The push to self-optimize is hollowing out your happiness | Brad Stulberg

0:00 I'm Brad Stalberg.

0:01 I'm author of The Way of Excellence

0:03 and I'm on faculty at the University of Michigan.

0:08 The barriers to excellence.

0:13 We have this hard wiring to move towards what feels right to flourish.

0:18 And what has happened in the modern world is there are all of these temptations,

0:24 distractions that feel really good in the short term

0:29 but leave us wanting and empty and in some

0:32 cases uh quite frustrated and that are not

0:35 concordant with our values in the long term.

0:38 So I've identified six barriers to the pursuit of excellence.

0:43 There's this term disevolution that was coined

0:46 by the evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman and it

0:50 essentially says that our modern environment has all

0:53 of these traps that we didn't evolve for.

0:56 So a prime example of diseolution is fast food.

1:01 So humans for the longest time lived in scarcity

1:03 and if a caveman came across a crispy cream,

1:05 the caveman would eat all the donuts.

1:07 But now we live in times of abundance,

1:09 but that hardwiring to crave the donuts hasn't gone away.

1:12 So we are diseolved for an environment that has donuts.

1:16 Hence a problem with obesity that is in so many developed countries.

1:20 Another source of diseolution is confusing social media with genuine community.

1:25 Right?

1:26 We long we're a social species.

1:27 We long for community.

1:28 We long for connection.

1:30 And now we are fed connection in these little

1:32 10-second bursts of external validation of likes, of comments, of retweets.

1:38 So, of course, that feels good when we're getting it,

1:40 but that's nothing like having an actual relationship with another human being.

1:44 The difference between a Pornhub and actually

1:46 having an intimate relationship with a partner.

1:49 The former is really easy.

1:50 There's no friction.

1:51 It can feel very good,

1:53 but it doesn't have the fulfillment and the satisfaction of the latter.

1:56 And when it comes to more conventional ways to think about excellence,

2:00 I think that there is standing on the sidelines and constantly being an observer

2:05 of other people doing something and kind

2:08 of almost feeling good like as a passive observer.

2:11 I'm getting to watch all these people do all

2:13 this cool stuff and that feels good in the moment,

2:15 but you're not actually stepping into the arena.

2:17 You're not putting yourself out there.

2:20 So the biggest trap is when this hard wiring to feel

2:24 good gets co-opted by things that feel really good in the short

2:28 term but in the long term they don't align

2:30 with our values and they often leave leave us feeling worse off.

2:35 Another trap to excellence is optimization culture.

2:40 So it is definitely true that we live in this environment

2:43 that that often pres on our our hard wiring for um for connection

2:48 and for satisfaction with these kind of shortterm things that feel really good

2:52 but as I mentioned that that leave us in the long term wanting.

2:56 There's a a kind of equal and opposite reaction to this which is optimization

3:00 culture which essentially says I'm going

3:03 to try to control everything about my life.

3:06 I'm going to try to control not only how long I sleep every night,

3:09 but how long I'm in REM sleep.

3:11 I'm going to count and monitor every single calorie that I eat.

3:14 I'm going to measure literally the space between heartbeats.

3:17 I'm going to track everything about my life.

3:20 And in doing so, we risk turning ourselves into robots.

3:24 And as I mentioned, excellence, it's it's deeply human.

3:27 So much of excellence is a felt experience.

3:30 And if we overoptimize our life,

3:33 then we never get to tap into that felt experience.

3:35 that is so satisfying.

3:37 Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong

3:39 with using devices that help you monitor uh certain things.

3:44 There's nothing wrong with using a sleep tracker or a device

3:47 that helps you count how many steps you're taking.

3:49 These things can be really integral to behavior change.

3:52 But when we let these devices control us instead of controlling them,

3:56 and when we build an entire life around row optimization,

3:59 it sucks the feeling out of life.

4:00 It sucks the humanity out of life.

4:02 It sucks the joy out of life.

4:03 and we struggle to have our best performances.

4:06 The last thing about optimization is it can make us really fragile.

4:11 So, I want to tell the story of the golfer

4:13 JJ Spawn who won the most recent US Open.

4:17 And the night before he won the US Open, JJ Spawn's young child was up at 2 a.m.

4:23 vomiting, really sick.

4:25 And JJ Spawn was staying in a hotel room with his young child and his wife,

4:30 and his wife needed to stay home with his kid.

4:32 So, he went to CVS, the only 24-hour drugstore that was open,

4:36 at 3:00 in the morning, and he was up the rest of the night.

4:39 Now, if JJ Spawn would have been wearing a recovery

4:42 device because he was so concerned with optimizing his performance,

4:46 it would have told him, "Your recovery score is zero.

4:48 You didn't sleep.

4:49 You should stay home." JJ Spawn won the US Open the next day.

4:54 So, when we become too focused on all of these optimization tools,

4:59 it just makes us fragile.

5:00 We have to think that everything needs to be going a certain way or everything

5:03 needs to be perfect or we always need to feel our best to perform well.

5:06 But that's utter nonsense, right?

5:08 Performance for all that we know about the science of performance,

5:11 there is so much that we don't know.

5:13 And when we overoptimize our lives, we short change ourselves.

5:16 We don't give ourselves a chance.

5:18 And it doesn't account for the messiness of life.

5:23 Flow is a term that was coined by the psychologist

5:26 Mahali Chick Mi and it is the experience

5:30 of being completely immersed in what you're doing being totally

5:33 in the zone and flow states can be absolutely remarkable.

5:38 They can be the stuff of meaning in life.

5:41 If you are in a flow state playing an instrument or coaching

5:44 a team or in a relationship with someone or uh doing math, right?

5:50 These are these are such great experiences.

5:53 We yearn for these experiences.

5:55 However, you can also be in a flow state scrolling Twitter.

6:00 You can be in a flow state gambling.

6:03 Right?

6:04 These are other experiences where we lose our sense of self.

6:08 Our perception of time and space becomes warped.

6:11 They have the hallmarks of flow.

6:13 Like these things can light you up.

6:14 They can lead to that sense of aliveness.

6:16 But it's a pseudo aliveness.

6:18 It's a kind of aliveness that is not connected with your values

6:20 and again that over the long haul often leaves you feeling worse.

6:25 The psychologist and philosopher David Pizaro coined this term shitty flow

6:29 to describe these experiences where we're in flow but it's shitty.

6:33 Like at the end of it we wish that we weren't in flow.

6:36 And what Pizaro says is that so often in the modern world we mistake

6:41 good genuine flow for shitty flow and then we wonder why we feel so crappy.

6:45 So what separates excellence from flow?

6:48 One thing that separates excellence from flow,

6:50 the first big thing that separates excellence

6:52 from flow is that flow is values neutral.

6:55 You can be in flow doing something completely

6:57 aligned with your values and it can be wonderful.

6:59 But you can also be in flow doing

7:00 something that is very discordant with one's values.

7:04 The second big difference between excellence in flow

7:07 is that flow happens in acute moments.

7:10 Maybe you get into the zone for a couple of seconds,

7:13 a couple of minutes, a couple of days.

7:14 If you're lucky, you can enter the slipstream for a week or two.

7:18 But nobody stays in flow forever.

7:21 Excellence is so much broader than flow.

7:23 Excellence includes all of the things that happen before flow,

7:26 all of the effortful trying, all of the fundamentals,

7:29 all of the unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence

7:33 and conscious competence that leads to a flow state.

7:36 And then it also includes what happens after the flow state.

7:39 how we come down from those great experiences

7:42 because there is this inherent risk of becoming

7:44 addicted to flow and constantly chasing flow and thinking

7:47 that in order to have a good life,

7:49 in order to perform well, you always have to be in a flow state.

7:52 But that's nonsense.

7:52 It doesn't work like that.

7:54 By definition, flow states are extraordinary.

7:57 Excellence is also concerned with what you do on your ordinary days.

8:00 It's about making your average a little bit better, too.

8:03 So, good flow is a part of excellence, but it's a small part of excellence.

8:07 Excellence includes everything that happens before it and after it.

8:10 And excellence by definition cannot be shitty flow because

8:14 it's got to be in alignment with one's values.

8:16 So I think of flow as a small component of excellence.

8:19 And excellence is a much broader concept in broader term to build a life around.

8:24 A telltale sign of shitty flow is when you come out of the zone,

8:30 you feel kind of gross or you feel anxious or you feel regret.

8:36 So when you're in the zone rage scrolling on X, you feel really good.

8:41 Like you just get warped in, right?

8:43 You get sucked in.

8:43 And maybe it's not good, but like you're just you're immersed.

8:46 But when 2 hours has passed and you've just been rage scrolling,

8:50 and you come out of that, you tend to feel restless,

8:54 impatient, like you need a hot shower, aggravated.

8:58 If that was in alignment with your values, you wouldn't feel that way.

9:00 You'd feel satisfied and fulfilled.

9:02 So, one of the best ways to figure out if you're spending time

9:05 in shitty flow is to ask yourself not how you feel during the experience,

9:10 but how you feel after.

9:11 And if you feel exhausted and like you were just on a bender,

9:14 it's probably shitty flow.

9:16 If you feel exhausted, but fulfilled and satisfied,

9:20 it's probably the good kind of flow.

9:23 There's two kinds of burnout.

9:24 There's the kind of burnout that most people talk about,

9:27 which is burning out from working too hard,

9:30 doing 90hour weeks back to back to back.

9:32 It doesn't matter what you're doing.

9:33 Eventually, you're going to burn out.

9:34 You're going to suffer from loss of motivation

9:36 and in fatigue and perhaps injury and illness.

9:39 But there's another kind of burnout that we don't talk about too much.

9:42 And this is the term that I coined in the book, zombie burnout.

9:45 And zombie burnout doesn't come from doing too much.

9:48 It comes from not doing enough of what lights you up.

9:51 So, you could only be working 30 hours a week,

9:54 but if you're just kind of going through the motions,

9:57 if you're a passive observer to life,

10:00 if you don't really care deeply about anything,

10:02 you can start to feel all the signs of burnout.

10:05 You can feel exhausted.

10:06 You can feel apathetic.

10:07 You can feel dread even though you're not working very hard.

10:11 If your life has no meaningful friction in it,

10:14 if you don't have to ever overcome challenge,

10:17 that can zap the feeling out of you.

10:19 And I called it zombie burnout because it's this kind

10:21 of numbed out sensation of going through the motions

10:24 that on the one hand you're not really working

10:26 very hard but on the other hand you're really exhausted.

10:30 And I think that while over the last decade there was so much talk

10:34 about conventional burnout and conventional burnout is

10:37 certainly still a problem for some people.

10:39 I think that a lot of people actually suffer from zombie burnout.

10:43 Let's take a tale of two people and assume

10:45 that they're both working 40 hours a week.

10:48 And one person is pretty into their work.

10:51 They're focusing intently.

10:53 They're challenging themselves.

10:54 And they're they're working in a way that is align aligned with their values.

10:58 The other person working a 40-hour week

11:00 is just totally going through the motions, right?

11:03 Doesn't really give a crap about what they're doing.

11:05 The first person might absolutely flourish and the second person might

11:09 feel burnout even though they're both working 40 hours a week.

11:12 So, I just think that when we only think about

11:14 burnout in terms of the quantity of what we're doing, we really miss the boat.

11:19 We also have to think about the quality of what we're doing.

11:22 When you have excellence, you're filled with this satisfaction and aliveness

11:25 and intimacy towards your own life,

11:28 toward the activities that you're engaged in.

11:30 And to me, excellence is the ultimate antidote, the pursuit of excellence.

11:34 The aspiration toward excellence is the ultimate antidote to zombie burnout.

11:38 Because if zombie burnout is just kind of passively going through

11:41 the motions and smoothing your life over and numbing yourself to death,

11:44 the pursuit of excellence is pouring yourself into things

11:47 that align with your values and make you tick.

11:50 I think that there's a couple of small

11:51 shifts that can help thwart zombie burnout.

11:54 The first is in a traditional workplace,

11:56 if if you work a job, to ask yourself, can you job craft?

12:01 Can you massage what you're doing day in and day

12:04 out to be a little bit more aligned with your values to be a little bit more

12:08 in touch with the things that you care about?

12:09 Because sometimes we just have boring jobs, right?

12:11 And we work to pay the bills, we're not passionate about our work,

12:14 and we we we fill out spreadsheets all day,

12:17 whatever it might be, but we make good money and we go home.

12:20 And in those instances,

12:21 I still think generally there are a couple small levers that one can pull

12:25 to bring a little bit more engagement

12:26 and a little bit more interest into their work.

12:29 However, a lot of people say, "You know, Brad, you're very fortunate.

12:32 You you get to pursue this craft.

12:33 You're a writer.

12:34 I just work to pay the bills.

12:36 I want to send my kids to school.

12:37 I want to pay my mortgage." And to that person, what I would say is, "Well,

12:40 what are you doing in your leisure time?"

12:42 And if your leisure time is very passive,

12:45 if it's passive consumption, and if it's not active,

12:48 if you're not stepping into the arena, if you're not challenging yourself,

12:51 then I would say that actually what's going to make you feel less

12:54 exhausted is trying harder in exerting

12:58 effort towards things that you find meaningful.

13:00 So replacing the passive consumption

13:03 of mind-numbing television with reading a book,

13:06 a lot more active, a lot more engaging.

13:08 Even better, train for a marathon, learn an instrument, go garden.

13:12 In my own life, I pursue excellence in in three primary domains.

13:15 The first is as a husband and a father.

13:18 The second is as a crafts person in in my craft is as a writer.

13:22 And then the third is in my leisure time in in in a hobby,

13:25 which for me is powerlifting in particular of a deadlift,

13:28 which is just lifting a bunch of weight from the ground up to your waist.

13:33 It's a very simple movement.

13:34 And I got into deadlifting about seven years ago because

13:39 I love the objectivity and the concrete nature of it.

13:42 Right?

13:42 Writing can be very subjective.

13:43 Whether or not someone likes a book is completely outside of my control.

13:46 It depends on what's going on in their own life and in their own mind.

13:49 But a deadlift, it's just lifting weight and like the bar doesn't lie.

13:52 You either get better or you don't.

13:54 So the the the the tangibility of it and the feedback

13:57 loop is is is really uh satisfying for me.

14:00 Now, you might be thinking that spending all this time just lifting

14:04 weight from the ground to your hips is kind of futile and meaningless.

14:08 But as I stated earlier, the goals that we work on also work on us.

14:12 So, I'm never going to win anything in deadlifting.

14:14 I'm not that good.

14:16 However, what deadlifting does for me is it teaches me about doing hard things,

14:21 about embracing discomfort, about vulnerability, about failure,

14:25 about commitment, about discipline, about patience, about consistency,

14:29 about the power of coaching, in mentorship, in community,

14:32 in showing up in all of these other

14:34 things that don't just make me a better deadlifter, but make me a better person.

14:39 There's a misconception that excellence can only happen in one's career,

14:43 but you can aspire toward excellence and get

14:45 all the benefits in hobbies and leisure time.

14:47 And in some ways, it's actually easier because you have full agency.

14:51 I think zombie burnout happens when you have this perfect

14:54 mix of a job that you don't really care about

14:56 and you're going through the motions and then leisure time where

14:59 you're just kind of floating through life with a a pacivity.

15:03 Another barrier to excellence is what I call the happiness industrial complex.

15:09 And the happiness industrial complex says that the whole point of life

15:12 is to be happy and that we should just chase happiness.

15:16 However, happiness is just like any other emotion.

15:20 It comes and it goes.

15:21 And happiness is is never the result of aiming for happiness.

15:26 It's always a byproduct of doing something else.

15:29 And I think that sometimes what happens is when we

15:31 think that we should always be happy all the time,

15:33 we put all this pressure on ourselves

15:34 and we judge ourselves when we're not happy.

15:37 But the truth is life is full of discomfort,

15:40 of challenge, of suffering, of heartbreak.

15:43 And in my last decade plus of reporting, individuals who really live good lives,

15:50 who flourish, they experience happiness, but they don't chase happiness.

15:54 What they chase is satisfaction, meaning, and fulfillment.

15:57 In my own life, the things that make me feel most alive,

16:00 most situated in the world, when I'm writing,

16:04 when I'm in the gym deadlifting, when I'm coaching my son's basketball games,

16:08 if you were to ask me in those moments, am I happy?

16:11 The answer would undoubtedly be no.

16:14 When I'm working hard on a manuscript, I wouldn't say that I am happy.

16:17 When I'm on the sideline coaching my kid, I'm not happy.

16:20 I'm engaged.

16:21 When I'm in the gym deadlifting, I'm often very uncomfortable.

16:24 But what I am in all of those instances is I am deeply satisfied and fulfilled.

16:30 And I think that it behooves us to not put happiness on a pedestal,

16:34 to not chase happiness,

16:36 and instead to try to orient around what I call excellence,

16:40 which then leads to mastery and mattering and satisfaction and fulfillment.

16:43 And satisfaction and happiness are very different things.

16:46 Happiness has this hedonic tone to it that is very ephemeral.

16:50 Whereas satisfaction, it's deeper, like we feel it in our bones.

16:54 It's more lasting.

16:55 And don't get me wrong, satisfaction,

16:57 like a life of satisfaction is going to have moments of great great happiness,

17:01 but it's like a butterfly.

17:02 The more you try to grab happiness, the more it's going to float away from you.

17:06 And there's a a wonderful uh very very popular hypothetical that's often used

17:12 in undergraduate philosophy classes to make

17:15 the point that I'm making about happiness.

17:16 And and I'll give it to you all real quick.

17:19 Imagine if you had two options.

17:21 And in the first option,

17:23 someone will put you in a tube for the rest of your life.

17:27 So they take you away from your friends.

17:28 They take you away from your family.

17:30 They take you away from any hardship that you have,

17:32 any suffering, and they'd put you in a tube.

17:35 But here's the catch.

17:36 They would give you two drugs.

17:38 The first drug would make you forget that you're in a tube,

17:41 and the second drug would make you feel euphoric for the rest of your life.

17:46 Or you could choose not to go in the tube and just go on living your life.

17:51 And the vast majority of people choose not to go in the tube.

17:55 So the tube is like a happiness machine.

17:58 You're just happy all the time, right?

18:00 But you would leave behind all the stuff of fulfillment of meaning.

18:05 And that is really what makes for a good flourishing human life.

18:09 And if you step back and you think about the tube,

18:11 you know what the tube starts to sound quite a bit like?

18:15 Like a heroin addiction, right?

18:17 I mean, it shrinks your life and in and and those are very serious issues

18:22 that that they that that lives and they

18:24 and they blow up communities and families,

18:26 but someone in the throws of heroin when they're

18:30 actually using like they get a rush of euphoria.

18:33 So, I just think there are so many examples

18:35 that that that show us that while happiness is great,

18:37 if we make happiness the thing, it can often backfire.

18:40 Um, and as I said, I call it the happiness industrial complex.

18:43 There's all these books about how to be happy,

18:45 but the best way to be happy is to stop trying so damn hard

18:47 to be happy and to throw yourself and care deeply about things that matter.

18:51 And when you're having good days, enjoy them.

18:54 And when you're having bad days or you're feeling pain,

18:56 realize that that too is a part of the human existence.

19:00 Another trap or misconception about excellence is that it's a standard.

19:04 So, it means making it to the Olympics or becoming the first chair violinist

19:10 or graduating from medical school or getting

19:12 straight A's or playing division one sports.

19:16 Those outcomes, they're wonderful and we should want to attain them.

19:20 However, they are a very small part of excellence.

19:23 They are the peak of the mountain.

19:25 But the truth is that you spend 99.9999%

19:28 of your time on the sides of the mountain.

19:31 And that is where so much of life is lived.

19:34 And that's where so much of excellence unfolds.

19:36 I also quote Robert Persig in the book um and I just I

19:40 love this so much and I think it it really encapsulates this point.

19:43 And Persig says that the only zen you find on the tops

19:47 of mountains is the zen that you bring up there with you.

19:50 We think that all the zen, all the good stuff is what we get

19:53 on the summit of the mountain when we achieve our goal.

19:56 But actually the only good stuff that's going to be on the top of the mountain

19:59 when we achieve the goal is the experience that we have to get there.

20:03 And that's very true as an actual mountain climber,

20:05 but that's also true metaphorically in whatever goal we pursue.

20:08 If we pursue a goal of starting a company,

20:11 but we're miserable the whole time we do it.

20:13 We're angry.

20:13 We're resentful.

20:14 We're not building relationships.

20:15 We're not living in alignment with our values.

20:17 When that IPO bell rings, we're still going to be an empty, miserable person.

20:20 There's going to be no zen on the top of that mountain.

20:23 But if we pursue the goal of starting a company,

20:25 of having a company IPO in a way that aligns with our values,

20:28 that shapes our character, that builds relationships, we're actually having fun,

20:32 then when we ring that bell, it's going to be a really joyful experience.

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