How To Achieve Peak Performance — And Sustain It — With Brad Stulberg & Steve Magness

Plenty has been written about achieving peak performance in sport, career and life. But there is a black hole in the literature when it comes to the tools and practices required to consistently perform at your absolute best over the course of an athletic season, a long professional career and ultimately an entire lifetime. Until now. This week I convene with Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) and Steve Magness (@stevemagness), two high performers who both quested for greatness but fell short, succumbing to the paralyzing burnout that all too often destroys the hopes and dreams of even the most talented, determined and capable. Once a rising star at McKinsey & Co. with a stint consulting on health care at The White House, Brad was a golden boy determined to maximize his seemingly unlimited career potential. Instead, he worked himself right out the door of his chosen profession. Reinventing himself as a writer and author, today Brad specializes in the health and the science of human performance, known for his ability to merge the latest science with compelling personal stories to offer readers practical insights that they can apply in their own lives. Currently a columnist for Outside Magazine and New York Magazine, Brad has also written for Forbes, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Runner’s World, and The Huffington Post. And because Brad's insights are generally so awesome, they often find their way into my weekly Roll Call newsletter. An elite track & field athlete with very realistic Olympic dreams, Steve clocked an extraordinary 4:01 mile in high school. As a collegiate, he would spend the next several years chasing the elusive sub-4 minute barrier, unable to best what he accomplished as a teen. Steve reinvented himself as one of the most accomplished, respected and in demand track & field and cross country coaches in the world. In addition to serving up duties at the University of Houston, he is the personal coach to some of the most accomplished professional and Olympic runners on the planet. In the wake of their respective course corrections, both Brad and Steve wondered: what could we have done differently? And more importantly, what can be learned from the latest science, our experience and that of others to save people from suffering our fate? The product of that inquiry is Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout and Thrive with the New Science of Success*. Based on science and insight derived from some of the world's most accomplished athletes, artists, and intellectuals, it's a must-read primer on the common principles that drive and ultimately sustain performance, regardless if you're trying to qualify for the Olympics, break ground in mathematical theory, craft an artistic masterpiece or just become a better weekend warrior, parent or professional. Today, I sit down with Brad and Steve to unpack the aforementioned common principles. Chockablock with life-enhancing treasures, this is a great conversation. Enjoy! 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.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Brad Stulberg?

  It's really, really hard to be balanced, and that's okay. But what's not okay is to mindlessly just go down a path because that's where your passion's taking you, and to do it recklessly.

• 1:17Steve Magness?

  I'll just layer on, and I think it's about being intentional. It's being thoughtful and intentional on what you're trying to do and what you want out of it. Deciding where you go and how do you get that, but also making sure that you're not getting in your own way. So I think getting out of our way and then being intentional on what we're trying to accomplish is two takeaways that I think are really important.

• 1:43Rich Roll?

  That's Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. And this week on the Rich Roll Podcast, it's all about peak performance.

• 2:00Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast where each week I bring you the best and the brightest, the most paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, fitness, diet, nutrition, entertainment, athletics, business, entrepreneurship, all with one goal in mind: to help you manifest your best, most authentic self, to help you self-actualize, which is the greatest aspiration that we could all have for ourselves and each other. I've got a fantastic show coming up for you in a couple of minutes, but first, we've got to take care of a little business.

• 2:47Rich Roll?

  All right, today's show. So today, I sit down with two guests, two really awesome guys, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Now, I could easily do an entire show with either one of these guys individually, and I may do that in the future, but today, they're here as the dynamic duo behind their new book, which is called Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success. It's a great read. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of it. I really enjoyed it. You should all check it out because these are two gentlemen who have each, in their own respective fields, achieved super impressive levels of success and really understand both the science and

• 3:29Rich Roll?

  the process behind not only attaining peak performance, your potential, but also how to sustain it over the long term. And it's that sustainability part that's perhaps not that sexy, but is really most critical, most important. It's what separates the most successful people across every field, any field of expertise and prowess, from the flash in the pants. So who are these guys? Well, a former consultant for McKinsey & Company, Brad Stulberg, he's @bstulberg, S-T-U-L-B-E-R-G on Twitter, is a

• 4:06Rich Roll?

  Writer, he's an author who specializes in writing about health and the science of human performance. He's a columnist with Outside Magazine and New York Magazine. He's also written for Forbes, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Runner's World, and the Huffington Post. Brad is known specifically for his ability to merge the latest science with compelling personal stories, offering readers practical insights that they can apply in their own lives. And this new book is really a manifestation of that style. Steve Magness. Steve is a former world-class runner who once clocked a 401 mile in high school, and today is one of the world's most accomplished, respected, and in-demand track and field and cross-country coaches. In addition to serving up his duties at the University

• 4:51Rich Roll?

  of Houston, Steve is the personal coach to several professional athletes, a bunch of Olympians, basically some of the best runners on the entire planet. As an aside, Steve was also the main whistleblower on the Nike-Oregon project, Alberto Salazar doping scandal. That's a fascinating story in its own right, but it's a little bit far afield of what we talked about today. So we didn't really get into that in today's podcast, but if there's some interest, perhaps I can revisit that with Steve at a later date. What's interesting is that both of these guys are, like I said earlier, super high performers, but they're also two people who both ultimately burned out, dying on the

• 5:35Rich Roll?

  sword of this "more is better" or "I'll sleep when I die" ethos. Despite being a high school phenom, Steve never reached his personal athletic potential, and despite Brad being sort of a golden boy in his younger years, he never reached his potential in the consulting world. And I personally have a version of this story as well. In any event, this got each of these two guys thinking deeply about the sustainability aspect of peak performance, and really how to help others. Not only achieve it, but prevent the failures that they experienced. And this new book, which is packed with the latest science and insights from some of the world's greatest athletes, artists, and intellectuals, is a result, and it's

• 6:18Rich Roll?

  great. I think it's going to help a lot of people. And today, we get into the principles behind it. So this is a conversation about, of course, the sustainability of peak performance, athletic performance, and how it can apply to non-athletic activities, practices, and careers in a non-athlete's life. It's about training versus overtraining, avoiding burnout, the courage to rest for the athletes out there. It's about habits to set yourself up to perform at your best. It's about self-actualization. It's about passion versus purpose, and the mindfulness to enjoy your pursuits. In other words, purpose as the ultimate performance enhancer. It's about meditation. It's about service. It's about overcoming fear. But

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  ultimately, it's really about identifying who you are, defining your core principles, and constructing a principled life that supports that mission over the long term. So I love connecting with these guys. They're awesome. They have great energy. And I think you guys are going to really enjoy this one. So let's dig in. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness.

• 7:30Rich Roll?

  You guys ready to rock? Yeah. Let's do the podcast. All right. All right, man. We're in a super sexy Marina Del Rey. What are we in? Like some kind of holiday in situation here? I think it might be a double. Yeah, I feel like it's like we're in like a CIA safe room, you know, like we've like some kind of weird Edward Snowden situation here. Pull the blinds shut. We're going to talk about this book. It's not out yet. So anyway, super great to meet you guys. I love the book. I'm excited to talk about all the good stuff in it, about peak performance, athletic performance, basically, you know, self-actualization, which is, you know, the undercurrent kind of theme behind all of this. Brad, you and I kind of go back

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  virtually, like we've communicated over the last, I don't know, year and a half, two years or something like that. I've been following you for a while. I've shared your stuff in my roll call and retweeted your stuff. Steve, I know less about you, and I'm looking forward to learning more about you today. But I think maybe the best way to kind of kick off this discussion about peak performance is to contextualize it with your own personal stories in the way that you did in the book, which I thought was really great, like sort of sharing a little bit about how each of you have come into this sort of interest in this field. So whoever wants to go first?

• 8:52Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I can start off.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  This is, that's Brad, by the way.

• 8:57Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, we'll have to do something with that. Get the voices down. So this is Brad here. Yeah, so coming out of undergraduate school, oh, about 10 years ago, I took a job at a corporate consulting firm called McKinsey & Company and...

• 9:16Rich Roll?

  Super prestigious.

• 9:17Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it's, I don't know if prestigious is the right word, but it was a tough gig to get and...

• 9:22Rich Roll?

  You gotta be really smart.

• 9:23Brad Stulberg?

  Thanks, Rich.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  That I know.

• 9:26Brad Stulberg?

  It very quickly became all-consuming and not so much because the work itself, but because of my relationship with the work. I just really, really, really struggled to turn it off. I kind of realized that I had a problem when I would be on the phone with my, at the time, girlfriend or my family, and even though I'm talking to them, I'm thinking about like the PowerPoint slides I'm working on or the Excel spreadsheet. Just struggled mightily to turn it off. And that was sustainable and I performed well for a short period of time. But about a year and a half, two years in, I just started feeling burnt out, like emotions that I hadn't felt before, just like, what am I doing here?

• 10:11Brad Stulberg?

  Do I really want to be here? Is this sustainable? Is this the path that I want to be on?

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  And to put it in perspective, I mean, you were working on high-level healthcare policy on behalf of the White House, right? We're talking like 1,600 pen and you're running spreadsheets trying to figure out how to create or innovate on healthcare and make it work, right? So this is like big-time stuff.

• 10:34Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it was definitely intense, for sure. So there, you know, there wasn't much opportunity to rest and kick back, but there probably was more than I gave it.

• 10:47Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so it was big time stuff. It was thrilling. It was super exciting, for sure.

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  And are you, like, just to get, climb inside your mind, and sorry for interrupting, but, you know, at the time, are you thinking, like, this is my shot? Like, I've got a, like, sort of the pressure that you internalize and place on yourself to really make sure that you're maximizing this rare opportunity that you found yourself in?

• 11:09Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I think so. That was definitely the case. I mean, I was like 22 or 23 at the time, so I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I went back now. I think that there was a fair amount of ego that got caught up in, too. Like, it felt really good to say that I was working on that stuff, even if I was just saying it to myself. It was pretty validating. But again, you can say that to yourself, and it can make you feel good, and you might get a nice little hit of a feel-good neurochemical in the moment, but repetitively not sleeping, grinding, not being able to turn it off, not cultivating any kind of spiritual practice, just being purely in the work, became pretty draining.

• 11:48Rich Roll?

  And so how did that ultimately manifest itself? Do you end up just walking away from this career, or what happens?

• 11:55Brad Stulberg?

  So I was fortunate to have a pivot point. The way that the firm operates is they're, they encourage their consultants to go to graduate school. So I was encouraged to go to graduate school, and I did. Ended up studying public health, and it was in graduate school that I did some soul searching, and I kind of realized that perhaps the path to being a partner at this consulting firm wasn't for me. And again, it's not to say anything wrong against the consulting firm. I think McKinsey's a great place to work, and I think they do great work. It's just that I struggled. My fit for that job wasn't right.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Right, I get that, but I think even maybe, perhaps more importantly, is, is this idea of reframing

• 12:40Rich Roll?

  What the appropriate or sustainable or optimal path towards achieving whatever goal it is that you set for yourself as opposed to, you know, the burnout work every waking minute kind of program that is, you know, culturally reinforced. I mean, at that time, did you have the awareness to start rethinking that or did that came in later?

• 13:00Steve Magness?

  That came in later.

• 13:01Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 13:02Steve Magness?

  For sure.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  Okay, so we're going to get into all of that, but like, but like, let's hear Steve's version of Brad's story.

• 13:07Steve Magness?

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's, it is my own version of Brad's story, only mine takes place in athletics. You know, I think conceptualizing mine, it starts in high school. I was essentially a phenom. My senior year of high school, I ran at the Prefontaine Classic, which is probably the biggest professional track meet in the country, if not one of the worlds. And I was the fastest high school miler in the country, third fastest in the world. And at that point, thought, man, like, I have the world at my fingertips.

• 13:42Rich Roll?

  Like, you are Prefontaine.

• 13:44Steve Magness?

  Yeah, like, that's it.

• 13:45Rich Roll?

  You just need the mustache.

• 13:46Steve Magness?

  Exactly. Just grow the hair out, get the mustache. But that's what you envisioned. And that's like Olympics were what was all in my head. So at that point.

• 13:57Rich Roll?

  And you're 18. And you grew up where?

• 14:00Steve Magness?

  Houston, Texas.

• 14:01Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 14:02Steve Magness?

  So, you know, and I was obsessive about it, you know, much like Brad said in his story that he was all about McKinsey and healthcare and stuff. I mean, I was running as a high school kid, 100 plus miles a week in the Houston heat and humidity. You know, I was in bed at 9:00 PM. I didn't do the social life high school thing. Like, I would skip my prom and all that stuff. Like, my, my parents hated me on vacations because I, I'd run 16, 17 miles a day and drive them nuts while they were trying to like, you know, tour around some, some vacation spot.

• 14:41Rich Roll?

  And so you're at this meet and, and this is where you're gonna be able to put your, put your wares on display for the world, right?

• 14:48Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  And so what happens?

• 14:50Steve Magness?

  So I ran the mile in four minutes and one second.

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  So. And you, do you win this race?

• 14:56Steve Magness?

  I did not, but, because it was the best athletes in the world.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  It's not just high school, it's everybody.

• 15:02Steve Magness?

  It's everyone. To give you an example, Bernard Lagat was there, who is, I mean, it's multiple time world champion, Olympic medalist in that things. And like I was, I was running, I was ahead of Alan Webb, who's the American record holder in the mile until he came by me with maybe like 60 meters left in the race.

• 15:22Rich Roll?

  So 401, which establishes you, does that make you the fastest high school miler in the country?

• 15:27Steve Magness?

  Yes.

• 15:28Rich Roll?

  In the world?

• 15:29Steve Magness?

  It was third, third fastest in the world that year.

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  And like sixth fastest?

• 15:33Steve Magness?

  All time.

• 15:33Rich Roll?

  High school all time, right?

• 15:34Steve Magness?

  Yes.

• 15:34Rich Roll?

  So superstar.

• 15:36Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Rich Roll?

  And like, you must've been stoked, right?

• 15:39Steve Magness?

  Oh yeah. I mean, I was a little bit peeved that I didn't get under four.

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:43Steve Magness?

  But I mean, I was, I was stoked. I was on top of the world. As I said, I thought that like.

• 15:47Rich Roll?

  And you're a senior in high school.

• 15:48Steve Magness?

  Yeah. I, I thought, I was classic phenom. Like, I'm gonna go do anything that I want to in this sport.

• 15:55Rich Roll?

  And then what, and what happens?

• 15:57Steve Magness?

  I never ran a step faster. Like that is still my, my best mile I have ever run. I went to college, burned out. I did the exact thing that, you know, I think anytime you struggle, is I said, alright, I'm gonna put my head down and do more. And I went from under 100 miles a week to 120 miles a week to, you know, becoming more obsessive and compulsive on like, training as hard as I could, because I thought the solution was, put your head down, grind away, be tough, get it done.

• 16:32Steve Magness?

  And all I did was keep digging that hole.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  Making it worse and worse and worse. Yeah. And the more tired you are and the worse that's happening, your solution is to then double down again.

• 16:40Steve Magness?

  Exactly. And that's all it was. My whole college career was, was going backwards every year as I doubled down and doubled down and doubled down.

• 16:48Rich Roll?

  And, and so did you run throughout college?

• 16:50Steve Magness?

  Yes.

• 16:51Rich Roll?

  You kept, you just, you were a glutton for punishment.

• 16:52Steve Magness?

  I was, yeah. I mean, I ran myself. Like, by the end, it was like, you know, I was a, a walking zombie at some point.

• 17:00Rich Roll?

  And at no point you have a coach who pulls you aside and says, listen, man, I, I know you're, you're all up in your head about this, but like, we need to find a new way.

• 17:08Steve Magness?

  You know, no, I didn't. I, I mean, I was lucky in that I had some coaches who had done some great things as athletes. But normally, even at the college level, you're used to having, to have to motivate athletes to do things.

• 17:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Steve Magness?

  And I was the kind of kid who, if you told me I, if you gave me free reins, I was gonna push that edge as far as I could go training wise.

• 17:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:32Steve Magness?

  So no one was there to put the reins on and say, hey, like, stop doing this. Like...

• 17:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's this idea that, that, that performance is a linear equation.

• 17:43Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 17:44Rich Roll?

  Right? And it's a function of how much work you put in and how much you're willing to sacrifice and dedicate yourself to. And should you do that, you will get the result that you seek.

• 17:52Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 17:53Rich Roll?

  And it becomes, you know, really painful when you realize, not only is that not working, it's moving you further and further away from your goal.

• 18:00Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 18:01Rich Roll?

  And as a young person without that much life experience, and you know, it's, it's hard to like have perspective enough or the confidence to step outside that unless you have some kind of mentor or coach who can like do that for you.

• 18:15Steve Magness?

  Yeah. You, you, you're exactly right. Like, you don't have the knowledge or the perspective to do it. I mean, you just, the best way I can describe it is like, your, your vision kind of narrows and all you see is this, you know, path forward of work harder until it eventually kind of all blows up in your face.

• 18:34Rich Roll?

  Well, what I love about this is that my own, you know, my own personal experience is like a weird hybrid of like both of your, it's like a less sexy hybrid of both of your stories. Like, I wasn't a phenom, like, I was pretty good at swimming, and I wasn't working at the White House, but I was like, successful sort of in the lawyer world, like, in the corporate context. So I have, I'm able to relate to both of your experiences in some regard, and, you know, I, the last time I swam, I swam my best times when I was 18, 19 years old, you know, so, and, and I did, I'm convinced, looking back, that I was overtrained in my entire swimming career, because that was an era in which volume dictated everything. And I was a glutton for punishment, and I wasn't the most talented swimmer, but I

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  realized early and often that if I was willing to put in more work than the guy next to me, that I was progressing more quickly. And, you know, I swam the butterfly events, which were considered, you know, that's where the people that liked punishment would go. And I would do ridiculous sets, and I got results. But then, at a certain point, when you can only escalate that volume to a certain point before it becomes diminishing returns. And I think when you're 17, 18, you can absorb that level of volume and punishment, but at a certain point, it starts to work at cross purposes, and if you don't have another idea of where to go with it, you're just, you're digging your grave. And I walked around like a zombie through college, you know? And then I started drinking, and then it got

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  worse from there, but then I found myself in the corporate world, and I was, you know, working those 70 or 80 hour weeks without any self-awareness to look at the people above me and say, "Do I even want that person's life?" I just was like, "This is what I'm supposed to be doing." And it took, you know, a big shakeup in my life in order to, like, get me to look at it in a different perspective. But, but that's a long, roundabout way of saying that, that, you know, I love what you guys are doing, and I, I think it's a beautiful kind of collaboration that you guys have created to bring your two different perspectives to this subject matter that I think is in great need of redress, especially in this culture that we find ourselves in, in which it's, you know, there's this heightened

• 20:42Rich Roll?

  sense of like, you know, you gotta hustle, and, you know, sleep is for the weak, and all that kind of stuff. It's like, we gotta find a sustainable path towards success. So, you know... Tell me, you know, how you conceptualize peak performance? Like, how do you define it? What does it mean to you? And what have you learned through your, not just your own life experience, but the research that you guys have put together and put into this book?

• 21:06Brad Stulberg?

  So, Brad here. I would, um, I would say that, how I would define peak performance is sustainably getting the most out of yourself and feeling good about it.

• 21:22Brad Stulberg?

  And how to get there? It's, it's an entire section of the book. We call it the growth equation, which is stress plus rest equals growth.

• 21:30Rich Roll?

  That's the big secret.

• 21:31Brad Stulberg?

  And that's it. That's the secret. And I think that, Rich, what you were alluding to is that

• 21:38Brad Stulberg?

  society pushes us to really focus on the stress part of that equation, but not so much on how to temper that and manage it and follow it up with enough rest to elicit growth. And when I say stress, I don't mean stress as in like fighting with your spouse or even like being anxious about your boss. I'm using the word more scientifically like a stimulus. So, the stimulus in swimming might be to log that 75K week. The stimulus in a more intellectual pursuit might be to really, really grind and work hard on solving a problem. And that's all good. You need to do that to grow. You want to take on challenges. You want to get outside of your comfort zone. But if you don't insert periods of rest and recuperation,

• 22:23Brad Stulberg?

  rather than grow, you get injured, you burn out. I mean, just think about lifting a muscle or lifting a weight with your bicep muscle. And if you pick up way too much weight, you're going to tear your bicep. If you lift weight nonstop all day, you're going to fatigue and your muscle will literally burn out. If you don't pick up enough weight, or you pick up hardly any weight, nothing's going to happen. So, you need to find the right weight. Do it to a point that is stressful enough to stimulate some growth, but then follow that up with rest. And we learned that that applies, I hesitate to use the word universally because there are always exceptions, but that equation applied pretty broadly as we reported out across great performers in various fields.

• 23:04Rich Roll?

  It's super interesting. I mean, any, you know, runners, swimmers, triathletes, they are pretty well-versed in this idea of, you know, stress and rest and the periodization of training and this idea that you have periods of intense work and then periods of overemphasized rest and this is the, you know, this is the process of how you get better over time. And I think, you know, even on a fundamental level, like a lot of athletes don't understand that you don't get better during the training, you get better in the period in between the training sessions. You know, just that like basic concept alone is like, oh, wow, like I never thought about that. It's so true, but I've never, like, until your book broached this subject, like I had

• 23:47Rich Roll?

  never really conceptualized that idea applying to anything outside of sport, like the idea that it applies intellectually. And of course it makes sense, like you hear stories of these great thinkers and artists who were sort of deemed lazy, you know, and perhaps they were just in their rest phase, you know, in between their work phase where that kind of creativity percolates up. And you talk about that in the book, like, when do you have your, you know, when do you have that sort of lightbulb moment or that creative impulse? Like, it doesn't happen when you're grinding, it happens...

• 24:18Brad Stulberg?

  When you're at rest.

• 24:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in the shower or when you're...

• 24:22Brad Stulberg?

  On a walk through the woods.

• 24:24Rich Roll?

  Exactly. So, um, so, you know, maybe like, uh, let's talk a little bit about like the nuts and bolts of this, though. Like, you know, I can understand that intellectually, but let's say somebody's just, first of all, like, why should we even care about peak performance? Like, is this important? Like, what if I just want to go to work and go home and be happy?

• 24:46Brad Stulberg?

  Well, I think...

• 24:49Steve Magness?

  I think the part of it. I envy you. Yeah. I think the part of it is, is it's peak performance defined for each individual. And you get to like, define what that is and what, and that's dependent on what your goal and all that is. And I think there's a couple of misnomers in it, in the sense that when we say like, peak performance, we mean not only like, what you can do, but it's what you want to do. And you kind of create those parameters around things. So I would say that that's number one. Number two on why you should care about this stuff is because it's sustainable. Like, it's really, like, it's really easy to work really hard.

• 25:34Steve Magness?

  People think, oh, it's really tough to go grind away and get all the work done and work the 80 hours a week. No, like, anybody can do that if they're motivated and they choose to, but eventually it's going to catch up to you.

• 25:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:46Steve Magness?

  And like, what we're conceptualizing around peak performance is how to maybe reach the levels that I did as an athlete or Brad did in the corporate career. But to be able to be comfortable with that and do it for not only, you know, two years, but 10, 15, 20, 30, however long you want to, and give you the choice and the power to decide that, versus like, having this burnout decision like, forced upon you.

• 26:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's tricky. It's challenging. It's a little bit of like, a mindfuck. Because I'm, I'm thinking of you as this young 18-year-old, you know, phenomenal runner, and thinking, alright, well, what if he just had like, a healthier relationship with performance? Right?

• 26:35Steve Magness?

  Right.

• 26:35Rich Roll?

  But had you had that, would you have been on the blocks, running 401 at 18? Like, I don't know the answer to that. Maybe, you know what I mean? Certainly you would have had longevity in your career. Would you have achieved that level of, of, of performance? Because, and this is through the filter of my own perception and experience, because I'm like, a crazy workaholic and an extreme person. And, and my whole life has been, you know, early bird gets the worm. And, and like, you gotta work, outwork the next guy. And like, I burned out. Like, I'm like, I'm like you guys. Like, I get that. And still, it's like... It's uncomfortable, the idea of creating a balanced, sustainable approach to this. It doesn't feel the same. Like, I don't get the jolt.

• 27:16Steve Magness?

  And I think that's where there's a big misconception, is I don't think it's about balance. I don't think we think it's about balance. In the sense that, you know, I work with some really elite athletes. I mean, I just had two who finished first and second at the US Half Marathon Championships. And I'm trying to get them to make Olympic teams and, you know, medal and all those stuff. So, we're trying to maximize performance. So, this is almost like a little experiment, is can we get that, like, that max level, while still making it sustainable?

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:48Steve Magness?

  And I think what I've found, and what we've found in researching this book, is that there's gonna be periods where you need to go into that, like, obsessive work mode, right? But then you have to have, like, the self-awareness to be able to, like, shut it off.

• 28:03Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:04Steve Magness?

  And know that, like, this is my secret power, almost. Like, I need to go into that obsessiveness and get, like, get that jolt that is my power. But then, when I no longer need it, when it's no longer moving me forward, then I have to have the ability to turn it off and go have the, as we call in the book, the courage to rest.

• 28:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's definitely a different kind of discipline that I think gets overlooked, and that's hard for athletes. They know how to be disciplined about the hard work.

• 28:36Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 28:37Rich Roll?

  They don't know how to be disciplined about the holding back. And, you know, Brad, this is, we talked about this in that first phone call.

• 28:43Steve Magness?

  I was just gonna say, when I interviewed you for...

• 28:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Steve Magness?

  Man, we are on the same wavelength. So, I was just gonna say, when I interviewed Rich for a story in Outside Magazine on passion, what I learned is that passion is really a gift, and it can also be a curse. And I think that when passion meets self-awareness, that's when the magic happens.

• 29:05Brad Stulberg?

  But, passion is inherently a force working against self-awareness. Just think about when you are in high school and you set eyes on the girl that you have a crush on, you get tunnel vision and you are just after that. And that is like, one of my favorite, most basic examples of passion. But that can manifest itself in a career, in a sporting event. And how do you overcome that tunnel vision? And the biochemicals that are behind it, that are like, dopamine is being released. I mean, you are like, being driven by your entire biochemistry to go after that. So how can you have the self-awareness to pull up? And A, say like, is this really what I want to be doing? B, back to that definition, is this sustainable, is it making me feel good?

• 29:50Brad Stulberg?

  And C, if not, how can I recalibrate and adjust?

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  But Brad, come on, that's a lot of-

• 29:56Brad Stulberg?

  That's hard to do.

• 29:57Rich Roll?

  That's a lot of work, especially when every message that I'm seeing on Instagram and on Twitter is like, "You gotta be passionate, live your passion, you know, unleash the passion." You know what I mean? So come on, how are we gonna do this? You know, it's, it's, I'm with you and I'm on your page and I think you're correct. But the practical aspect of like, parsing that and applying it to your life, I think is, you know, is a harder, is a harder journey. I mean, Ryan Holiday talks about this too. He's written about like, "Forget about your passion, cares about your passion." You know what I mean? And how your passion can lead you astray because it has such powerful, you know, headlamps on it. It's blinding.

• 30:40Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it's tough. I mean, this is not something that is in, in peak performance. But, a practice that I have adopted for myself, by, almost by happenstance, is just reading and thinking more about mortality. And I find that if I read a really, really moving book that has death as a central theme, there's nothing like that to shock my system to do some like very, very clean, clear evaluation. Like, is this what I want to be spending my time doing? And now I'm happy because like I love writing and I'm able to do it in a way that leaves room for other things that I care about. Like Steve said, I'm by no means a balanced person.

• 31:22Brad Stulberg?

  I don't think of myself as balanced. I kind of envy someone that can be balanced and just have everything in alignment, but I'm not sure if that really exists. But I've been able to do enough self-reflection to actually like make certain decisions to pull the plug on things when old me might not have.

• 31:49Rich Roll?

  I should say that, you know, you're, you say you're not balanced and I'm interested, like when you said that, I was thinking about how prolific you are because you churn out like a lot of articles compared to, you know, the average journalist, magazine journalist. I mean, you're writing, it seems like you're just coming out with stuff all the time. So is that a reflection of you doing that, what Steve was talking about, like going into the intense hole and cranking it out and then coming back out again?

• 32:15Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And I've really made a practice of what I preach, I guess. So I try to follow that growth equation, stress plus rest equals growth. So I'll go into the hole. We talk about this in the book. I try to chunk my day into blocks of between 60 and 90 minutes of deep focus and then I'll come out of that. I mean, you've written, I don't know what your process is, but a lot of prolific writers will adopt such a process. And then I'll come out of it. So while I'm not balanced in the sense that I write, I run, and I love my wife, and I'm probably not a good friend, I might not be the best family member. So I still wouldn't say that I'm balanced, but in the things that I do, I do them in a way

• 32:59Brad Stulberg?

  that's sustainable. Whereas old me, like more Twitter followers, more articles, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, I would write myself into the ground.

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're apportioning your energy in between the things that are most important to you in your life.

• 33:13Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, and I think that's, I think you're hitting on something that is nuanced, but really important. Which, again, maybe we're hitting a broken record, like, it's not about balance, it's about deciding what is important to you. And then going all in, in a way that allows you to go all in for a long time.

• 33:32Steve Magness?

  And I think a lot of it is like about knowing what, how much energy you have to give and what's sustainable. And I think that actually the writing of this book was a great example. I mean, we finished this thing in what, three months, maybe?

• 33:44Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Steve Magness?

  Less time than that.

• 33:46Brad Stulberg?

  It was wild.

• 33:47Steve Magness?

  You know, we would do that. We would be like obsessive about it for, you know, a couple hours and then like walk away and do something else and then come back obsessive about it. And we had this like, we followed what was in the book essentially of like, when to stress and when to rest. But then there would be periods, I mean, Brad lives in California, I'm in Texas. There would be periods when we were together for like three, four days. And it would just be like hammer at home.

• 34:14Rich Roll?

  Full on.

• 34:14Steve Magness?

  Because we know we had this specific block and if we like, it's like doing a really hard workout. If we need to go over the edge, then this is the time to just go over the edge. And once we're done, like, we'll take some time, come back out of it and make sure we rest and recover. So the book was a great example and also forcing us to practice what we preach.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  Alright, so we have the, the stress and we have the rest for growth. Let's talk about like the next phase, which is the priming, right? You talk about this in the second sort of section of the book. So what does that mean?

• 34:48Steve Magness?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's all about setting yourself up for a performance. And that, whether that performance is running a race or writing a book or giving a speech. Is what we found is that regardless of what the performer was doing, is they would do things intentionally, set up routines so that they were at their best or gave them their best shot to perform on, on that given day. And what that means is, the, the favorite example I like to give is we talked to a drummer who was Taylor Swift's drummer named Matt Billingsley. And we just said, hey, I don't know anything about music, like, I don't know anything about drums. Like, walk us through your process when you're about to perform in front of, you know...

• 35:33Steve Magness?

  80,000 people. And he starts walking us through like how he gets ready for the drums and how he does like various exercises and stuff. And I'm waiting the whole time to hear him say, and then I pick up my drums and I like go through things. But he just kept walking, like then I do arm swings and then I do like these stretches and then I get my mind right and then the show starts. And I'm like, you didn't talk about drumming. And you know, he's also a personal trainer and he said, yeah, like my warm up is just like what I would do getting ready for a lifting session or getting ready to go run a 5K race. Because he said, I need to warm up my body. And then I use that to warm up my mind to put me in the space that I need to.

• 36:18Steve Magness?

  And I think regardless of whether you're sitting down at your desk to go write, great writers set themselves up and set their entire environment and their routine up so that when they need to write, then they're gonna write. It's not haphazard.

• 36:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's universal across anybody who's a high performer in whatever field they're in. They have a routine that they stick to and that routine is gonna vary wildly. But they're conscious and they're mindful about their approach leading up to it. Let's say they're, you know, they're pitching a venture capitalist on their startup or it doesn't matter what it is. But it's interesting how these examples so often root back in athletics because that's the one discipline where there's actually some thought that goes into the benefits of that. Like athletes practice this, you know, across every sport. And yet it's so, you know, it really doesn't spill over into other areas of, of, of culture and performance.

• 37:15Steve Magness?

  During, during the, the writing of this book, I wrote out of one coffee shop at the same time of day with the same coffee on a computer that I only use for writing the book.

• 37:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. What do they call that? Like the computers that are like cut off from the internet? Like they're called like gray box or something?

• 37:33Steve Magness?

  Yeah, that was me.

• 37:34Rich Roll?

  Back to the Snowden analogy.

• 37:36Steve Magness?

  I was just thinking that, we're back in the CIA room on my computer that no one else can access.

• 37:41Rich Roll?

  Unhackable.

• 37:43Steve Magness?

  Totally. But um, yeah, and I, and, and you know, we, we write in the book that um,

• 37:50Brad Stulberg?

  It stems from what in the early 1900s was called behaviorism, which is like if you ring a bell and give a dog a treat, the dog learns to associate the bell with the treat. And while that science has evolved quite a bit, like the fundamental pairing of a cue with an action, there's actually lots of recent science that that still holds pretty true. Something called affordances, so when you see a chair, the motor neurons in your brain that are going to tell your body to sit start firing before you have any conscious thinking about sitting in that chair. So to the extent that you can create a routine that you associate with what you are going

• 38:31Brad Stulberg?

  to do, what the desired action is, it helps. It helps bring about where you want to be.

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're sort of reaffirming like a habit or a pattern in your brain and you're removing decision fatigue because there's that association. And so it's almost like a stoic Spartan sort of approach. Like I read that Jonathan Franzen moved up to Santa Cruz and he rented some crappy room that was just terrible, you know, and just had like a wooden desk and an uncomfortable chair and nothing else in the entire room, just to remove every single distraction, to make it impossible to avoid doing the one thing that every fiber in your body is going to resist doing. Why is writing so hard? I can't believe you guys wrote this book in three months. I'm pissed now.

• 39:23Brad Stulberg?

  Well, you know, the secret is there's two of us. So it was like whenever I got stuck, it's like, oh Brad, I don't know what to do. Like you take this now.

• 39:32Rich Roll?

  Do you guys go running together? Do you, Steve, do you still run?

• 39:36Brad Stulberg?

  I do still run.

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  Do you?

• 39:38Brad Stulberg?

  I have a good relationship with running now. Go running together. I would need to be on like my bike in the arrow position to keep up with this guy.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  So how did you, I'm interested, this is a little bit of a tangent, but like I'm interested in how you sort of, maybe repaired is the wrong word, but like kind of recalibrated your relationship to running in the wake of having like a less than, you know, sort of, or, you know, collegiate career that was disappointing to you.

• 40:05Steve Magness?

  Yeah, you know, it actually ties a lot to the purpose chapter of our book in the sense that when I was burnt out and done, my whole entire identity was wrapped around running. Like that was it. Like I was Steve the runner and like nothing else mattered or existed. So it was really a process of unraveling that and figuring out like, okay, like what else is there to me? Like what else do I enjoy? What else are my interests? And what really got me over the hump is like getting outside of myself and stop being so like individual self-focused because that's what running does to you in the sense that

• 40:47Steve Magness?

  like all that mattered really was my performance and I was, you know, for-

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Everybody else in the world is a puppet.

• 40:52Steve Magness?

  Exactly. So for, you know, four years through high school, four years through college, all that I was focused on is how do I get Steve to run faster? And what changed my relationship was volunteer coaching. And all of a sudden, my perspective changed because now it's not me. It's, you know, 35 high school kids who have various levels of talent and, you know, love of the sport. And it's like, okay, how do I help them? So it was really, you know, getting away from myself and helping others and helping others realize what is good about this sport that reminded me of like, oh, like, yeah, that's why I started in the first place. Like that's why I fell in love with it.

• 41:35Rich Roll?

  That's exactly what Anthony Irvin told me about his relationship with swimming and what got him to come back, you know? Service, you know, getting outside of yourself and it's a, you know, it's a theme as old as time and you hear it, you know, everywhere you go. Like I'm a long time in recovery and it's a big theme of recovery, right? Like you- Devote your life service. You put that first, ahead of everything else, and your life gets better. And it's so anti, you know, you're just like, what? Like, how does that make sense? Like, that's not on my agenda. You know what I mean? But my experience, and the experience of everybody I've ever seen truly practice this, is their life expands in direct proportion to the extent that they are of service to others.

• 42:18Brad Stulberg?

  I couldn't agree more. And I think that to the extent that you can make yourself a coach, make yourself a coach. So Steve, very literally, has made himself a coach. I'd say that I listen to your podcast. What you do, you are coaching. It's a different medium. And in the way that I write, I am trying to coach too. And I think that, like Steve said, when you get outside of yourself like that, paradoxically, it gives you more self-awareness. So not only does it feel good to be helping other people, but I think it's easier to kind of step back and be like, am I doing this right? When the beneficiary on the other end isn't yourself, but someone else.

• 42:56Rich Roll?

  I think the idea of service gets, I agree. Thank you for that. You know, I think the idea of service gets confused, or conflated with this idea that, like, you're gonna be, you know, like, serving soup at the soup kitchen to the homeless. And it can be that, and that's great. But it can be something as simple as, you know, saying something nice to the cashier at Ralph's, or, you know, just making yourself available to help, or calling up a friend who's having a hard time, you know? And I think a lot of people think, well, I don't really have that much to give. I'm not an expert in anything. There's nothing that I can coach. But I think we all have life experience, and there are always people that are further down the ladder, in some regard, who could benefit from a helping

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  hand. And more than that, I think it's just about stepping into that mindset. So you're thinking in that way. And that becomes like, it's a muscle that you have to flex until it becomes an instinct. And, you know, I'm not saying I'm great at it. You know, I'm super selfish. You know what I mean? Like, I have to work hard to do it. And when I do it, then I'm like, oh, yeah, my life's working better now. You know, you could almost do it for selfish reasons. You know, like, I'm gonna selfishly be unselfish, so that my life gets better. So I'm not necessarily recommending that. I mean, I would imagine the spirit of doing it selflessly is better. But I couldn't agree more with you than that. I think it, you know, goes back to the kind of, the arc of the book, or the structure of the book, which is...

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  You know, it kind of culminates in this idea of finding a purpose outside of yourself that directs all of this energy that you're putting into whatever it is you're trying to, you know, achieve that peak performance with.

• 44:32Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, purpose is the ultimate performance enhancer. I mean, it sounds strange to be like, oh, find a purpose so you can enhance performance, right? It's almost like being selfish, but...

• 44:44Rich Roll?

  But if you don't know, like, can you, you can't just Band-Aid on a purpose.

• 44:49Brad Stulberg?

  Right, it has to be real.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  It has to be real.

• 44:51Brad Stulberg?

  It has to be deeply felt.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  And how does somebody, in the same way that it's like, I don't know what I'm, I don't have a passion, all right, I don't know what my purpose is, like, how do you, how do you speak to somebody who's sitting in that chair?

• 45:02Brad Stulberg?

  So, it's in the book, and we can go through it a little bit now, but there's a researcher at the University of Michigan, his name's Dr. Vic Strecker, and he has a remarkable personal story of overcoming loss through finding a purpose and helping others. And for him, loss wasn't like not hitting the mile time. He lost a daughter and just had, she had health issues, very, very like gut-wrenching personal story. He overcame it through purpose. And he didn't use to study purpose, but he saw what having this self-transcending purpose did for himself, and he redirected his academic career into studying purpose.

• 45:44Brad Stulberg?

  And he's actually developed an evidence-based process to help individuals come to a purpose. And it works.

• 45:54Rich Roll?

  And, and so what is that process?

• 45:56Brad Stulberg?

  So, the, the process begins with identifying your core values. And those core values can be things like creativity, community, intellectualism, athleticism. I think that, I'd have to look in the book, but I'm pretty sure he defines them as like the things that are your north stars, your guiding principles that you hold most dearly. And most people, if you give them some time to think about it, can come up with a couple of core values.

• 46:26Brad Stulberg?

  Then the second step would be to personalize those core values. So what does creativity mean to you? What does community mean to you? And then you go through this process of personalizing your core values. Eventually, you rank them. And at the end, it's only like a 20-minute process of this process. Again, it can be 20 minutes. It can also be a lifetime. But at the end of this process, you are asked to reflect on your core values, how you personalize them, how you rank them, the relationship with each other, and then come to a purpose statement. I went through this exercise when Dr. Strucker had first introduced this process. And I had no clue, really, like what my purpose was.

• 47:09Brad Stulberg?

  And I came out with cultivate positive energy and share it, which I would not have done on my own. But now that is like on a little sticky note on my mirror. And I think that, I mean, whether or not I'm a better performer for it, it's arguable, but I feel better. And it's a nice reminder, like, okay, like, what am I, what am I gonna do today?

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  It's also wide open. I mean, that, you know, you can express that in, you know, countless ways, right? So it's not pigeonholing you into one specific thing. Like, my purpose is to, you know, whatever, you know, save the tigers or something like that. You know what I mean? Like, it can be, it's adaptable.

• 47:45Steve Magness?

  Yes. I think a lot of people get too specific on like passion and purpose. And they think, I need this one tiny thing, and I'm gonna do only this. And I think what this process does is it, A, it gets you to think about it and become self-aware about it. And ask, ask the questions that most of the time you don't. Because when, when people don't have like a purpose or haven't thought about it, when they get asked that question, they almost go to this default, like, oh, that's too big of a question for me to think about. I don't wanna go there. And what this does is it breaks it down simple enough so that you can kinda get a better understanding of what you're looking for. But then, then on the other hand, it's like we just said,

• 48:29Steve Magness?

  is it doesn't narrow it down into saying like, my purpose is to run the fastest mile that I ever can, right? It gives you this broad, um, understanding, this broad statement that can apply in multiple places in your life.

• 48:44Rich Roll?

  It's also not unrelated to goal setting, which is another area that I want to explore with you guys, like the idea of purpose and goals are sort of bedfellows in certain respects. You know, I'm still kind of sitting in the chair of the guy who's like, I don't know what I'm passionate about, I don't know what my purpose is. And I think, you know, look, I'm doing that because I think that's most people, honestly. And I think it creates a paralysis because until they're waiting to get struck by lightning. Yes. To have this epiphany before they make a move, right? As opposed to if you could have a general sense of cultivating positive energy, whatever, like some, even if it's the most vaguest notion of what your purpose is, at least it's something to then take

• 49:27Rich Roll?

  an action on. And I think this also gets into like getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, which is another thing you guys talk about, like taking an action without having to know where that's going to lead you. It doesn't have to be anchored to a goal, but it has to be, there has to be a doing, you know what I mean? There has to be an implementation of that idea into a specific action.

• 49:50Steve Magness?

  Yeah, you know, one of the examples that I can give is when I work with my college team is a lot of times before like big races, we talk about purpose and goals. And, you know, in the past, before, you know, understanding all this stuff and researching, we would have individual goals of, you know, I want to place top five or run this time in the 5K or whatever. And it works okay, right? There's, there's benefits to that kind of goal setting. But what we've shifted more to is like, as a team, like what do we, what is our purpose as a team? What do we want people to, to know about us when we cross the line? And sometimes it's, it's as simple as like, we want to be the guys that are

• 50:33Steve Magness?

  underdogs who don't expect to run well, but when they look at us crossing the line, they know that we gave everything we got. And that's as simple as that.

• 50:43Brad Stulberg?

  And that works really powerful because it takes them away from like all that matters is like how I do. And if I'm having a bad day, then I can just kind of throw in the towel and like it doesn't matter.

• 50:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:57Brad Stulberg?

  To realizing that it's not just me, it's you know, the seven, eight, nine, 10 other guys on this line that all have the shared common goal or purpose, whatever you want to call it.

• 51:08Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:08Brad Stulberg?

  And you've just see better and consistent performance out of that.

• 51:12Rich Roll?

  Right, because it transcends the individual performer.

• 51:14Brad Stulberg?

  Exactly.

• 51:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:16Brad Stulberg?

  There, um, there's some pretty interesting research that, um, that we, we stumbled across in, in writing the book on this notion of fatigue occurring in the brain before the body. And if you think about this in evolutionary terms, it makes a lot of sense because your, your brain is protecting your literal self. And when you're out and you feel pain, that's the brain telling the body, whoa, you might hurt yourself, like let's, let's pull back. And it got us thinking, well, if you can, again, not just pay lip service to it, but really feel and deeply hold a purpose that is beyond just yourself, can you kind of like

• 52:01Brad Stulberg?

  quiet that part of your brain? The answer is there has been, it's, it would be very hard to do such a study to, to show that that is in fact the case. But there have been some interesting studies with neuroimaging that shows that when individuals reflect really deeply on their core values, they have a better response to threats. Um, in the sporting world, you hear tons of anecdotes of when people do things that were thought to be impossible, rarely do they finish and say like, oh, I was thinking about being champion, or I was thinking about all the money I'm going to bank winning this race. It's generally, I was thinking about my family and how much they've sacrificed me, or I was thinking about my friend with cancer, or if they're religious, I was thinking about God.

• 52:45Brad Stulberg?

  Um, so again, they're, they're fueled in their performance by something that is beyond themselves.

• 52:51Rich Roll?

  It's a longer term view also, right? Like you're, you're You're pursuing something not for the short-term result of whatever, like running a sub-four-minute mile, but because it's in alignment with some higher purpose, or this core set of values, and that's a more sustainable energy source, right?

• 53:12Brad Stulberg?

  Totally, and it holds true off the road, too. There's an enormous meta-analysis that we cite that looked at workers across industries, and they found that people that have jobs, that they connect to a greater sense of meaning, tend to perform significantly better than those that are motivated by something like a paycheck.

• 53:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:32Brad Stulberg?

  And, you know, back to that fear thread, because I think about this a lot, and if you just were to ask yourself, like, would you take a risk for, and then if on the other end of that, it might be $100, or like, to help a good friend, or to do something for someone else, I know that I tend to answer yes, and I have less fear of messing up if I'm doing the action for someone else. And that just kind of happens automatically. We talk about in the book, this notion of superhuman strength, which is that these things happen not frequently, but more frequently than we would have thought. When you get like a

• 54:15Brad Stulberg?

  kid or a pet stuck under a car, and the person comes over and lifts up the car.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:21Brad Stulberg?

  And that's like the ultimate example of this, because they're totally overcoming whatever in their brain is telling their body, like, you are going to hurt yourself to do this. And my hunch is that if you were to say, you know, Rich, if you lift this car, I'll give you $7 million, there's no way you're going to lift the car. But, man, God forbid someone you care about is stuck under that car dying, you have a shot at lifting the car, because it's happened.

• 54:45Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, that's super interesting, where the brain can override the body in that kind of way. But what you said just prior to that has me thinking about identity, the psychology of identity, right? So if you're like a young Steve and your identity is totally wrapped up in running a sub-four-minute mile, that's different than an identity of somebody who loves running and running is a form of self-expression. You know what I mean? Or like, you know, like just performing at your peak just brings you joy. You know what I mean? So then you remove the fear of failure because whether you run under four minutes doesn't really matter because you are living in alignment with your core values.

• 55:27Brad Stulberg?

  Exactly. I mean, that sums things up exactly. I mean, if I had a bad race when I was 18 years old, like I would see myself as a failure. Like, not just like, "Oh, I failed at running." It was, "I, Steve, am a failure." And you see that along, whether it's runners or other pursuits, is if they are tied to their identity to that activity and they see themselves as that identity, then you get this fear of failure, as you mentioned. And they stop trying to play to win and they play not to lose.

• 56:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:03Brad Stulberg?

  Because it's just...

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  That's a fear-based approach.

• 56:05Brad Stulberg?

  Exactly.

• 56:06Rich Roll?

  That's a fearless mentality.

• 56:07Brad Stulberg?

  And I wonder if a lot of folks, like you mentioned, that are sitting back, kind of like, "I don't know what my goals are. I don't know what my purpose is." Maybe it's that there's actually like this fear because like, you know, changing paths and going in a new direction is a pretty scary thing to do. So I wonder if part of it is overcoming fear. And like, I look at Steve and even yourself, Rich, like, I don't think that any of us would say that we made a very rational decision to come in and take chances and, you know, do what we do now. It happened because we all burned out in one way or another, had these like inflection points where we had wake-up calls. So I can't tell someone like, "Oh, here's exactly how you find your purpose and goals."

• 56:51Brad Stulberg?

  Because for me, it was to burn the fuck out. And like, that's not advice that I'd want other people to have. But I wonder if part of the reason that I burnt out was because like my identity was in like this like young gun consultant rock star that eventually got, you know, a gig at the White House for a summer.

• 57:09Rich Roll?

  Right, you're supposed to be, you're supposed to be on Pod Save America right now, not on my podcast, right? Talking to Lovett and Jon Favreau about healthcare policy.

• 57:21Brad Stulberg?

  And it would have, and it would have been a totally different path. And like, maybe if I would have, if I would have had the wisdom to pursue it more sustainably, like, maybe that's where I'd be. But here I am. And it wasn't a conscious choice back then. But now I'm hoping that I'm making more conscious choices, you know, to be more explicit about, I guess, the goals I want to take on.

• 57:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you have to, you have to give yourself permission, first of all, to be self-reflective enough to ruminate on what it is that brings you joy, and then have the courage to find, give that expression, even if it's in just a really small way, you know? And I think there, I think, I think with guys, it's hard, you know, guy, it's just, we're just on a path, you know? And it's like, we got it, we're climbing the corporate ladder, and, you know, the pressure to be alpha and all that kind of stuff gets in the way of that. And I think it, so it's, I think it's, and it's hard for guys to talk about, like, being content in their lives, or being happy in their lives. It's just, it's like, not cool to talk about that, you know? But the truth is, there's a lot of guys out there suffering in careers that they're,

• 58:31Rich Roll?

  they don't like, and they're there as a result of circumstance, or social or familial pressure that have placed them in situations that they really don't want to be in. And there's, there's a sense of feeling trapped, and like, this is it, right?

• 58:43Steve Magness?

  Yeah, I mean, it's almost like, especially if you've devoted years to that path. If you're along that path a while, and I know I felt this with running.

• 58:52Rich Roll?

  You're so in, yeah.

• 58:53Steve Magness?

  It's like, what else do I do? Like, you've been zoomed in all the way, where you can just, you just see the tunnel ahead in this one road, and then, you know, five years down the line, like, you know, you stick your head out of the sand a little bit, and you're like, alright, like, all the other roads, I don't know where they lead, I don't know if I can even take them.

• 59:13Rich Roll?

  But you stayed in running, you know? Like, Brad is like, what, you're gonna, you're gonna walk away from McKinsey, you're gonna be like a writer now? Like, what?

• 59:20Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, but so, but so to be fair, you know, it's, it's funny. I recently wrote a column about this for New York Magazine. So the, the way that I made that transition, it wasn't like all at one point. So following public health school, I took a gig that was still in consulting and still in healthcare. It was much less high pressure, high stress than McKinsey.

• 59:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but this is a very inconvenient narrative that you're spinning right now. Like, we just want to know that, we just want to think that you like, you flicked that switch.

• 59:52Brad Stulberg?

  I wish. I don't have the guts. I mean, it's very hard to have the guts to do that.

• 59:55Rich Roll?

  Don't interrupt with reality.

• 59:56Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. So like, we were talking about this before we started recording, like, reality. So yeah, like, I didn't just make the jump to writing. I decided that it was something that I really wanted to do, and I started doing it as a hobby. And then I went down to 80% of my job, and then 70%. And I still do part-time consulting. And it's allowed me, I would say, to like, take more shots in writing. And maybe if I make the jump fully, who knows, maybe like, instead of two articles a week, there'll be four. But maybe I'd work myself into the ground. So I guess back to your point, like, yes, there is, there are those times where there's an inflection point, and you just make the jump. But I also think that you can identify other interests or paths that you might want to

• 1:00:39Brad Stulberg?

  be on, and test them without making the jump, and then see what happens.

• 1:00:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I like that because it's incredibly sensible. You know what I mean? And it does, you know, it's a counterpoint to that, you know, that internet meme of like, you know, follow your passion and everything else be gone. You know what I mean? And it's like, life's more complicated than that, and it's more nuanced than that. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean quit your job. It means, like, you know, taking those tiny steps, and not knowing where they're going to lead, and having faith that it's going to, you know, set you on some kind of trajectory where more will be revealed.

• 1:01:18Brad Stulberg?

  There's actually, there's a, there's a study that showed that entrepreneurs that started their venture while still holding on to their current job were more successful.

• 1:01:31Steve Magness?

  Then entrepreneurs that made a

• 1:01:33Rich Roll?

  Leapt all the way in.

• 1:01:34Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:35Steve Magness?

  And the researchers speculated that, this is like in the Harvard Business Review, so this is like corporate world stuff and I guess a lot of these entrepreneurs were probably starting new startup ventures. The researchers speculated that because they had something safe on one end, they actually probably took greater risks with higher payoffs on the other.

• 1:01:56Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Yeah, that's very interesting. I wouldn't have thought that, but that makes complete sense.

• 1:02:03Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Rich Roll?

  Of all the people that you kind of interviewed and the studies that you reviewed and all the research that you did for this book, what was the most surprising thing that you came across?

• 1:02:18Steve Magness?

  Oh, man. I think personally, the most interesting is we went out and met with the guys who essentially started Google's meditation unit. Essentially now it's called Search Inside Yourself and has branched off. But, you know, I've been a runner, so I considered that my form of therapy now that I have a good relationship with it. I'd go out on runs and just have clear headspace and, you know, think about things and that was my form of meditation. But I never had any meditation practice. And sitting there and listening to these guys and explaining the brain science behind it and explaining the practice behind it, I was sitting there thinking like, oh, my

• 1:03:02Steve Magness?

  gosh, like, this is exactly what goes through my head, my athletes' heads in the middle of races. In the sense that what they explained meditation was, or one of the benefits of it, is that when you have like an intrusive thought or a stress response, right, there's either, it either goes stress to a straight reaction where you have an emotional reaction from it. What meditation allows you to do is have space between that, like, and have space to make a decision. And with myself and my runners that I coach, it's what we've always talked about is when that point in a race comes and you're really hurting.

• 1:03:45Steve Magness?

  And you're like, you have that, almost like that freak out moment where you're like, oh, I can't do this. And I'm just gonna slow down and, and forget about it. And a lot of times, when you choose that like, slow path and just like, I'm gonna back off. It's because like, instant stress, because like, I can't do this. Those thoughts going crazy in my head leads to instant like, emotional response. And what we talk about is having a calm conversation, which is creating space in between them. Where you can almost like, rationally talk yourself out of it and like, not out of it, but like, accept it. And be like, yeah, this hurts, but it's supposed to hurt. Like, this isn't necessarily bad, this is how it's supposed to be. So I'm gonna do the best that I can within it.

• 1:04:28Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:28Steve Magness?

  And I think like, that connecting, like, these two very different worlds, that I wouldn't have put together, was really like, an aha moment for myself.

• 1:04:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the implementation of the meditation and mindfulness programs at, at Google, were really a reaction to, like, recognizing the fact that they have these coders there that are just gonna work, you know, until they drop dead. And that if they wanted to create, you know, some sustainability around the employment of these brilliant people, they were gonna have to figure out a way to take care of them, right? And, and, and really, that space that you talk about is, is like a superpower. Because even if it's just a microsecond, where you have enough awareness to make a conscious decision about how you're going to respond as opposed to react in a given scenario, that can change your life, you know? If you're doing that on, you know, on a micro basis, like, a million times a day.

• 1:05:21Rich Roll?

  Like, it really becomes like, a very, very powerful thing.

• 1:05:25Steve Magness?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, it, it drove me to start my own meditation practice in addition to running. So, I, I think that is like, again, a very mind-opening thing for me, because it's, you know, you, if you don't dive deep into it, you think like, oh, okay, meditation, like, I get that. Like, it's kinda new agey, but like, I get it, behind it. But once you like, experience that, like, just, you know, as you said, microsecond of space, that gives you that, that moment to pause and have almost that awareness to almost like, choose your path. Instead of just being this reactive being who just like, up, this happens, like, here's my emotions, I'm going that way.

• 1:06:15Rich Roll?

  Speaking of superpowers, you know, there is, I've talked a little bit about this recently, and I'm interested in your thoughts on it. You know, we're in this arms race for attention right now, where we're constantly being enticed and, and sort of romanced by all of these apps to achieve, to get our focus, right? And so, to be able to have discipline around that, for the sake of the greater goal that you're pursuing, or whatever you're trying to achieve peak performance in, requires this added level of discipline that I feel like 10, 15 years ago. I mean, when I was, you know, I was like, that didn't exist. And

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  now we're contending with something that's so powerful, that is constantly taking me out and taking me away from the thing, the greater, the greater goal and the greater good. So how do you, you know, how do you guys think about that?

• 1:07:10Brad Stulberg?

  What is, in our Edward and Snowden, CIA, DoubleTree, top secret room, what is not on the table, where we're having a conversation?

• 1:07:19Rich Roll?

  Our phones.

• 1:07:20Brad Stulberg?

  Bingo. So what we learned is that it is a futile effort to try to resist the temptation of your phone, or whatever other device is there that connects you to the world. And that to think that you have the discipline to do so is almost always going to be a fool's errand, and that the best bet is just to remove the phone, or whatever that device is that's connecting you to the world, literally, from, from your sight altogether. We came across research that showed that simply having a phone on the table, even if it was turned off, and isn't yours... interferes with your ability to think clearly, to be creative, to problem solve.

• 1:08:05Rich Roll?

  Because you're just looking at it. And like, when can I look at it?

• 1:08:08Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, totally.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Steve Magness?

  I mean, your mind, like, literally, if they've practiced, like, your brain, if there's a phone there, has like, part of it that's like, processing, like, phone there, phone there, like, expect ring, expect buzz, even if it's not your own.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Steve Magness?

  So you'll, you'll have things like phantom rings, where you'll feel, you know, your phone vibrate, and then you go down to check your phone, and you don't have it in your pocket.

• 1:08:33Rich Roll?

  Right. I have, I'm wearing like, a Garmin watch, and it's Bluetooth connected to my phone, and every once in a while, it like, vibrates. But sometimes I imagine it's vibrating. Have you ever had that? And it's like, I felt like it was, and I, and I look at, and I just like, impulsively, like, look at it, and I'm like, this is insanity.

• 1:08:48Brad Stulberg?

  It's not just you. I, I want to say, maybe, I'd have to look at the book to, to, to be sure, but I think researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that phantom vibrations, like the majority of college students, now feel them.

• 1:09:02Rich Roll?

  Really? I had no idea that was a thing. I thought I was being oversensitive, or something like that.

• 1:09:07Steve Magness?

  It's your brain adapting to have it, right? You're used to like, that vibration, so it will almost predict that it's gonna happen at times wrongly, and you'll just feel that sensation.

• 1:09:19Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, go ahead, sorry.

• 1:09:21Rich Roll?

  I was gonna say, I'm forgetting his name now. It's Tristan something. He was on Sam Harris's podcast recently, and he was on 60 Minutes, but he's like, an ex-Googleer, I think, who...

• 1:09:31Brad Stulberg?

  He's teaming up with Arianna Huffington, I think, right now, right?

• 1:09:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's created this nonprofit, that's all about like, sort of educating people. He understands how they sort of, you know, bake the bread, in terms of creating that addictive response that makes it impossible to not, you know, sort of impulsively, be using these devices in that unhealthy way.

• 1:09:50Brad Stulberg?

  It's like going to the casino. I mean, we write in the book, if you think about your favorite app, odds are, you are scrolling down, or scrolling to the right, seeing a little ball, which is the slot machine doing its thing, and then having a potential reward, which is a retweet, or a like, or a Facebook message. And what we argue in the book, is that those potential rewards are as meaningful, if not more meaningful, than winning money, because that is like, a validation that you exist in the world, and you are important. Like, what is a more enticing reward than that?

• 1:10:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:24Brad Stulberg?

  So it's really hard.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Especially for Steve, who's trying to, who's struggling with his identity.

• 1:10:29Steve Magness?

  That's right. I'm just on the phone. Please, someone like me.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  But it's, I mean, look, Brad, you have a, you have a pronounced presence, especially on Twitter. You know, Twitter is kind of like your medium and you've, you've hit like a kind of a sweet spot with it and you're sharing content, you're very involved there. So how do you create boundaries around that?

• 1:10:49Brad Stulberg?

  It's hard. Um, you know, I could give you like a cookie cutter answer that wouldn't be true. It's something that I struggle with for sure. Um, I think it's back to what I said about just removing the object of distraction. So when I sit down to write, my phone is if I'm, if I'm at home, my phone's in another room. If I go to the coffee shop, my wife, who's kind of anxious, hates this, but like I don't even bring it because like all I'm going to do is look at it. It's not when I'm going to the coffee shop. And she'll text me asking where you are. Yeah. Um, in, in the evening, I, you know, if I, if, if, if like I need to be there for, or not I need to, I want to be there, right? And be present with my wife, like I turn the phone off. Um, but yeah,

• 1:11:32Brad Stulberg?

  like I, I struggle with it for sure. So I guess it's a long-winded way of saying, I try to be aware of when the phone will be a distraction that is unwelcome and not have the phone there. Now, before we like go down this road of just bashing technology and, and phones and especially Twitter, there's a lot of good. I met both of you on Twitter.

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah. So I, I have to always balance, that, that always comes in, you know, that's the, the little guy on the other shoulder who's like, listen, man, this is how like you get to do what you do, you know, like my whole like living is sort of, you know, a result of the, you know, the online community. So on, in some sense, like I have to embrace that, but you, not, not at the, not at the sort of, you know, cost of everything else.

• 1:12:24Brad Stulberg?

  Right. And it's like, you know, I think that there's a huge gray area of finding out a healthy relationship, um, with your phone and with these devices. But I mean, I met Steve on Twitter, so this book would not have happened. Not only are we collaborators, we've become like best friends, this friendship would- Wouldn't have happened. I love your work. Here we are sitting down, having a great conversation.

• 1:12:43Rich Roll?

  And 90% of the people listening to this are listening to it on their phone right now.

• 1:12:47Brad Stulberg?

  Right. Exactly. So there's a lot of, so there's a lot of good packed away in that device too. So I think it's, it's not about, you know, good or bad. It's just about being mindful with what are the good things? What are the bad things and how can you manage them?

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  And for the less disciplined, there's a, there's a program called Freedom. You know this program?

• 1:13:07Steve Magness?

  Yes, I use that.

• 1:13:08Rich Roll?

  Do you? Yeah. So you can, you can install it on your phone, on your desktop, on your laptop or whatever. And essentially you can just set a timer and it just prevents you from going online or using any apps for a set period of time. So that, you know, if you don't trust yourself, but so if you're trying to write or whatever, you can just focus on that.

• 1:13:26Steve Magness?

  Yeah. And I don't think, I don't think any of us have the ability to trust ourselves. Like no one, everyone likes to think like, oh, I'm self-disciplined. Like I can do it. Like I can write with like my Twitter and my wifi and everything on, but you can't. And I think coming to that realization and realizing like, no, like I don't have that power. I'm not like Superman with my, my phone.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  On a similar, on a similar note, what do you guys think about all these trackable devices? And the sort of quantified self movement that's happening right now? I mean, Steve's laughing, you know, as a coach of elite athletes. And also, you know, Brad, who's interviewed a ton of people and writes for Outside where they talk about all these things a lot. And it's always like, what's the latest thing? How do you, like, what's your perspective on, on all of that?

• 1:14:12Steve Magness?

  Yeah, it's tough because like I'm a science nerd, like that's my background. So I love like data. But at the same time, from a practical standpoint and from a coaching standpoint, I think what they've done is they've made us lose touch with being able to pay attention to like what our internal sensations are doing. I know from a running standpoint is like all the, all the tracking data, all the GPS stuff has made like people lose the ability to like internalize their pace and, and their effort. And they become reliant on like this little external thing.

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would. I would venture to imagine that any elite runner on a track could tell you within a tenth of a second their splits per 400 meters, just based on feel, right?

• 1:15:01Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:01Rich Roll?

  It's the same in swimming, growing up, I could tell you exactly where I was, because you're so in touch with your body, but once you abdicate that to a device, you end up tuning out. And then there's a disconnect between you and yourself that is not serving performance.

• 1:15:17Steve Magness?

  And that's the skill that needs to be developed. You know, the example I always give, if you watch like, high school kids who run a track race line, there are some of them who have developed that skill early on, and there are some who are entirely reliant. And what you do is if you stand at like, the first lap, right? And you'll see, or the first mile in a 5K, you'll see runners all look at their GPS watch as it beeps, and you'll see certain ones just like, go, oh my gosh, and slam on the brakes. And what they've done there is they've taken away listening to their internal self, where maybe they were on their way to a breakthrough, and they were ready to come through the mile faster. But what they've done is they've abdicated that and looked at their watch and said, my

• 1:16:02Steve Magness?

  watch is dictating, and it says I'm too fast for what I should be, even if possibly my internal sensations tell me otherwise. And they've just given away that breakthrough. Or the same thing happens on the opposite side, where maybe it's not a day where I can hit the splits that I need to, and I need to listen to my body. But they'll just like, like, you know, robots be like, oh, my watch is beeping at, you know, six minutes a mile, and I need to be on six minutes a mile.

• 1:16:29Rich Roll?

  It takes the wonder out of sport. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm only, I'm only as good as this spreadsheet, and I know what I've hit, you know, in every week, leading up to this, so there's no way that I'm going to be able to eclipse that in any way, so I just need to like, you know, hit the mark that the data is telling me I'm capable of, as opposed to like, throwing all that out the window and just racing.

• 1:16:49Steve Magness?

  It holds you back, you know? I think the best example I can give is professional runner I coached named Natasha Rogers, who just won the US Half Marathon Championship. When we started working together, she'd been hurt for two years and just had this horrible, horrible relationship with running. So, she was so bad that for three months, the first three months we were working together, she refused to wear any watch. And at the time, I was like, alright, that's a bit extreme, like especially like if I'm looking, you know, I kinda wanna know like what your tempo run is or something.

• 1:17:25Rich Roll?

  What you're doing.

• 1:17:27Steve Magness?

  Instead of being like, ah, go run, go run hard today, you know?

• 1:17:30Rich Roll?

  And is your heart rate at like 180 or 120?

• 1:17:33Steve Magness?

  Right, you know, you have no idea, but in a lot of ways, I think what it did is it gave her the ability to like, listen to her body more than anything. And if you watched how she ran this, this half marathon that she won, it was a huge breakthrough for her. And she ended up going out with, with the leader who she, on paper, had no, like, no reason, no business to be with. But she wasn't looking at her watch, she had no idea what her splits was, were, and she was like, I just felt good. And like, it felt within my realm of possibility. And then, you know, at mile 10 of the half marathon, she said, I just felt good, so I decided to take the lead.

• 1:18:16Steve Magness?

  And it led to this huge breakthrough that, you know, a year and a half, two years ago, I don't think she could have had, because she would have, you know, said, oh, this is too fast, I can't do this.

• 1:18:28Rich Roll?

  If you're geeking out on the data too much, thinking, oh, I'm way outside my range, I'm gonna blow up.

• 1:18:32Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I think it's, it's the same as it is with, with the tech, like, it's about your relationship to it, right? Like, I think you need to have that, that, um, you know, that time without it, so that you develop that understanding and that connection with yourself. And it's a tool, like, if you have a responsible relationship to it, it can inform your training and it can make you better. But I think, you know, the idea that like, all these numbers are gonna like somehow translate into you being a peak performer, I think is myopic.

• 1:19:02Steve Magness?

  Exactly. It's feedback, right? You can't be a slave to the data. It shouldn't drive the horse.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  I'm all about peak performance, because every night, you know, I plug my Garmin in and I track my sleep, and it's like, what does that really mean? Like, what is that, how is that making you a better performer?

• 1:19:17Steve Magness?

  The funny, the funny thing about that is like, with sleep, is they've actually shown, and a couple of research studies that show that, like, the quality of sleep goes down because it makes them anxious.

• 1:19:28Rich Roll?

  You're like, I have to perform tonight in this sleep, you know? And it's like, the pressure is on me, I'm looking at my watch, like, am I gonna hit, how long is that deep phase gonna be?

• 1:19:37Brad Stulberg?

  Unless, unless someone is coming out of like, clinical insomnia.

• 1:19:43Brad Stulberg?

  Where they've actually lost their biological clock significantly more accurate than any device you're gonna wear on your wrist to tell you if you got a good night's sleep is like when you wake up, do you feel well rested?

• 1:19:55Rich Roll?

  You know immediately.

• 1:19:56Brad Stulberg?

  Right. Are you falling asleep at 3pm in the day? And like the margin of error of that is a lot less than than the device. But I mean, like, otherwise, I've got nothing to add. You guys nailed it. It's a tool and context is key and it can hold you back in certain circumstances. It's a helpful tool.

• 1:20:13Rich Roll?

  Does Outside magazine call you up and ask you to write articles about wearables?

• 1:20:17Brad Stulberg?

  Um. Yeah, it's, it, it, it, it's interesting because like they are a product and like lots of products, like they claim to be the panacea to a lot of things and they're not, but like you said, like they're a tool. So I actually, Outside's a great magazine. My, my only article on wearables for Outside was called "Listen to Your Gut." So they let me do that.

• 1:20:49Rich Roll?

  That's cool. Yeah, so you, you, you were able to put your spin on it and still deliver the goods.

• 1:20:55Brad Stulberg?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  I love Outside. I'm not bashing it. Please don't, yeah, like I love Outside, man, and I love the work that you do for them. So it's like I always read Outside.

• 1:21:04Brad Stulberg?

  It, um, yeah, it, it, but I guess my point is like I had full editorial freedom and like what the, what the story said is the discussion that we've been having, which are like, yeah, tools can help, but if you rely on them, you become fragile and you might end up holding yourself back. And it's not fun. Like, if you count every single step you take, when are you gonna like have a moment of joy of like taking that step?

• 1:21:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of been something that I've been focused on lately. Like I haven't, I haven't raced in five years and I'm doing this race in September and so I'm kind of getting back into structured training in a way that I haven't.

• 1:21:41Brad Stulberg?

  Rich looks super fit, by the way.

• 1:21:43Rich Roll?

  Trust me, I'm not like, I'm not actually, but, but my life is, is really a lot busier, more complicated than it was like in 2009 and 2010. And so the journey for me is like being okay with that. Like, I'm not going to be able to train like I'm living in a hut by myself. And I've got to find, like, the purpose of it is to use it to carry a message that's helpful to other people, a positive message, like, that's the purpose. And the underlying kind of current that supports that purpose is finding the joy in the day-to-day of the training, because I love the training, but if I'm so caught up in performance, it undermines that sense of joy, and ultimately, it's going to harm my performance.

• 1:22:27Rich Roll?

  But I'm going into it knowing, like, you know, when I show up at the starting line, like, I probably could have trained harder, you know, and it's like, I have to be at peace with that, which is uncomfortable for me, because I want to toe the line with knowing that I did everything possible. And it's just not my life right now, and what I would have to sacrifice for that, the cost of that is too much, because then I'm not sitting with you guys doing a podcast or writing another book, I'm just, you know, riding my bike all day, and I don't know that that's really of service to anybody.

• 1:22:54Brad Stulberg?

  For sure.

• 1:22:55Rich Roll?

  So it is, yeah, it's like, finding that joy, and that's been a little bit of a, there's some discomfort with that, like, because that's acclimating to a different perspective on performance than I'm used to.

• 1:23:05Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it goes back to that original definition that I offered around performance being sustainable, and you feel good about it. And that changes over one's lifespan, because if you're, you know, 23, 24-year-old Rich wanting to swim in the Olympics, then, at that time, it's probably sustainable to swim a lot more, and what might make you feel good is really going for it, trying to be in the Olympics. Then it's having the self-awareness right now to say, you know what, like, what is sustainable and what's going to make me feel good isn't to go live in a hut and put my head down and just train, it's to do it in this greater context. So I would argue that you are, like, nailing your peak performance, you've had the self-awareness to shift the parameters.

• 1:23:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it plays into the theme of the book pretty clearly, in the sense that, you know, you are saying in the book, like, there's this sort of default mentality, if like, if you want to achieve peak performance, you gotta, like, sacrifice, you gotta, like, remove all distractions from your life, and just put 110% of everything that you do 24 hours a day into, you know, optimizing yourself to achieve this particular goal. But, like, human beings don't work that way, we don't function long-term in that way. Like, I had an amazing conversation with Kerry Walsh Jennings about this, you know, and she's like, I mean, look at the sustainability of her performance over like five Olympias. It's crazy, right? And I'm like, do you think you'd be a better volleyball player if you weren't married and didn't have kids? It's

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  like she has a busy life, like, you know, she's a mom in like a big way and she shows up for her kids. She's not like a mom in word only, like she's there. She's like, no, this enhances my ability to perform at my peak. Whereas most, like on paper, the math of that is like, this is, this is time away from your training. This is an energy drain. Whereas she needs that to support her. And so it doesn't work, like, like we were saying at the beginning, it's not a linear equation.

• 1:25:03Steve Magness?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  You don't have to say anything.

• 1:25:05Steve Magness?

  It's true. You know, it's funny. One of the pro athletes I coached, Sarah Hall, really has done phenomenally well.

• 1:25:16Rich Roll?

  Four kids overnight.

• 1:25:21Rich Roll?

  And a husband, it's a bodybuilder. Yeah, I know. Like, I see those sponsored ads popping up on Instagram now where he looks like a superhero.

• 1:25:28Steve Magness?

  It's nuts. But like, I don't know how she does it. Like, I don't know how, because she's a fantastic mom. But I think that that shows it. It's like,

• 1:25:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:38Steve Magness?

  That having, it's not about like being selfish and being obsessed about it. In that way, you think that's the message we're given is that in order to reach our maximum potential, we need to like be all in, forget everything else in the world, forget everybody else. And that's what it, it's all we have to do. And I think these examples like Kerry Walsh, Sarah Hall, like they're great examples of people who are at the top of their game, have been for a while and have these diverse other, you know, activities and things going on in their life. So it's not about sacrificing necessarily. It's just about figuring out how to prioritize and like getting the most out of yourself, given those priorities.

• 1:26:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think people can, can Get comfort out of that because I think a lot of people are thinking, well, my life, you know, it's like, look, man, I'm just trying to, you know, I got kids, I got this, I got that, like, yeah, it would be great if I didn't have any of that and then I could just, you know, pursue my goal, but that's not my life. But to understand, like, even people that are performing at the absolute elite level of whatever it is they're pursuing have the same challenges and are welcoming those distractions into their lives as part of the success equation.

• 1:26:52Brad Stulberg?

  You know, Lin-Manuel Miranda, behind Hamilton, he said that he credits the spaces between writing sessions for that show. And he talks about, like, I think he says, you know, it's when I was playing with my kid with trains that a scene came into my mind. And he could have put in more work, like, at the whiteboard or at his notebook, I'm not sure exactly how he writes, and maybe the show wouldn't have been as good because, like, there is this space in between where, in his case, like, insight occurred. So it kind of gets back to that stress plus rest equals growth. And like, realizing, like, the rest is not just there in lip service, like, the magic happens, not when you're applying

• 1:27:36Brad Stulberg?

  the load, it happens when you're at rest.

• 1:27:38Rich Roll?

  Right. And back to that discipline about making sure that you carve out that time.

• 1:27:43Brad Stulberg?

  You still have to work hard, though. Like, it's funny, people, what we don't want is people to think, like, oh, like, I can just, like, rest and, like, chill out. Like, you've got to work hard, too.

• 1:27:53Rich Roll?

  The clickbait headline, you know, to this podcast is, you know,

• 1:27:56Brad Stulberg?

  Rest your way to-

• 1:27:57Rich Roll?

  Rest your way to peak performance or something like that, right?

• 1:28:00Brad Stulberg?

  No, no, no. You've got to, you've got to work hard, for sure. But I think that it's the people, it's like Steve said, I think that, you know, individuals can get very, very easily caught up in work, work, work, work. So I think that the kind of counterintuitive message is the one of rest. So that's the drum that we're hitting loudest. But, I mean, you'll see in the book, everyone that we spoke with that is world-class, I mean, they also put in the work.

• 1:28:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course, right? There's no, there's no end around that. I mean, on the, on the subject of work, like, what do you, Steve? In dealing with these incredibly elite athletes and being integral in the running, not just track and field, but the running community at large, what do you see? You know, there's a lot of runners that listen to this podcast. So like, what are the mistakes that you commonly see where you're just like, ugh, Billy, like all these people, I'm at a 10K or I'm at a half marathon. Like, doesn't that, doesn't she know that if she just did this, it would be so much easier?

• 1:29:01Brad Stulberg?

  You mean, what are the things that Brad does?

• 1:29:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay. Brad, what are you doing wrong? What is getting in the way of your peak performance, Brad?

• 1:29:09Brad Stulberg?

  I don't have Steve as my coach.

• 1:29:11Steve Magness?

  I think a lot of it-

• 1:29:12Rich Roll?

  Isn't that baked into the deal that you guys have?

• 1:29:15Brad Stulberg?

  It should have been.

• 1:29:15Rich Roll?

  You're not getting free coaching? Renegotiate.

• 1:29:19Steve Magness?

  I think a lot of it is like, people try to go places before they're ready to go places. What I mean that is, is one of my core like coaching principles is like, don't go there before you need to go there. Which means a lot of times people get like super excited, like, I got a marathon coming up, or I'm gonna do my first half marathon, I'm gonna go, you know, zero to 100% in this short amount of time. And then what happens is they just fail, or they get hurt, or they have a horrible experience, and then they just kind of like abandon it, or go into slump for a while, and come back out of it and get motivated and try and do something.

• 1:29:57Rich Roll?

  Because they bite off a huge goal, and then they can't consistently show up to prepare for that?

• 1:30:02Steve Magness?

  Exactly. And one of the things from a coaching standpoint, I always say is like, you know, you're looking at maximizing adaptation, and to do that, like, you need a challenge or stimulus that's just a little bit more than you can, than you've done before, but like, not 2X, 3X, 4X. And then you just have to have the patience to be able to like, alright, you know, this week I'm a little bit better than last week, and next week I'm gonna be a little bit better, and then a little bit better, instead of going for these huge chunks. Because what you see is like- Regardless of the level, it's the people that can put in consistent, solid work,

• 1:30:43Steve Magness?

  not like brief periods of insane work that do the best over time.

• 1:30:48Rich Roll?

  Right, like you can't cram for it.

• 1:30:50Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  You can't go from surfing Venice Beach to surfing Mavericks overnight. Like, and the guys that surf Mavericks, like, how do you surf Mavericks? Well, they just inched up to it over a very long period of time. So that by the time they're surfing Mavericks, it feels like a wave they're used to surfing.

• 1:31:06Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:31:07Rich Roll?

  Compression gear.

• 1:31:09Steve Magness?

  I think you-

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  Huge in the tri-community, but anathema in like, with pure runners, right? Is that still the case?

• 1:31:17Steve Magness?

  Uh, for the most part, it is.

• 1:31:19Rich Roll?

  Totally not cool, right?

• 1:31:20Steve Magness?

  For the most part. Compression gear is interesting. You know, my-

• 1:31:26Rich Roll?

  This is way off, I just had to ask.

• 1:31:28Steve Magness?

  My one tip is this, so like the compression gear, the like, have you seen like the Normatec pants?

• 1:31:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:35Steve Magness?

  Compression, like if you go stand in like the pool, like the shallow end of the pool, you'll actually get more compression than any, either of those things do.

• 1:31:45Rich Roll?

  More than Normatec? Really?

• 1:31:47Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:47Rich Roll?

  Just from the water pressure?

• 1:31:48Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Rich Roll?

  That's true. You're the scientist, right?

• 1:31:51Steve Magness?

  Seen the research.

• 1:31:52Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:31:52Steve Magness?

  It's true. So like with my athletes- You gotta hop in the pool. Yeah. They're like, oh, I need to wear like my compression pants and stuff. I'm like, gosh, go splash around in the pool, like you'll get the same thing.

• 1:32:02Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:32:03Steve Magness?

  So-

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  Same with the socks and everything?

• 1:32:05Steve Magness?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:05Rich Roll?

  Even when you're getting on an airplane?

• 1:32:07Steve Magness?

  Guys, we've got a new product. We need to be at Kona with like these like little tubs of water, like right at the Kona airport for after the race and just have people like stand in the tub on their way to security.

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  All right, enough bashing of the triathlon community. I will say this about triathletes, they are experimenters.

• 1:32:25Steve Magness?

  They are.

• 1:32:26Rich Roll?

  And so they're the first, they're early adopters of lots of things. And I think those things, the good ideas ultimately percolate down into other, into other sports.

• 1:32:35Steve Magness?

  And they're some of the best athletes.

• 1:32:37Rich Roll?

  Like, incredible athletes.

• 1:32:38Steve Magness?

  Well-rounded, so strong.

• 1:32:40Rich Roll?

  And, uh, you know, there's, the idea's going around now, like the Wim Hof stuff, the breathing and the cold therapy, like, are you familiar with that at all?

• 1:32:47Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Steve Magness?

  Well-

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  Are you making a weird face?

• 1:32:50Steve Magness?

  Uh, no, I mean, I'll put it, I'll put it this way. If you if you look back to like meditation and like we talked about in running, right? And how like if you apply a stress or a pain and then you create space. All I would say is that if you do some of that like Wim Hof stuff, forget, you know, we'll ignore the breathing for now, but getting in the in the cold and you create this like sensation of like, you know, almost like stress response, pain, discomfort, whatever. Essentially what you're trying to do is figure out a way to cope and deal with that.

• 1:33:23Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:24Steve Magness?

  And the breathing technique is essentially teaching you like one way to deal with it, whether it works or not, whatever, but it's developing a skill set to do that.

• 1:33:32Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:33Steve Magness?

  And I think you'd probably get the same benefit, and I've tried this with some MyRunners, is like, hey, jump in an ice bath, like, make sense, accept it in your brain, however you cope with it, and then translate that into running and accepting pain, and you'll see you'll see some benefit. So I don't necessarily think it's like, ah, this guy's figured out how to control, you know, his body reactions, like anything like that, like, we can already do that to some degree. Um, I think it's just like putting yourself in a stressful situation and then figuring out how to cope with it.

• 1:34:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, learning how to be comfortable with discomfort is a huge thing, right? And Brad, that's something you talk about quite a bit and finds its way into your writing. So that's going to spill over into everything that you do.

• 1:34:21Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:22Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:34:22Steve Magness?

  I mean, that's the whole key to, I mean, any, almost any endurance athletic endeavor is like being comfortable.

• 1:34:30Brad Stulberg?

  One of one of my favorite studies of all time had college students start an exercise program and make themselves uncomfortable physically while exercising. And then it measured their stress response during exams. So their biochemistry as well as like how they reported stress. And the individuals that went in it hard in the exercise program had less stress.

• 1:34:59Brad Stulberg?

  During their exam period.

• 1:35:00Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:01Brad Stulberg?

  Two are totally on its face disconnected, but exercising, what's so great about a physical practice, it's all relative. So for Steve, it might be running four minute miles. For me, it might be running six minute miles. For, you know, my wife might be running eight minute miles, but it's learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, like you just said. And once you can do that, that transfers like quite broadly.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:26Rich Roll?

  What is the most, uh, let me rephrase that. Let me rephrase this. I'm trying to think of how to articulate this. So in the course of researching this book, I'm sure you came across people that have like sort of freak performances, like that were almost inexplicable, right? Like massive, you know, massive gains that were like beyond like what people thought humanly possible. Like, did you come across examples of that? Or is there any kind of like literature on explaining that kind of stuff outside of a doping context, I suppose? You know what I'm talking about. I mean, you kind of refer to it like with the lifting the car kind of thing.

• 1:36:05Brad Stulberg?

  So it gets back to purpose. I think that the ones that are legitimate that weren't aided by performance enhancing drugs, when individuals tend to break through their own limits, they tend to report being fueled by something that is beyond themselves. We saw that in athletes, but we also saw that in an artist, a sculptor, that was dealing with some fear and some insecurity and lack of patience for the financial and business side of art. And for him, it was coming back to his purpose, reminding himself of it, and really meditating and reflecting on it that allowed him to break through and become

• 1:36:48Brad Stulberg?

  an internationally acclaimed sculptor. So again, you know, for me, the most fascinating thing in the book, when we went into this, we had a hypothesis that there might be some connections, but we actually thought that like we'd learn stuff. From art that could be applied to sports and learn stuff in sports that could be applied to business. And while there was a fair amount of that, I'd say there was equal, if not more, parallels of these like universal principles that applied across the board. In where breakthrough was, there tended to be some sort of, some sort of very strong, deeply held purpose.

• 1:37:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier about the connection between fear, failure, and identity. Because when you're driven by purpose, then the missteps along the way, or the failures along the way, aren't even really failures. You're just, because you're committed to this higher vision, they don't, they're just like bumps in the road that don't mean as much as they would if your identity is tied up and whether you're going to achieve this short-term goal or not. And I think that that, you know, that's huge, right? That's absolutely huge. I mean, you talk, you've written also about like visualization, right? Like, and that's part of the priming thing, but like, and we're taught to like visualize

• 1:38:07Rich Roll?

  success and to be kind of, you know, positively minded, but there's value in visualizing failure. Like, what does that feel like? Like, what's the worst-case scenario? Like, how bad would that feel? And if you can be okay with that or comfortable with that, then you can dissipate the fear that surrounds that.

• 1:38:23Steve Magness?

  And it has a biological impact. I mean, there's some of my favorite studies to point out to runners, I coaches. It's been a slew that looked at like testosterone levels in athletes after they've won or lost games. And not only testosterone levels at that point, but then during or prior to their next game. And what's really interesting is like, if they failed, how they viewed that. If they saw it as like an attack on themselves, right? Or if they saw it as like a teaching moment where they watched their failures and then, you know, with the coach discussed like, how do I, you know, get around this?

• 1:39:05Steve Magness?

  That will actually influence hormones like testosterone. And what's really interesting in some related research is that that testosterone level, like, if it drops post-game, let's say they watch a failure and they think that, or they watch mistakes of a game and they think they failed. If that testosterone drops, then it'll stay low the next game and it will essentially predict their performance the next game.

• 1:39:30Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. Wow. That's super fascinating. That's incredible. Um, yeah, I think, uh, I think there's so much, it's so interesting how there's so much science going on right now in this world and that we're able to like quantify some of this stuff and calibrate it.

• 1:39:49Steve Magness?

  Yeah. You know, what I think it finds is it's fascinating to look at, but what it does is it like, almost validates some of the intuitive things that, you know, either great coaches or smart thinkers or just people have been through some of these processes have kind of like figured out. And that's what we found in this book is that a lot of these performers were doing things. And then like, we'd say, oh, we found some science on this stuff. And they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. You know, of course, but they're already doing it and they figured it out.

• 1:40:19Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. The purpose, Victor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning, like in the late 40s or early 50s, shortly after the Holocaust, maybe 60s. I'm not sure exactly when, but well before we were neuroimaging people's brains while they were reflecting on their purpose. This guy said like, if you have a reason to live, it's beyond yourself, you'll live. Um, so I think like, like to Steve's point, a lot of this stuff is intuitive, but now we are validating it, proving it and learning more about it.

• 1:40:50Rich Roll?

  Right. And Ryan Hollow gave you guys a blurb, said essentially that in his blurb. He's like, it's so great to read this book that just validates everything I believed and thought my whole life. But it's true. Like when you grow up as an athlete, and maybe this is more specific to individual sports or endurance sports than, than team sports. Like I grew up with a lot of these ideas that you talk about in the book and they're like intuitive to me. Um, and then you're like, oh man, like all these business people are going to read this book who didn't have that experience that I had and they're going to learn something about how to like be more effective in their job or whatever it is that they're doing. And, and, and in certain respects, it is sort of self-evident, but to see that reflected back in other people's experiences who are pursuing other disciplines

• 1:41:34Rich Roll?

  and then have science to support it is, is pretty cool.

• 1:41:38Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I think so, at least I hope so. That's our objective with the book. But in even like myself, it really made me realize that there are very few people have the privilege to be professional athletes. So for those of us that are like myself that are, I don't know, I train like eight to 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours a week. So like, I'm an athlete.

• 1:41:59Rich Roll?

  You're looking fit yourself.

• 1:42:00Brad Stulberg?

  It's a part of my identity for sure. But it made me realize that there are so many things that I do in my eight to 12 hour hobby that I don't do in my career and my profession that I could apply to that that has made me like a significantly better writer. So that was like really eye opening. Even someone that lives it in sports didn't necessarily see how it could then translate off the field.

• 1:42:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think I struggled with that in my own life. And I just looked at it like, well, that chapter's over. And I was jealous of people that like loved playing the guitar or loved business or something that they could pursue their whole life. And it's like, why did I choose to be passionate about this thing that I gotta stop doing when I'm 20? It's like, my life hasn't even started yet, you know? And I always thought like, oh, well, all of this sort of like hard work ethic that I had will probably translate into other areas of my life. But I struggled with that because I didn't have a purpose and I wasn't passionate about what I was doing. So all of that, all of that, all of those skills that I had developed weren't finding a home in these other areas.

• 1:43:09Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, and I think that's, that's one of our hopes out of this book too, is to get people to start thinking like out of their silo domains and start thinking like, okay, like, all of this can apply in other areas, you know? From an athletic standpoint, especially a college athletic standpoint, I see athletes in every sport who don't have that understanding of like, this can help and translate into the next area of my life, my next step. And you see that in a lot in professional sports where athletes finish and they're like,

• 1:43:43Steve Magness?

  All right.

• 1:43:43Rich Roll?

  That's the identity crisis.

• 1:43:45Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:43:45Rich Roll?

  It's major, you know, it's an epidemic.

• 1:43:47Steve Magness?

  It is.

• 1:43:47Rich Roll?

  And I feel like the organizing bodies of these various sports really need to get more actively involved in these athletes' lives to prevent that from happening. I think that the damage from that is severe.

• 1:43:58Steve Magness?

  It's incredible, and I think it's something that, as you said, needs to be addressed. And then, you know, our hope at least is that people realize that those toolsets that you develop can transfer over. It's just about figuring out how to use those best in almost any endeavor.

• 1:44:16Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, we've got to wrap this up in a couple of minutes. But one thing that's on my mind is, you know, other than this kind of conventional wisdom of go big and go home, for lack of a better phrase, you know, what other, what other kind of conventional ideas are out there about peak performance that you were able to kind of rebut or revise as a result of the journey of writing this book?

• 1:44:41Steve Magness?

  You know, I think one of them is that it can be hacked. So we're all about like quick fixes and hacks and everyone wants to like cut down the time to nothing that they can do. And I think what we found in talking to, you know, great performers across domains is that's not what occurs.

• 1:45:02Rich Roll?

  I've never met an elite performer who's focused on hacks.

• 1:45:07Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:08Brad Stulberg?

  I like, I like all of your stuff, Rich. My favorite thing that you've ever produced is that blog post on...

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  Why I should stop hacking your life.

• 1:45:17Brad Stulberg?

  Yes.

• 1:45:18Steve Magness?

  Yep.

• 1:45:19Brad Stulberg?

  That's it. There are, like, you know, like I said, yeah, you have to rest, but you also have to work hard. There are, there are very, very few shortcuts. And often the shortcut is like running 90 miles a week instead of 100. Like, that's not really a shortcut.

• 1:45:37Steve Magness?

  Well, I think it goes to the mindset, too. If you're looking for a hack or if you're looking for a shortcut, then you're not in the mindset to achieve what we define as peak performance.

• 1:45:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that you have to define your terms. I mean, if you're defining hack as like an interesting new, good idea, like, there's certainly nothing wrong with that. But if you're defining it as a shortcut or an end run...

• 1:45:58Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:59Rich Roll?

  Then I think you're being short-sighted.

• 1:46:01Brad Stulberg?

  So, an example is...

• 1:46:04Brad Stulberg?

  Sleep. So there's been a flurry of like hack your way to sleep. So take like, you know, six naps every hour and a half, or wear this brain stimulation device that you'll hit a button and it'll be like you slept eight hours. Well, when you talk to sleep scientists, they, I mean, they're scientists. So like, maybe that could work, but we've yet to see the evidence that that could work. And even just short cutting your own sleep, like that's not even in the framework of a hack. Like, oh, I only need five or six hours of sleep. And that is true for no one. Like, a bare minimum seven hours of sleep to support whatever

• 1:46:44Brad Stulberg?

  performance, whether that is intellectual, artistic, physical, or even like being a good spouse. Like, there's all kinds of emotional processing that happens in your sleep. So there's an area where like, I just irk when I hear someone talk about like hacking your way to sleep. Because like, it's just, there's no evidence to support it. When in fact, all the evidence is the opposite, which is like, it's almost hard to sleep too much.

• 1:47:11Rich Roll?

  Right. You're, listen, you're preaching to the choir with this stuff. You know what I mean? We could do a whole podcast on this kind. You know what I mean? I think that, you know, people, people want to hear that there's an easier way. You know what I mean? And yeah, like, there, there are always easier ways. And perhaps you can achieve whatever goal you set for yourself by taking shortcuts. But it's just not that interesting to me. You know what I mean? Like, if you want to, if you're, if you're pursuing it with your heart, then I would imagine you're trying to achieve some kind of value from that experience that is going to, you know, give your life purpose or meaning. And if you're focused on trying to find the quickest way there, then I think you're

• 1:47:56Rich Roll?

  missing the beauty of just embracing what comes with, you know, the longer road.

• 1:48:02Brad Stulberg?

  Totally. Ryan Holiday, who I know you've had on the show, I think that he, he wrote in one of his books that basically like, you're all, we're all gonna die. And like very few people, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, like very few people are we still talking about a couple hundred years later?

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  It's not gonna matter.

• 1:48:18Brad Stulberg?

  Right, so if the goal is the endpoint, you're like missing the boat because you're gonna die, so you might as well like enjoy the journey and embrace the journey because like that's what you're going to experience. Very few people are gonna remember that endpoint a hundred years from now. Next to no one two hundred years from now unless you do something really special in a thousand years from now, like good luck.

• 1:48:37Rich Roll?

  Right. Alright, last question for you guys. So let's say somebody's listening to this, they're looking at their first 10K, or maybe they're just trying to get a promotion at their job and they're like, alright, like peak performance, these are new ideas to me. Like what are, you know, what's the main takeaway here? What is, you know, what's one or two things that I could like hear from you guys that I could like incorporate into my life right away that that might, you know, give me some benefit?

• 1:49:04Brad Stulberg?

  So I think that it goes back to what I led with, but just this notion of the growth equation and trying to figure out, like going through some goal setting and where do I want to be in one year, two years, three years? And how how am I gonna plot out those cycles of stress plus rest equals growth to get there? And how am I gonna do that over the course of a day? So can I block my work into chunks with little abilities to recuperate? We talk about in the book. Short walks, looking at pictures of nature, listening to music, like there are all kinds of things. And again, you could call those hacks, but they're not really hacks. Like they're good practices, ways to take breaks throughout the day to get more quality work done in a day. And then you think about over the course of a

• 1:49:46Brad Stulberg?

  month or a week, and I'd say over the course of a career, like what projects can you take on that like Steve said are ever so slightly out of your comfort zone? So not zero to a hundred, but just make you a little bit uncomfortable. And then what's the next project that you take on after that? In a relationship, like in a romantic relationship, like what are things that you can do with your partner that make your relationship, you know, just a little bit more uncomfortable? Maybe you get a plant, then you get a pet, then you have a kid. Like it's so universal, how, at least I've interpreted this thinking like quite universally, to really think about like what do you want to grow? What capability? What part of yourself do you want to grow? And how can you apply the right stimulus,

• 1:50:29Brad Stulberg?

  reflect on it, digest it, recover from it, and then build on it?

• 1:50:35Brad Stulberg?

  That would be takeaway number one. And then I think my second takeaway that Steve alluded to earlier is just this, I hope it's not what you're gonna say, this notion that

• 1:50:43Steve Magness?

  Just steal my thunder.

• 1:50:45Brad Stulberg?

  This notion that balance is kind of an illusion and it's really, really hard to be balanced and that's okay. But what's not okay is to kind of, I'm looking at Steve like I was gonna say, what's not okay is to mindlessly just go down a path because that's where your passion's taking you and to do it recklessly.

• 1:51:06Steve Magness?

  So with Brad stealing my thunder, I'll just layer on and I think it's about being intentional. It's being thoughtful and intentional on what you're trying to do and what you want out of it. And as I think we've, we've talked about a lot now is like deciding where you go and how, how do you get that, but also making sure that you're not getting in your own way. You know, I think a lot of times what we do is both from Brad and I's stories of ourselves is like essentially we got in our own way and like led us to burnout. And whether it's something as simple as saying like, I am easily distracted by my phone. So if I'm gonna do something that I wanna do well, I'm gonna go put it in the drawer or like not

• 1:51:51Steve Magness?

  bring it to the coffee shop. You know, the world didn't end, you know, 15 years ago when we didn't all have cell phones, right?

• 1:51:57Brad Stulberg?

  Right.

• 1:51:58Steve Magness?

  So I, I think getting out of our way and then being intentional on what we're trying to accomplish is two takeaways that layer on top of Brad's that I think are, are really important.

• 1:52:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful. I mean, I think, you know, sort of interwoven into that is a commitment to self-understanding, like self-knowledge, right? In the sense, what I mean by that is understanding like who you are and what drives you and being self-directed and intentional, like you said about that, not getting caught up in what other people are doing or being influenced by, you know, the distracting noise of whatever's going on, on Instagram or holding yourself up to some imagined, you know, sense of balance where everything has to be in proper, you know, check at all times or you're falling short as a human

• 1:52:50Rich Roll?

  being sets you up, sets yourself up for failure because you feel like internally you're falling short all the time and that. Inevitably is going to lead to, you know, low self-esteem and self-defeatism. And then you're in this vicious cycle that's going to, you know, basically lead you to nowhere good.

• 1:53:06Steve Magness?

  Exactly. It's all awareness and perspective. And, you know, one quick story I'll throw in there is my, our good friend Phoebe Wright, who was, who has run at the Olympic trials. When I was, when we were talking to her about like, how does she handle like being on the Olympic trials and like a chance to make the Olympics and deal with all that stuff? You know, her answer was like, "I remind myself that no one else gives a shit how I do." And then it doesn't, "Well, I put all this pressure on myself and think it's the end of the world. In the end, it doesn't really matter."

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:39Steve Magness?

  No one cares.

• 1:53:40Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful, that's like a beautiful expression of humility.

• 1:53:44Steve Magness?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:44Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Humility is huge. That's, that's in the book as well, like how important to cultivate humility. Did you see the, somebody sent me this video the other day. It was this collegiate track and field runner at Cornell. And she was talking about how like, she, she smiles like the whole time that she's running. And that's how she like had this massive like leap in her, she had this huge like drop in her time. And she, because it was-

• 1:54:09Steve Magness?

  Love it.

• 1:54:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she was like engaging in her joy.

• 1:54:12Steve Magness?

  Yeah. Chrissy Wellington did that a lot.

• 1:54:13Rich Roll?

  She did do that. Yeah, that's true.

• 1:54:15Steve Magness?

  That's neat.

• 1:54:16Rich Roll?

  That's true. Did you see that video?

• 1:54:17Steve Magness?

  Yeah, I did.

• 1:54:18Rich Roll?

  You did? Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:54:19Steve Magness?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:54:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, to kind of round it out also, like a lot of people are just like, "Oh, this is, you know, convenient, but like I'm busy." And the truth is like, I think everyone wastes so much time. You know, we're talking about our devices and on that kind of vein of self-understanding and self-knowledge to really get honest with yourself about how you're allocating your time, because I think we lie to ourselves or we're in denial about how we're actually spending our time. And if you got out a notebook and wrote down honestly what you're doing in 15-minute increments throughout the day, I think most people would be shocked. I know that I was, I've gone through this process before. Oh my God.

• 1:54:54Steve Magness?

  Totally.

• 1:54:54Rich Roll?

  Like, I look at all this free time I could have if I just stopped doing this thing that I'm getting no value out of anyway.

• 1:54:59Steve Magness?

  You know, everyone comes up to Brad and myself and they're always like, "Oh, man, you guys like write so much and coach and like consult and do all these things and you wrote a book? How do you have that much time? You guys must be like on it all the time." Like- If you really watched us, like, there's hours spent, like, you know, doing nothing and lazing around. And it's because we're not perfect. Like, everyone has this mistaken idea that, like, oh, you guys are machines and like, you get stuff done. But all of us have way, way more time than we realize.

• 1:55:33Rich Roll?

  We do. And I think that's a great place to put a pin in it. You guys wrote a great book, Peak Performance. I love it. Thank you for asking me to write a blurb. You have incredible blurbs here from so many people. Adam Grant, Arianna Huffington, Daniel Pink, like, Ryan Hall, Ryan Holiday also. Awesome. I love it. You guys did a really great job. And I think this is gonna really help a lot of people. So congratulations. And I'm excited for people to check it out.

• 1:56:00Steve Magness?

  Thank you. This has been such a wonderful conversation.

• 1:56:04Rich Roll?

  Did we do it?

• 1:56:05Steve Magness?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:06Rich Roll?

  Did we do the podcast?

• 1:56:07Steve Magness?

  I think so. I think we nailed it. That was awesome.

• 1:56:10Rich Roll?

  Alright, so-

• 1:56:10Steve Magness?

  Gotta get a picture and-

• 1:56:12Rich Roll?

  We'll do all that and do all that. We'll do all that. So you can connect with Brad. Best place to find Brad is at B Stulberg on Twitter. Brad Stulberg is your website. And Steve, you have your Steve Magness on Twitter and also scienceofrunning.com, right?

• 1:56:30Steve Magness?

  Correct.

• 1:56:30Rich Roll?

  Is that correct? Anywhere else people can find out what you guys are doing?

• 1:56:34Steve Magness?

  We have a book website, peakperformancebook.net.

• 1:56:38Rich Roll?

  Ah, cool. Awesome, man. And so the book comes out June 9th?

• 1:56:42Steve Magness?

  June 6th.

• 1:56:43Rich Roll?

  June 6th. And are you guys gonna do the book tour thing and cruise around and give talks and all that kinda stuff? Or what's happening?

• 1:56:50Steve Magness?

  We are. We're setting that up right now.

• 1:56:54Rich Roll?

  Alright. Is that like, top secret or something?

• 1:56:56Steve Magness?

  Our social media.

• 1:56:57Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:56:58Brad Stulberg?

  It's coming together nicely. Yeah, no, we hope to be in a couple of big cities. And then also just on social media and hopefully just continuing to have opportunities to write about this stuff.

• 1:57:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Awesome, man. Alright, super nice to meet you guys. I appreciate your time. Guys, again, did a wonderful job on the book and much love.

• 1:57:18Steve Magness?

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:57:19Brad Stulberg?

  Thank you.

• 1:57:19Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:57:34Rich Roll?

  Good dudes, great information. What more do you guys want? I thought that was awesome. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope you got a lot out of it. Do yourself a favor, pick up their new book, Peak Performance, and hit them up and me up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever your favorite social media is. Again, Brad is at B Stulberg, S T U L B E R G. Steve is at Steve Magness, M A G N E S S. And let them know what you thought of this conversation and their book. A couple announcements before I let you go. Julie's new book, This Cheese Is Nuts, is coming out June 13th. You can preorder it now. Do us a favor and do that. Those preorder numbers are super important in terms of enhancing the visibility of the book and influencing booksellers' order size.

• 1:58:19Rich Roll?

  So if it sounds like something you would be into, it would be huge if you would click that preorder button from your favorite bookseller. We also have a Thunderclap campaign to help get the word out on release date. Thunderclap is this really cool, simple-to-use crowdsourcing platform that basically allows you to pledge a social media post in support of the book that will automatically post your timeline on June 13th. I'll put a link up to that for those of you who are interested in supporting this. It's free, it's easy, it's simple, and it's just a cool little thing. Plant Power Ireland is coming up, July 24 through 31. We're going to this amazing place. I keep calling it Ballyvolan, and all the Irish people keep tweeting me and telling

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  me it's Ballyvolan, or I'm pretty sure that's how you pronounce it, Ballyvolan. In any event, it's this extraordinary manor on 90 acres in the Irish countryside. We're taking a group of about 35 to 40 people to this location for an extraordinary seven days of transformation. We're going to do all kinds of stuff. We're going to cook, we're going to eat, we're going to run, we're going to meditate, we're going to do tea ceremony, we're going to have cooking instruction, we're going to eat an extraordinary menu that Julie designed, all plant-based, of course. We're going to have intense workshops on everything from creativity to relationships and unlocking your best, most authentic self, and lots, lots more. So if this sounds like your divine appointment, if it sounds like something you would be interested

• 1:59:45Rich Roll?

  in learning more about, go to ourplantpowerworld.com. We've got a few spots left. They're definitely going to go soon, so definitely jump on it if you're intrigued. Also, we are giving away one free slot to this retreat, which is very exciting. That's like a $5,000 value, and you can enter to win when you purchase three copies of This Cheese is Nuts. And you can learn more about that at srimati.com, S-R-I-M-A-T-I.com, or on my website, richroll.com. Just click on This Cheese is Nuts. You'll see it there on the homepage, and all the details are there. Also, we just launched this new meal planner, the Plant Power Meal Planner. We're super excited about it. People are really digging it. They're sharing these recipes on social media, which is

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  really awesome. Essentially, it's a program, it's an online program that allows you access to thousands of plant-based recipes, unlimited meal plans, grocery lists, everything is totally personalized and customized based on your goals, your food preferences, your allergies, your time constraints. We've got great customer support from a team of experts seven days a week. There's grocery delivery in 22 metropolitan areas via Instacart, and all of this is available to you for just $1.90 a week. It's a great value. You can learn more, just click on Meal Planner at richroll.com. You'll see it there at the top, and it'll take you right to the program. If you would like to support this show and my work, there's a couple of ways to do that. You

• 2:01:12Rich Roll?

  can share it with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, make sure you subscribe. That is the most important thing to get those subscription numbers up. And we have a Patreon for those of you who want to support my work financially, and major love to everybody who has done that. It means a ton to me. If you would like to receive a free, short, weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. It's basically five or six things I stumbled across over the course of the week, a product I'm enjoying, a couple articles I read, a podcast I listened to, a documentary that I screened, just things that I find interesting, inspiring, enlightening, et cetera. No spam. No affiliate links or anything like that, just some good stuff.

• 2:01:54Rich Roll?

  And you can sign up for that by going to richroll.com/subscribe, or just entering your email address in any of those email window fields on my site. Easy to find. And while you're there at richroll.com, you can pick up some Plant Power merch and schwag. We've got signed copies of Finding Ultra, The Plant Power Way, and now This Cheese is Nuts. We've got t-shirts, tech tees, sticker packs, all kinds of cool stuff. I want to thank today's sponsors. MeUndies, the world's most comfortable underwear. Visit meundies.com/roll to get free shipping in the US and Canada and 20% off your first pair. And Squarespace, the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. You can get 10% off at checkout when you use the coupon code RICHROLL at checkout.

• 2:02:39Rich Roll?

  So visit Squarespace.com and use the code RICHROLL at checkout. Squarespace, make your next move. Make your next website. Thank you to everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production and work on the show notes and the script that I tried to riff on for all of these introductions. Sean Patterson for all the help on graphics and theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here soon. Have a great week. Make it count. Be well. Search out your own peak performance and figure out how you're going to sustain it over the long haul. That's what it's all about, right? All right, you guys, take care. I'm done rambling. Bye-bye. Peace. Players.