another person or a job or a sport or some endeavor, knows that when you are in the grips of passion, it is. If you have blinders on, all you can think about is the object of your affection, your desire, what you want to do. This is in an extreme. It's an eighth grader having their first crush or it's an Olympian training for a gold medal. In the heat of training, the rest of the world disappears. You are eyes on the prize. That can be a beautiful thing. That can be a wonderful high. You can get the most out of yourself. The risk is that if your blinders are on, you lose the ability to see anything else that's happening around you. The most interesting research in the entire book to me is by a neuroscientist, Mark Lewis, who has shown that if you look at the brains of someone that is suffering from an eating disorder, and you look at the brain of an entrepreneur, or someone that's pursuing a passion, they're actually quite similar because an individual with an eating disorder, they look in the mirror and they don't see somebody that is gaunt and skinny, they see somebody that is fat. An entrepreneur or someone pursuing an Olympic medal, they don't look in the mirror and see that 99.9% of people fail. They look in the mirror and they see, oh, I'm going to succeed. So it's literally like a loss. You almost need a loss of self awareness to be able to pursue and achieve great things. But the downside of that is that when you are pursuing a passion with single minded focus and clarity, you can forget about family, you can forget about basic health, you can forget about hobbies, all these other things can fall away. And if you lose your self awareness or your ability to kind of take a more objective view of what's happening, that is when passion can really lead to immense suffering, it can lead to the end of marriages, the end of relationships, to poor health, or in the harmonious obsessive dichotomy, it can lead to obsessive passion because you're no longer, you're losing sight of all the tasks that you're taking to get to this goal. You start to cheat, you start to take shortcuts, you start to experience terrible anxiety but not do anything about it because you're so caught up in this thing that you can't see outside the tornado.

Yeah, I love it. And I love the passage or the couple sentences where you say, mindlessly living with a passion can be extremely harmful and destructive. Mindfully living with a passion can be the key to a life well lived. And then the key to that mindfulness is the self awareness. You give us a number of practices. You say the favorite is actually the memento mori idea of remembering that we're going to die. I also loved your third person perspective of self.

Yeah, giving advice to a friend. Yeah, I love that.

Super cool. Yeah, the research on that. Can you talk to us about both of those briefly?

Yeah. So I'll start with the giving advice to a friend. So that's really simple. It's hard to follow the advice, but it's simple to do. So if you're in the midst of a really tough, emotionally driven situation, it's really helpful to be like, okay, if my good friend was in this exact same situation, what advice would I give him? Or her? All right, so I work with a lot of athletes. So the example I like to use is an athlete that's coming back from an injury that's going to force him or herself to go work out. Because they're so passionate about their sport and they're worried that they're falling behind in their training, and they're literally hobbling out the door to go to the gym to do a workout. And if they were to say, imagine that my training partner, my close friend, is in the same condition I'm in right now, hobbling out the door to force themselves to work out, what would I tell him or her to do? And without fail, they all say, oh, I'd be like, dude, take one more day off. Better to miss a day now than like a month later and you'll be fine. So then it's like, well, then why are you going to the gym? Why don't you follow that advice? Same thing when people have professional failures. It's like, oh, you know, this stinks. I should consider a new job. All this. Well, if you put your friend in that situation, nine times out of ten you're gonna tell that friend, like, why don't you just give it a day or two and, like, see how you feel about it then? So we're often a lot wiser with the advice that we give to our friends than ourselves, because, again, with ourselves, we get so caught up in what's happening, we can't see the bigger picture. You can also do some third person journaling. So if the exercise of giving advice to a friend is hard, you could write about your situation in the third person and then read it. And again, that helps you evaluate it a little bit more objectively, because that's what this is all about, is trying to bring some wise objectivity to these emotionally fraught situations.

And what's so cool about it is the intellectual rigor with which you share that wisdom. In the book, this is scientifically validated. If you bring people into a lab and you randomly split them into two different groups, one that's doing it in the first person, the other that's doing in the third person. You'll see. I forget the phrase what it was, but a wiser perspective.

Yeah, that's it. It's wise perspective. And the example they give is, again, like, I like these examples because they really help drive these concepts home. The example they give is they have people, like, imagine that their spouse cheated on them with their friend. And the person that does not journal in third person, they, like, go try to, like, beat up and kill the friend and, like, commit a crime. And the person that does do the journaling in third person, they like take a much more wise approach. Like they talk to their wife, they involve lawyers if they're getting divorced, but they're not like, oh, I'm gonna go kill the fucker. Excuse my French. Because like, they've taken that time to have this wiser perspective by zooming out of the situation. Again, that's an extreme example, but I think that you are deciding whether or not to quit a job or whether or not it makes sense to go all in on your startup for six more months at the expense of being present for your family. It can be really helpful to do some of this third person evaluation.

Yeah, I loved it. It's a big idea. And I hadn't seen the research behind that before, so I appreciate you sharing that. And then you also talk about awe, which I love. Just getting into nature and seeing something bigger than yourself as perspective gathering. And then tell us about why the remembering our death is your favorite one as a practice in self awareness.

I just think it's the most. I think it's the strongest. I think there's nothing that helps you figure out in the moment what's really meaningful and what you want to be spending your most precious limited resources on, which are your time, energy and attention than viscerally remembering that you're going to die. I try to read a memoir of somebody that is in the dying process once a year. I don't like doing it. It makes me uncomfortable, sad. But when I finish those books, I have like this crystal clear view and feeling in my bones of what I actually want to be doing. I never finish those books and say I want to tweet more or I want to spend more time on Facebook, finish those books, saying like, I want to minimize distractions and write and be with my family and spend time in nature. And it just so happens that when I do those three things, I'm the happiest and most fulfilled.

Which brings us right back to Eudaimonia and the ultimate game that we're playing. I just interviewed Ryan Holiday and I.

Oh yeah, it's what a Small World. I'm interviewing him tonight at a live event here in the Bay Area.

No way. Seriously? Say hi to him for me.

Yeah, he's a great dude.

Yeah. So his memento mori coin is often on my desk and he's sending me a ring, you know, and obviously that's a huge part of his practice and the whole stillness is key. Perspective, daily stoic, et cetera. So that is awesomely small world. So then kind of wrapping up the discussion on the book again. Thank you. The Passion Paradox. Where can they learn more about the book? And then I want to ask you some more personal questions.

Yeah, for sure. So the book's website is www.passionparadoxbook.net and then if you just Google Passion Paradox in my name, it's available on Amazon, it's available at independent bookshops. You should be able to get it anywhere you get books.

That's awesome. And Brad Stolberg is spelled S T U L B E R G. So then let's talk a little bit more just about your own personal practices. So our big thing is to help people optimize their lives, which comes from the Latin optimus, which means the best. So we talk about the best version of you. We connect that actually to Aristotle's eudaimon, which is a good soul. And the third person perspective. For me, the ultimate one is what would your daimon tell this little version of you? You know that, that inspired version. But when you approach your life, what are your core? We're all about the fundamentals. What are your core fundamental practices that keep you plugged in to something bigger than you? We often talk about eating and moving and sleeping and other basic practices. But does anything come to mind for you as essential to you staying plugged in?

You know, it's interesting. Like the basics work, so I was going to go to those three things. So I think the most important for me is having a regular physical practice. And a big part of my physical practice is that it's completely unplugged. So I'm not like listening to podcast or texting while I'm exercise. I'm not wearing like a fitness tracker. I'm just training my body based on how it feels with the help of a coach to guide me so I don't get reckless. But a daily physical practice is super important. It varies between like typical strength and conditioning, weight training, and then hiking. So I try to get out and hike two days a week and I'm in the gym four days a week and then I take one day off how I feel my body super important. I try to eat what I consider a very healthy diet that nourishes me. But I'm not super hard on myself either. So I don't beat myself up for indulging in moderation sleep. Super important with a 19 month old. It's funny, my take on sleep is the same, but now I add in one thing. So in my first book, there's a whole chapter on the science and the importance of sleep. And yes, sleeping is the most important thing. And if you don't sleep, the worst thing you can do is freak out that you didn't sleep. So I learned that having a little boy because at first when he'd keep me up, he'd be like, oh, crap, I didn't sleep. This is so terrible. And all of those, like, negative thoughts were just, like, additional, like, arrows pinging me. So now sleep is still super important. But when my kid wakes me up, I'm like, all right. Like, I'll get through the day without sleeping. And then community, I think, which. Which it's kind of sad that, like, it's had to become such an intentional practice in this day and age, because even just I'm. I'm 33. So, like, when I was growing up 20 years ago, like, you hung out with your neighbors and you had family, friends, and I grew up in a small neighborhood where everyone walked to school together. And today it feels like you have to be a little bit more intentional about creating that, like, deep community. So I go out of my way to make sure that I'm spending time in a meaningful way with friends, both in person and then in the online communities I cultivate to also be a part of that in a meaningful way, not just in 280 characters.

Yeah, right on, man. All of that is so great. We can talk about it for quite a while. And we will talk about some of that, by the way, in our chat after. But then the final point here is we're big on going from optimize equals optimist equals best equals you, daimon. So you're personally flourishing. But for us, the ultimate game is to give yourself to the world, to give your greatest gifts and greatest service to the world. The word we use for that is hero. And again, I lean into the classic Greek etymology of the word, which literally means protector. So a hero for them meant protector. And for us, we say their secret weapon is love and compassion, and they're willing to do the hard work to be the best versions of themselves in service to the world, etc. But I'd love to hear your thought on what it means to you to be a modern hero.

Mm, love that question. Yeah, so it's interesting. I would also go back to the Greeks. I'm sure that you've come across this word. There's a word arete.

Arete.

But, yeah, you gotta get out.

By the way, if I had to summarize our entire philosophy in one word, I say it's arete.

But before you yeah, so there you go. So this notion of arete, which is achieving excellence, but having excellence caught up with virtue. So excellence is not being the VP of a company or a best selling author. Excellence is getting in touch with what's deepest and truest to you and expressing that outward to the world, we're all different. Everyone has a unique experience. But I think that when people take the time to peel back the layers, the common threads that tend to be deepest in all of us are love, compassion, awakening wisdom. So I think it's really trying to express those values through you. And whether you do that in creative artistic pursuits, whether you do that by showing up to a meeting and giving everyone in the room the benefit of the doubt, whether you do that by talking with a cashier instead of staring at your phone, all those things are equal. There's a line at the end of another book that I love. I don't want to misquote it, but I know you're a book guy. Me too. Middlemarch, which is a beautiful novel by George Eliot. And let me get you the last line in this book here. All right, so George Eliot writes for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owning to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life in rest in unvisited tombs. And I think what George Eliot is saying there is like the good of the world just depends on these small acts of kindness, compassion, love. And like that. Unhistoric, but heroic. Wow.

Beautiful. Absolutely love it. And I love the connection from eudaimonia to Aristotle's number one admonition, which is, well, how do you live with Eudaimonia arete, which is translated again as virtue or excellence, but when not in the abstract, but moment to moment to moment in the most mundane micro moments in which we can live with love, compassion, creativity, presence, etc. Absolutely beautiful. Thank you for sharing. We talked about where they can find the book. How about you? What's the most direct way for them to connect with you?

Yeah, so trying to practice what I preach. I'm limiting my social media, so I am on Twitter and I engage there. I'm Stahlberg. I don't do Instagram or Facebook. And then my website is just my name www.bradstahlberg.com and most of my writing is on my website. Links to the various essays I've written to the books and whatnot.

Right on. Well, again, congrats. On the two first books, Peak Performance, the Passion Paradox. Looking forward to the next ones. So happy to be connected.

Yeah, thank you, Brian. Really enjoyed this chat.