Brad Stulberg - Just Manageable Challenges - [Invest Like the Best, EP.49]

This week's conversation is about performance. More specifically, it is about the ins and outs of steady progress and growth. My guest is Brad Stulberg who coauthored the book Peak Performance, which combines research from many fields into a description of how athletes, creatives and others continue to push boundaries in their respective crafts. As someone who is intermittently lazy, the growth equation framework that Brad and I explore has impacted me often since I first read the book several months ago. I hope you enjoy this conversation, which isn't about investing, but which is, at its heart, still about the power of compounding. Books Referenced Outliers: The Story of Success Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Online References Jool Health Show Notes 1:32 – (First question) – How Vick Stretcher influenced the book, Peak Performance 4:32 – Looking at some of the preliminary research at the science of purpose 7:58 – The idea of a growth equation and the components that can lead to success 11:47 – How the introduction of stress can help in all sorts of creative and entrepreneurial pursuits. 13:39 – The ratio between physical and mental as an impact on this formula 14:56 – Just manageable challenges and the role that they play in the growth equation 18:06 – The idea of just manageable challenges through the example of an athlete 22:19 – Favorite example of a crazy feat of physical performance, stress on older athletes operating at high levels 23:30 – Thoughts about outside influences like mentors/coaches and how they help high performance individuals advance 25:51 – Describe catabolic and anabolic states and why anabolic is so important 29:13 – How the relationship of catabolic and anabolic states also helps the mind 30:47 – How does the idea of practice play into the growth equation 32:49 – Exploring the nuances of practice and why you don’t go all out 32:56 – Outliers: The Story of Success 33:00 - Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise 34:24 – The idea of designing of a day 42:06 – What role can environment play on us 43:40 – How far is it healthy to run 46:25 – How does ego play into all of this 48:06 – The idea of camaraderie and study of Air Force Cadets highlighting this 49:28 – Fatigue and why it is believed to happen in the mind and not the body 54:00 – Most memorable day 55:43 - Method for finding purpose 56:29 – Jool Health 58:26 – Kindest thing anyone has ever done for Brad Learn More For more comprehensive show notes on this episode go to http://investorfieldguide.com/brad For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. To get involved with Project Frontier, head to InvestorFieldGuide.com/frontier. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

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

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai.

• 0:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This week's conversation is about performance. More specifically, it is about the ins and outs of steady progress and growth. My guest is Brad Stulberg, who co-authored the book Peak Performance, which combines research from many fields into a description of how athletes, creatives and others continue to push boundaries in their respective crafts. As someone who is intermittently lazy, the growth equation framework that Brad and I explore has impacted me often since I first read the book several months ago. I hope you enjoy this conversation, which isn't about investing, but which is, at its heart, still about the power of compounding. I'm on vacation with my son and he demanded that he close this one out.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Listen carefully for tips about peak performance.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Vic Strucker, he's a professor affiliated with the University of Michigan. And when I was studying public health there in graduate school, pretty much everyone I came across told me that I should enroll in Vic's class. I think he was teaching a class on health communication and behavior change. And I went to enroll in the class and I saw that Vic was no longer teaching that class. And I went to my advisor and I said, I want to take this class, Vic's not teaching it. And it turned out that Vic wasn't teaching that class because his daughter, who was in nursing school, so a young woman, I think she's either 19 or 20, had passed away. And his daughter, her name was Julia,

• 2:43Speaker 04

  she was born with congenital heart issues and actually ended up requiring a heart transplant at age nine. It was the youngest heart transplant ever. And at that point Vic thought that he was going to lose his daughter and she made a miraculous recovery. And as far as they knew, she was in good health. And then she suddenly passed away at age 19. This put Vic in a completely dark hole. He told me that he just retreated into himself and really wanted nothing to do with the world. So that's why he wasn't teaching that semester. He went to a lake house in northern Michigan alone and just tried to cope and manage and deal with his grief. And he had this revelation one morning out as the sun was coming up.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  He was out on either a canoe or a kayak on the water. And he claims that it was as if his daughter Julia was talking to him and saying like, Dad, you've totally lost your way. You've got to find a why. And for the longest time Vic's why had been his daughter, his girl. And he says it was if she was telling him that this can't be your why anymore because I'm not here and you need to find your why. You can't just live your life like this. So Vic is one of the smartest people I know. He's so wise. He's a public health professor, but the man could teach philosophy. He'd spent years in India before. He'd studied Zen. He says that this revelation kind of triggered thinking in him, which was to explore, start exploring the power of why and the power of purpose. And what he found is that

• 4:12Speaker 04

  when individuals lose their purpose and they lose their why, in whatever it is they're doing, they tend to flounder. And it made him realize that this voice inside his head that he credits to his daughter that was telling him, "You've got to find your why," was actually pretty correct, and there's a ton of science behind it. So Vic totally shifts his career, shifts his research priorities from health behavior and communication to understanding the power of purpose, and starts to find all this research that was validating what he was experiencing, which is if you can come back to and find your why, you can overcome the deepest depths of darkness. So in a nutshell, that's Vic's story.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  How this fits into our book is Vic is an extreme example of the why, but if you have a why, it can help you and help you get through all kinds of uncomfortable times.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  Maybe before we get into some of the how, you could expand a bit on, you mentioned the science behind this idea of purpose or why. So it's a little bit, sometimes when you hear the words like "purpose," it can seem sort of new-agey or idealistic, maybe a little magical or something, but I found it fascinating that there's a lot of real good hard science behind the potential value of having, I'll call it like a compass of sorts, guiding principles. So maybe talk about some of that science and why that is an important feature of any sort of performance goal, or just performance in general.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  With Vic, he ended up coming up with a new why, a new guiding principle, a compass for his life, and his why was to help others discover their purpose and the power of purpose. And once Vic came up with that, it's not like the grief didn't disappear overnight, but he started to feel better, and he was able to quote-unquote "perform" and go back to his job and find fulfillment in life. What the science shows is something exactly mirroring Vic's experience, which is that if we can cultivate some kind of true north or a why, and particularly if the purpose, the why, is a self-transcending one, so it has to do with something beyond immediate self-concerns, our performance improves.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  At a very reductionist level, they have studied this using FMRI technologies, which allow researchers to look at brain activity in someone's brain, and they put individuals inside a machine and they give them threatening messages. And the individuals that were primed to think about their core values beforehand, the part of their brain that's associated with fear, it doesn't light up. Whereas individuals that weren't primed to reflect on their core values, their purpose beforehand, they had this fear response to a threatening message. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. If we're confronted with something that can cause us pain or can cause us distress, we're programmed to retreat. We protect our quote-unquote self.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  But if we can hone core values or a purpose that is beyond our self, we can literally turn off the part of our brain that would otherwise freak out and say, "No, no, need to shut down, need to shut down," to then get through a challenge. Again, I find studying the extremes fascinating, so an extreme example of this is the stories that you hear of individuals that lift a vehicle off of a kid or maybe a pet that's stuck under a car. These things happen, they're extremely rare events, but they happen more frequently than I thought when I started reporting on this book. They happen enough that there's an entire field of academic study. It's called the study of hysterical or superhuman strength. And what the researchers postulate is very much like Vicks' research on the power of

• 7:40Speaker 04

  purpose, is that when someone else is stuck under that car, the part of your brain that would otherwise say, "You're gonna throw it your back, you're gonna injure yourself, don't lift the car," that part of your brain just completely goes dim, shuts off. And that allows you to access all this other strength because you're not worried about protecting yourself to lift the car. You can't really do a controlled study because you'd never get HIB approval to put people under cars, but you can offer individuals who have completed these acts of superhuman strength to help others, you could offer them a billion dollars the next day and say, "I'll give you a billion dollars if you lift this car." And there's no way they can do it. But when their daughter, their neighbor, their pet was under the car, they can lift it. Because again, it's that notion of a self-transcending purpose that really influences your biology

• 8:25Speaker 04

  or your brain science to allow you to override your fear and your central governor that would otherwise shut you down.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  We'll come back at the end of the conversation to sort of discovery of purpose and specific methods for doing that, but I think it's important that this can be pervasive everywhere. One of my favorite examples is in corporate ethos, and of course, Amazon, as it so often is, is one of the best examples, where there's two ideas that you could argue are its purpose or its sort of timeless principles. That's another way I like to think about this is that a really good purpose is one that is not specific to a given setting or period of time that sort of would survive any sort of external changes or circumstances. And of course, there are two are customer centricity, which is just put the customer first at every single decision. That's obviously a perennial concept that should work pretty well, clearly

• 9:14Speaker 05

  has for Amazon. And the second is this idea, they call it day one. So day one being the sort of early entrepreneurial innovative mindset that they try to foster regardless of their growth or their size. They try to keep that kind of fresh, that fresh mindset. And so those are just two simple examples in the corporate sphere. So you really can see this anywhere and anyone that has a kid, you know, kind of has this purpose baked into them as well. We'll end with that and kind of more specifically how to craft one if you don't explicitly have one. But the meat of the book and a lot of your writings has more to do with some of the how. And there's, we'll start with a very high level framework that you built out for growth. It's a simple equation. So maybe you could

• 9:55Speaker 05

  just start by explaining that equation, how you got to it, and then we'll go into each of the variables in some detail.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  The equation that Patrick's referring to is what I call the growth equation. And it's very simple. It's this notion that stress plus rest equals growth. And the way that I refer to stress in this equation is not necessarily how most conventional definitions of, at least everyday definitions of stress work. So stress is not being in an argument with your significant other or being nervous before a performance review at work. The way that I like to think about stress and the way that it's represented in the book and in this equation is it's some kind of challenge or stimulus that makes the mind or the body work and even makes the mind or the body uncomfortable. So the easiest way to explain the growth equation is to do it in physical terms. So if you think about how to, let's take your bicep muscles, so the big muscle in your arm. And if you

• 10:47Speaker 04

  think about how to make your bicep muscle grow, you have to go to the gym and you have to lift weights. And if you pick up way too heavy of a weight and try to lift it, two things are going to happen. You're going to injure yourself, you're gonna tear your bicep tendon or throw your back out, or you're just not going to be able to pick up the weight and you're gonna be like, "Screw this, I'm done, I quit." And that's an example of way too much stress. Now, the flip side is if you go to a gym and you just start curling a one or two pound weight, you could sit there and curl that weight all day and your bicep muscle is not going to grow. It's not enough stress. So, the first part about making your bicep muscle grow is you've got to find the right dose of stress. So, it's a weight that really challenges you and almost works you to fatigue and maybe even by the end you're so close to

• 11:30Speaker 04

  failure, but it's not such a great weight that you're going to injure yourself. That's only half the battle, though, because even if you find that perfect weight, if you sit there and you lift that weight all day, every day, eventually your arm is quite literally going to fatigue and burn out. So, you have to follow a hard workout with rest and recovery. And your bicep muscle, it actually doesn't grow while you're stressing it, it grows during the period of rest and recovery. So, you get into this nice rhythm of stressing the muscle, letting it recover, adapt, grow, and then it can take on ever so slightly more stress, and that's how you build capacity. What's really interesting is that what my co-author and I learned in our research and reporting on the book is that this equation,

• 12:12Speaker 04

  while it absolutely applies physiologically and in athletic performance, it also holds true in artistic, creative, and entrepreneurial pursuits.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Can you talk about that latter category a little bit? So, maybe a simple example, like the bicep one, to flesh out how this works in all sorts of different pursuits?

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, why don't we start with creativity? Because I think that parallels the athletic realm quite well. So, if you look at how creativity happens and creative breakthrough and insight, it tends to follow a pretty common pattern. And the first part of this pattern is what researchers call immersion. And this is when you throw yourself deep into your work. And that is stress. You're really, really working hard, whether you're working hard to understand something or you're trying to solve a thorny problem, but you are in the weeds, you're in the work, you're working on the whiteboard, staring at your computer screen, reading the research, whatever it might be. Then the second part of breakthrough thinking is a period of incubation.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  And that is when you step away from what you're working on. So in the growth equation, that mirrors rest. And then the third part of this, this pattern is insight, which is when you have a eureka moment. And at a very micro level, this explains why so many people have creative thoughts when they're in the shower or on a walk, because they've stressed themselves, whatever they were working on before, working hard. And then they've incubated, they've gone into the shower, they've gone on a walk, they've done something separate from their work. And it's only when they're doing something separate from a work, when their mind has the chance to shut off a little bit, that a creative insight emerges. On a more macro perspective, this is why so many people report being more creative at the tail end of a vacation, when they take a sabbatical, if you disconnect for the weekend.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  It's almost as if, very similar to the body, when you immerse yourself in the work, you're only setting the stage or priming yourself for true mental growth, and you need to step away from it and rest, and that's when the breakthrough thought happens or the growth occurs.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  When you were doing the research across physical and mental iterations of this formula, how did you think about the ratio between those two things? So, and I'm sure it's different from discipline to discipline, but is there, is there any high, anything high level that you can say about how much stress versus how much rest? And then we'll get into some of the specifics of those two things.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  It's a great question. I think it, like you said, it's very contextual, and it will definitely depend on the activity that you're doing, and also how much stress, like how much you've built up the capacity to handle stress. So a prime example is myself. When I first started writing, I could probably not write effectively or well for more than 30 minutes at a time before needing a little break. Now I can put in a good 90-minute writing block and feel okay. You asked for a high-level recommendation. Across the vast majority of pursuits, on a micro scale, quality work tends to top out. It between 90 minutes and two hours. It's very, very hard to produce high quality work for over two hours without a break. We cite a bunch of research in the book that shows that, again, depending on the task

• 15:13Speaker 04

  and depending on one's skill and capacity to do that task, working in cycles of about 45 minutes to 90 minutes of deep focus work, followed by short, I don't know, five to 20 minute breaks, that tends to produce the highest quality work and also the greatest quantity.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  We've talked a bit on other episodes about this formulation called MIA, so most advanced yet acceptable when it comes to advertising and sales and brand and things like that. And there's an analog here, which is this idea, I think you call it just manageable challenges. And one of my missions always is to study the concept of boundaries or barriers, understand what each person's are, what yours are in a given context, and then kind of play with them, not necessarily break them or be this nutcase about constantly pushing the edge, but just kind of toy with boundaries to see that, in many cases, they're kind of stories we tell ourselves. So talk about this idea of just manageable challenges and the role that they play in this kind of whole growth equation.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  The cycles of work, right, on the 60 to 90 minute duration that I just talked about, I consider that like a very micro application, right? Throughout the day, you want to stress yourself, rest, stress, rest. What Patrick's referring to is actually, to me, equally as important and equally as interesting, which is how do you apply this equation over the course of a career or a lifetime? And in the book, we write about what we call just manageable challenges. And a just manageable challenge is something that pushes you ever so slightly outside of your comfort zone. And I firmly believe that it is through taking on these just manageable challenges that someone grows. I also think that they can be an enormous trap, because if you take on just manageable challenges in every aspect of your life at the same time,

• 16:57Speaker 04

  it's just too much pressure in the cooker, it's going to explode. So a very concrete example of a just manageable challenge would be, let's say that whatever you work on, you're accustomed to projects in one content area. And you've been doing that for five years and you feel like you've really mastered that content area. So a just manageable challenge might be to work on a similar type of project, but do it in a different content area. So maybe you've worked in healthcare projects for a long time and you're really good at org development in healthcare. Well, take on an org development project, consulting gig in finance, or in retail and sales, some other kind of industry. So it's not, like you said, it's not completely going off the cliff, but it is a little bit outside of your

• 17:38Speaker 04

  comfort zone. Where you run into trouble is if you decide to take on that just manageable challenge, that project at work, at the same time that you're having your first child, you're training for your first marathon, you're caring for an ailing parent, like those are all just manageable challenges. And anyone that's tried to push the envelope in all areas of their life at once, will tell you that it's fricking impossible. You can't do it. So I think it's really good and healthy to be pretty deliberate and kind of say, these are the big buckets of my life. For a lot of people, it's family, it's personal hobbies and pursuits, and it's work. Maybe to have one just manageable challenge across those three, maybe two, but to be pretty deliberate. This is where I want to grow right now. And here's the kind of challenge I think I'm going to take on

• 18:22Speaker 04

  to grow. And how am I going to recover from that challenge? So after you take on that, that, that project that pushes you outside of your comfort zone, are you going to go right to the next one and continue pushing? Or are you going to give yourself some time and space to kind of recover, reflect, adapt, before you go take on the next one?

• 18:38Speaker 05

  For stories like these, I'm always fascinated by performance athletes. I think everyone is, because it's something we can obviously relate to, understand, watch, appreciate. And I also am fascinated by the research process. So I think your research process is very much like mine, or like any, any scientific method type thing, which is subjects, variables, outcomes. And so in stocks, it's, you know, stock XYZ, price earnings ratio, return. And if you can draw across a wide sample, a relationship, kind of down that chain, maybe you've found something. And I know that you have personally met, talked to, studied dozens, hundreds, I don't know how many different performance athletes. I'd be curious if you could pick one, and tell part of their story, or the relevant part of their story for this idea of just manageable challenges, and how it

• 19:22Speaker 05

  helped them grow and get better and set a record, or whatever, whatever the story might be, whatever the outcome might be.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's a tough question because almost every world-class athlete I've had the privilege to interview, they go through this process of taking on just manageable challenges and never being satisfied and continuing to push the envelope. I think that one example right now that is in the news is the free solo climber Alex Honnold. He recently free soloed up El Cap, which, for those that don't know, is a multi-thousand-foot sheer rock face in Yosemite. Just go Google it, you'll be terrified. Right, there you go. You don't even need me to tell you. And free soloing means you're climbing with no ropes, no support, like you fall, you're dead. I had the chance to interview Alex for Outside Magazine about two years ago, and we talked a lot about fear. And one of the things I asked Alex was, how do you handle fear?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  How do you manage fear? And he said that he feels fear. He didn't deny this. It's that he takes the fear and he channels it into what he's doing. But what allows him to do that is the fact that he has gradually built up over time to being able to free solo El Cap. So to him, it's just the next just manageable challenge. And that started when he was a kid. So you start with bouldering, and then you start with climbing something a little bit higher with ropes. And then you maybe take off the ropes and you free solo something, but if you fall, the stakes are low because you're 20 feet off the ground. And we look at these world-class athletes and we see the end result, which is the end of the trajectory, which for him is free soloing El Cap. Who knows what he'll do next?

• 20:55Speaker 04

  But what we don't necessarily see is that no one just does that overnight. It's a very, very slow, steady, and methodical buildup, and especially amongst adventure and extreme athletes. I think that there's a huge misconception that these guys and these gals are reckless, but it's the total opposite. They are so calculated and so methodical. It's just that what we see blasted on the news is Alex free soloing El Cap or Jimmy Chin skiing down Mount Everest, but we don't see the body of work in the years of pushing the envelope to get to that point.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think many people out listening will start, will be starting to think of absolute versus relative change and the idea of compounding. That we almost always read about things, magazine covers, for example, that are great examples of absolute change or are understood on an absolute scale. Whereas the relative improvement that whatever that feat represented was likely the same, call it percentage increase, as early changes. It's just that because of the power of compounding.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  That's such a good analogy.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Percentage change later on produces bigger absolute changes.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Man, I wish we would have had this discussion before I wrote the book because this would fit this framework perfectly. It's totally that. Like every time you take on a just manageable challenge, you're investing in yourself and it compounds. And even though it can be very uncomfortable to take on that challenging project at work or to have your first child when you're not sure if you're ready in a marriage, whatever it is, if you, if you take on a challenge that is appropriate, even if it makes you uncomfortable, if you can recover from it, then you grow the capacity to take on the next challenge, which will be more, and it all compounds on itself. And I love that analogy because every single world-class performer that I've had the privilege to interview, they are all perfect examples of just the power of compounding.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Because they start small and they're fricking consistent and they're constantly pushing the envelope just a little bit at a time. But a little bit at a time compounded over years ends up to being able to do some pretty ridiculous things.

• 22:51Speaker 05

  Alex has been in the news, but I'm wondering what your favorite example of a crazy feat of physical performance is in all your research. What, what thing stands out as something that to you just seems, understanding that you appreciate the process behind it, but just, just that the face value just seems so incredible and out there.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  I think Alex has got to be one of the most.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  He's one right now.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  One of the most mind-boggling. He might be on top. What aging athletes are doing, while we're talking about compounding, is also pretty incredible. Roger Federer, I think, is 35 and looks as good as ever and is winning majors. Serena Williams, I want to say is 34, 35. Tom Brady is like 40 or 41. So that intrigues me. And the common thread with a lot of these athletes, it gets back to that growth equation, right? Stress plus rest equals growth. At least in how they're speaking to the press is they're saying that the reason that they're, they feel so good and they're on top of their game is because they've really prioritized recovery. And they've learned how to nail that notion of recovery. And over the course of a career, you can almost think of all the training that you do when you're young, that's just stress in the bank.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  And then you get to this older age and it's more important to focus on the rest side of the equation and the outcome is still growth.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Before we get to recovery, which I found to be the most interesting part of all this, because it seems like you're doing nothing, but it's, but it's actually the period that may be most important, or the science is starting to say is most important. The idea of stress, though, before we leave that idea, I'm curious what you think about mentorship, coaching, outside influences to kind of push yourself to always be advancing. What I've found just out of personal experience, I'm curious if you've found the same, that I can go, I'll go through bursts where I'm very good at this adjacent state thing, but then you just get tired. You just get worn out of doing it so much. And once you've made some improvement, it's very easy to coast and feels great to coast for a long period of time.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  So in your research across some of the, the performance athletes or high performing people in general, is there any commonality in terms of the uses of coach or mentors and how people use them to kind of help stay accountable to that equation?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Totally. So, um, almost everyone has a coach or a mentor. Having a good coach or a mentor is priceless. And it's funny, if we end with concrete action items, finding a good coach or a mentor is going to be high on that list. In terms of how they use them, it's interesting that you say your example of the complacency, I think that there's a use for that, but I think that often what happens is especially for like driven, high performing people, the coach is holding them back so they don't get to a point where they're so fatigued that they become complacent. So it's almost like the coach is holding them accountable to the stress plus rest cycle, and particularly the rest part.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  My co-author Steve, who coaches runners that are Olympic caliber, some have competed in the games, world championship level runners, he often says that it's not hard to push a highly motivated, driven person to work hard, it's hard to hold them back. And I think that that holds true across a lot of my experience with reporting on great performers with coaches. Yes, the coach can come there and say, you need to keep pushing, but it's often the coach that says, hey, you've pushed pretty hard. I don't want you to start feeling fatigue, so let's scale back for two days. So three days from now, you can start pushing again. Over the course of a career, maybe it's, it actually makes sense to make sure that you carve out 30% of your time, it's something that is completely in your wheelhouse, because that gives you the capacity to really put in the work elsewhere.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  So let's bridge then into rest. So you talk about this difference between catabolic and anabolic states. So maybe, again, using the physical, since it's helpful, describe what those states are and why the anabolic becomes such a key part of this equation.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  For sure. And then we can go into the mental like we did, because I think it's a nice transition. So when you work out a muscle, you think that you're getting stronger when you're at the gym, but you're actually completely breaking down your muscle when you're at the gym. Your body enters something that's called a catabolic state, which is a state of breakdown. So you apply the stress and your muscle's broken down. Your body only enters an anabolic state, which is a state of building. It's when all the good growth promoting hormones flood the muscle. That only happens when you rest, and in particularly when you sleep. So physiologically, it's in our sleep that testosterone, human growth hormone, all of these things that make us stronger, that's when it's released. So again, the common notion is, oh, I'm going

• 27:21Speaker 04

  to go to the gym and I get stronger at the gym. No, you actually get stronger when you sleep. All that you're doing when you're at the gym is breaking your body down and providing the stress, the stimulus for your body to grow, but the growth doesn't happen until you're at rest.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  What's the actual thing that's happening in the catabolic state? So you see breaking down. What does that, what does that physically mean, like at a cellular level, or as deep, as deep as you're able to describe it?

• 27:46Speaker 04

  For sure. So the main thing that's happening is a biochemical hormone called cortisol is being released. And cortisol is an innate part of the stress response. And what cortisol does is it literally signals to your body. So at a cellular level, you're tearing your muscle. I guess that's not a cellular, a soft tissue level, you're tearing your muscle. And the cells are, they're being hurt in that process. And this hormone called cortisol is flooding your system, which is saying to the body, like, we are under attack, we are in a state of breakdown. And then when you sleep, anabolic hormones such as human growth hormone or testosterone, they flood your system and they go to the site of the tear and they rebuild the area that tore and they make it stronger. So it's the whole notion of like tear and repair,

• 28:31Speaker 04

  which actually is something that meatheads have been saying forever and it's quite true. So yeah, when you're at the gym, you're tearing the soft tissue, you're degradating the cells, you're having the stress hormone flood your system and it's not until you recover, and again, mainly when you sleep, that the body goes through the process to build up. But the tear is real important because when you tear, you're signaling to your body, you're literally saying, I just got embarrassed and broken, you better come back stronger so you can handle this challenge next time.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  I don't know why this is making me think of this and I have no idea where this is from, but there's, I want to say it's like an Irish folk song or something like that, but there's this idea, kind of medieval castle idea that the higher someone builds their wall, the stronger we become on the outside. And there's an interesting parallel here where basically what's going on is the more stress you put something through, the more the body or the mind kind of overcompensates in the other direction.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  As long as you give it the other direction.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  As long as you let it, as long as you let it, right?

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  So it's almost like, it seems almost like an arms race of sorts.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  That you're effectively building the equivalent of a taller wall by putting your body through this stress. And then on the other side, if you allow it to rest and recover properly, it gets stronger.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And same thing happens for the mind, which I think is fascinating. So we expose ourselves to all kinds of stimuli throughout the day. Reading a book, having this conversation, doing research, driving to the parking lot and seeing different color cars parked, right? It's literally infinite stimuli. And it's only when we sleep that our brain actually goes through all that information, figures out what to retain, what to throw out. Of the things worth retaining, figures out what to connect them to and what neural networks should be activated and where in the brain to store them. Which again, it's just mind boggling how it parallels the physical so cleanly, but it's almost

• 30:26Speaker 04

  as if having this conversation, we're both flexing our mental muscle. We're totally present, we're engaged, we're thinking deeply. But for these concepts and the things that we're discussing to really sink in, you almost literally need to sleep on it. At a micro level, anyone that's been sleep deprived knows that their thinking goes to crap, their willpower goes to crap, their emotional control goes to crap. And at a macro level, across all the world-class performers that I've interviewed, not just athletes, but artists, entrepreneurs, they all say that they have had, during their periods of their best work, quality and creativity, have been periods following lots of sleep. And the scientific research points a direct line, like I said, to your brain really doing

• 31:11Speaker 04

  its best work when you're sleeping, which gets to something that you said in the opening, which is rest is actually, it's not a passive process, it's extremely active.

• 31:20Speaker 05

  I want to talk a bit about practice and varying degrees of stress within some specific context. So let's say it's, I don't know, something elemental like sprinting, 100 meter sprint. It might be tempting to think that to get faster at the 100 meter sprint, you should just go all out in the 100 meter sprint every so often, rest and recover and rinse and repeat. But I think that there's more variability than that. I think it was with running as well. You'll find, say, marathon runners not running at pace, but at half pace or quarter pace or something much more manageable. So how does that kind of more practice-oriented, context-specific thing factor into this whole formula? Is it all out and then rest? Or is there more of a gradation?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  It's completely a gradation. And I think that's because if you just go all out and then rest, you only have so many all-out efforts in you. So the cumulative stress is actually lower if you were to go all out and rest versus if you were to go maybe 80% and rest, because you can just do a lot more reps at 80%. So athletically, that's the rationale for the gradation. From a more intellectual problem-solving standpoint, and I guess this holds athletically true, I like to think about looking at a problem is, what are all the things, what are all the levers that we can pull on to solve this problem? So if in your example, if the problem is running 100 meters as fast as possible, one lever is acceleration off the blocks, how quickly you start.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Another lever might be how fast you hit top speed. And another lever is how you decelerate. And even so you don't injure yourself when you finish. And I'm pausing because even after you hit top speed, there's probably a lever of how do you sustain top speed? And you want to probably train, I'm not a sprint coach, but you want to train all four of those skills slightly differently. So if you were just to run all out sprints, you're giving up a chance to stress the system of firing off the blocks more. So it's almost like you break down the problem into component parts and then you stress each part and follow that with rest.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  The idea of high level performance seems very popular today. I think it probably kicked off with the 10,000 hours notion popularized by Gladwell. I think Andres Erickson just came out with a book called Peak.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, like a year and a half ago.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have not read that book, full disclosure, but the notion is straightforward. So everyone glommed onto it, which was if you just practice enough at something, 10,000 hours, you're going to get really good. But there's not a lot of nuance in that idea. So maybe you could flesh out some of that nuance around practice and why sort of every hour of practice isn't created equal. And there can be good and bad practice.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. So like you said exactly, the notion of 10,000 hours to make an expert caught on. What Erickson's research actually shows, however, is that it's less about the quantity of hours and more about the quality of what you do in those hours. So two writers could put in 10,000 hours of writing and the end result at the end of those hours will look extremely different. If one of those writers has their cellphone on the table and is scrolling through Twitter during their writing time, is checking their email browser, is only writing in the syntax that they're comfortable with versus the second writer that is in a completely undistracted state when he or she is writing,

• 34:38Speaker 04

  that is toying with different forms, that's constantly pushing themselves, that ends writing not feeling like chilled out and refreshed, but ends writing freaking fatigued. In my hunch is at the end of both, both those writers write for 10,000 hours, the latter is going to be performing significantly better.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  There certainly is no one formula for success about how your day should look. But it does seem to be the case that many people that have done very interesting things, while the, the exact pattern of the day is extremely different, there still is that pattern that they tend to repeat things. It could be at different times, at different lengths, et cetera, throughout the day. So describe this idea of designing of a day and how people might think about applying that in their own lives.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  So you picked up on something that is 100% spot on, which is that routines are extremely powerful in an N of one, but there is no routine that works across a population. So anyone that says, I've got the routine for you. You've just got to wake up at this hour, drink this kind of tea, do this kind of work, do this workout, take this long of a nap. They're charlatan. There's zero routine that works across an entire population. The flip side of that is if you can figure out your N of one routine, it's an enormous performance enhancer. So then the question becomes, well, how do you figure out your N of one routine? The first place to look and where there's a lot of evidence and research

• 36:01Speaker 04

  is this notion of chronotype, which simply means are you more alert and more able to focus and think deeply and physically primed in the morning or at night? And this is largely biologically determined and there's a lot of variation. So researchers tend to put people into these two buckets, which I think like we, like everything, right? It's not so black and white. It's gray, but you have morning larks and night owls and morning larks are able to focus, put out more energy in the morning and night owls tend to work better at night. So the first step of designing an ideal day is to just do some introspection. Like you can get blood work and stuff to tell you, but you really don't need it. Most

• 36:41Speaker 04

  people tend to know, am I most aware firing on all cylinders in the morning between, I don't know, 5:30 and nine? Or do I love to get home after dinner, start working at 10 and the wheels start turning at night? Once you have that information, then the next step becomes how can you start to manage your energy, not time? So I like to think about designing a day in terms of managing energy, not time. And what I mean by that is if I know that I am going to be able to do deep focus work better in the morning, because I'm a morning person, how can I try to set up my day so I protect my mornings for that type of work? I'd be foolish to schedule meetings and conference calls and things that don't demand

• 37:23Speaker 04

  deep focus work in the morning if I know that that's when I have a window of opportunity to really be the best at deep focus work. So there's this notion of managing energy, not time. I think the second important thing is trying to work in discrete chunks of undistracted work. We spoke about this a little bit earlier. All kinds of research shows that between 45 and 90 minutes of deep focus work, followed by a short break, tends to lead to the greatest quality and quantity. Deep focus work, though, that doesn't mean like I'm just working on something and I'm checking my email every now and then, scrolling down my Twitter feed, I'm getting a snack, answering the phone. Deep focus work is defined as the most extreme form of single tasking.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  So you are only working on the task at hand and there is nothing distracting you from that. I think a lot of people think that they're doing deep focus work, but it's very hard. I write about this stuff, I'm here preaching the benefits of it. On a good day, I can get in two blocks of deep focus work.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is something that, this is the classic example of easy to say, hard to do. The good thing about doing it is how good it feels. Maybe like mid to later stages of that block and immediately afterwards.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  You know you've done it. You're like fatigued, right? It feels like you just ran a hard workout.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, it's kind of like the clarity you have after a good run. The reward itself, for me, is not so much the work, it's actually, it's the feeling of doing the work itself. And I feel like that's an interesting shortcut to make this work, is find stuff where the, what usually starts as very, very stressful when you first get into this and get in the habit of doing it, but you can kind of get this, this perverse enjoyment out of really stressful work.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  And you build up to it, right? Like following that equation, if you've never done deep focus work, like I said earlier, at first I would sit down to write and 30 minutes I'd be tapped out. So like, don't just shoot for 90 minutes, like gradually build your capacity to do deep focus work. I think the other important, I hate to use the word hack, because like all of these principles are kind of the anti-hack, but if there's something in the book that I would brand as a hack, it's just the importance of rigging your environment. So rather than rely on willpower to resist doing something, and for me, that something is always checking my phone, when I do deep focus work, I remove the temptation completely. So that means going to a coffee shop, not bringing my phone. If I'm in my apartment, it means turning off my phone and actually putting it in the other room. And it's super important to have the thing out of sight.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  So this was eye-opening for me in the research for the book. I used to sit down to do work, and like most people, I'd have my phone on the table, unsilent, turned over. And I often wouldn't check it. I'd do an hour of work and I wouldn't check it. And I'd think like, that's great, deep focus work. But in fact, just the fact that my phone is in my visual field, it's occupying probably between like 5 and 10% of my cognitive energy. And part of that is my brain resisting not checking the phone. Because I'm like, huh, I wonder if I got an email. I wonder if someone retweeted me. I wonder what's happening in the world. And another part of that is just by having the phone there, on a subconscious level, researchers have found that it primes your brain to what, like a little part of you is

• 40:31Speaker 04

  just, it's a cue to make you think about what's happening elsewhere, because the phone is a venue, an avenue to everywhere, versus what you're working on. One of my favorite studies in the book was they had individuals have intimate, intense conversations. And they had three groups. One group, nothing was on the table. One group, they had a notebook the size of a phone on the table. And a third group, they had a cellphone turned off, face down. And the group with nothing and the group with the notebook, they reported the same quality conversation, and on objective measures and what they retained, they scored the same and quite high. The group with the cellphone on the table, they performed like significantly worse than those other two groups.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  And it gets even crazier, and the third, they repeated the study, and this time, the cellphone wasn't even one of the participants, it was the researchers. So simply having a cellphone, even if it's not yours, detracts from your ability to focus and do deep work. And again, they suspect, and it makes a lot of sense, it's because the way that our brains have been conditioned to think about cellphones, even if the cellphone's not yours, it's making you wonder, I wonder what's happening on my cellphone? And it's occupying a little part of your cognitive energy.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Let's talk about environment for a second. So- I was actually doing this independent, or actually before reading your book, trying to craft this set of guiding principles, I guess I'll call them. And the guiding principles are meant to serve not just me, but to kind of find a tribe of sorts, to try to attract a group of people that have at least highly overlapping guiding principles. And one that I kept coming back to, even though it's not one that I expected to, was to be spending a lot of time outside. That if I just study my N of 1 and sort of subjectively rank what makes me happiest versus unhappy, the most consistent thing is if I'm outside more, everything else is better.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Preach, uh, brother.

• 42:24Speaker 05

  So I'm curious, and I know you're going to be biased, given that you're a writer for Outside Magazine, but talk about the evidence or interesting findings when doing the reporting for the book that you found about the magnitude of that being true.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  So it is 100% true, and there's a fair amount of hard science behind it, that time spent in nature is extremely beneficial for you, for your health and your cognitive function. From a health standpoint, when we're in nature, our stress response tends to diminish. So in urban settings, even in an office, where there's traffic, there are people, there's cell phones, there's email, there's all these inputs. We kind of operate in this state where our stress response is always humming along because there's so many inputs. And the whole point of the stress response is to be able to respond to those inputs. When we're out in nature, and particularly if we don't have our devices with us,

• 43:22Speaker 04

  it's literally like a virtual letting your shoulders down. Your body just knows that, ah, this is where I've evolved. I can chill out. And you see all kinds of physiological benefits. So after just like a two-hour nature walk, people have lower blood pressure, less of the stress hormone cortisol in their system, they report sleeping better that evening. I mean, I could go on and on about the benefits. Better oxygen saturation, lower heart rate, almost every physiological indicator improves after time spent in nature.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  And is that, have they isolated that variable? So if people took a two-hour walk in the city?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  You're a smart guy. They've done exactly that. So they've had people take an urban walk versus a nature walk, and then measured these variables. Because you're right, you could argue that it's just the exercise that led to those changes, but they've found that all exercise is good, but there's significantly better to do it in nature.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  I ask the next batch of questions very selfishly, which is about running. So what I'm always interested about is how far it's healthy to run. So with training, obviously, I can get up to higher and higher distances, but is there any evidence that there's too much that you should contain your running, or really, I guess you're running as an example here for any sort of physical stress and activity, to some shorter period of time so that you don't create negative long-term results?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  It depends on how we're defining negative. If it's negative, like in terms of your relationship with your significant other, then absolutely. If we're talking about just health and longevity, it's an intriguing area of research, and it's relatively new because people haven't been running 100-mile ultra-marathons for all that long. What the evidence shows right now is that more is better with a few caveats. The first caveat is there are definitely diminishing marginal returns. So you get almost all your bang for your buck out of running 20 miles a week, and anything over 20, you're still getting some bang, but it's miniscule. The second caveat is if you're going to run over 20 miles a week, and especially if you

• 45:25Speaker 04

  get up to 50, 60, 70, you can't do it recklessly. So the individuals that have issues with their health, they jump to that distance too soon. Back to the growth equation, stress plus rest equals growth, they skipped some stages of that, and they got there too soon. So their body, the system, the organism, hasn't been stressed enough, and all of a sudden, it's got this huge stress on it, and it can't adapt, and it fails. That's one caveat. The second caveat has to do with just how you support that kind of training. So where people run into trouble is the type A triathlete that works a intense corporate finance job, that's struggling to keep his or her marriage alive, that has two kids and a third on the way, that all they want to do is qualify for the Ironman World Championships, so they're also training 25 hours a week.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  That, I mean, they've shown in lots of athletes that can lead to deteriorated health and even heart problems, which is so ironic because you think all this endurance sports will be good for your heart. When you look at athletes that have built up gradually and they've gradually and incrementally developed the capacity to handle increased stress and they support it in other elements of their life, it fits in nicely, there are only health improvements. But I come back to that diminishing margin of returns because I think it's important. For most people, mile zero to 20, you get almost all your bang for your buck. So that's like the public health hat that I have on says do that. The crazy endurance hat that I also wear says like, if you want to run ultra marathons, there's zero evidence to the contrary, so long as you incrementally build the capacity

• 46:55Speaker 04

  to do so and you don't do it recklessly.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Talk about how ego figures into all of that. So how is ego a barrier? What does it do to either help or hinder our performance?

• 47:07Speaker 04

  I need to be careful here. So I don't want to say the ego always hurts performance because I think like in an entrepreneur, you have to have some ego. Not all ego hurts performance, but I think that uncontained ego absolutely hurts performance. And it's for a bit paradoxical reasons. We tend to think of people with big egos as like being on top of it and they just think that they're so great. And that's what they're portraying, but often under the surface, the bigger the ego, the greater the insecurity. And when you have insecurity, you fear failure. And when you fear failure, you don't take risks. You don't take just manageable challenges because a cornerstone of a just manageable challenge is it's uncomfortable and you might fail. And if you're worried about protecting your ego, you're never going to do it because

• 47:52Speaker 04

  you're protecting your like your literal self. So why would I challenge myself? So I think that you have to have, it's almost like you have to have confidence without ego or like a healthy ego that allows you to have the self-confidence to take on a challenge or to think that you can do something that others can't, but not to be so egotistical that you think that you're the greatest because the minute you think you're the greatest, A, you're going to be less likely to take on challenges because you fear failure and B, if you actually do fail, You like completely degrade. If you have an enormous ego and your ego is completely tied up in investing and you have a bad quarter, you're going to feel like shit in all elements of your life. If your whole self is wrapped up in your activity.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  And that's like, to me, that's a very, very fragile state to be in.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Maybe one way around this is the idea of who you surround yourself with and camaraderie. Touch a little bit on this interesting study of Air Force cadets and the group that each cadet was in and its impact on their performance.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Air Force cadets are put in what are called squadrons. And squadrons are groups of, I want to say it was either 20 or 30, I think 30 cadets. And squadrons live together, they train together, they do PT together, they take their classes together, they're like a second family. They're, I guess they're your first family when you're at the academy. And what the researchers found was that the group's performance had incredible impact on each individual's performance. Somewhat common sense. What's interesting, at least what's interesting to me, is that we often tend to think that a rising tide lifts all ships and that if a group has a really strong leader, he or she will bring everyone's performance up. What these researchers found is that the group actually gravitates towards the lowest

• 49:37Speaker 04

  common denominator. So groups that had someone with a poor attitude that didn't want to be there, all the individual members, when they controlled for everything, their performance suffered against those in a group, even if they didn't have a great leader, but the lowest common denominator still had good energy, still had a good attitude. It's like negativity is a more powerful effect than positivity when it comes to groups.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  I want to come back, sort of in this closing section, to purpose again. One of the more interesting things that I read in the book was this study by, I believe his name was Tim Noakes.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, Tim Noakes.

• 50:11Speaker 05

  About fatigue. Someone told me one time, rather cryptically, that fatigue is an emotion. And then I read this study and I kind of thought, yeah, I guess he was right, that's true. So describe Noakes's study, what he learned about fatigue, and we'll use that as an entry into, back into this idea of purpose.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Tim Noakes, in the 90s, he had this hypothesis that fatigue happened in the brain, not the body. And he came up with this because he watched marathon runners. And they'd always kick at the end of the race. And he'd be like, "This is frickin' impossible. How are they speeding up? They should be depleted. Something's going on here." So yeah, that led to this hypothesis that fatigue happens in the brain, not the body. So to test this hypothesis, he had individuals exercise the major muscles in their legs to complete failure, until they were totally tapped out. Think of yourself at the gym, like, begging for mercy. Your legs are shaking and shivering. You literally cannot even begin to contract your muscle. And then, he ran an electrical current through their muscles, and the muscles contracted with full force.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  So what this told Noakes is that it's not the muscle that is completely shot and given out. There's something in the central system. He calls it the central governor, the nervous system, the brain, that is telling the body to stop. And this gets back to evolution and this notion of a protective mechanism. The reason that we feel pain and fatigue is it tells our brain that we are pushing pretty hard. We better slow down, or we might hurt ourselves. So then, our brain slows us down. So, if fatigue happens in the brain, that would lend one to think that if you can overcome the central governor, your ego, whatever it is that's protecting yourself, you can

• 51:58Speaker 04

  probably eke out those last few percentage points of performance. So in athletics, every world-class performer that I've ever interviewed that has done something remarkable. Kryke Alexander won the Ironman World Championships at age 41. And I asked Crowe, I'm like, "Dude, what are you thinking about in the back half of that marathon? Like, you gotta be completely falling apart." And Crowe says, "I'm thinking about my family and how much they gave for me." Something completely unrelated to himself. Mep Kofleyski, who just won the Boston Marathon at age 41. Again, should've never happened. After the race, he was asked, "How did you do it? Like, what were you reflecting on in the back half of the race when you should've been falling apart?" And he said that he had devoted the race to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing,

• 52:43Speaker 04

  and he had written their names on his bib. So again, it's some kind of self-transcending purpose, something beyond himself. I could go on and on with examples. So it gets you to start thinking that if you have this purpose that's beyond yourself and you're deeply focused on it, and coming back to where we started with the research about what happens in the brain, maybe it's almost like you're overriding the central governor. The part of your brain that is so caught up with protecting yourself and holding yourself back in ego, it's quiet because you're not thinking about yourself, you're doing it for something beyond yourself. Now, how does this apply to everyday life? It applies across the board. So there's another study that we reference in the book of hospital janitors. And the simple intervention, so let's say there were 100 janitors, and they divided

• 53:27Speaker 04

  the janitors into two groups. And one group just went on, did their work as they always had. Another group became educated on staph infections and bacteria in the hospital, and how if the hospital is not kept clean, patients die. And their job was reframed as not just cleaning puke and sweeping the floors, but as saving lives. The group that had that intervention, they ended up performing better on all kinds of objective measures of their job, and they had less turnover. So, on its face, you're like, well, what does a janitorial work have to do with winning the Boston Marathon? And the answer is nothing and everything. Nothing because they're completely different acts and drawn in different capacities, everything because it's putting your head down and doing work that's not comfortable.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  And in both cases, when there's some kind of greater purpose than oneself, you tend to endure fatigue, endure discomfort, endure perception of effort, whatever you want to call it, more. I'll ask people, if you are doing something for someone else, are you willing to take a risk? Are you willing to make yourself a little bit more uncomfortable? And the answer is almost always yes.

• 54:33Speaker 05

  What was the most memorable individual day of this research process for you?

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Probably speaking to a guy named Matt Billingsley. He plays the drums for Taylor Swift. And just the way that he was, he was so humble. So here we are interviewing him. You could argue based on who he's playing for that he is the best pop-rock drummer in the world, certainly one of them. He's playing in front of 100,000 people touring the world. And it took us so many follow-up, like emails and phone calls with him to get the information that we wanted, because he had all these questions for us. So he wanted to know, what are the best athletes doing? And what are the scientists doing? And what are other artists doing? And we're like, no, like Matt, like, like you're the story in the book. We're like, we're learning from you. And he just kept on asking us questions.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  He wanted to know from me about what adventure athletes are doing to deal with nerves. He wanted to know from Steve about endurance and stamina. And he was the most profound example of that. But a switch on my head clicked, which is across all of these great performers, all of them had questions for us. A lot of the scientists we spoke with, they were less, I mean, all scientists are excited to share their science to a mass market book. And they were super interested to hear that we were looking in different domains. And the motivation researchers that did the janitor study, they wanted to understand the physiology of purpose. So it all comes back to humility. And you might say that they're humble because they're so great and that allows them to be humble, but I actually think that they're great because they're so humble.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  And it's that hunger to keep on learning more that Matt Billingsley embodied more than anyone, which is why that that's what comes to my mind first. But again, it really represented to me the most interesting part of all these conversations.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  One of the things I'm finding across these conversations is the, that humility, ego minimization, or even ego destruction is actually the rational choice to make. Because it creates the biggest open space for growth. I think everyone's got, obviously, purpose implicit in what they do. But sometimes it's helpful to kind of go through an exercise and draw it out of yourself a little more explicitly. So what's the method through which you did it for the book? That you've seen successfully others kind of apply a simple, a simple method to find, find theirs?

• 56:49Speaker 04

  So this is, this is all in the book. If you like, really want to go through the exercise in detail. And it's based on Vic Strucker's research. And he actually now has a whole company that is devoted to helping people find their purpose. It's called J O O L Health. So I'll go through it really, really briefly, but if you want to get into it, either in the book and/or Vic's new company, it has a mobile app, all kinds of neat stuff. Super simple. So it starts with selecting your core values. And core values are things that you hold near and dear to your heart. In the book, we've got a list of 50. There is no, I'm not aware of it, there's like a validated list, but if you just were to Google "psychology list of core values," you can probably find lots of good ones.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  These are things like community, creativity, health, relationships, expertise, power, authority, humility, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we have about 50 in the book. I'd recommend looking at a list of at least 25. And you don't necessarily have to pick something off that list, but it helps prime for these types of core values. So then you select five core values. The next thing that you do is you individualize those core values. So let's say I picked creativity. Well, what does creativity mean to me? Or if I picked humility, what does humility mean to me? So I'd write, I don't know, one to three sentences describing that core value. So now you're left with a list of three to five core values that are each defined personally by you. Then the next

• 58:15Speaker 04

  step is to rank order them, from most important to least important. And this is really hard because you've already narrowed down from, I don't know, 50, even 100 core values to five, and you've just given them thought and about how they're all probably intimate to you. Now you've got to rank them. And as far as I'm aware, the only purpose of this ranking mechanism is just to help you even think more deeply, like what do you really stand for? After you've ranked the core values, then you step back and you try to come up with a purpose statement that embodies your core values and what you stand for. And that can be anywhere from one sentence to a short paragraph. What I like to do is I, actually above my desk where I write, I have a list of my core values and my purpose statement, just so it's always kind of there as a visual cue.

• 58:58Speaker 05

  Very appropriate closing question. It's always my closing question, but given a lot of what we've talked about and the importance of ego minimization, doing things for others, et cetera, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Probably my wife agreeing to marry me.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  A common answer.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  No, I'm super fortunate that people have been kind to me throughout my life. You probably know this, but the process of writing a book, you kind of go out there and then all these people are offering positive reviews and blurb-ing your book. It's just friggin' incredible. I don't think it's the kindest thing ever, not to sell her short, but in the context of this conversation, it's the one I'll mention, is there's a woman named Kelly McGonigal. She's a psychologist at Stanford. She herself has written two books. And a long time ago, I interviewed her for one of the first articles I'd ever written for Outside magazine. And we had a good conversation. She read the article, she's like, "This is great." And she started reading some of my other stuff. And she emailed me one day, she said, "You should write a book on this stuff, because you have a really interesting approach to performance, and I think it would benefit

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  a lot of people." And I had just started writing for Outside, and I was like, "That is so kind of you. Here's someone that I look up to. I've read both of her books. I'm floored." And I don't really think anything of it. And then a year later, a bunch of stuff happens, and now I'm actually thinking somewhat seriously about writing a book. It's actually a year and a half later. And writing a book, you have to have an agent. It's very hard to write a book without an agent. And it's quite hard to find an agent. And I didn't really know where to start. So I emailed Kelly, I'm like, "Kelly, I don't even know if you remember me, but we had this talk." And she's like, "Oh yeah, I told you to write a book." And I'm like, "And I think I'm gonna do that. Do you have any tips?" And I sent her a draft query letter, which is what you'd otherwise basically cold-call "Pitch an Agent." And she said, "Far better than this query letter.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  Why don't I just email my agent, tell him that you're super smart and that he should work with you?" So she did that. And her agent, Ted, is now my agent, and he's friggin' awesome and is instrumental in getting this book deal and the thing being in the world. I never met Kelly in person, I still haven't, right? This is from phone interviews. So kind, and the end result is this book, this conversation. So thank you, Kelly.

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  Fantastic place to close. Really interesting research. I highly recommend everyone check the book out. It is intuitive, but very helpful to remind ourselves constantly that, especially for me, the thing I'll remember more than anything is the power of rest, right? That we tend to think of performance as go-go-go, but if anything, it's sort of the opposite, that in that ratio, you don't need as much go as you think, and that simple rest can go a long way. So thank you for your time.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. This was great.

• 1:01:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hey everyone, Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter @Patrick_OShag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.