Brad Stulberg: Ditch The Hedonic Treadmill For Sustainable Success

Ambition is laudable. But hustle culture extracts a cost. True, sustainable success demands groundedness. Here today to elaborate is Brad Stulberg—a writer and coach specializing in human performance and well-being. Returning for his third appearance (you can check out episodes #293 & #429). Brad is the author of three books: Peak Performance, The Passion Paradox, and his latest, the subject of today’s exchange, The Practice of Groundedness. His work has appeared in the NYT, WSJ, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Forbes, GQ, TIME, & Outside. He is the co-founder of The Growth Equation newsletter & podcast alongside elite track & field coach Steve Magness. This is a conversation about striving–not out of compulsion–but from a place of wholeness and love. It’s a state of mind and action Brad calls groundedness. In addition, we discuss in great detail the principles upon which to build sustainable success and a life grounded in meaning and fulfillment. Trigger Warning: We discuss a few intense mental health topics including suicidal ideation—in fairly graphic detail. So sensitive viewers please be advised. This conversation is overflowing with evidence-and-experience-based, practical, and actionable life counsel. You can also watch the magic transpire on YouTube. As always, the podcast streams free on Apple Podcasts & Spotify. Pick up Rich’s lates book VOICING CHANGE Vol. II HERE. For full show notes and to read more about Terry, go HERE. Enjoy the show! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Brad Stulberg?

  Everything in the culture tells us not to accept reality. You know, you don't feel good, there's a substance for that. You can go buy some stuff, you can tweet, you can post. But of course, if you can't accept where you are, then you're never going to get where you want to go. I don't think that you can truly be strong unless you are vulnerable. Vulnerability should very rarely feel good in the moment, especially if it's with other people. Like, that for me is the barometer. If you are doing vulnerability as a means to an end, or like you're scheming, then you're probably actually doing yourself more harm than good. For people like you and I, I think it's so important that when you pick a goal, the steps that you have to get there should involve building community.

• 0:45Brad Stulberg?

  So like you bake it into your work, but try to make more and more things a team game, or a game of relationships, or where you're building a community as a part of this pursuit that you have in life as a practice. And you got to show up. And some days are better than others, and you just get on the path, and you fall off the path, and you get back on, and you repeat that interval. And if things go well, you learn and grow, and hopefully have some fun along the way.

• 1:21Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:25Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Let me open with a thought. And that thought is that ambition is laudable. But I think we can all agree that hustle culture extracts its pound of flesh in the form of exhaustion, frayed relationships, even substance abuse, just being one of many undesirable side effects of an obsessive relationship with performance. Because true success requires sustainability, a healthier model rooted in groundedness, one that prioritizes presence, patience, and long-term values over short-term gain. Here to elaborate today is Brad Stulberg, a writer and coach specializing in

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  human performance and wellbeing. Brad is the author of three books, Peak Performance, The Passion Paradox, and his latest, The Practice of Groundedness. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Wired, The New Yorker, Forbes, GQ, Time, and Outside Magazine, which is how we first met. Brad is a fellow at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health, and he is the co-founder of the Growth Equation newsletter and podcast alongside elite track and field coach Steve Magnus. This is Brad's third appearance on the show. Check out Episodes 293 and 429 if you happen to miss them. And it's coming right up. But first.

• 3:01Rich Roll?

  Okay, Brad Stulberg. So this is a conversation about striving, but striving not out of compulsion, but from a place of wholeness, a place of love, what Brad calls groundedness. It's about the perils of something called heroic individualism, the tension between self-discipline and self-compassion. It's also about the power of rooting yourself like a redwood, why in the long run, the tortoise always beats the hare, and the principles upon which to build sustainable success and a life grounded in meaning and fulfillment. Quick note before we get into it, a bit of a trigger warning. We do discuss a few intense mental health

• 3:43Rich Roll?

  topics today, including suicidal ideation in fairly graphic detail. So, sensitive viewers, please be advised. That said, amidst the chaos and confusion of the self-help world, I find Brad to be a principled and welcome voice of reason, as well as a like-minded soul. And this conversation is just overflowing with evidence and experience-based, practical and actionable life counsel. So, without further ado, here we go. This is me and Brad Stulberg.

• 4:17Rich Roll?

  Good to see you, my friend. It's been a couple of years. This is podcast number three, but your first solo appearance on the show. I'm excited to unpack your latest book and all these wisdom tools that you're so good at sharing with people. And every time I think about you or I see you, I remember vividly the first time that we talked. It was for an article that I think you were writing for Outside. You called me. And I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting in my truck in this parking lot outside this other office that I had. And we ended up, I thought we were going to talk for like 10 minutes and we ended up talking for like an hour. And I remember getting off that call and just thinking, this guy is like on my wavelength.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Like, we just immediately synced up on these ideas that have gone on to become the foundation of these books that you write. And this shared sensibility that I think we have where we kind of have this bristled resistance to the flavor of the month self-help, you know, that we see kind of shared on social media, et cetera. A shared allergy to the life hack culture and relentless optimization. And all this kind of reductive, binary conclusions and statements about the pursuit of excellence. So it's good to kind of further that discussion.

• 5:37Rich Roll?

  And it's nice to be, you know, that that conversation ended up with a friendship and what we're about to do here today. So, welcome.

• 5:46Brad Stulberg?

  It's great to be here.

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  So, the latest book is called The Practice of Groundedness. So why don't you talk a little bit about what inspired you to write this book? Because I think the kind of origin story of what you were enduring and going through that prompted you to dive into this subject matter is super interesting.

• 6:04Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so shortly after my first book came out that I co-authored with Steve Magness, peak performance. I was doing some media for the book in New York City and went on a long run in Central Park. I don't know, 18, 20 miles, as long as I could go back then. And was super busy throughout the rest of the day. So had an interview here, a podcast there, and just lived on a cliff bar. And I was under the impression that I was meeting a close friend, a guy named Adam Alter, for dinner, and turns out it was just a bar. So I had two stiff drinks and some kettle chips. And my blood sugar plummeted.

• 6:49Brad Stulberg?

  And unbeknownst to me then, something that happens when your blood sugar plummets is you can become super jittery and anxious. And I had a massive panic attack. I had never experienced anything like it. I felt like I was gonna die. My heart was pounding out of my neck, just totally out of control. And I got through the night. It was rough. At the time, my younger brother was finishing up medical school. So I'm on the phone with him for like two hours, and I think he knows immediately I'm having a panic attack. He's like, "You're fine, you're fine, but when you're in the middle of that and you don't believe it." And the next day, I went to an urgent care clinic, just to get myself checked out before getting on a flight to go home. And they took my blood sugar. It was fine then. And the doc there said, "Yeah, it sounds like your blood sugar got super low.

• 7:35Brad Stulberg?

  You had a panic attack." And when most people have a panic attack, it's a one and done kind of thing. It's an awful experience. They move on from it. For me, it really latched on to my psyche, and I just developed this like omnipresent bad anxiety related to everything health. And I got in to see a therapist. I got in to see my doctor. They're running all these tests for heart rate, this, liver, that, adrenal gland, that, ruling out all the health stuff. And everything's coming back fine, but I still don't feel fine. So for about three weeks, I lived in this place of just terrible health anxiety.

• 8:18Brad Stulberg?

  And maybe a month into it, I started feeling a lot better. And I had seen a therapist a few times. I was no longer looking for like an organic cause. It's just anxiety. I accepted it. And I was feeling good enough to go on a long car ride to meet some close friends for a running and camping trip. And about an hour and a half into this four-hour car ride, I just got absolutely pummeled by the thought that you could just drive off the road and end it. And it came completely out of left field.

• 8:51Rich Roll?

  Is that the first instance in your life of having any kind of suicidal ideation?

• 8:56Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Scary.

• 8:58Brad Stulberg?

  Terrifying. And not just the thought, but the accompaniment of that thought with just a head to toe wave of just dread and anxiety, you know, stomach coming up into your throat. And I couldn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the drive. I don't know how I made it there. It was just an utterly torturous drive. And I got there and then throughout the entire weekend, I was just constantly bombarded by these thoughts of self-harm. So I'd wake up in the middle of the night to pee and my brain would be like, you could go down in the kitchen and stab yourself with a knife. And it was just freaking unrelenting. And I didn't let anyone there know what I was going through because these weren't like

• 9:40Brad Stulberg?

  my closest friends and this was also very bizarre to me. And I made it through-

• 9:46Rich Roll?

  Did you call your wife or your therapist or anything like that?

• 9:49Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, my, my wife kind of knew, but I also didn't want to scare her, you know? So I was really holding on to most of this myself. And it was the weekend. I didn't have my therapist's phone number because as far as she knew, I was just like a run of the mill case of like some simple to moderate health anxiety. Made it through the weekend and was just completely like white knuckling myself, getting ready for the drive home, just hoping that it wouldn't happen again, which is the wrong thing to do, I learned later. And of course, the whole drive home, it's like 10 times as bad as the way there. By far the worst four hours of my life. Just terrible. Got home, told my wife that something's going on. I'm sick. Something is wrong with my brain. I need

• 10:33Brad Stulberg?

  help. I learned that while it's very hard to get into a psychiatrist, if you just have anxiety, if you have any kind of suicidal ideation, you can get seen like-

• 10:43Rich Roll?

  Immediately.

• 10:43Brad Stulberg?

  The next day. So I was, I was seen the next day and my doctor, Dr. Lucas Van Dyke, I'll never forget, I was just terrified and traumatized and I'm telling him this story and that I thought I was actually gonna do it and just how awful it felt. And I remember asking him, saying like, you know, if I need to go to be in an inpatient facility somewhere, like, sign me up for that, because I don't want to hurt myself. I just want to know I'm safe. And he's sitting across from me like this and he just kind of chuckles. I'm like, what's this guy laughing for? And he's like, you're not depressed, you're not suicidal, you just have OCD.

• 11:24Rich Roll?

  That's such a strange, counterintuitive diagnosis.

• 11:28Brad Stulberg?

  And at that moment, my whole just affect, my shoulders dropped, it was like, I was free. Because I was scared. I thought that I really was, like, going to act on those thoughts. And over the next year, I learned what OCD is and how it can manifest in different ways. And one of those manifestations is having intrusive thoughts about self-harm. So it was actually not like a bizarre case of OCD, it's a pretty common theme.

• 11:57Rich Roll?

  What triggers that? What is the prompt for suddenly, out of the blue, being obsessed with a recurring, looping thought of self-harm?

• 12:07Brad Stulberg?

  You know, there's no one answer to that question. Clearly, the anxiety that I was experiencing after the panic attack was like priming my brain, my nervous system, to be on heightened alert. But why it went in that direction and why it happened at that moment, it's hard to say. There's some speculation in the research community that OCD intrusive thoughts tend to latch on to the things that people care most about. So people that are really worried about or care deeply about, like, perfectionism, they tend to have OCD around germs and germ phobia, because like, a germ is gross, it's not perfect.

• 12:50Brad Stulberg?

  And I love life. I'm like an optimistic, positive guy. My wife was pregnant with our first kid at the time. It's like OCD found like the perfect dagger and it's just like, let's go stab this guy with it over and over and over again.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's really strange. I'd never heard it characterized in the manner in which you've suffered. Like I've had periods in my life where I've been the guy who's like organizing his pencils and having strange rituals that I've convinced myself are important and related to some goal that I'm seeking. And if I skip them, then I'm jeopardizing the whole thing. Like, I don't know what causes that. And it's pretty mild, but I have seen myself do that kind of thing. And I think that's what people's common

• 13:32Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  kind of understanding of what OCD is. But this seems, you know, obviously not only qualitatively different, but also more severe.

• 13:41Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And I think what you're describing there is the visible compulsion. So you might have some thought, which is like, hey, if I don't organize my pencils, my book's gonna flop.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:53Brad Stulberg?

  Or my wife's gonna leave me. And then you organize the pencils. Whereas the actual issue is not the organizing the pencils, it's the thought, and then you try to make it go away. So the level of severity is often related to the thought and the anxiety it causes. So some people, they do have an organizational compulsion around what's called harm OCD. So they might have a thought that, hey, I'm gonna kill myself or other harm. I'm gonna push someone into traffic. And in order to make that thought go away, they go touch a doorknob 10 times. My compulsions weren't visible. They were all psychological. So my compulsion was trying to figure out what was going on and reassure myself that I wouldn't do it.

• 14:32Brad Stulberg?

  So I would spend hours Googling signs of suicide and signs of depression and the pathways of that, trying to convince myself that it wasn't gonna happen to me, which of course just makes the OCD worse.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:45Brad Stulberg?

  Because OCD is like a what-if machine.

• 14:47Rich Roll?

  You're just deepening that groove.

• 14:49Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it's a what-if machine. Well, what if that doesn't do? Or what if I'm different? Or what if I do go down this pathway? But yeah, Wyatt latched on to that. The best guess that I have, the best guess that my therapist had is just that I love life. And OCD goes right after the things that you love the most.

• 15:03Rich Roll?

  So you got some relief from the diagnosis, but obviously that's not the solution to the problem. How did you heal from this?

• 15:10Brad Stulberg?

  Right. Because the what-if machine, like two days later, is like, well, what if the psychiatrist is wrong? I mean, that was the thought that I had for a month. Like, oh, he's misdiagnosing me. The first thing I wanted to do is get a second opinion because I was just scared I was gonna harm myself.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Brad Stulberg?

  And the psychiatrist is like, you know, you can if you want, but that's only gonna set you back. Because the therapy for OCD is something that's called exposure and response prevention. So you expose yourself to the thing that causes the distress. And then you prevent the response that makes that distress go away.

• 15:44Rich Roll?

  So walk me through what that looked like in your case.

• 15:47Brad Stulberg?

  Sure. So for me, the exposures were reading deeply about people suffering from terrible depression. Watching videos of people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Just gruesome stuff that would bring up these feelings of that could happen to me. I could do this to myself. And then not going to Google or try to call my therapist or convince myself that it wasn't gonna be me. And if anything, when you have the thought that it could be you, in therapy, you're just supposed to agree with that thought. You say, yeah, it might be, but I'm gonna get back to what's in front of me right now.

• 16:21Rich Roll?

  That's pretty intense to watch that. I mean, that feels like aversion therapy to me, like

• 16:27Brad Stulberg?

  Well, it is.

• 16:27Rich Roll?

  For an alcoholic to go, alright, you need to go drink as much as possible and get sick so that you don't do it again. They've realized that that is ineffective.

• 16:35Brad Stulberg?

  But it's not about getting sick. It's about desensitizing yourself to the fact that you can watch something like that. And you can have those feelings without deeply knowing that you're going to do that.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Dissociating it or depersonalizing it?

• 16:50Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And knowing that, to be clear, like, I was so fortunate. The psychiatrist I saw, it just so happened that his whole research program was in OCD. I didn't know this. Then the therapist

• 17:03Rich Roll?

  But then the, inside, you're like, yeah, but he's a hammer looking for a nail.

• 17:07Brad Stulberg?

  Well, of course, I had all those thoughts. But, but over the course of my treatment, I was very lucky. Because this kind of OCD is very commonly misdiagnosed as major depression. And then people are institutionalized for like suicidal ideation. Which technically, at the time, I thought that's what this was, but this is called just like intrusive thinking. And it's that theme. So I'm very fortunate that I got on this treatment pathway so quickly. And ultimately, and I'll share that here, and I think it's important to say that, I don't know what the right word is, if it's a trigger warning, or if you're suffering, obviously, you don't take my advice, Rich's advice, you go talk to a professional. But the ultimate thing that got me through this, and this is gonna sound crazy, is it

• 17:51Brad Stulberg?

  was shortly after Thanksgiving, and I had a pretty rough holiday. I just wasn't feeling good. I was still having all these intrusive thoughts. And the way that exposure and response prevention, this therapy works, is you start with things that aren't as intense, and then you gradually work your way up to very intense things. And I had been watching those videos and listening to podcasts about, you know, people that have suffered with suicidal ideation and the like. And my therapist could tell I was pretty dejected. And we'd been doing this for about three months. And I just said, like, Brooke, I, this, I don't feel like I'm getting that much better. She's like,

• 18:33Brad Stulberg?

  well, like, if you want to get better, it's gonna be really hard. And I'm like, that's fine. And she probably talked to my psychiatrist to do this. And again, she also has a specialty in OCD. And she said, here's what I want you to do. For the next 10 days, when Caitlin, it's my partner, is not home, I want you to take a knife and hold it to your neck on the couch.

• 18:56Rich Roll?

  Whoa.

• 18:57Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And I was just, it'd been four months. I had written this book, I'm an athlete, like, I freaking love life, and all that was sucked out of me. So I was desperate. At that point, I'm like, you know what? If I do it, I do it. And Brooke's like, and I'll take responsibility. If you do it, it's on me. And something about her saying that said, like, screw it, I'm gonna do it. And then she's like, if you have an urge to push it, you might, like, follow that urge, see what happens. Yeah.

• 19:21Rich Roll?

  Holy shit.

• 19:22Brad Stulberg?

  Right. So I'm sitting there on the couch, and the first day, of course, I'm panicking, and I have an urge. And I'm like, fuck. And I really want to call Brooke, but I don't because she's like, you can't call me. And I just want to, like, I want, deep down inside, I clearly want to get better. That's why I'm doing this. And it's terrifying. So I push it a little bit more and then I stop. And then that night, I completely freak out. I'm like, I had the urge, like, tomorrow, I'm going to do it. Because I didn't do it today. I got lucky. Something stopped me, but tomorrow, I'm going to do it. So it's this tension of not wanting to do the exercise again, but knowing that that's what's going to get me through and just having the ultimate trust in Brooke, my therapist. So day two, feel the urge, follow it a little bit more, don't do it. Panic attack that night. Day three, kind

• 20:07Brad Stulberg?

  of feel the urge, but don't really care. I kid you not, Rich, by day nine, I fell asleep on the couch from boredom. Because I had to sit there for an hour. And that was part of it. She's like, if you get bored, you just sit there.

• 20:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, so the assignment was you had to do it for a full hour?

• 20:21Brad Stulberg?

  For a full hour. And the first couple of days, like I said, the whole time's just panic. By the ninth day, I swear, I fell asleep. I set the knife down and I fell asleep because I was so bored. And that was the turning point for me.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  And where's your partner in all of this?

• 20:34Brad Stulberg?

  So she knows. And she's met with me and the therapist. And she's been educated on what OCD is and how it manifests.

• 20:42Rich Roll?

  And she knew that you were engaging in this, this practice?

• 20:45Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, she knew it's a part of the therapy.

• 20:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, that had to be terrifying for her, knowing that you're in the other room.

• 20:51Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And again, like, if, if people listening, if you're, if you're like, this guy's nuts.

• 20:56Rich Roll?

  This is crazy.

• 20:57Brad Stulberg?

  You're right. Google around OCD. And like, this is actually very, like, this is just standard. There's nothing crazy about this. This is standard protocol. I'll give you a couple of other examples, because OCD has these, like, very bizarre pathways. So one pathway is, people think that, as I mentioned, they're going to harm other people. So they don't leave their house. Especially, like, you live in a big city, you're scared to go on the subway because you think you're going to push someone in front of it. So what do those people do? They spend two hours a day on the platform of the subway, going as close to people as they can. And then they gradually do it. So once the diagnosis is made, and a professional is sure that that's the diagnosis, the therapies, while they seem extreme, are like textbook. And the other thing that's very hopeful, if people

• 21:40Brad Stulberg?

  are listening and might be suffering from OCD, or know someone that is, is that through exposure and response prevention therapy, outcomes are phenomenal. Like, 80% of people get better.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  On top of this, there's a very interesting, complicated, and I presume disorienting

• 21:59Brad Stulberg?

  I knew you were gonna go there.

• 22:00Rich Roll?

  You know, as you're this guy who's published these books and articles and all these big magazines, really on the subject of like how to live better, right?

• 22:10Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Rich Roll?

  How to be, you know, your most actualized self, how to achieve your fitness goals and your lifestyle goals. If it was me, I would be experiencing profound shame and confusion while all of this is going on.

• 22:24Brad Stulberg?

  I was.

• 22:25Rich Roll?

  I'm supposed to be the guy who's helping other people figure out these problems, not the person who's suffering, not just suffering, but like profoundly suffering.

• 22:34Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I was, for sure. And I wasn't writing during that time period. I was just focused on like getting through every day. And I remember a turning point on that theme was gradually as the OCD started to get a little bit better, just a little, like I had a foothold. I was in Virginia with my brother and we were supposed to be having just a fun weekend together, as much fun as you can have when you're four months into this. And I got an email from this young fellow, he's I think like 25 or 26 in the email, and he's basically like, "Hey, I want to follow your path. You're this young person, you have it all together, you've written these books, how do you do it?"

• 23:17Brad Stulberg?

  And meanwhile, I was that day like scared to be in the kitchen of the place we were renting because there were knives in it. And the amount of cognitive dissonance and distress that that caused, even though I hadn't been putting out much work, just that people in the world saw me as that, and here I was, completely falling apart, that in that moment was worse than the OCD itself.

• 23:41Brad Stulberg?

  As you said, just holding that shame and just this feeling of like, living these two lives.

• 23:47Rich Roll?

  Right, the duplicitous nature of all of it.

• 23:49Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Rich Roll?

  And so that, I presume, is what catalyzed you to kind of come clean and write that article that you wrote that got shared widely.

• 23:57Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, and I don't, you know, I wouldn't necessarily say, "Come clean", because to me, it wasn't about, like, I wasn't gonna-

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  You weren't hiding it, but just for yourself.

• 24:07Brad Stulberg?

  Right, and I wasn't gonna keep writing, bingo. It was, it was less about coming clean, it was more about just continuing to be a writer.

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:11Brad Stulberg?

  Because I remember telling Brooke, my therapist, that I'm done writing. Like, "I can't write about this stuff when I'm going through this." She's like, "That's a cop-out." She's like, "You gotta play through the pain." And, we decided that for me to continue as a writer, I wasn't gonna do it with this huge cognitive dissonance, so yeah, I, I wrote the story. And then writing the story itself, this is one more insight, and I know we'll move on from this, but just to like, give you a sense of the weird OCD brain, the part of writing that story that was terrifying, wasn't like, "Oh, what are people gonna think of me?" You know, there was maybe a little bit of that, but by then, it's like, "Screw it, I don't care, I'm just like, happy to be doing a little bit better." But, I was so scared that by writing a story about what I was going through,

• 24:56Brad Stulberg?

  it would be as if I was asserting myself over OCD. Like, "I have some control of this, I have enough control about this to write about it", and then it would come back with a vengeance.

• 25:05Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 25:06Brad Stulberg?

  So that was my fear in writing the thing. And, again, like, back to this fault, like, go through your anxiety. It's like, "No, like, the thing that I have to do is write it, go through", and, um, and then, yeah, I had no idea this was gonna happen. But then the piece gets shared everywhere, I get literally thousands of emails from people saying, "Oh, me too", or "My brother", or "Not OCD, but depression", or "Bipolar", or you name it. And some of these emails were coming from people that I would have never guessed are, are suffering in any way. Um, and that was really a pivot point on my, my journey as a writer, from exploring topics that are-

• 25:45Brad Stulberg?

  I'd say like peak topics, so when everything's clicking and things are going well, to thinking more about, well, what about when things aren't going well? Or how do you build a solid enough foundation to be able to weather these various storms?

• 25:59Rich Roll?

  And also, from writing about these peak experiences from a rather clinical perspective, to this lived experience version of what it means to grapple with these ideas.

• 26:12Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 26:13Rich Roll?

  And I would suspect that writing that article is an act of self-love that left you feeling more integrated, and of course, with the response, feeling more connected to other people. Like, it is part of the healing process for this. So although your OCD mind is telling you that this might catalyze a snapback, it actually was part of the process of becoming whole again.

• 26:35Brad Stulberg?

  100%.

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Brad Stulberg?

  It's the best thing that I could have done. And then, you know, people reach out to me that, "Oh, hey, will you coach me because I'm a partner at this firm, but I also have OCD?" Or, "I'm an entrepreneur, but I suffer from depression." And sure enough, like, most people have something. Throw addiction in there. It's like 70% of the population.

• 26:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. So with this epiphany and this pain body that you had, this kind of leads you down this rabbit hole of trying to understand not only what caused this, but, you know, the kind of more macro grand idea of like, what is leading people, you know, people with good intentions, who are ambitious and goal-oriented, like, what is kind of leading them away from the path that they seek? I mean, how do you think about, you know, what led you into the subject matter terrain of the book?

• 27:32Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. So I had come out of that experience, and the book didn't start until, I don't know, a year after my diagnosis. So I was out of the woods of deep OCD. I'd say I was in those woods for about eight, nine months. And by month 10, I was seeing my therapist maybe once every three weeks, once every four weeks. So I was doing much better. I was back to functioning and perhaps even high functioning at that point in my life. And a lot of what I had been reading at the time wasn't necessarily about OCD, but this is pre pandemic. Lots of people just feeling like I'm striving for this success, or I'm trying to be excellent and great, but I feel like crap.

• 28:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:15Brad Stulberg?

  I feel anxious. I feel depressed. I can never feel content, you name it. And coming out of a year of therapy, well, these topics had been on my mind in the most extreme way. So that is ultimately what crystallized in this idea of, hey, what if I try to write a book that takes conventional ways of thinking about success and excellence and kind of flips them on their head and tries to both redefine those types of things that we strive for and also the path to to get them. So that's going on in my brain on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm hearing from coaching clients, from readers of my work, that they're all struggling

• 28:56Brad Stulberg?

  with various discontents in their own life. And then the third thing is, coming out of therapy, I got super into reading like Buddhism, Taoism, all these eastern religions, and some Stoicism too on the West. And all these ancient teachers are basically saying the exact same thing that is now considered evidence based therapy. And it was like those three things came together and said, in my brain, oh, there might be a book here, or at the very least, this is something I'm deeply curious about, so I want to explore it.

• 29:29Rich Roll?

  Right. It's sort of choose your adventure. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Stoicism. I throw AA in there as well, because a lot of these tools that you're talking about are really fundamental to recovery and the parlance of like how you get better. And it's interesting how those parallels just kind of recur and show up across these various philosophies and, you know, ways of living.

• 29:54Brad Stulberg?

  I think about it as a three legged stool. And I stole this-

• 29:58Rich Roll?

  I think we talked about that last time.

• 30:00Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I stole this from my collaborator, Steve. The first leg is modern science and empirical studies. So what is happening in rigorous, methodologically sound experiments that is true? The second leg is ancient wisdom and history. So what have people been talking about for millennia?

• 30:24Brad Stulberg?

  And what patterns and themes are there? And then the third leg is daily practice. So when I go out and coach people, or when I put on my reporting hat and ask people, "Well, hey, what kind of tools do you use? What works and what doesn't?" That's daily practice. And in this book, for anything to make it in there, it had to be able to stand on all three of those legs, because I'm interested in what I call "truth with a capital T." So, principles, concepts, skills, that are going to work for most people in most circumstances.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, all of this tracks back to this idea that you have, that you characterize as heroic individualism, right? So, explain what that is, because I think that kind of creates the foundation for everything that we're going to explore.

• 31:06Brad Stulberg?

  Love it. So, heroic individualism I define as a constant game of one-upmanship against both self and others, where measurable achievement is the main arbiter of success.

• 31:20Rich Roll?

  Right. Which basically means, you know, everybody.

• 31:25Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. This is a societal problem.

• 31:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We are all, we are all, like, I'm reading about this and I'm like, "Yeah, that's me 100%."

• 31:32Brad Stulberg?

  It's everyone.

• 31:32Rich Roll?

  "That's me today."

• 31:33Brad Stulberg?

  We swim in this water.

• 31:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:35Brad Stulberg?

  And, and I think the other part of the definition that's really important is that regardless of what you tell yourself, the finish line that is lasting fulfillment is always 10 yards down the field. So, if I just hit 100 million downloads, then I'll be content. You hit it, you're content for a day. If I just publish that book, if I just get promoted to the C-suite, if I just then thinking, always fails.

• 32:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:01Brad Stulberg?

  It is literally the basis of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism, and it is now, in modern behavioral science, called the arrival fallacy, which is this notion that we think we're going to arrive somewhere and that will make us happy, that will make us feel a certain way, and we just set ourselves up for suffering because we got there, maybe we get a short blip of happiness, and then we adapt back to where we were.

• 32:22Rich Roll?

  On top of that, in addition to the goalposts always, always moving, it's almost like those Chinese finger traps, like, the more ambitious you are, the more type A you are, the more suffering you create for yourself, like, the more heightened that, that level of angst and consternation is going to be for you.

• 32:42Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And particularly now, I want to be really clear. Both in this conversation, and then hopefully I was clear enough in the book, that this is a societal thing. Like, this is the water that we swim in. Social media is a personality marketplace. Like, people trade shares of you and followers. The proliferation of metrics in every field, including like these old, like, what used to be an art field, medicine, everything is now on a dashboard. So, we're constantly connecting ourselves and what we're trying to strive for to some kind of external arbiter of success. And that's a tough kind of pool to be swimming in.

• 33:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Short of becoming a complete Luddite, or living some sort of Thoreau-like experience, acknowledging that we live in the modern world, and that there are benefits to many of these things, but what's broken is our relationship to them.

• 33:37Brad Stulberg?

  100%. And that's it. I mean, that's what groundedness is all about, is it's, how can you strive for excellence and success in a way that the good outweighs the bad? And that you try to stop yourself from walking into some of those traps? Because, I'll say this, you know, right now, Rich, it's very fashionable to have like this anti-ambition argument. There's been a lot of articles and a lot of books circulating, and I think it's like gobbledygook. I don't buy it. I'm really glad that people have ambition. Like, the person I always give as the example is Katalin Karakó, who's the Hungarian woman that developed mRNA technology. In profiles of her, she's like a workaholic for 20 years on this research.

• 34:21Brad Stulberg?

  I'm really glad that she was ambitious. And I also find it kind of ironic that a lot of the people that are writing the anti-ambition books are super ambitious about selling their anti-ambitious book. So, it's like a little bit of like a rose search test, you know? Like, what you look at and what you see. So, I don't, I think ambition and progress and striving is a good thing. I think setting a goal and chasing it, there's a lot of life to be had there. As you said, it's about our relationship with that.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you know, a couple reflections on that. I mean, yes, there is, you know, I think there's a huge Reddit thread board.

• 34:57Brad Stulberg?

  Anti-work.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  Anti-work, right? Like, there's a massive swath of the population who is into this idea. But what's driving that? What's driving that is a lack of purpose and fulfillment that they're extracting from their work life, right? So- That's a more endemic problem. If people felt purposeful and directed and, you know, passionate with all the paradox that's built into that, of course, perhaps that wouldn't be a thing. You know, that's, that's, that's part of what's broken in our economy, I think, and that's a different conversation. But to the extent that you can get plugged into something professional that, that, you know, that, that gives you sustenance on some level, doesn't the conversation turn, in terms of like how you're thinking about this, turn

• 35:42Rich Roll?

  to the tension between self-discipline on the one hand, yes, we want the woman who's working on the mRNA vaccine to work very hard on that for all of our benefit, versus the self-compassion required to, you know, be grounded and, you know, have a kind of broader sense of, of what's important to better prioritize our, our time, energy, focus and attention?

• 36:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And I think that that is, um, that's a gap that hopefully this work helps to try to close a little, is in this genre of books, let's broadly call it like personal development, personal growth, there tend to be two big categories. And I'm, I'm generalizing a little bit here, but I, I still think there's truth in the generalization. The first category is self-discipline. Wake up at 4:00 AM, push, push, push, go crush yourself.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:38Brad Stulberg?

  Think like Gary Vee, just push. And the second category is-

• 36:43Rich Roll?

  Gary Vee, Jaco Willink, David Goggins, like that. And there's a lot of people that need that.

• 36:47Brad Stulberg?

  Oh, oh, I'm, yeah, I'm being totally non-judgmental. I was, I'm gonna come back to that. So there's that. And then there's like, let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya and love each other and everything is self-love and let's take care of ourselves. And that's like the bookshelf in most bookstores in this area. And I think that- True excellence requires not either or, but both and. So you need to take Goggins and Jaco and Gary Vee and Tara Brock and Sharon Salzberg, and you need to put them together.

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:21Brad Stulberg?

  Because you talk to anybody that's highly fulfilled, that is living a good life, that is doing great things, and that feels great about it, and they are badass MFers, but they're also so kind to themselves, and they're able to hold this paradox. And if listeners take away anything from this, it's like, it's not self compassion or self-discipline, it's both and. And I actually argue that it's self-compassion that allows you to have such self-discipline, because it's freaking hard. It's hard to wake up early, it's hard to push, it's hard to fail. So if you don't have the self-compassion there, then you're never gonna last.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  Right, but if you're compassionate towards yourself, and you're also very driven at the same time, when that alarm clock goes off at 4:30, or whenever Jaco Willink's alarm clock goes off, does the self-compassion say, "Listen, you really need a good night's sleep if you want to function at your best," or does the self-compassion say, "I care about what I'm doing, and I value who I am, so I'm gonna get out of bed and get out into the world and do my thing." How do you know the difference between those two things?

• 38:27Brad Stulberg?

  Well, the concrete answer is, I think it depends on the day. Like, if he's really tired and he needs to sleep, but, I mean, that's wisdom.

• 38:33Rich Roll?

  Which makes it hard to drill down into actionable, like, you know, this is my book, or my article, or my listicle about how you do this.

• 38:41Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, yes, and I think the definition of wisdom is like, you learn from experience, so you test those things, and you see how it makes you feel. I think that one way to think about this is related to one's core values. So this is a huge part about how I think about what it means to be excellent, or to be successful. And core values are these qualities that we hold as very aspirational, so they are ourselves when we're at our best. Things like love, creativity, health, community, intellect. Those are just a few examples, right?

• 39:23Brad Stulberg?

  And for each core value that you have, it's really good to define it in super concrete terms. So you tell me a core value is love, or authenticity, or vulnerability. Well, what does that actually mean? And then, what are practices, day in and day out, that you can show up? To quote you, "Mood follows action," regardless of how you're feeling, and just act on? And then that's how you live in alignment with your core values. So for Jaco, I don't know what his core values are. But presumably, there's something in there. If it's going to be around health on the one hand, and around waking up early and crushing yourself on the other. And life is just a constant game of being very aware of those values. Perhaps the tension between them. Choosing accordingly, seeing how you feel, and updating as you go.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure.

• 40:15Rich Roll?

  The idea of being value-based is something James Clear talked about in Atomic Habits. It's addressed in detail in your book. In sort of like, I don't know, two-thirds, three-quarters of Way In. You talk about this idea of aligning your being with your actions. Because we can intellectualize, like, oh, this is who I am, and this is what's important to me. I understand that. But how do you then translate that into action? You have a couple people that you use as examples, like coaching clients of yours, like Parker and Samantha, that you talk about. Because I think that's the gap that most people relate to. Like, I think a lot of people, maybe they haven't written down their values on a piece of paper. But, you know, it's up there. If pressed, they could probably tell you what they are.

• 40:59Rich Roll?

  But the struggle is, how do you translate that into something actionable? So that when you're moving forward in the world and behaving in a certain way, there's an alignment there. And when you are aligned, as you know, like, you feel more integrated as a human being. When your actions are out of alignment with those values, you feel that cognitive dissonance, and you don't feel quite yourself.

• 41:21Brad Stulberg?

  I think writing it down actually is really helpful. Because you mentioned, like, that's the first step of doing, right? Because being is, oh, I kind of know my values. I have a sense of what they are. My coaching clients come to me and they say that. And then I ask them, and we spend like six hours talking about it. Because it's one thing to have a sense. It's another thing to make it concrete and real. And once you've gone through this process of making it real, well, then it gets a lot easier. So I'll give you an example from my own life of just like how concrete this gets, right? So one of my core values is love. Okay, a lot of people probably say, yeah, love. Well, how on earth do you practice love? So I define it as being fully present for the people and things that I care about.

• 42:05Brad Stulberg?

  Okay, so I have to define, well, who are the people I care about? Whatever things I care about? Then I have that. How do I be fully present for them? Well, one way, for example, is at 6:15 PM every night, my phone and computer go out in the garage until my son is sleeping.

• 42:23Brad Stulberg?

  Okay, so I went from this like very high level esoteric aspirational thing, love, all the way down to even if I really want to get in that tweet or check my email or whatever it is, nope, my phone's got to be in the garage. And to me, unless you get that concrete, it's very easy to fall into this trap of, yeah, I'm values based. I know my values, but are you actually, you actually living them? So I think that there's some truth to the saying, what gets measured gets managed. So why don't we try to harness that for the things that we actually care most about?

• 42:55Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I mean, that's great advice and good wisdom. I think where it gets tricky is when your values are in competition with each other. Because that's generally what happens. Like, perhaps another value of yours is to, you know, basically be this creator of great books that are helpful to other people. And how do you reconcile that with being present for the people that you care about? If you want to write the absolute best book, To your maximum capabilities, that's going to require time away from the people that you love. So when those two things are butting up against each other, I think that's where confusion ensues.

• 43:34Brad Stulberg?

  And the only way through is just to pay super close attention as you go and then update. Because at different times of your life, the answer in the moment to what do I do in this situation is going to be different. And I firmly believe that there's no such thing as a bad decision. The only wrong way to go about a decision is without being thoughtful, paying attention, and being aware. Because you can't know when you make that decision what the right thing is to do. But if you just do it on autopilot, that's when you get into trouble. Because if you're paying attention, then your mind-body system, like the algorithm will update based on what you get out of it. But it's when we get on autopilot, when we get just swept up into the inertia of go,

• 44:15Brad Stulberg?

  go, go, go, whatever direction that it's pushing us in, that's when we can get ourselves into trouble.

• 44:21Rich Roll?

  Sure, because we're acting impulsively and reactively without taking that moment to pause and reflect and calibrate our behavior against that value set or what is most important.

• 44:33Brad Stulberg?

  And also in realizing that often it doesn't feel good in the moment to act in alignment with your values. Particularly around success and excellence, there's like a very addictive nature to those feelings of creating, of pushing, of being relevant. And you could argue to yourself, I know you've talked about this a lot on this podcast, you could argue to yourself, well, it's a wholesome endeavor I'm doing, but deep down inside, if you pay close attention, like you can kind of discern, is there a compulsive nature to this pushing? Or am I doing this because I genuinely want to in the moment?

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  It's both.

• 45:11Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 45:12Rich Roll?

  I got into a little thing with my wife this morning because she noticed that I'm not as grounded as I probably should be. And she's a pretty good mirror. And she let me know, like, hey, I don't think that you're really on your game right now because I've been working a little bit too hard and I'm juggling a bunch of stuff. And she's right. This is like, as long as I've been doing this, like, I'm as guilty as anybody of falling prey to external reward systems and the habit trail of like, okay, what's next? I got to keep this thing going and how is it doing and all of that. And I lose sight of... The values that are most important to me, which is can I be present with my wife and my kids in the morning before I go off and do this thing with Brad today?

• 45:56Rich Roll?

  Or am I obsessed with making sure I'm as prepared as possible and not present for the people that I care about?

• 46:02Brad Stulberg?

  But that's it. So you're winning the game, like just having that trade off and being aware of it and evaluating.

• 46:07Rich Roll?

  But self-awareness, you know, in AA they say self-awareness will avail you nothing. Like it's like, it's good that you understand that, but until you actually behave differently, you're still stuck in the negative cycle.

• 46:20Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, and I think that you need the self-awareness to be able to realize that, hey, these are two competing values and I'm feeling a real tension. And then that gives you the opportunity to kind of force yourself to maybe act in one way, even if in the moment, the inertia is carrying you in the other way.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  Right. The recurring kind of motif that anchors these principles around groundedness that recurs in the book is this idea of being a redwood. So explain that and then we can kind of get a little bit more granular into the kind of six aspects of what it means to pursue this.

• 46:57Brad Stulberg?

  So I had the idea for the book, but I had no idea what I was going to call it. And I was out for a hike with a dear friend in Redwood Regional Park. This is back when I was living in Oakland, California. And it was a super gray windy day and the overstory.

• 47:16Rich Roll?

  It's always like that in Oakland.

• 47:17Brad Stulberg?

  Right, that's true. And the overstory of these trees, they were just, you know, swaying back and forth. And I remember telling my friend Mario, you know Mario Freely.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Brad Stulberg?

  I remember telling Mario, like, man, like, that's kind of like how I feel a lot of the time. He's like, me too. I'm like, yeah. And he had known about this book. He's a good friend. We brainstorm all the time. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, that's kind of what I'm getting to in the book, like heroic individuals and a lot of this. And I'm like, but look at the fricking core of those trees. Like it is just held firm to the ground. It's really grounded. And that's when the light bulb went off. I'm like, huh, like, maybe I should call this grounded. Groundedness, get grounded, whatever. So then, like, the writer intellectual brain in me is like, I want to learn more about redwoods. And the first thing I learn about redwoods, to this day, remains the most fascinating, which is that even the old growth redwoods

• 48:11Brad Stulberg?

  that tower 200, 300 feet above the ground, their root structures only run six to 12 feet deep.

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 48:20Brad Stulberg?

  But they're intertwined.

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  Lateral.

• 48:22Brad Stulberg?

  Bingo. They're laterally, they run for hundreds of feet, and they're intertwined with all the other roots of other trees in the forest. So what holds a redwood up through really rough weather is not its trunk that you see, it's this deep stuff that's underground, but it's only as deep as it is lateral, because it's held together by a community of other trees.

• 48:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:44Brad Stulberg?

  And that then became the metaphor for grounded, for groundedness, is both this notion that when the weather is really rough, what kind of foundation do you have holding you to the ground? And these are often qualities that people don't see. So it's not the beautiful overstory, or even the big, firm trunk, it's stuff that's invisible. And it's only as powerful as the trees that you're intertwined with, which of course is why community is arguably the most important of the six principles in the book.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  Right. Standing in your strength, being unflappable, being neutral in the face of catastrophe and conflict, et cetera. How do we achieve that, right? We achieve that through community, that's one of the pillars here. But let's, let's break it down, because I think it, it has a nice flow to it and how you think about this and write about this.

• 49:36Brad Stulberg?

  All right, let's do it. Where do you want to start?

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Well, the first one is acceptance, which is like, that's also like a big recovery thing, right? You cannot, whatever you're going through, you cannot get better until you snap the denial and take an honest accounting of where you actually are, which is very scary. We have all these defense mechanisms and... Excuses that we tell ourselves to allow ourselves to perpetuate whatever it is that we're doing and we're very good at deluding ourselves as human beings. So acceptance, you can't, you can't really progress anywhere until you get real about the truth of your current situation professionally, interpersonally, whatever it is. So talk to me about how you kind of arrived at this and how you think about it.

• 50:19Brad Stulberg?

  So I love how you teed that up and the only thing that I would add to that context is back to heroic individualism being a cultural issue. Everything in the culture tells us not to accept reality. You know, you don't feel good. There's a substance for that. You can go buy some stuff. You can tweet. You can post. We're, we're constantly kind of like living in this world that allows us to distract ourselves from whatever the reality might be. But of course, if you can't accept where you are, then you're never going to get where you want to go. Right? Because you'll be working on the thing that isn't actually the thing that you need to be working on because you're slightly deluded or you're

• 51:01Brad Stulberg?

  refusing to see it clearly. Now, a lot of people hear acceptance and they think passive resignation or phoning it in or like, I'm not going to try. But that is not at all what acceptance means, at least not in the way that I conceptualize it. It is actually very empowering because it tells you, here's exactly what's going on. Here's the situation I'm in. And then that gives you the opportunity to take some sort of wise action to progress the situation or make it better.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  Right. And the more type A and driven you are, the more difficult it is for you to reckon with acceptance because you're the person who says, I do not accept this. I am working towards this. This is not okay and I will not stop until this happens. And you just plow forward with blinders on and the idea of acceptance is akin to surrender and that's absolutely the last thing that I'm going to even entertain.

• 51:54Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And I think that also what can be really helpful in less extreme contexts. So yeah, surrender in my case, right? Trusting Brooke with the knife and being like, I don't, anything to get me out of here. I'm done. I'm lost. Hitting bottom as someone that is suffering with a substance abuse disorder. But also, just surrendering to a reality that, hey, I'm way too overworked, or I'm not living in alignment with my values, or this relationship isn't what I thought it would be, or I'm not giving enough into this relationship. It's really hard to get there. So, a couple of things that are super concrete and very helpful, and they all relate to this concept that's called self distancing.

• 52:37Brad Stulberg?

  So, we tend to fuse, I'm gonna do this for the camera, so I'm not in front of the microphone here, we tend to fuse with our circumstances. And when you fuse with your circumstance, it's very hard to see it clearly.

• 52:48Rich Roll?

  Meaning self identify?

• 52:50Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. Like, instead of watching the action movie, we're in the action movie. And when things are going really well, you want to be in the action movie. That's flow. That's a peak experience. Like, you don't want to be separate from your lived experience. But sometimes, when things aren't going so great, or even if they are, it can be really helpful to create some space between your awareness of what's happening and what's happening itself.

• 53:13Rich Roll?

  Right. You did a Twitter thread on this recently. You know, a way of translating that is by saying, you know, rather than saying, "I am depressed," saying, "I am somebody who is experiencing depression," right? Creating that little gap or that distance. So, you disassociate, or, you know, deconstruct the self identification, and then you're able to evaluate the situation that you're in and your behavior from a more objective perspective.

• 53:42Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And that is just one of many ways to self distance. Another way that I think is super powerful is this notion of pretending that a really close friend is in the same exact situation that you are, and really visualizing it, down to a T. And then giving that friend advice. Right. And then you have to follow that advice. We're all much better at that than giving it to ourselves, of course. Bingo. Or imagine a wiser, older version of you, looking back on current you. What would wiser, older you tell you? So, an extreme example of this, but I just freaking love this story, is I was working with a woman who's a world-class runner, professional runner,

• 54:25Brad Stulberg?

  multiple-time Olympian, and she had a proximal high hamstring strain. And she was trying to train through it. And she's hobbling down the steps of her apartment to go do a mile repeat workout. So for the uninitiated, this is a really hard workout. And I'm not coaching her on her running. I'm there to provide mental skill support. And I remember saying, I'm gonna call her Rachel for the sake of this story. Rachel, imagine that your training partner was in this situation, and you saw your training partner hobbling down the stairs, kind of grasping at her hamstring on the way out the door to do an interval workout. What would you tell her? And she's like, I tell her not to do the workout. Like, she's just gonna blow herself up.

• 55:10Brad Stulberg?

  It's okay to go off the plan. I tell her it's better to miss a day or two now than it is to miss a month later. Like, well, then why on earth are you going to do this workout? Because you don't understand, Brad. Well, no. I can make this work. Yes, and I think that when you give that advice to someone, you very quickly see that you can't make it worse. This isn't a coaching session, but in your situation with feeling ungrounded and you being like, well, I have these competing values. It's really hard to know which one to prioritize. I think in that instance, if you could imagine yourself 30 years down the road, looking back on current you in that situation, it might give you some insight, at least for today, like, hey, here's the decision that I should make. Yeah. It's not bulletproof, but again, what it does is it takes this. I'm fused with the situation.

• 55:54Brad Stulberg?

  I'm in an Olympic cycle. I need to train. It's on my plan. I'm so caught up in the storm. And it puts you here so that you can watch the storm and then gives you a chance to make a more thoughtful decision.

• 56:05Rich Roll?

  On the subject of acceptance, the path towards acceptance is paved with pain, right? Pain is like the great catalyst for this awakened self-awareness.

• 56:14Brad Stulberg?

  Often.

• 56:15Rich Roll?

  And the ability to develop acceptance around what's occurring. In your case, it was a much more severe case of OCD than I realized. In my case, it was grappling with addiction and, you know, later in life with some health stuff. Short of experiencing some kind of extreme, you know, emotional experience or, you know, what we would call a bottom in recovery, you can grow into this level of acceptance around whatever it is you're doing. It's just harder, right? Like, pain really makes it, as painful as it is, it actually makes this whole process easier.

• 56:53Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 56:54Rich Roll?

  It creates an opportunity or it helps that door swing wide open. And I'm interested in the coaching that you do with people. Like, they're probably not hitting a bottom. They're probably high performers who are just trying to, you know, hone their game a little bit more, maybe are experiencing some things that aren't working in their life, but, you know, they're not bottoming out on drugs and alcohol or, you know, having some, you know, suicidal ideation. So how do you coach somebody towards a greater level of acceptance who's not in that position? I mean, you just gave an example, but what's another way that you would think about that?

• 57:28Brad Stulberg?

  Well, another great example is just having a coach. Or, in the case of someone that may not have access to that, is other people that you can trust, right? Because if you can't see the world clearly, well, go ask someone that you trust. And it's got to be someone that is willing to tell you.

• 57:47Rich Roll?

  The real feedback.

• 57:48Brad Stulberg?

  The real deal. So it's just ways to get outside of yourself a little bit. And I do think that, yes, deep pain can be a gateway to acceptance. No one gets through life unscathed. Everyone experiences some pain. And I'll tell you what, like before I got sick with OCD, I thought like, you know, getting dumped by my college girlfriend was pain, or having a book flop was pain. Like, and in, you know, based on my reference point, that was real pain. So as a coach, when someone comes to you with what they're experiencing is pain, I have to be totally nonjudgmental because I might be thinking like, that's not real pain. But to that person, it is.

• 58:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:28Brad Stulberg?

  So anytime that you meet a barrier, there's some suffering, or there's some tension or sense of disconnect, I think is a pathway to explore, well, what's really going on here? What's the actual problem that we're trying to solve?

• 58:40Rich Roll?

  Right, and reframing pain, or whatever difficult experience you're enduring as an opportunity. Like, where is, where is the learning experience in all of this to grow?

• 58:50Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, the only thing I'd say there is back to non-dual thinking. I wouldn't say as an opportunity, but and an opportunity. Because pain sucks. And like, I'm not one to paint suffering as positive. Like, suffering sucks. Like, the less that you suffer, the better. And suffering exists, and it's gonna happen inevitably. So when it happens, yes, there's also an opportunity along with it.

• 59:15Rich Roll?

  Right, can you look at it as a teacher?

• 59:17Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, both and, like, this sucks and it's a teacher. And sometimes, that has to happen on its own, and it has to happen later. Because one of the worst things that you can do when you're in pain is put this, another expectation on yourself to, like, it has to be meaningful.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  That's a good point.

• 59:34Brad Stulberg?

  And I did this, I'm a type A pusher. I remember, you know, I don't know, three, four months into my recovery, being like, wow, like, I don't feel like I'm growing from this, and it has to be meaningful. And I don't think I'm ever gonna write about this at the time. And again, I remember my therapist, Brooke, looking at me and being like, why the hell do you care? Like, this doesn't have to be meaningful. You have severe OCD, it just sucks. Can that be enough? And of course, now, a couple of years later, we're talking about it. I did write a book, it's super meaningful. It's probably, you know, shy of like, falling in love and having a kid. It's by far, maybe even on the same level, most meaningful experience in my life. But when I was in it, utterly meaningless.

• 1:00:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Brad Stulberg?

  And that's okay.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  The meaning isn't revealed immediately, it's only in time.

• 1:00:19Brad Stulberg?

  Right, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about, like, how we all have a psychological immune system. And you can't fake it. So when you're really suffering, if you're like, oh, I'm gonna grow from this, your psychological immune system's like bullshit. Like, we just need to fight this and get rid of this pain. But then afterwards, like, the real immune system, it gets stronger. Like, an immune system doesn't get stronger as it's fighting the thing, it gets stronger after. So yeah, sometimes you can reframe pain as like a growth opportunity. And that might be the pain of a minor business failure, or something in a friendship, or a creative endeavor gone sour. But illness, death, loss, I often think that it's actually just okay to meet it where it is, and then let the meaning and growth happen on its own time.

• 1:01:08Rich Roll?

  Which leads into the next pillar here, which is presence. Like, can you just be present with what is happening?

• 1:01:14Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:01:14Rich Roll?

  In acceptance and present with it.

• 1:01:16Brad Stulberg?

  Mm-hmm. I don't know if I can. It depends on the day.

• 1:01:19Rich Roll?

  It's pretty tough, right?

• 1:01:20Brad Stulberg?

  It's tough. And yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of get real and in the moment on this table. So I'm as present as I've been, I don't know, in the last week, right now. What's not on this table?

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  What do you mean?

• 1:01:36Brad Stulberg?

  There's no cellphone.

• 1:01:37Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:38Brad Stulberg?

  Right? There's no Twitter.

• 1:01:40Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:01:40Brad Stulberg?

  If I need to write something down, I've got a notebook and a pen.

• 1:01:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:45Brad Stulberg?

  I think that we think of presence as this internal quality, which it can be, but it's also very external. So a huge part of presence is putting yourself in situations where it's easy to be present. I often think that presence happens upstream of the moment that you want to be present. I know you recently had Johann Hari on, it was a great episode, and he talked about, like, telling someone not to itch, I think it was, if, like, you pour itching sauce on them. And, like, the distractions in our lives, the itching sauce. So back to core values. If one of your core values is presence, or related to things that you care about, well, then you have to be pretty intentional about setting up the time and space and conditions to be present.

• 1:02:29Brad Stulberg?

  Something else that I talk about all the time with coaching clients that want to be more present is there's a reason that monks that achieve enlightenment, they're all in monasteries.

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  Cultivating an environment that's conducive to being present.

• 1:02:44Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:02:45Rich Roll?

  But what about the relationship between presence and groundedness? Particularly in the context of like, working with very driven people. Presence feels like an indulgence. It feels like an obstacle in the way of achieving whatever you need to get done on a particular day. So you have to sell the bill of goods as to why this is important.

• 1:03:05Brad Stulberg?

  Timeout. You said on a particular day. And that's the thing. Deep presence and really like honing that is never going to get you the most work done on a particular day, ever. But it might over the course of a year, or a decade, or a career.

• 1:03:23Rich Roll?

  The tortoise over the hare.

• 1:03:26Brad Stulberg?

  And that's how you settle that score, right there. I'm super clear with my coaching clients. They come to me talking about efficiency and productivity and optimization. And I'm like, all these things are great. I want all these things too, but on what time scale? Because if I wanted to optimize over the next 24 hours, or even over the next week, let's say, I would slam espresso and Red Bulls. I'd sleep four hours a night and I would just bury myself. And that'd be super optimal. But not for a month, certainly not for a year. So I think that there's the zooming out and saying, hey, like, what time scale are we operating on? And there, the research is unequivocal. If you're talking about excellence or success over the long haul, being present for the

• 1:04:06Brad Stulberg?

  work that actually matters is perhaps the most important variable that you can do to set yourself up for that success.

• 1:04:14Rich Roll?

  Right. We don't intuitively think about these horizons in decade-long chunks. We think about the next quarterly earnings, or the next six months, or perhaps the next year. But if you really want to build sustainability, which is what is at the core of what this is all about. How do you want to operate to the best of your ability for the longest period of time? You have to broaden that window, right? And I've had to learn this, like, I'm, you know, I just want to grind and grind and grind. And I've been doing this podcast for almost 10 years. Became pretty clear like two years ago, like I'm not gonna make it. Like, I have to figure out a different way of doing this so that I can maintain my joy for it and my presence when I'm sitting with guests and my enthusiasm for, you know,

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  consuming all of their wisdom and material and being able to deliver on the best experience, conversational experience that I can. I can't sustain it the way I was doing it. So now I take a month off every year. I've hired a team and like I've had to learn how to, you know, overcome this perfectionism and control impulses. And those were not easy lessons for me. And I'm not great at them every day either. But it was like a necessity, I think, in order to do that. Which gets into, we're sort of moving out of presence and more into the next thing, which is patience.

• 1:05:34Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  And I think built into patience is this idea of looking at things, you know, on a longer timeframe.

• 1:05:40Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, real quick, I jotted a note down. Did you, during that period, and we don't have to name guests, but did you ever find yourself resenting the fact that you had to come in and talk to someone?

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  It never got that bad, but I was moving in that direction. And I really never wanted to feel that way.

• 1:05:55Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Rich Roll?

  And I realized that if I didn't change some things, that I was quickly gonna be that person.

• 1:06:01Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Rich Roll?

  Obviously, that's at odds with the experience that I'm trying to cultivate and create.

• 1:06:06Brad Stulberg?

  I ask that because that emotion is often, in my coaching clients, a game changer for helping people realize that their work style is too frenetic and frantic and too quote unquote optimized on short time scales. As people come to resent work that they once loved, and the only thing that's changed about the work is that when they started doing it, they were a team of one and they had a really low bar and they spent most of their day deep in the creative work. And now, suddenly, they're running meetings and they're leading teams and that deep focus present work has gone away. And they start to resent their job.

• 1:06:46Brad Stulberg?

  And the number one thing to help those people are to help them reclaim those moments of presence. And I'll say one more thing on this before moving on to patience because I think it's a very important coaching insight. And that is that... Unequivocally, you will fail if you just say, "I want to be more present." And even if you try to work top-down, you'll likely fail. So to say, "I need to be present all the time," it's never going to work. There's too many distractions. So with clients, I always have folks work bottom-up. So that means just start with two hours a week. So schedule ahead of time, two one-hour blocks where you know what you're going to do during that period. So when it rolls around, you don't just pull up your email. And just start there. And then after two weeks, try an hour and a half.

• 1:07:30Brad Stulberg?

  And I had this one client who came to me because of feeling resentment and just like coming to hate a job that she loved. And at first, I'm like, "Yeah, maybe it's the job, actually, and she needs to move on." But it quickly became clear that she actually loved the work. She just didn't love how she was running around frantically. And she said there's no way she could be present. She's high up, she runs this huge team, she's got kids, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we just started with an hour a day. And slowly but surely, she proved to herself that the world wasn't going to end if, for an hour a day, she put everything away and worked. And a year into our coaching relationship, this is a true story, and I try to practice what I preach, so I am very, I have boundaries around when I coach. It's like certain days, certain times.

• 1:08:15Brad Stulberg?

  And I went to try to work with her executive assistant to get a coaching slot, and the person's like, "No, like, sorry, Kate can't meet with you then."

• 1:08:24Rich Roll?

  Your window and her window. Her window and your window.

• 1:08:26Brad Stulberg?

  So she went from impossible to be present at a company with over 1,000 people to three and a half to four hours a day. But it started, if I would've told her that at the beginning, she would've fired me. And I think the same's true with ourselves. Even if you don't have a coach, individually, if you tell yourself, "Oh, I'm going to be present for four hours," and you fail, it's like a diet, it's like anything. You're off the wagon, it's hard to get back on. So I think starting really small, and again, it's a common theme in this book, and I think this is the coach in me, is that you take something that's really noble and aspirational, but for it to work, you've got to get super concrete and start at a level that is like in the weeds. So I just wanted to add that in.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think in furtherance of that idea is the notion of just being really granular. Yes, you're going to cultivate an environment that's conducive to you being present, but what does presence actually look like? In sobriety, it's talked about in the context of what is the next right action? Like, if you're just fully present with yourself... Meaning, how do you overcome the overwhelm of all these different competing stressors that are in our mind, "Oh, I have to do that. I gotta do that. How am I going to solve that problem? Okay, what's the next right action? What is the one thing I can do right now? I will just do that thing, not worry about anything else, because truly, all we can do is one thing at a time. How can we show up 100% for that one thing and

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  move to the next thing?

• 1:09:53Brad Stulberg?

  Yep, and just pay close attention along the way, because like the attention, that's the feedback mechanism. Because I think that our like deeper, wiser, removed selves know what's good for us. So I know that I feel so much better after a day spent writing and reading than a day on social media.

• 1:10:11Rich Roll?

  Right, but then you will then construct a million distractions to

• 1:10:15Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  Ultimately prevent you from doing that thing. And it's like, and then you beat yourself up. "Why am I doing this? I know better. I actually wrote a book about how to not do this, and here I am doing it. Ah, I'm a piece of shit."

• 1:10:26Brad Stulberg?

  But that's where it's gotta get really concrete. So like, what does it look like? It looks like taking the apps off your phone. I mean, it's all of these very, these concrete practices. And remembering, again, like behavioral activation, that you don't have to feel like you want to do something to do it. You often just have to do the thing.

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  All right, talk to me about the patience piece.

• 1:10:45Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, we were talking about this offline a little bit before we started recording, because I think it just occurred to me, walking in, seeing you. You're like the perfect example of this in many ways.

• 1:10:55Rich Roll?

  I don't feel that way.

• 1:10:56Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah?

• 1:10:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Brad Stulberg?

  All right, well.

• 1:10:59Rich Roll?

  I'm pretty impatient on the moment-to-moment basis.

• 1:11:02Brad Stulberg?

  But over the long haul. So the study that we were joking about that's in this chapter of the book was performed by researchers at MIT and Northwestern, and they looked at successful entrepreneurs judged by company valuation and if companies IPO'd, the IPO price. And what they found, to everyone's surprise, is that the peak age for a successful startup founder is 45.

• 1:11:29Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:30Brad Stulberg?

  Which is, flies in the face of like, you know,

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Super pumped, the dropout, we crashed, all of these narratives where these very young people are achieving crazy heights of success at a very young age.

• 1:11:43Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, and the reason for that, researchers speculate, is that when you're 45, while you failed a couple of times, you've got some wisdom behind you, and you can put that to bear at what you're doing. The way that I like to think about this is, there's these two curves that I think apply to anything that you're doing, broadly speaking. And one is what I call quickness, cleverness, raw talent, intelligence. I think a cognitive scientist would call this fluid intelligence. So you're quick, you're sharp on your feet.

• 1:12:24Brad Stulberg?

  If you're an athlete, you're physically like as fit as you're going to be. And that curve declines as we age. But there's this other curve, which is wisdom. And wisdom increases as we age. And I think every pursuit has a meeting point of these curves. And the slopes are different, right? And like, if you're running the 100-meter dash, the wisdom curve's not as important as the raw talent curve. Whereas if you're doing an ultra marathon, the wisdom curve and the ability to problem solve and have pattern recognition is super important. And in intellectual pursuits, we often like overvalue the quickness curve and undervalue the wisdom curve, which I think is why that study was so surprising. We assume that people peak 25 to 30, 35, when they're super fresh and quick on their

• 1:13:08Brad Stulberg?

  feet, but we discount that wisdom curve. So we got into that because we were talking about that. But that's just like, that's one example where, again, you zoom out, well, do you want to be efficient today? Or do you want to be efficient over the long haul? What does that mean? And it's a real tension. In my own work, I'm constantly asking myself, in the moment, I think even when we were talking about coming on to do the show, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to write a book that's better than this. So I can be really futile, but it's like, no, if I'm not an idiot, I will. Because I'm gonna get wiser, hopefully, if I like live my life and experience the world. So the patience to hold back, knowing that, yes, you're building up that curve, and it goes totally against this cultural narrative of you have to be young.

• 1:13:50Rich Roll?

  Right. You've written about Darwin, and we all think that he just, you know, went down to the Galapagos and just figured it all out.

• 1:13:57Brad Stulberg?

  Right, 25 years.

• 1:13:58Rich Roll?

  In truth, that was, yeah, 25 years for him to truly figure it out.

• 1:14:03Brad Stulberg?

  And contrasted him, or not contrasted, well, I guess compared and contrasted him with another one of these overnight breakthroughs, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I mean, I was surprised to learn that-

• 1:14:12Rich Roll?

  He'd been writing for a long time.

• 1:14:14Brad Stulberg?

  Dude had been writing for 15 years, no one knew about him, like, could hardly afford food and rent, and then suddenly he's this breakthrough. And he's got this beautiful quote where he's like, "I'm not a breakthrough, like, I was pounding that stone for 15 years."

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  Right, which is the case, of course, with every overnight success that we see. There's a deeper story that tells the truth about the hard, you know, well-trodden path to get to that place. And, you know, I think the patience piece is complicated by external social factors. Like, we're all in this rat race where we think if we take a day off, we're falling behind, and if we fall behind, we'll never be able to catch up, and then the whole game is over with. Like, the insanity of that, you know, habit trail that we're all on, when in truth, like, that's why I put that tweet out that I put out that, you know, everyone seemed to like, that's pinned on my thing, that life's short, but it's actually long. Steven Pressfield talked about this on the podcast, like, it's kinda

• 1:15:12Rich Roll?

  long. You know, you need to go out and have lots of different experiences. And like David Epstein talks about in Range, try many, many, many things, most of which you'll probably be shitty at. But ultimately, you'll find that thing that lights you up, and then you'll realize by pursuing that, that all those other experiences find a way to contribute to, you know, deepening your enrichment in whatever thing is exciting you. And then suddenly- You're the one person who can do this very specific thing because of all these rich experiences that you've had while you were experiencing them, not knowing that they were contributing to you becoming this kind of unique, actualized person.

• 1:15:54Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, there's a mindset tool that I just freaking love in the book about D.W. Winnicott, the psychoanalyst from the mid 20th century. And I'm a huge fan of Winnicott's work in parenting. And his whole parenting philosophy is what he called the good enough mother. And I'm going to update it for today's time, I'm going to call it the good enough parent. And long before helicopter parenting was a thing, Winnicott observed that there's two extremes of parenting. There's the parents that meet a child's every need all the time and hover, and then there's parents that check out and neglect the child. And both of those lead to bad outcomes.

• 1:16:37Brad Stulberg?

  The ideal parent, Winnicott said, is the good enough parent. And he defined the good enough parent as someone that creates a space for their kid to unfold. And when their kid steps off that path, or veers too far out of that space, they gently nudge them back into it. And I remember reading that as I was working on this book and thinking like, A, that's our new mantra for parenting in our household, is like, let's just be good enough. And B, what if we adopted that mindset with our own selves and the projects in our lives? So what would it look like to think of ourselves not as constantly needing to intervene and make everything happen, but to provide a space for our pursuits to unfold on their own? So how can we be good enough to ourselves?

• 1:17:21Brad Stulberg?

  How can we take that mindset and apply it to our own pursuits?

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  How's that working?

• 1:17:26Brad Stulberg?

  You know, I was going to say, for me, it's actually working pretty well. Like, I think there's real power in giving something a language, because then you can name it and make it real and wrestle with it. So when I catch myself getting into that need to make things happen mode, I just ask myself, like, am I hovering? Am I being a helicopter parent for my next book, for my podcast, for my newsletter, whatever it is? And what would it look like to be good enough? And sometimes the answer is, no, you need to push, you need to make things happen. But often, that pause gives me a chance to actually step back and say, you know, this is gonna, this is gonna work itself out, or I need to give this a little bit more time and space. For us as creatives, I think that this, this is really helpful.

• 1:18:09Brad Stulberg?

  I think it's even more helpful for people that work in the traditional workplace, because most people, at least in my experience coaching, they get into these executive roles because they were phenomenal at making things happen. That's how they get noticed. They get work done, especially in big organizations. It's like, oh, you're the person that can actually like get the work done. So then you get promoted, you get promoted. Now suddenly you have a team of a thousand people under you. Guess what? Like, that sensibility of making everything happen is not gonna work. You've gotta learn to step back and let things happen, and the whole job becomes like the conductor of an orchestra, or the good enough parent. You're just kind of defining the space and keeping everyone in it. And so many people hit this wall, where they continue to try to make things happen when they need to step back and play that role.

• 1:18:53Rich Roll?

  Well, also, the skillset changes. They go from somebody who is a doer and making stuff happen into this role as being a manager, which requires some emotional intelligence and some background in psychology to figure out how to motivate people and get them to do their best work and all of that. Like, it's a completely different skillset.

• 1:19:15Brad Stulberg?

  And it requires a lot of confidence and security, because the worst managers are super insecure and they think they always need to be doing stuff, right? No different than probably a helicopter parent that like is insecure that their kid's not gonna turn out great if they don't do everything. Or an individual working on a project. Like, generally, overdoing something is a sign of our own insecurity. It's the athlete that in their taper has to go out and run a really hard workout to prove to herself that she's still fit. That's born out of insecurity. So I think that also part of being a good manager is having the security to know that, hey, there's no visible, observable, concrete thing I necessarily need to do. I just need to, again, define that space and then hold it for my team to do their thing.

• 1:19:58Brad Stulberg?

  And that's where just like, just the word, like, be good enough, has been so powerful with clients, because it serves as this little cue to step back and ask themselves, like, what are we really trying to do here?

• 1:20:08Rich Roll?

  One of the challenges with patience, if you're somebody who is ambitious, you're inevitably going to be comparing your trajectory to other people, right? And here's Brad who's telling you, "Slow it down a little bit, be present, be patient. Life is long. Don't worry about what those other people are doing." It's easier to say that than to actually embody that and practice that. So how do you help people disconnect from that kind of external motivation or pressure of comparing yourself to others?

• 1:20:46Brad Stulberg?

  Back to the core values. So all these things are entangled, right? So then you go look at your core values and how you define them and how you practice them. And you just say like, "Well, what would living my core values be in this moment?" And then you just do it, you know? Behavioral activation. Like, in that moment, you probably don't feel like you should slow down. You probably feel like you should speed up. But I think the core values, like, that becomes your internal dashboard. So ideally, you're not spending as much time comparing yourself to everyone else. You're spending more time comparing yourself against your core values and measuring yourself that way and then letting that guide your actions and your behaviors.

• 1:21:27Brad Stulberg?

  It's a tough shift. I mean, we moved from Northern California, big city, airport, tons of opportunities to talk about books and sell books and build a coaching practice, to a small mountain town in Western North Carolina. And it was tough, and that was 100% a values-based decision. But in the moment, that move was like, "What am I doing? Like, I'm not going to sell as many books." Like, it made not... The inertia of the moment and speed did not make sense, but from a values perspective, it made sense. And it didn't feel great making that decision, but now that we've done it, it actually feels really good. But there's a real trade-off. Would I be, quote-unquote, "more successful externally" if I still lived in the Bay Area?

• 1:22:10Brad Stulberg?

  Maybe, probably at this young age, but would I be successful against my internal dashboard? Probably not.

• 1:22:17Rich Roll?

  Right, well, the counterargument would be that by living in a smaller town, there's less distractions. So, the actual work of writing the books and the frequency of these books coming out is going to be enhanced. And ultimately, that's the larger lever to your success. If you're in Oakland, maybe you can go on more podcasts, maybe you can talk about it a little bit more and be more engaged with media and promotion. But ultimately, over the long run, the thing that matters most is the quality of the work. And creating an environment that's conducive to that is the key thing that aligns the values with, you know, the actual, like, byproduct of your actions.

• 1:22:58Brad Stulberg?

  100%. And you said "long run" like, two times in that sentence. Because, again, it's patience, it's playing the long game, but I didn't get there, like, out of this esoteric value. I got there because my wife and I said, "What do we care about? We care about nature, we care about family, we care about love. What would it look like to practice those things in Oakland versus in a smaller town?" And it was a very, like, somewhat rational decision that now has this huge emotional benefit, which is I feel like I can play the long game. You'd think I'd get more writing done, but I walk out the door into trails with my German shepherd. If anything, I'm a professional walker now. Do a lot of long walks.

• 1:23:37Rich Roll?

  Without any, any audio? Just solo?

• 1:23:40Brad Stulberg?

  It depends. I, I, I go back and forth. Sometimes I'll listen to your podcast, because I don't really commute, so it is my time if I'm going to listen to a podcast. Sometimes I'll listen to, like, Vivaldi or classical music. I listen to Dispatch, who I was so shocked that you hadn't heard of.

• 1:23:56Rich Roll?

  I'm an old man, Brad. Come on, give me a break.

• 1:23:58Brad Stulberg?

  Those guys are old.

• 1:23:59Rich Roll?

  I listen to R.E.M. and Radiohead and, like, a couple other bands, and that's, like, it. I'm stuck in my, in my ways.

• 1:24:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, Dispatch came a little bit later, but not much. I bet those guys are, like, 49. You know, they're peaking right now. Their songs are so wise. You'll check them out. But, um, yeah, so, so, so, yes, it, it all loops back. Like, all these things are integrated, and in that case, the, the patience and the core values go, go hand in hand. But if you don't have that internal dashboard, then you're going to be sucked up into the rat race, into measurement, into speed. And it's not either/or.

• 1:24:33Brad Stulberg?

  Most people live in both these worlds every day, maybe even every hour. So the game is just trying to, again, realize when you're in the world that you don't want to be in, and then have some tools to get you back on the path.

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  One of those tools being the practice of vulnerability. We talked earlier about you writing about your OCD and how important engaging in that vulnerability has been in your journey and in your process. But why is this like one of the core principles of groundedness?

• 1:25:06Brad Stulberg?

  Well, I don't think that you can truly be strong unless you are vulnerable. And Brene Brown writes beautifully about vulnerability, and in particular, the benefits of connecting with other people. So there's no point of me talking about that. Y'all could just go listen to or read Brene Brown. Something that she doesn't speak about as frequently is the benefits of being vulnerable with yourself for your ability to trust yourself. And that is why vulnerability makes you stronger.

• 1:25:45Brad Stulberg?

  If you have parts of yourself that you don't explore, that you're scared to explore, that you kind of know are there, but you don't go there, those parts of yourself tend to creep up and uproot you, to stick to the groundedness metaphor. There's this ancient Greek myth that I just love about the god Pan. And Pan lived just outside of the village boundaries. And every once in a while, people would be out hunting or foraging, and they'd get lost, and they'd venture into the terrain of Pan. And then they'd see Pan.

• 1:26:30Brad Stulberg?

  And he was so terrifying that as they ran away, they would freeze out of fear and die. Whereas in the myth, a few courageous villagers deliberately ventured out to go see Pan. And to the people that went to see him, Pan bestowed upon them wisdom, compassion, and strength.

• 1:26:51Brad Stulberg?

  And I read that as just a beautiful metaphor for vulnerability. So, we all have our pans, right? These are like our cracks, the parts of us that make us fragile. And if we try to avoid them, eventually, we're gonna stumble into them and it's gonna be ugly. And there's a lot of projection that happens too, I think. Whereas, if we can face them, sometimes with the help of other people, a therapist, a coach, more often than not, a friend, community members, family, it actually makes us stronger. Because it's very hard to trust all of yourself unless you fully know all of yourself.

• 1:27:27Rich Roll?

  Right, but short of some kind of crisis, it's easier to just live another day compartmentalizing all of those things and not look at those things. Rather than continue to peel back the layer and peel back the layer. And it's like, is this ever gonna end? There's no end to the amount of stuff that's down there waiting to be excavated, Brad. It's exhausting.

• 1:27:49Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, and it's back to both and.

• 1:27:53Rich Roll?

  Did you take improv classes?

• 1:27:55Brad Stulberg?

  Why, is that a thing?

• 1:27:56Rich Roll?

  Yes and is like the core of improv. Yeah, you do yes and to everything. Never say no when you get a prompt. And I've noticed you in this practice of yes and, which is good for conversation.

• 1:28:07Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I never knew it was an improv thing. I always think of it, it's non-dual thinking. Because I'm a firm believer that like very few things are either or. They tend to be both and, or like in this context versus that.

• 1:28:18Rich Roll?

  How do you survive Twitter with that ideology?

• 1:28:22Brad Stulberg?

  I schedule a lot of my tweets.

• 1:28:23Rich Roll?

  I say that as a joke, like, you know. Somebody who appreciates nuance and can see, you know, the complexities of everything.

• 1:28:32Brad Stulberg?

  The Twitter thread.

• 1:28:32Rich Roll?

  Because Twitter's like your main thing.

• 1:28:34Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, the Twitter thread function is nice now. Like, I do a lot more threads where I actually explain things. And Twitter is just, I mean, I'm being raw, I probably shouldn't say this. Like, Twitter is just a gateway to have people hopefully discover my books. Because like, that's where I really have the time and space to explore this. But a lot of people live there, so that's where I meet them. But to your point about like how to do all of this? Non-dual. Like, if you were to spend your whole day just peeling back that layer and exploring your own mortality and just all these things that are really hard, you'd be like one of these existentialists that ends up quite miserable.

• 1:29:18Brad Stulberg?

  But totally denying those things also, I don't think is a ticket to a rich and textured life and you can't run away from them forever anyways. Like eventually they catch up to you. So it's about knowing them without harping on them. And I think that most people by trying not to know them, again, at some point, like you come head to head with them and that's when it becomes really hard to detach.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The, um, the war that I wage is, is understanding these principles and I practice vulnerability and I understand how that makes you more able to connect with other people. Like, I think there's this notion, like, oh, I'll make friends by, you know, presenting the best version of myself and, and those people will be impressed and they'll invite me into their friend group. When, of course, it's the opposite. It's only when you're honest and you can disarm people with your level of like candor and self-reflection. That's really the, the glue, I think. And I think I'm pretty good at that. But I think what

• 1:30:20Rich Roll?

  I do is I fall into this pattern of, of tomorrow. Like, I know that, like, I gotta get through today. I know all this grounded in it stuff, but like, I got 10 things I gotta, I gotta get through. So I just, I just can't like take that moment to do that other thing that I know is good for me and that's just gonna have to wait for another day. And then that day becomes two days, becomes three days.

• 1:30:46Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. I mean, you, you say this on all your podcasts, man. Like, you just have to do it. So it's back to like scheduling it, owning it, not waiting, not needing to feel motivated to do it. There might never be a good time, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't put it on your calendar and do it. And in this case, I don't know what that might be. It might be like structured contemplation. It might be a bi-weekly session with a therapist. It might be scheduling time with a close friend to just dive deep. I think that you sell yourself short. I think that you get a lot of that in your work because you get to have these conversations right now. Like, what are, what are at least 70% of your podcast shows if not? Peeling back those layers.

• 1:31:30Rich Roll?

  They're self-serving in that regard, for sure.

• 1:31:32Brad Stulberg?

  Right, but so you built it into your life, so you do do it.

• 1:31:34Rich Roll?

  Right, I do, and it is true. Like, last night I had a therapy group meeting that I have here every Monday night with a bunch of dudes, but that means that I'm up later and I don't get as much sleep. And then today, because I had that last night, I wasn't as prepared to talk to you today, so I made the decision to block out the morning to make sure I was optimally prepared to talk to you, which meant that I didn't train today. So, there's so many moving pieces, and for me, it's about just being okay with the fact that, like, I'm not gonna get every piece in the right place every single day, and that's okay. And not beat myself, like, transcend that default setting that is telling me that I

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  failed because I didn't do these three things that I would've preferred to have done because I had these other competing values that took precedence on this particular day.

• 1:32:25Brad Stulberg?

  So, what you just said to me is a beautiful and very concrete example of the self-compassion and self-discipline, because it takes a lot of self-discipline to do what you do. But if you didn't have that self-compassion too, you'd burn out. Like, imagine if you went into this, and I'm sure there's still a part of you, it's like, "Damn it, Rich, like, you're off your schedule, you didn't train, whatever."

• 1:32:44Rich Roll?

  Right, well, I was like, "Oh, I should've just woken up earlier and made sure I got my training in, and then I could've also done this." But then, I have done that also, but then I'm rushing from one thing to the next, and yeah, I can check all those boxes, but I'm less present for all of those things, and I'm actually less fulfilled and happy, because it's always about, you know, being on this ticking clock and making sure that I get from point A to point B on time.

• 1:33:09Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, another thing that I just noticed, and again, I know we're not coaching here, is the word "should" is always a flag for me.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm, I say that a lot. I know you talk about that, so explain that.

• 1:33:20Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, don't shit all over yourself. When you catch yourself

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  I constantly do that.

• 1:33:24Brad Stulberg?

  When you catch yourself shitting, ask yourself, can you replace it with a wish or a want? And if the answer is no, then maybe you shouldn't do that thing. And if the answer is yes, then even that softens the tone. So I wish I would have been able to exercise. It's not nearly as judgmental. There's a parable in Buddhism about the second arrow. I love this too. I love all these parables because there's so much truth in them. And it goes like this, the first arrow is something that we can't control. And it can be internal or external. I used to think it was just external, but OCD will teach you that you cannot really control your thoughts.

• 1:34:07Brad Stulberg?

  So you could have an intrusive thought, your schedule could get away from you, whatever it is. And the first arrow hurts, it sucks. But the second arrow, the third arrow, the fourth arrow, all those additional arrows are your judgments about those things, your repression of those things, your shitting on yourself. And those arrows often hurt worse than the first arrow.

• 1:34:27Rich Roll?

  Right, it's the compound interest of negativity.

• 1:34:30Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  Right, like you make the mistake and then you beat yourself up for making the mistake, so you've just made a second mistake.

• 1:34:35Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, and you can't be perfect.

• 1:34:38Brad Stulberg?

  Again, though, non-dual, like it doesn't mean that you should say, well, to hell with it all, or let's all just hold hands and sing kumbaya. It means that let's hold hands and sing kumbaya and accept that we're not perfect, and let's identify things that matter for us and try to get better and strive. Lot of like mid-century George Leonard, before him, Alan Watts, these kind of like self-fashion gurus and philosophers of the good life, many of whom had a lot of good things to say. They often talked about the wisdom of insecurity. And that's an Alan Watts term in particular. And just how like, accepting that you're not perfect and being okay with that

• 1:35:22Brad Stulberg?

  is actually the key to getting better. Because if you constantly hold yourself to this bar of perfect, like you're gonna just get in your own way all the time. So that's another example of this non-dual thinking. You can be both good enough and get better. You can be both loving to yourself and really hard on yourself.

• 1:35:41Rich Roll?

  On the subject of vulnerability, I'm just putting myself in the shoes of, let's say, an executive at a corporation, and he is listening to this, or she is listening to this, and thinking, okay, I understand that, but I can't show vulnerability in the workplace. That's going to be the death knell. My whole thing is to make sure that everybody understands that I'm in charge, I've got everything under control, and that's how we push this train forward.

• 1:36:09Brad Stulberg?

  That's a really tricky situation.

• 1:36:11Rich Roll?

  And I'm sure you hear that a lot.

• 1:36:13Brad Stulberg?

  It's a common one.

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Brad Stulberg?

  And the coaching tool that I use there is, ask yourself what you really want to say, and then say something as close to that as possible. So, there's a story here. And one of my first coaching clients was a woman who, in the book, I called Donna, not her real name, and she called herself the accidental executive. So she had no goal of being an executive. And sure enough, there she found herself in the number three position at a multinational organization with over 50,000 employees. And she was the only woman

• 1:36:54Brad Stulberg?

  on the 20th floor of headquarters, and the only black person. So she called herself the double only. And she had so much imposter syndrome. And it was a real challenge for her.

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  And also probably thinking that she doesn't have the liberty of being able to make mistakes.

• 1:37:14Brad Stulberg?

  Bingo. Because of being the double only. So we talked about this. And she particularly froze up when she was on, like, the corporate roadshow. So overseas, giving talks about, hey, here's the vision, here's the strategy, here's how we're going to do it. She got really panicked. She felt like she wasn't herself on stage. So for a while, we tried just having her pretend that she was performing. But that didn't work for her. She's like, but that's not me. Like, I'm a genuine person. I'm like, what do you really want to say? And she looked at me, she's like, what I really want to say is like, I have no idea how I got here. I'm utterly overwhelmed and this is crazy. Like, why don't you just say that? And to your point, she's like, I can't say that. These people like, we're

• 1:37:58Brad Stulberg?

  a publicly traded company. Like, that'll be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Like, I don't know how I got here. But then I asked her, because she, this was after my essay on OCD. I'm like, well, you read what I wrote, right? That was all over the place. She's like, yeah. I'm like, well, how did that make you feel about me? She's like, it's actually like, part of the reason I wanted to work with you. Like, well, I clearly don't have it all together. Like, why would you want to work with me? I'm a mess. She's like, no, like, you're a human. And I'm like, all right. So you can't say that you have no idea what's going on, but maybe you can get close to that. So ultimately, she ended up going on stage and she started to open up these talks by saying that I feel like an accidental executive. Sometimes I walk onto a stage like this and I'm in awe

• 1:38:39Brad Stulberg?

  of how I got here. And it's a really challenging job. And I'm doing the best that I can. And that's why it's so important that I need all of your help and engage in the company and this, that, and the other.

• 1:38:49Rich Roll?

  And then everybody fell in love with her.

• 1:38:51Brad Stulberg?

  Everybody fell in love with her. The reviews after the talks skyrocketed. And most important is she felt like herself. So that's all it took. Because she knew she was bullshitting. When she went up there all corporate, like, these are the vision and values. And she's like, I don't know what I'm talking about. And I think that that's another truth, is that so many of us are making it up as we go. In a way, we all are. Some of us are just making it up with a little bit more experience and expertise than others. So it's a long-winded answer to your question of, for the person that's in that setting, I think the heuristic is ask yourself what you really want to say, and then say as close to that as you're comfortable with.

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it has to be gauged in accordance with the scenario, because the unhealthy extreme of this is either the TMI, like-

• 1:39:38Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. Or performative vulnerability, which is a huge thing.

• 1:39:40Rich Roll?

  That's the other thing. The performative vulnerability, which we see a lot of, which is inauthentic vulnerability for the purpose of gaming the system.

• 1:39:48Brad Stulberg?

  Correct. And vulnerability, like, that's the, I read a Brene Brown book, and I know that more people will like me if I'm vulnerable.

• 1:39:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:39:55Brad Stulberg?

  Or even worse, I'll get more followers on social media.

• 1:39:57Rich Roll?

  This is a good marketing strategy.

• 1:39:59Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And that, I get asked that question sometimes. And the way that I like to think about it in my own life is vulnerability should very rarely feel good in the moment, especially if it's with other people. So earlier, when you asked about my OCD, my brain is always going through this, well, like, how deep should I go? Should I talk about the knife thing? Like, I really don't like talking about that. And that doesn't feel good. Like, that was not a fun part of this conversation for me. And if, like, to me, that's the essence of vulnerability. Like, if I want to live that value, it shouldn't feel good. Whereas if I'm all calculating, and I'm like, oh, like, that's gonna make, people are gonna, a lot of people probably tune out at that point. Like, this guy's nuts. But I think that that's, like, that, for me, is the barometer.

• 1:40:44Brad Stulberg?

  If you are doing vulnerability as a means to an end, or like, you're scheming, then you're probably actually doing yourself more harm than good.

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  At some point, if you're compelled to tell that story tons of times, because you're doing lots of media and podcasts, you'll probably end up in this place where I found myself, which is telling the same story again, and always trying to, you know, be as honest as possible, and perhaps, you know, find a different way into it, or a different version of it, or angle of it. But I found myself telling a story that's, that's true, and then wondering, like, did that really happen? Because you end up disassociating with it, because you've told it so many times. And then you're like, and it doesn't have that same, you don't feel like it's, it's vulnerability, because it's so rote at that point, and then it feels rehearsed and almost flat. And I'm like, did that even happen? Like, or am I just remembering this?

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  Like, what is the truth behind this? So then it becomes an exercise of, like, going deeper into it, and trying to find a way to continue to stay emotionally connected with that thing that was so formative, and kind of, you know, catalyzing the journey that you've been on.

• 1:41:53Brad Stulberg?

  And just painful.

• 1:41:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Brad Stulberg?

  And I think that's it. Like, if it feel, and I don't, I don't, I, because most podcasts don't go as beautifully deep as yours, and I genuinely mean that. You look at the podcasts I've been on, they're shorter. I tend not to be able to go deep, because the last thing I want to do is feel compressed for time. So I'm fortunate that, in a conversation like this, I feel like I have the time to. But ultimately, like, it's just a memory of, like, a lot of pain. And, and I think healthy healing is, there's gotta be some distance between how painful that was, because otherwise, it'd be hard to get through the day.

• 1:42:27Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:42:28Brad Stulberg?

  So I also think that's probably a sign of, like, good recovery, is intellectualizing it enough.

• 1:42:34Brad Stulberg?

  But not so much that now it's just this thing that you're talking about.

• 1:42:38Rich Roll?

  Right. Let's talk about the community piece for a little bit. The roots that run laterally. I would imagine in your coaching practice, there's a bit of a hurdle here because the type A driven person is also likely to be the control freak, or I'm the only one who knows how to do it this way. Everybody just needs to listen to me and the world will be perfect and I can form it in my image.

• 1:43:01Brad Stulberg?

  You sound like my four-year-old.

• 1:43:04Rich Roll?

  I sound like me, you know?

• 1:43:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so we're to start with community. I think the first thing is, um, community is not efficient. It is not quote-unquote optimal or productive in the short term. Because building community is slow, it takes time. And the best, deepest, most nourishing communities are not those that are means to an end. They're ends in and of themselves. And I think that's really important. So there's building community because knowing these people is going to help you launch your product or fund your business. Then there's just building community for the sake of building community. And what the research unequivocally shows is that on our deathbeds,

• 1:43:51Brad Stulberg?

  no one looks back and says, "Oh, it's the gold medal." Or "It was the promotion or regional vice president." Everybody looks back and they talk about the relationships they made along the way. So, I'm going to give the answer for people that are on this wavelength. And then the answer for people that might be more like me and you, which are like, "Well, I need to be efficient, I need to be productive, I need to push." So, for those that don't, I think you're already like in a good spot in terms of community. It's just make that a goal, like build community, put yourself out there, take the time to do that. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about how. For people like you and I, I think it's so important that when you pick a goal...

• 1:44:33Brad Stulberg?

  The steps that you have to get there should involve building community. So like you bake it into your work. Again, clearly you've done that with this podcast. But try to make more and more things a team game or a game of relationships, or where you're building a community as a part of this pursuit that you have or this passion that you have. But ultimately, the best community that I have is like my actual neighbors in my neighborhood. And I think some of this is probably the privilege of living in an actual neighborhood in this small town, but no one knows who I am. Like, it's very easy for me, you know, like you, like, oh, I'm this intellectual person

• 1:45:16Brad Stulberg?

  and I need people like Rich that I can talk about these topics with. You know, Brandy and Evan next door, they don't really care. They don't even know that I do this. So there is zero means to an end, but there's something that is just so viscerally like grounding about being in a space and knowing your neighbors and knowing the gossip and knowing that you all have each other's back if something were to happen and having the dogs play in the backyard. These small things that help us to feel like this world isn't so big and we're not so insignificant, which if you live on the internet is how you feel all the time because it's just infinity. Whereas if you have a physical community, then it becomes small, it becomes manageable.

• 1:45:59Brad Stulberg?

  So a homework assignment that I have for a lot of coaching clients and they don't like it is like, really try to get involved locally. Go to a city council meeting. I mean, maybe not politically as a first step, but you get my point. Like, like, go to the farmer's market, like, start having these routines. If you work from home and you're creative, like, pick two cafes and work at them. And I used to be like this when I was like way back, pre OCD in my like too productive mode. I remember distinctly like working on my first book. And when I first started writing for Outside, I was in my twenties, I was hungry, thought I had to push. I wouldn't want to leave my apartment because the commute to the cafe would take 10 minutes and I might lose my train of thought. That's where I was at.

• 1:46:42Rich Roll?

  I'm with you on that.

• 1:46:43Brad Stulberg?

  And now it's like, no, like you go to that cafe, you learn the barista's name. Because again, efficiency today busts out the piece. Long haul efficiency productivity is being happy, feeling grounded. And there's something really nice about walking into a coffee shop and nodding and everyone knows you.

• 1:47:01Rich Roll?

  Right. So again, it's ultimately about understanding what's in your best interest long term and being willing or having the kind of emotional fortitude to delay.

• 1:47:12Brad Stulberg?

  And short term though.

• 1:47:13Rich Roll?

  Or set aside the short term gain.

• 1:47:16Brad Stulberg?

  But it's also, yeah, but it's also short term because I think it's-

• 1:47:18Rich Roll?

  Well, because you're happier throughout your day and your life is more rich.

• 1:47:21Brad Stulberg?

  Bingo. And I think like we're such creatures of our surroundings. So another example on community that definitely my guess will resonate for listeners that spend a lot of time on the internet and other creatives out there. So when I do not do a good job prioritizing community, that is when I am most apt to feel insecure about myself as an author and as a person on the internet. That is when I will check the sales rank of my book. That is when I will tweet more often to try to get more followers. I will do all of these things to try to feel relevant against infinity. When I am engaging in my community, I find that the urge to do that, the thought to do

• 1:48:05Brad Stulberg?

  that, the feeling like I need to, it's zero. It's not important.

• 1:48:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:09Brad Stulberg?

  So you do feel better in the short term. I think, at least I do. And I know, like I've gotten really good at paying attention. So now when I catch myself like searching for that relevance on the internet, it simply means like I look at my calendar, I look what I did the last two weeks. It's like, oh, I was supposed to train with Tony on Saturday, but I kind of flaked out on him because I knew I only had 45 minutes because I wanted to write this thing before Theo goes to soccer. It's like, no, the thing can wait. Because now I'm sitting there on Twitter hoping that people like the thing. Because I'm not feeling relevant because I didn't make time for the community.

• 1:48:43Rich Roll?

  Right. Talk to me about the movement piece.

• 1:48:46Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, you talk to me, you know it better than anyone.

• 1:48:49Rich Roll?

  I don't, you know, it's like, listen, we're on the same page here.

• 1:48:51Brad Stulberg?

  We're on the same page here.

• 1:48:52Rich Roll?

  I can't, I can't be

• 1:48:53Brad Stulberg?

  It's impossible.

• 1:48:54Rich Roll?

  A happy, functional, productive human being unless I'm moving my body on the regular.

• 1:48:59Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so this was, this was a really interesting conversation with my, um, my editor, who I, who I loved, which is movement at first felt disconnected from the other principles in this book, at least to a lot of people at my publisher, not to me.

• 1:49:12Rich Roll?

  Because why?

• 1:49:13Brad Stulberg?

  Because these other things are these like very age-old psychological principles. And this is a perfect way into movement because most people, you and I hear movement and we think probably more psychology than physiology.

• 1:49:25Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:49:26Brad Stulberg?

  But most people hear movement and they think exercise. They think, what does exercise have to do with vulnerability, or patience, or community? And the argument that I made to them and then that I make in the book is it actually has everything to do with these other attributes. So Rene Descartes separated the mind and body and that was a huge mistake and our thinking is still very much in this

• 1:49:48Rich Roll?

  Bifurcated.

• 1:49:49Brad Stulberg?

  In this bifurcated mind-body thinking, when in fact, the latest research shows that we are not a mind or body, we're not even a mind and body, we're a mind-body system. And it would be intellectually dishonest for me to talk about all these other principles and tools and not include movement. Because before I do any of the other work with my coaching clients, I help them develop a movement practice if they don't have one. And a movement practice doesn't need to be cycling, or swimming, or CrossFit, it can be gardening, it can be dancing, it can be yoga. And what I find for most people, and actually what I do the most of myself right now, is just walking. The benefits of a daily brisk walk are just nuts.

• 1:50:33Rich Roll?

  You're also pre-jacked up right now.

• 1:50:37Brad Stulberg?

  So the shirt might be tight.

• 1:50:38Rich Roll?

  The first thing when you walked in, I was like, whoa, someone's been in the weight room since the last time I saw you.

• 1:50:42Brad Stulberg?

  So, um, so I, I, in the spirit of full disclosure, right now, my physical practice looks like four days a week, I strength trained for an hour. And I have a phenomenal coach that is just fun to work with and we get all kinds of cool skill development. And then every day I walk for between 45 minutes and two hours. And those are long walks with Ananda, my, my German shepherd. And the, the, because you went there and because I know a large portion of your audience are athletes, a big part of the strength training, somewhat related to the principles in this book, is it gives me something that is tangible and measurable, where there's concrete improvement, that doesn't depend on what other people think.

• 1:51:26Brad Stulberg?

  So if I put a book out into the world, I have no control whether or not people buy it. I try as hard as I can to practice what I preach and say, well, what are my core values? What's my internal dashboard? Did the book live up to them? What do the people I respect most think of the book? But still, it's out there in the world, sales numbers are a thing that matter. Whereas in the weight room, I get this thing that I can work to make progress at, that is solely in my control. The closest thing to it is like a pool. Cause like even in running and cycling, there's weather, conditions change, but like 45 pounds is 45 pounds, you know, 100 meters is 100 meters. So I think it's important for me, it helps me stay grounded to have this very real thing, that the successes are 100% concrete and can be traced directly to myself and the failures are in my face.

• 1:52:11Brad Stulberg?

  I can't be like, well, it was a bad news cycle or people don't get it. It's like, no, like I didn't hit the weight. But it's something that I struggle with all the time. It's something I talk about with my therapist all the time, is am I just addicted to progress? Like, why do I still care how much I squat? Why do I need a goal to chase? Why can't I just be okay walking my dog for an hour and a half?

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  That's a good question.

• 1:52:35Brad Stulberg?

  I spend a lot of time.

• 1:52:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Brad Stulberg?

  Tumbling that around in my mind.

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think. Having a healthy relationship with those numbers is important. But irrespective of that, to be in the habit or the practice of challenging yourself to do hard things

• 1:52:52Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:52:53Rich Roll?

  is important to developing resilience across the board, emotional and physical resilience. And just the sheer humility that it gives you, like, especially when you get older and it's like you can't do the stuff you used to be able to do, I think all of that is super healthy. And then, of course, the integrated mind-body system requires it, like emotionally I'm better, I'm more present, I feel better, I'm happier, I just feel more grounded

• 1:53:19Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:53:20Rich Roll?

  when I'm working out, right?

• 1:53:21Brad Stulberg?

  And that's, but that's movement, that's not necessarily connected to a goal.

• 1:53:24Rich Roll?

  But that movement can be in the weight room, right?

• 1:53:26Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, oh, for sure it is. But what I'm saying is, it's like the goal, like I always talk about with this guy at the gym, Zach, I'm like, you know, at some point, I'm just going to come in here to be healthy three days a week. I'm not there yet. Like, right now, I still have a goal.

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  Right. And that goal is what, just like pushing these PRs?

• 1:53:43Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, this is arbitrary numbers, but I'd love to, it's like 5-4-3 in powerlifting world, so it's deadlift 500 pounds, squat 400 pounds, and bench press 300 pounds.

• 1:53:53Rich Roll?

  But goals add structure

• 1:53:55Brad Stulberg?

  Sure.

• 1:53:56Rich Roll?

  and build accountability and drive, like, in a world in which your attention and time and energy is limited, when you have a goal, it helps you prioritize how you focus that attention, time, and energy.

• 1:54:08Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:54:09Rich Roll?

  So there's nothing wrong with that unless your attachment to that goal or the outcome is unhealthy.

• 1:54:15Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, and this is something that I wrote about recently, so we'll dive in here really quick, because I think it's fascinating, and maybe you can give me some advice. And I don't know if you saw, it was just in the newsletter, so it wasn't like widely shared on Outside Magazine or anything like that. But I recently had a fitness test, and for the first time in my life, there was no part of my identity or self-worth that was attached to the result.

• 1:54:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:42Brad Stulberg?

  And I couldn't find any extra gear. So my relationship with athletics I was bullied when I was in first to third grade really badly. Had to switch school level bullying. Then in seventh grade, my parents wouldn't let me play football. They were concerned about health and I got jumped on the side of the road by high schoolers, like beat the crap out of me. Became super anxious to be outside of my own neighborhood because I didn't feel safe. Like they, they beat me to the ground. Then my parents were like, all right, I guess we'll let Brad play football for his confidence. So I play football and I go in the weight room and suddenly my ability to feel safe and confident is totally related to my strength. And then in high school, girls start liking me.

• 1:55:26Brad Stulberg?

  It's not because of my brain, it's because like the size of my arms and I'm the captain of the football team and my entire identity is connected to football. So then I go to school at Michigan and I'm not good enough to play there. Right. And I can't have anything to do with sport, with, excuse me, with the sport of football. I don't even go to games anymore. It was too painful. So I'm just kind of like, and I can't, I don't lift for cosmetics. That was never me, like it's meaningless. It has to have a goal. My identity was so connected to strength geared towards football. So I kind of get into endurance sports and I'm doing it as like a hobby level. And then the girl that I dated throughout college dumps me kind of out of the blue. And at the time that was really painful. So what do I do? I totally numb it with triathlon. I just train away all my pain, all my insecurity around that.

• 1:56:11Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it's good for that. And now triathlon is my identity and I care deeply about triathlon. You're higher power. All of that stuff. And for the first time in my life, getting back into strength training, which the, the, the long story made short is to get better at triathlon would have required training so much. And my son was coming along. I just like had gotten through the OCD thing. It's like, you know, I'm just going to go back to my roots and start strength training again. I joke with David Epstein, who wrote Range All The Time. Like my fit is definitely with strength training. It took me 10 years to try to run a marathon. It's equivalent to what I can squat after like two months. So my body just responds to this kind of training better.

• 1:56:54Brad Stulberg?

  So I get back into strength training, but for the first time in my life, like I love my wife to death. We live in a place where we're happy. I've got this dog that I love. My son means everything to me. My professional identity is connected to that book right there. Maybe that's not so healthy, but certainly more than athletics. And I can't find that extra gear. I'm like, I just don't care if I make the lift. So that's what I'm exploring now is like, how do I find that extra gear? Or do I even need to find that extra gear anymore? Because it used to be if I missed that squat, my entire identity is on the line. So of course, you figure out a way to make it. And now I'm just like, well, I already promised myself a breakfast burrito regardless if I make this or not. So like, it doesn't really matter.

• 1:57:38Rich Roll?

  Well, age will purge that out of you.

• 1:57:40Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, in what way?

• 1:57:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you'll get to a point where that's just not part of the conversation.

• 1:57:45Brad Stulberg?

  Whether or not you're gonna make the thing.

• 1:57:46Rich Roll?

  Right. And so one of the things that my wife always says to me that's super helpful is because, you know, when I was training for Ultraman, it's very performance metrics oriented. And you're carving out a huge amount of time and you got to make every minute count. And I'm super focused on how this was going to translate into a certain result that I care deeply about. It's not about that anymore for me. But then, if it's not about that, what is it about? And how are you finding meaning in it? Right? And Julie will say, you got to do it for the joy. Like, that's the sustainable energy source, right? If you're, if you're, if you're chasing something else, then, you know, it's not going to be something you're going to be able to stick with over time.

• 1:58:27Brad Stulberg?

  Yes. And to tie it back to what we talked about, for me, with strength training, because it happens inside, it's purely related to community. So my sustainability and strength training as I age will be directly related to my doing it with a group of other people that I have fun with and I enjoy their company. Because if I were to do it alone, like, again, it doesn't really matter.

• 1:58:48Rich Roll?

  Right. Why is meditation not one of these core principles?

• 1:58:54Brad Stulberg?

  It's a good question. I think that I would, I would argue that meditation is baked into all of them. Actually, let me reframe. I would argue that mindfulness is baked into all of them, especially the presence principle. But the act of meditation itself.

• 1:59:12Brad Stulberg?

  Is not worthy of a principle in a book on groundedness.

• 1:59:16Rich Roll?

  It's a practice that would be within the subheading of presence.

• 1:59:20Brad Stulberg?

  Correct, and meditation, and I have a practice, and it's been a wonderful thing, especially when I was going through OCD. Nothing is better exposure therapy than sitting with your eyes closed and being bombarded by these intrusive thoughts and feelings and then not being able to do anything. So I'm a huge believer in meditation. And meditation today has been completely ripped out of the ancient wisdom traditions where it originated and sold as like a balm for all that ails us. When in fact, you look at any of the contemplative traditions that meditation was a part of,

• 2:00:00Brad Stulberg?

  and the actual act of sitting with your eyes closed and having an anchor tends to be one of five to eight other principles. And in Buddhism, which is the tradition here in the West that is most closely associated with meditation, it's actually just one of eight parts of what the Buddha called the noble eightfold path. And meditation was taught in Buddhism after ethics. So right action came before right being. And I think that meditation itself, like your practice is only as strong as your life. So if you think that sitting with your eyes closed for 20 minutes a day is going to somehow help you find freedom or fulfillment or enlightenment, but then you get off the cushion

• 2:00:45Brad Stulberg?

  and your life is like completely ungrounded, it's not going to work. So I see it as a practice that supports all of these principles. Also in Buddhism, sangha, which is the word for community, was taught before meditation. My favorite parable, because I'm on a little Buddhist kick in the whole book, I mentioned that my German shepherd's named Ananda, and here's why. So in the Polycanon, which is one of the oldest living texts that we have of Buddhism, Ananda was the Buddha's loyal attendant. And throughout these scriptures and texts, he's painted as like this overly eager, enthusiastic, curious, wanting to soak up all the knowledge from the Buddha person.

• 2:01:29Brad Stulberg?

  And Ananda goes up to the Buddha one day, and there's tons of repetition in the Polycanon, but I think it serves its purpose. So he says, Buddha, Buddha, blessed one, blessed one. I've just heard that good comradeship, good friendship, and good sangha is 50% of the spiritual path. Could this possibly be true? And Buddha says, "No, Ananda, no, you are mistaken. No, good comradeship, good sangha, good friendship is not 50% of the spiritual path." And Ananda looks at the Buddha and says, "What is it, Blessed One? What could be true?" And the Buddha looks at him and he says, "Ananda, good comradeship, good friendship,

• 2:02:12Brad Stulberg?

  good sangha is the whole of the spiritual path."

• 2:02:15Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:16Brad Stulberg?

  There was nothing in there about meditation.

• 2:02:18Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:19Brad Stulberg?

  So, I think that it's a very powerful tool, but it's gotta be situated.

• 2:02:23Rich Roll?

  Meditation being a tool that would be important for sangha, important for all of these things, right?

• 2:02:28Brad Stulberg?

  Oh, it's important for everything. And again, when I met my best, I sit for 20 minutes a day. Doesn't happen as much with a young kid, but it is an extremely powerful tool, but I think it needs to be situated in a broader framework. And what's great about meditation too, is we talked in Acceptance about self-distancing, giving advice to a friend. Meditation's a great way to do that.

• 2:02:48Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 2:02:49Brad Stulberg?

  Because you start to see thoughts, feelings, situations in your life from the place of being an observer, not in them. And then it's the observing you, the more you connect with that, your essence, your core, your spirit, whatever you want to call it, the more that you can start to make decisions out of that place.

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  Right. And the greater capacity you have to respond from a place of neutrality to all of the stressors in your life.

• 2:03:16Brad Stulberg?

  Neutrality or perhaps even compassion. That's what I get out of meditation. Meditators understand this. I didn't when I first heard it, and now I think it's one of the most beautiful quotes on meditation. It's an anonymous source, but this woman at the end of her life was reflecting on her meditation practice, and she said that "Every itch not scratched was a lesson in compassion."

• 2:03:43Rich Roll?

  I'm just chewing on that. Explain that.

• 2:03:45Brad Stulberg?

  Well, how I interpret that is that when you're sitting, whether it's a physical itch or a mental itch, something comes up and you want to deal with it. And the practice is just to let it be there.

• 2:03:57Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. Be in the allowing.

• 2:03:59Brad Stulberg?

  And learning to let it be there helps you become a more compassionate person to yourself, to others, because we all have all these itches that we want to scratch all the time. And it's so hard to live a life where we're bombarded with these things that we want to fix, with loss, with disappointment, with all these things. And learning to accept it, if that doesn't make you a more compassionate person, then what will?

• 2:04:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Let's, let's close this thing down with some practical takeaways for people. So perhaps somebody's been listening to this. They're thinking, okay, I'm on board, Brad. I'm going to get the book. But help me with a few simple things that I can begin to incorporate into my life to cultivate groundedness. So we've talked about these things from kind of a 10,000 foot view. But, and in the book you have like practices, like here's the, here's how you kind of do things. So you, it's certainly in the book. But what are a few of your favorites or things that you think could be helpful to somebody who's trying to, you know, blaze this path?

• 2:05:01Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, blaze it slowly.

• 2:05:04Rich Roll?

  Right, the patience thing.

• 2:05:05Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, no, but blaze it is good.

• 2:05:07Rich Roll?

  Slow variety.

• 2:05:08Brad Stulberg?

  It's good to have, it's good to have motivation. Is Elliot Kipchoge, the greatest runner and potentially the greatest athlete of all time, talks about his progress. And he's literally like the fastest human on earth over long distances. Says he makes progress slowly by slowly.

• 2:05:23Rich Roll?

  Right. And you talk about, you write about him rarely going beyond 80%.

• 2:05:27Brad Stulberg?

  In his workouts.

• 2:05:28Rich Roll?

  In his workouts and, and this notion of like, you know, one less rep or like not going to max out.

• 2:05:35Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Rich Roll?

  As being a kind of habit of building sustainability into your daily routine.

• 2:05:41Brad Stulberg?

  So, so, um, yes, I'd love that. And, and just like the compounding consistency. And you've had other guests that talk about that topic and have whole books on that topic. So a couple of like really tactical things. The first is the core values work, I think, is, can be really transformative. So it doesn't have to be more than a half an hour or an hour, but try to come up with the three to five qualities that you really aspire towards, that are you when you're at your best, and then define them in concrete terms. And then for each of those qualities, talk about things that you will do or that you'll stop doing that allow you to practice them. Something else.

• 2:06:20Rich Roll?

  The three, you tell, yeah, the three things that you want to adopt and the three things you want to let go of.

• 2:06:26Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, in service of that core value. So if your core value is vulnerability, well, what are you doing that goes away from that? And what could you do that works toward that? If your core value is love, how do you, again, how do you define it? What do you do? How do you get from love to I'm going to put my phone in the glove compartment of the car and leave it in the garage? Start trying to think non-dually. So when you catch yourself being like, I need to be self-disciplined, how can you be self-disciplined and self-compassionate?

• 2:06:52Rich Roll?

  The yes and.

• 2:06:53Brad Stulberg?

  How can you sometimes go fast and realize when it's important to step back and be good enough and go a little bit more slowly? And then another thing that I think is just, is really helpful and has an immediate effect is try to catch yourself shooting on yourself and try to replace that self-talk with wish or want. And that's the whole intervention and just watch what happens. My coaching clients are like, wait, you mean that's going to change things? Like, just try it. And some of the most perfectionist people that are hardest on themselves after a few months, they're like, wow, like, you're right. Like, when I catch myself shooting, all I do is like, I wish I could do that, I want to do that.

• 2:07:35Brad Stulberg?

  And it just lessens that second arrow.

• 2:07:39Rich Roll?

  That's the big one for me because obviously that's my Achilles heel right now. When I read the book and just in the conversations that we've had, I feel like you read my mind and, you know, everything that I've been able to kind of achieve is a result of practicing the things that you talk about. I mean, I remember. The first podcast we did, I met you in a hotel lobby and it was you, me and Steve in a tiny hotel room. The second time, you came to my house and we had a setup and we filmed it and now you're here. Well, that took place over a number of years, that progressive growth. And that growth is the result of making incremental progress on the daily, not having any kind of viral crazy spikes, but just showing up for the thing, day in, day out, trying to

• 2:08:23Rich Roll?

  get a little bit better, iterating and being patient. You know, these things take time and I've been doing this for 10 years at this point. And I feel like I've grown into or matured into a place where I can kind of own this space in a way that I couldn't have the first time that we did a podcast. And that's just the way it works. So for people who are struggling or feel stuck or feel like they're falling behind their peers, try to have a broader view on your, on your trajectory and, and exercise a little bit of that self-compassion and tend to yourself and try to figure out the one thing that you can do that day that's tiny, that no one would care about, perform it anonymously, do it again the next day.

• 2:09:04Rich Roll?

  And it's only over an extreme amount of time that you begin to see results or that those results are reflected back to you by other people who can see what you can't. I mean, I remember being in AA for years, thinking I wasn't getting better and feeling like my life had stalled out and I had no trajectory. But I just kept going to meetings, I kept showing up, I kept just trying to get a commitment or do the thing. And I really felt static in my life and I felt like all my peers were passing me by because I couldn't see the growth or the foundation of growth that I was creating that would allow me to do things later in life. And I think the patience piece is like really powerful. And I think that's an opportunity for people to be gentle on themselves and, and exercise

• 2:09:48Rich Roll?

  a little bit of, you know, direct that grace inward.

• 2:09:51Brad Stulberg?

  I love it. I couldn't have closed it any better. It's a practice.

• 2:09:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55Brad Stulberg?

  The book's not called Get Grounded for a reason.

• 2:09:58Rich Roll?

  Get Grounded Today.

• 2:09:59Brad Stulberg?

  Like, this is an ongoing practice, and life is a practice. And you gotta show up. And some days are better than others. And you just get on the path, and you fall off the path, and you get back on, and you repeat that interval. And if things go well, you learn and grow, and hopefully have some fun along the way.

• 2:10:16Rich Roll?

  Right on, brother. Well, the book is amazing. It's a gift to humanity. I know you're already hard at work on the next thing, so you'll have an opportunity to come back and share about that as well. But I wish you well. Everybody should check out this book, The Practice of Groundedness, and all of Brad's other books, The Passion Paradox, and Peak Performance, right? Available wherever you buy books. You can also check out Brad's email newsletter and podcast, The Growth Equation. What is it? TheGrowthEQ.com? Is that the website?

• 2:10:47Brad Stulberg?

  You are right on.

• 2:10:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there you go. And Brad is pretty active on Twitter. He likes to throw down these massive threads.

• 2:10:54Brad Stulberg?

  I do what I can.

• 2:10:55Rich Roll?

  So if you're into that, check him out there. B. Stulberg there, right?

• 2:10:58Brad Stulberg?

  Yep, that's the scoop. And I just want to thank you for this. I'm just really, for whatever reason this time, you know, it's always a pleasure to be with you, but I was just feeling so grateful. I think some of it is, we tried to do it earlier, but my kid wasn't vaccinated, pandemic stuff. So just to be here and to be able to sit down with you is a joy. So thank you.

• 2:11:20Rich Roll?

  The feeling is mutual, my friend. Mad respect, much love, and you're always welcome here. Peace.

• 2:11:31Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as Podcast Merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

• 2:12:02Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering

• 2:12:44Rich Roll?

  by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.