"Shitty flow" is real, and most people are drowning in it | Brad Stulberg: Full Interview
Big Think
0:00 I'm Brad Stulberg.
0:01 I'm author of The Way of Excellence,
0:03 and I'm on faculty at the University of Michigan.
0:06 Today on Big Think, we're going to tackle three big ideas on excellence.
0:12 The first is what excellence actually is and how excellence
0:16 is different from so many of the common imposters to excellence.
0:21 The second are barriers and pitfalls that are
0:25 very common on the path toward excellence.
0:28 And then the third are going to be essential
0:33 factors to help in the pursuit of genuine heartfelt excellence.
0:39 There can be this thought that what excellence is,
0:42 is waking up at 4 a.m., having a 47-step routine, taking three cold plunges,
0:48 having nine supplements, tracking your sleep and your heart rate variability,
0:52 and telling all your friends about how great you are.
0:55 But that's not real excellence.
0:57 That is elaborate kabuki that is masquerading as the real thing.
1:01 Simply put, excellence is involved engagement
1:04 in something worthwhile that aligns with your values.
1:07 That simple.
1:08 Involved engagement with something worthwhile that aligns with your values.
1:12 We often assume that it has to do with what we are going to achieve.
1:18 But genuine, heartfelt excellence,
1:19 it's actually less about getting to the top of the mountain
1:23 and more about the person that you become on the sides.
1:27 So you could have very strong involved engagement at tapping a white wall,
1:32 but that probably wouldn't align with your values.
1:36 That wouldn't be excellence.
1:37 That would just be tapping a white wall.
1:38 That would be very different than saying,
1:40 I want to become a great physician because I value intellect.
1:44 I value contribution.
1:45 I value helping people, so on and so forth.
1:48 So we are working toward running a marathon.
1:50 We are working toward starting a company.
1:52 We are working toward graduating from medical school.
1:54 We are working toward publishing our first book.
1:57 And while all that's true,
1:58 the things that we work on and the way in which we work on them also work on us.
2:03 So we might be working on the marathon, but the marathon is working on us.
2:07 We might be working on writing a book,
2:09 but the process of writing a book is shaping us.
2:11 We learn about doing hard things.
2:13 We learn about overcoming setbacks.
2:14 We learn about resilience.
2:16 We learn about the power of consistency, of discipline, of self-kindness.
2:19 So the big goals that we set,
2:22 the mountains that we climb, they shape our character along the way.
2:26 And if we're climbing mountains,
2:27 if we're setting goals that are out of alignment with our values,
2:30 we're not shaping our character in a way
2:32 that is concordant with who we want to be.
2:34 So when we connect this kind of involved engagement,
2:37 this deep caring with something that aligns with our personal values,
2:40 we gain a sense of mastery and mattering.
2:43 Mastery is competence.
2:45 It is making concrete, tangible progress.
2:48 That is a very satisfying feeling.
2:50 And mattering is a sense that we belong and that there
2:54 is more to life than our own teeny little ego.
2:58 We are a part of something bigger.
3:00 Most people have somewhere between three and five core values.
3:04 And example values are things like mastery, craft,
3:07 integrity, community, spirituality, discipline,
3:11 intellect, wisdom, kindness, creativity.
3:13 These are just a few of truly hundreds of example values.
3:18 And when we have our values, when we select our values,
3:21 and there's a whole process for how to do this in the book,
3:24 you want to not just have words on a poster
3:27 on the wall that are empty and meaningless.
3:29 You really need to define your values.
3:31 If one of your values is health, what does health mean to you?
3:34 How do you practice health?
3:36 And from that value, you essentially want to say, what can I do day in, day out,
3:41 week in, week out to live in alignment with this value?
3:43 And when you have your core values, when you select goals,
3:47 you can check those goals against your values.
3:50 And you can say, if I pursue this goal,
3:52 will the process of pursuing this goal allow
3:55 me to live in alignment with my values?
3:57 If you are someone who values health and you choose a goal
4:01 that is going to make you work 22 hours a day and never sleep,
4:05 that's going to be pretty discordant with your value of health.
4:08 So these values are a really good way to make sure that what
4:12 you're doing on the side of the mountain is helping you become
4:15 the person that you want to be versus just staring at the peak
4:18 and thinking about what it might feel like if or when you get there.
4:23 I think that quality is, to me, the overarching umbrella over all of this.
4:28 Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974.
4:32 And at the center of that book is this term quality,
4:37 which Persig stylized with a capital Q.
4:40 And Persig's quality was the relationship between an actor and his or her act.
4:45 And when that relationship was so close, was so intimate,
4:49 that the subject and object ceased to exist.
4:52 So it's no longer Rachel playing basketball.
4:55 Basketball is just happening.
4:56 It's no longer Joe on the guitar.
4:59 Music is just being made.
5:00 And what Persig argued in this book
5:03 is that quality really drives all of evolution.
5:07 Persig's quality very much tracks with what
5:11 modern evolutionary biologists call homeostatic upregulation.
5:15 And homeostatic upregulation is this innate,
5:19 deeply hardwired drive of all living species to persist and to flourish.
5:26 And you can observe homeostatic upregulation
5:29 in the earliest forms of life that we know.
5:33 Bacteria, they have no brain, they have no cognition,
5:36 they don't think, they have no nervous system.
5:39 Yet bacteria sense and respond, this is the term that scientists use,
5:44 they sense and respond their way toward environments that are
5:46 conducive to their survival and away from environments that are not,
5:50 that are ill-conducive to their survival.
5:53 And again, they had no cognition.
5:55 There was no consciousness.
5:56 Yet these early organisms, they just innately knew how to move towards
6:00 conditions that were right for them to flourish,
6:02 which for a multi-celled organism simply meant to survive.
6:06 From those multicellular organisms grew more complex organisms.
6:09 We have nervous systems, still all precognitive before any thinking.
6:13 Species felt their way forward.
6:15 We navigated the world using feelings.
6:17 Only more recently do we have cognition.
6:19 Do we have the ability to think complex thoughts?
6:22 And we can use those complex thoughts in tandem
6:25 with our feelings to drive us towards flourishing,
6:27 but it's that innate drive that is all of us,
6:30 that homeostatic upregulation to move
6:32 towards conditions that support flourishing.
6:34 And for the longest time,
6:36 Flourishing simply meant survive and survive to an age when you can procreate,
6:41 when you can pass on your DNA, right?
6:44 Those are the two evolutionary imperatives, survive and pass on your DNA.
6:48 But we humans, we outlive that survival age.
6:51 There's so much more to finding meaning
6:54 and satisfaction in life than surviving and procreating.
6:57 So it's that same drive, that same homeostatic upregulation that leads us
7:02 to admire and try to pursue great athletic feats
7:05 or great musical feats or to contribute
7:07 or to become a better leader or a better parent.
7:09 But we all have this innate drive to flourish,
7:12 to grow, and to aspire toward excellence.
7:15 Situated cognition was a term coined by Richard Sennett,
7:19 who is a sociologist that studied craftspeople.
7:21 And what he observed in Craftspeople is that when they are
7:25 doing their best work and when they're feeling most satisfied and fulfilled,
7:29 they are very much not thinking with their head,
7:32 but they're thinking with their entire being.
7:35 So they're having this mind-body relationship as they
7:38 build a table or as they make a sculpture.
7:41 And Sennett called it situated cognition
7:44 because as you are performing your activity, as you're performing your craft,
7:48 you're situated in yourself and you feel at home and situated in the world.
7:51 So you're very much feeling your way forward.
7:54 You're using your entire nervous system,
7:56 not just your mind, to create your work.
7:58 And at the zenith of excellence, we get situated cognition.
8:02 So an example, for instance, is me as a writer.
8:05 When I first started writing, I did not go to journalism school.
8:08 I had no formal training.
8:10 I didn't know what I didn't know.
8:11 I needed to sit with the blue book
8:13 of grammar and all types of style guides and learn.
8:16 And then as I progressed as a writer,
8:19 I had to very much effortfully try to write.
8:21 I would get to a break in a sentence and I would think through,
8:25 should this take a semicolon, an em dash, a period?
8:28 Should this be offset with parentheses?
8:29 So on and so forth.
8:31 It was a very effortful experience of writing.
8:33 And only after I'd been writing for 10 years could I leave
8:37 all that behind and not have to think about what edits made sense,
8:41 not had to think about rules,
8:43 but rather feel my way to good turns of phrases and good sentences.
8:48 Situated cognition is a close cousin or perhaps
8:51 even a sister or a brother of unconscious competence.
8:55 There are four phases of competence.
8:58 Unconscious incompetence.
9:00 Conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.
9:08 So unconscious incompetence is when you don't
9:11 know that you don't know what you're doing.
9:13 And at this phase of progress, you need to read books, you need to study video,
9:18 you need to hire a coach,
9:20 you need somebody to help you understand your activity, your craft.
9:24 The next phase is conscious incompetence.
9:26 So here we know that we don't know what we're doing.
9:31 So we at least have a heuristic or a schema for how it should be done,
9:34 whether it's shooting a basketball or playing the violin
9:36 or building a table or leading a team.
9:38 And we know that we're not doing it.
9:40 So we're very aware of what right is.
9:42 And we're also aware that we're not yet there.
9:45 The third phase is conscious competence.
9:47 So this is when we know that we're doing it right.
9:51 We are effortfully trying.
9:52 We are using the heart rate monitor.
9:54 We're following the checklist.
9:56 We are thinking our way to a really proficient performance.
9:59 And at the top of the ladder is unconscious competence.
10:03 And this is when we leave all of that effortful
10:07 thinking and tracking and measurement and trying behind.
10:10 And we enter the zone and we let
10:12 our feelings guide us to our greatest performances.
10:15 In masters of craft,
10:17 they progress through these four phases of competence extremely predictably,
10:21 but they also cycle through them.
10:23 So nobody stays at unconscious competence.
10:26 So what masters of craft do is they understand when they
10:29 need to be in the conscious competence phase of the ladder,
10:33 where they actually need to effortfully try,
10:34 where they need to go back to the drawing board, where they need to learn.
10:37 But then they also have the courage to let go
10:40 of that thinking and And when they're going to have a magical day,
10:43 they trust the magic and they ride that wave.
10:45 In a world that feels increasingly distracted,
10:47 in which people often feel alienated from their activities,
10:51 in some cases alienated from their own lives,
10:54 having an orientation or a philosophy of life that centers around excellence,
10:59 it's a great source of intimacy.
11:01 intimacy with a craft and intimacy with yourself.
11:04 So it really helps connect you to what you're doing.
11:08 And again, connect you to yourself.
11:09 It's the opposite of alienation.
11:11 It's the opposite of going through the motions.
11:15 So, excellence is not perfectionism.
11:18 It's often confused with perfectionism,
11:21 trying to do everything incredibly always, trying to get all the gold stars.
11:27 Excellence is not obsession, being controlled by your pursuit.
11:31 Excellence is not happiness.
11:33 Happiness is often a byproduct of the pursuit of excellence,
11:38 but it is not a hedonic pursuit.
11:41 Excellence is not optimization.
11:43 It is not trying to turn yourself into a machine or to a robot.
11:48 Excellence is actually a very human and humane pursuit.
11:51 And finally, excellence is not flow.
11:54 While flow can be a part of excellence,
11:57 excellence also encompasses all that happens before
12:01 those flow states and everything that comes after.
12:06 Excellence includes all of that.
12:09 I mentioned earlier that we have this hard
12:13 wiring to move towards what feels right to flourish.
12:17 And what has happened in the modern world is there are all of these temptations,
12:24 distractions that feel really good in the short term,
12:28 but leave us wanting and empty and in some cases quite frustrated
12:33 and that are not concordant with our values in the long term.
12:37 So I've identified six barriers to the pursuit of excellence.
12:42 There's this term disevolution that was
12:45 coined by the evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman.
12:49 And it essentially says that our modern environment has
12:52 all of these traps that we didn't evolve for.
12:55 So a prime example of disevolution is fast food.
12:59 So, humans for the longest time lived in scarcity,
13:03 and if a caveman came across a Krispy Kreme,
13:05 the caveman would eat all the donuts.
13:07 But now we live in times of abundance,
13:09 but that hardwiring to crave the donuts hasn't gone away.
13:11 So we are dis-evolved for an environment that has donuts.
13:15 hence a problem with obesity that is in so many developed countries.
13:20 Another source of disevolution is confusing
13:23 social media with genuine community, right?
13:25 We long, we're a social species, we long for community, we long for connection,
13:29 and now we are fed connection
13:31 in these little 10-second bursts of external validation,
13:34 of likes, of comments, of retweets.
13:36 So of course that feels good when we're getting it,
13:40 but that's nothing like having an actual relationship with another human being.
13:44 The difference between a Pornhub and actually
13:46 having an intimate relationship with a partner.
13:48 The former is really easy.
13:50 There's no friction.
13:51 It can feel very good,
13:52 but it doesn't have the fulfillment and the satisfaction of the latter.
13:56 And when it comes to more conventional ways to think about excellence,
13:59 I think that there is standing on the sidelines and constantly being an observer
14:04 of other people doing something and kind
14:07 of almost feeling good like as a passive observer.
14:10 I'm getting to watch all these people do all this cool stuff.
14:13 And that feels good in the moment,
14:14 but you're not actually stepping into the arena.
14:16 You're not putting yourself out there.
14:19 So the biggest trap is when this hardwiring to feel good
14:24 gets co-opted by things that feel really good in the short term.
14:27 But in the long term,
14:29 they don't align with our values and they often leave us feeling worse off.
14:35 Another trap to excellence is optimization culture.
14:38 So it is definitely true that we live
14:41 in this environment that often preys on our hardwiring
14:45 for connection and for satisfaction with these kind
14:49 of short-term things that feel really good,
14:51 but as I mentioned, that leave us in the long-term wanting.
14:54 There's a kind of equal and opposite
14:57 reaction to this, which is optimization culture,
15:00 which essentially says, I'm going to try to control everything about my life.
15:05 I'm going to try to control not only how long I sleep every night,
15:08 but how long I'm in REM sleep.
15:10 I'm going to count and monitor every single calorie that I eat.
15:13 I'm going to measure literally the space between heartbeats.
15:16 I'm going to track everything about my life.
15:19 And in doing so, we risk turning ourselves into robots and And as I mentioned,
15:24 excellence, it's deeply human.
15:26 So much of excellence is a felt experience.
15:30 And if we over-optimize our life,
15:31 then we never get to tap into that felt experience that is so satisfying.
15:35 Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong
15:39 with using devices that help you monitor certain things.
15:42 There's nothing wrong with using a sleep tracker or a device
15:46 that helps you count how many steps you're taking.
15:49 These things can be really integral to behavior change.
15:51 But when we let these devices control us instead of controlling them,
15:54 and when we build an entire life around row optimization,
15:57 it sucks the feeling out of life.
15:59 It sucks the humanity out of life.
16:01 It sucks the joy out of life.
16:03 And we struggle to have our best performances.
16:05 The last thing about optimization is it can make us really fragile.
16:09 So I want to tell the story of the golfer JJ Spahn,
16:13 who won the most recent US Open.
16:16 And the night before he won the U.S.
16:19 Open, J.J.
16:19 Spahn's young child was up at 2 a.m.
16:23 vomiting.
16:24 Really sick.
16:25 And J.J.
16:26 Spahn was staying in a hotel room with his young child and his wife,
16:29 and his wife needed to stay home with his kid,
16:31 so he went to CVS, the only 24-hour drugstore that was open,
16:35 at 3 in the morning, and he was up the rest of the night.
16:38 Now, if J.J.
16:39 Spahn would have been wearing a recovery device
16:41 because he was so concerned with optimizing his performance,
16:44 it would have told him, your recovery score is zero,
16:47 you didn't sleep, you should stay home.
16:50 J.J.
16:50 Spahn won the U.S.
16:51 Open the next day.
16:53 So when we become too focused on all of these optimization tools,
16:57 it just makes us fragile.
16:58 We have to think that everything needs to be going a certain way or everything
17:02 needs to be perfect or we always need to feel our best to perform well.
17:06 But that's utter nonsense, right?
17:07 Performance, for all that we know about the science of performance,
17:11 there is so much that we don't know.
17:13 And when we over-optimize our lives, we shortchange ourselves.
17:15 We don't give ourselves a chance.
17:17 And it doesn't account for the messiness of life.
17:20 Flow is a term that was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
17:27 and it is the experience of being completely immersed in what you're doing,
17:32 being totally in the zone.
17:34 And Flow states can be absolutely remarkable.
17:36 They can be the stuff of meaning in life.
17:39 If you are in a flow state playing an instrument or coaching
17:44 a team or in a relationship with someone or doing math, right?
17:50 These are such great experiences.
17:52 We yearn for these experiences.
17:55 However, you can also be in a flow state scrolling
17:59 Twitter and You can be in a flow state gambling, right?
18:03 These are other experiences where we lose our sense of self.
18:07 Our perception of time and space becomes warped.
18:10 They have the hallmarks of flow.
18:12 Like these things can light you up.
18:14 They can lead to that sense of aliveness, but it's a pseudo aliveness.
18:17 It's a kind of aliveness that is not connected with your values.
18:20 And again, that over the long haul often leads you feeling worse.
18:24 The psychologist and philosopher David Pizarro coined this term shitty flow
18:28 to describe these experiences where we're in flow, but it's shitty.
18:32 Like at the end of it, we wish that we weren't in flow.
18:36 And what Pizarro says is that so often in the modern world,
18:39 we mistake good, genuine flow for shitty flow.
18:42 And then we wonder why we feel so crappy.
18:45 So What separates excellence from flow,
18:47 one thing that separates excellence from flow,
18:49 the first big thing that separates excellence
18:51 from flow is that flow is values neutral.
18:54 You can be in flow doing something completely
18:56 aligned with your values and it can be wonderful,
18:58 but you can also be in flow doing
19:00 something that is very discordant with one's values.
19:03 The second big difference between excellence in flow
19:06 is that flow happens in acute moments.
19:09 Maybe you get into the zone for a couple of seconds,
19:12 a couple of minutes, a couple of days.
19:14 If you're lucky, you can enter the slipstream for a week or two.
19:17 But nobody stays in flow forever.
19:19 Excellence is so much broader than flow.
19:22 Excellence includes all of the things that happen before flow,
19:25 all of the effortful trying, all of the fundamentals,
19:29 all of the unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence
19:32 and conscious competence that leads to a flow state.
19:35 And then it also includes what happens after the flow state,
19:38 how we come down from those great experiences.
19:41 Because there is this inherent risk of becoming addicted to flow and constantly
19:45 chasing flow and thinking that in order to have a good life,
19:48 in order to perform well, you always have to be in a flow state.
19:51 But that's nonsense.
19:52 It doesn't work like that.
19:54 By definition, flow states are extraordinary.
19:56 Excellence is also concerned with what you do on your ordinary days.
19:59 It's about making your average a little bit better, too.
20:02 So good flow...
20:03 is a part of excellence, but it's a small part of excellence.
20:06 Excellence includes everything that happens before and after it.
20:10 And excellence, by definition,
20:11 cannot be shitty flow because it's got to be in alignment with one's values.
20:16 So I think of flow as a small component of excellence and excellence
20:19 is a much broader concept and broader term to build a life around.
20:24 A telltale sign of shitty flow is when you come out of the zone,
20:29 you feel kind of gross, right?
20:32 or you feel anxious, or you feel regret.
20:35 So when you're in the zone rage scrolling on X, you feel really good.
20:40 Like you just get warped in, right?
20:42 You get sucked in.
20:43 And maybe it's not good, but like you're just, you're immersed.
20:46 But when two hours has passed and you've just been rage
20:50 scrolling and you come out of that, you tend to feel restless,
20:53 impatient, like you need a hot shower, aggravated,
20:56 If that was in alignment with your values, you wouldn't feel that way.
21:00 You'd feel satisfied and fulfilled.
21:01 So one of the best ways to figure out if you're spending time
21:05 in shitty flow is to ask yourself not how you feel during the experience,
21:09 but how you feel after.
21:10 And if you feel exhausted and like you were just on a bender,
21:14 it's probably shitty flow.
21:15 If you feel exhausted but fulfilled and satisfied,
21:19 it's probably the good kind of flow.
21:23 There's two kinds of burnout.
21:24 There's the kind of burnout that most people talk about,
21:26 which is burning out from working too hard,
21:29 doing 90-hour weeks back to back to back.
21:31 It doesn't matter what you're doing.
21:32 Eventually, you're going to burn out.
21:34 You're going to suffer from loss of motivation
21:36 and fatigue and perhaps injury and illness.
21:38 But there's another kind of burnout that we don't talk about too much.
21:42 And this is the term that I coined in the book, zombie burnout.
21:45 And zombie burnout doesn't come from doing too much.
21:47 It comes from not doing enough of what lights you up.
21:50 So you could only be working 30 hours a week,
21:53 but if you're just kind of going through the motions,
21:56 if you're a passive observer to life,
21:59 if you don't really care deeply about anything,
22:02 you can start to feel all the signs of burnout.
22:04 You can feel exhausted, you can feel apathetic,
22:07 you can feel dread, even though you're not working very hard.
22:10 If your life has no meaningful friction in it,
22:13 if you don't have to ever overcome challenge,
22:16 that can zap the feeling out of you.
22:18 And I called it zombie burnout because it's this kind of numbed
22:21 out sensation of going through the motions that on the one hand,
22:25 you're not really working very hard,
22:27 but on the other hand, you're really exhausted.
22:29 And I think that, well, over the last decade,
22:32 there was so much talk about conventional burnout and And conventional
22:36 burnout is certainly still a problem for some people.
22:39 I think that a lot of people actually suffer from zombie burnout.
22:42 Let's take a tale of two people and assume
22:45 that they're both working 40 hours a week.
22:47 And one person is pretty into their work.
22:50 They're focusing intently, they're challenging themselves,
22:53 and they're working in a way that is aligned with their values.
22:57 The other person working a 40-hour week
22:59 is just totally going through the motions, right?
23:02 Doesn't really give a crap about what they're doing.
23:05 The first person might absolutely flourish and the second person might
23:08 feel burnout even though they're both working 40 hours a week.
23:11 So I just think that when we only think about
23:14 burnout in terms of the quantity of what we're doing, we really miss the boat.
23:18 We also have to think about the quality of what we're doing.
23:21 And as I mentioned earlier, when you have excellence,
23:24 you're filled with the satisfaction and aliveness
23:27 and intimacy towards your own life,
23:29 toward the activities that you're engaged in.
23:31 And to me, excellence is the ultimate antidote, the pursuit of excellence.
23:36 The aspiration toward excellence is the ultimate antidote to zombie burnout.
23:39 Because if zombie burnout is just kind of passively going through
23:42 the motions and smoothing your life over and numbing yourself to death,
23:45 the pursuit of excellence is pouring yourself into things
23:48 that align with your values and make you tick.
23:51 I think that there's a couple of small
23:53 shifts that can help thwart zombie burnout.
23:55 The first is in a traditional workplace,
23:58 if you work a job, to ask yourself, can you job craft?
24:03 Can you massage what you're doing day in and day
24:05 out to be a little bit more aligned with your values,
24:07 to be a little bit more in touch with the things that you care about?
24:11 Because sometimes we just have boring jobs, right?
24:12 And we work to pay the bills.
24:14 We're not passionate about our work.
24:16 And we fill out spreadsheets all day, whatever it might be,
24:19 but we make good money and we go home.
24:22 And in those instances,
24:23 I still think generally there are a couple small levers that one can pull
24:26 to bring a little bit more engagement
24:28 and a little bit more interest into their work.
24:30 However, a lot of people say, you know, Brad, you're very fortunate.
24:34 You get to pursue this craft.
24:35 You're a writer.
24:35 I just work to pay the bills.
24:37 I want to send my kids to school.
24:39 I want to pay my mortgage.
24:40 And to that person, what I would say is,
24:42 well, what are you doing in your leisure time?
24:44 And if your leisure time is very passive, if it's passive consumption,
24:47 and if it's not active,
24:49 if you're not stepping into the arena, if you're not challenging yourself,
24:52 then I would say that actually what's going to make you feel less
24:56 exhausted is is trying harder in exerting
24:59 effort towards things that you find meaningful.
25:02 So replacing the passive consumption
25:04 of mind-numbing television with reading a book,
25:07 a lot more active, a lot more engaging.
25:09 Even better, train for a marathon, learn an instrument, go garden.
25:13 In my own life, I pursue excellence in three primary domains.
25:16 The first is as a husband and a father.
25:19 The second is as a craftsperson, and my craft is as a writer.
25:23 And then the third is in my leisure time in a hobby,
25:27 which for me is powerlifting, in particular of a deadlift,
25:29 which is just lifting a bunch of weight from the ground up to your waist.
25:34 It's a very simple movement.
25:36 And I got into deadlifting about seven years ago because
25:40 I love the objectivity and the concrete nature of it, right?
25:43 Writing can be very subjective.
25:45 Whether or not someone likes a book is completely outside of my control.
25:48 It depends on what's going on in their own life and in their own mind.
25:50 But a deadlift, it's just lifting weight.
25:52 And like the bar doesn't lie.
25:53 You either get better or you don't.
25:56 So the tangibility of it in the feedback loop is really satisfying for me.
26:02 Now, you might be thinking that spending all this time just lifting
26:06 weight from the ground to your hips is kind of futile and meaningless.
26:09 But as I stated earlier, the goals that we work on also work on us.
26:14 So I'm never going to win anything in deadlifting.
26:16 I'm not that good.
26:17 However, what deadlifting does for me is it teaches me about doing hard things,
26:23 about embracing discomfort, about vulnerability, about failure,
26:26 about commitment, about discipline, about patience, about consistency,
26:30 about the power of coaching and mentorship and community and showing up
26:34 in all of these other things that don't just make me a better deadlifter,
26:38 but make me a better person.
26:40 There's a misconception that excellence can only happen in one's career,
26:44 but you can aspire toward excellence and get
26:46 all the benefits in hobbies and leisure time.
26:48 And in some ways, it's actually easier because you have full agency.
26:52 I think zombie burnout happens when you have this perfect
26:55 mix of a job that you don't really care about
26:57 and you're going through the motions and then leisure time
27:00 where you're just kind of floating through life with a passivity.
27:05 Another barrier to excellence is what I call the happiness industrial complex.
27:10 And the happiness industrial complex says that the whole point of life
27:14 is to be happy and that we should just chase happiness.
27:17 However, happiness is just like any other emotion.
27:21 It comes and it goes.
27:23 And happiness is never the result of aiming for happiness.
27:27 It's always a byproduct of doing something else.
27:30 And I think that sometimes what happens is when we
27:32 think that we should always be happy all the time,
27:34 we put all this pressure on ourselves
27:36 and we judge ourselves when we're not happy.
27:38 But the truth is, life is full of discomfort,
27:41 of challenge, of suffering, of heartbreak.
27:44 And in my last decade plus of reporting, individuals who really live good lives,
27:51 who flourish, they experience happiness, but they don't chase happiness.
27:55 What they chase is satisfaction, meaning, and fulfillment.
27:58 In my own life, the things that make me feel most alive,
28:02 most situated in the world, when I'm writing, When I'm in the gym deadlifting,
28:07 when I'm coaching my son's basketball games.
28:09 If you were to ask me, in those moments, am I happy?
28:13 The answer would undoubtedly be no.
28:14 When I'm working hard on a manuscript, I wouldn't say that I am happy.
28:18 When I'm on the sideline coaching my kid, I'm not happy, I'm engaged.
28:22 When I'm in the gym deadlifting, I'm often very uncomfortable.
28:25 But what I am in all of those instances is I am deeply satisfied and fulfilled.
28:30 And I think that it behooves us to not put happiness on a pedestal,
28:36 to not chase happiness,
28:37 and instead to try to orient around what I call excellence,
28:41 which then leads to mastery and mattering and satisfaction and fulfillment.
28:45 And satisfaction and happiness are very different things.
28:48 Happiness has this hedonic tone to it.
28:50 that is very ephemeral.
28:51 Whereas satisfaction, it's deeper.
28:53 Like we feel it in our bones, it's more lasting.
28:56 And don't get me wrong, satisfaction,
28:58 like a life of satisfaction is going to have moments of great,
29:02 great happiness, but it's like a butterfly.
29:04 The more you try to grab happiness, the more it's gonna flow away from you.
29:08 And there's a wonderful, very,
29:10 very popular hypothetical that's often used in undergraduate philosophy
29:15 classes to make the point that I'm making about happiness.
29:17 And I'll give it to you all real quick.
29:20 Imagine if you had two options.
29:22 And in the first option,
29:24 someone will put you in a tube for the rest of your life.
29:28 So they take you away from your friends.
29:30 They take you away from your family.
29:31 They take you away from any hardship that you have, any suffering.
29:34 And they'd put you in a tube.
29:36 But here's the catch.
29:37 They would give you two drugs.
29:39 The first drug would make you forget that you're in a tube.
29:42 And the second drug would make you feel euphoric for the rest of your life.
29:47 Or...
29:48 you could choose not to go in the tube and just go on living your life.
29:52 And the vast majority of people choose not to go in the tube.
29:56 So the tube is like a happiness machine.
29:59 You're just happy all the time, right?
30:02 But you would leave behind all the stuff of fulfillment, of meaning.
30:06 And that is really what makes for a good, flourishing human life.
30:10 And if you step back and you think about the tube,
30:13 you know what the tube starts to sound quite a bit like?
30:16 Like a heroin addiction.
30:18 right?
30:18 I mean, it shrinks your life.
30:21 And those are very serious issues that cripple
30:24 lives and they blow up communities and families.
30:28 But someone in the throes of heroin,
30:30 when they're actually using, they get a rush of euphoria.
30:34 So I just think there are so many
30:36 examples that show us that, well, happiness is great.
30:39 If we make happiness the thing, it can often backfire.
30:41 And as I said, I call it the happiness industrial complex.
30:44 There's all these books about how to be happy
30:46 But the best way to be happy is to stop
30:48 trying so damn hard to be happy and to throw
30:51 yourself and care deeply about things that matter.
30:53 And when you're having good days, enjoy them.
30:55 And when you're having bad days or you're feeling pain,
30:57 realize that that too is a part of the human existence.
31:02 Another trap or misconception about excellence is that it's a standard.
31:05 So it means making it to the Olympics or becoming the first chair violinist
31:11 or graduating from medical school or getting
31:14 straight A's or playing Division I sports.
31:17 Those outcomes, they're wonderful and we should want to attain them.
31:21 However, they are a very small part of excellence.
31:24 They are the peak of the mountain.
31:27 But the truth is that you spend 99.99999%
31:29 of your time on the sides of the mountain.
31:32 And that is where so much of life is lived.
31:35 And that's where so much of excellence unfolds.
31:37 I also quote Robert Persig in the book.
31:39 And I just I love this so much.
31:42 And I think it really encapsulates this point.
31:44 And Persig says that the only Zen you find on the tops
31:48 of mountains is the Zen that you bring up there with you.
31:51 We think that all the Zen, all the good stuff is what we get
31:55 on the summit of the mountain when we achieve our goal.
31:57 But actually, the only good stuff that's going to be on the top of the mountain
32:01 when we achieve the goal is the experience that we have to get there.
32:04 And that's very true as an actual mountain climber,
32:07 but that's also true metaphorically in whatever goal we pursue.
32:09 If we pursue a goal of starting a company,
32:12 but we're miserable the whole time we do it, we're angry, we're resentful,
32:15 we're not building relationships, we're not living in alignment with our values,
32:18 when that IPO bell rings, we're still going to be an empty, miserable person.
32:22 There's going to be no zen on the top of that mountain.
32:24 But if we pursue the goal of starting a company,
32:26 of having a company IPO in a way that aligns with our values,
32:29 that shapes our character, that builds relationships, we're actually having fun.
32:32 Then when we ring that bell, it's going to be a really joyful experience.
32:37 So we've covered a lot of grounds
32:41 that really mirrors the first part of the book,
32:45 which is this big swing at reclaiming excellence,
32:48 reclaiming it from optimization, from the hustle culture bros,
32:51 from perfectionism, from the happiness industrial complex.
32:54 And I argue that excellence is our birthright.
32:57 It's what makes us feel alive and good in the world.
33:00 And then I explore the biology, psychology,
33:02 and philosophy of excellence, which we've discussed at length.
33:11 Caring.
33:14 Goals, consistency, trade-offs, focus,
33:27 discipline, renewal, confidence, patience,
33:36 routine, gumption, curiosity, failure, community, joy, and completion.
33:45 While there are 16 factors of excellence,
33:48 for the purposes of today, let's go into three.
33:52 Goals, consistency, and patience.
33:54 Goals give you a target to shoot for.
33:58 It's important to pick a mountain to climb.
34:00 And without a peak, there is no mountain.
34:02 And a goal is very much a peak that you're striving for.
34:05 So it gives your journey, it gives your pursuit some shape and some form.
34:09 A process over outcomes mindset says that first you do,
34:12 you want to pick your big aspirational goal.
34:15 And then after you set that big goal,
34:17 you want to break it down into its smaller component parts.
34:21 Because just thinking about this big goal can often be overwhelming.
34:24 But if you can break it down into small parts,
34:27 it gives you these manageable micro milestones along the way.
34:30 Then the third step of a process mindset is to largely
34:33 forget about the big goal and instead focus on those small daily,
34:38 sometimes weekly steps that you can take to work toward that big goal.
34:43 Now, the fourth part is if you catch yourself stressing
34:46 out or worrying about the big goal ahead of you,
34:48 use that as a cue to ask yourself, what could you be doing right now?
34:52 How can you re-immerse yourself in the process?
34:55 And fifth and finally, remember that occasionally, inevitably,
34:58 you are going to fall off the path.
35:01 And when you fall off the path, your job is simply to step back on.
35:05 A process over outcomes mindset is so important because when we set a big goal,
35:09 There's often this temptation to talk about the goal,
35:12 to think about the goal, to dream about the goal,
35:14 but these things all become stand-ins for actually working toward the goal.
35:17 And the only way that we accomplish really big goals is
35:21 by focusing on the small steps that we take along the way.
35:24 Oftentimes we think that the achievement of some
35:27 goal is what's going to bring us fulfillment,
35:29 but it's actually not the achievement.
35:31 It's all the work that we do to get to the goal.
35:34 That's where the joy and the satisfaction lives.
35:36 Don't get me wrong.
35:38 Achievement feels good.
35:38 As I said earlier, Excellence is not a let's all hold
35:41 hands and sing kumbaya and pretend
35:43 that winning or accomplishment doesn't matter.
35:45 But it also acknowledges that if we if we tell ourselves,
35:48 if I just win this or if I just accomplish that, then I'll be happy.
35:53 We are falling for a trap that is as old as time.
35:55 In the book, I tell the story of Ray Allen,
35:57 one of the best basketball players ever,
36:00 a craftsperson, phenomenal technician, three point shooter.
36:03 And Ray Allen had done everything in his career except win a championship.
36:07 He had been in all-star games.
36:08 He had won three-point shooting titles.
36:10 He'd even starred in a Spike Lee movie.
36:12 He got game.
36:13 But Ray thought that if he just won a championship,
36:16 then the hole inside would be filled.
36:18 Then he'd be content.
36:19 And finally, after years of trying,
36:21 he won his first championship with the Boston Celtics in 2008.
36:24 And you know what Ray Allen said?
36:26 He said the morning after winning that championship was
36:29 one of the most disorienting mornings of his life.
36:32 because he realized that it didn't fulfill him.
36:35 Now, if that is not a perfect
36:37 encapsulation of this trap of this arrival fallacy,
36:39 I don't know what is, but we all feel that, right?
36:42 My guess is every single individual watching this has at some point
36:45 in their life told themselves a story that if they just get to this achievement,
36:48 then they'll be happy or then they'll be content.
36:51 And perhaps you had contentment and happiness for a couple hours or a couple
36:55 days or maybe even a couple weeks and but then you're back to striving.
36:59 In running, it's called the post-marathon blues.
37:01 So you train so hard for this big goal, you run a marathon,
37:04 you achieve it, and then the next day you're sad.
37:07 Why?
37:07 Because you built up achievement as if it was gonna
37:10 be this thing that would give you lasting satisfaction when
37:12 you were actually more satisfied in the training because that's
37:15 the work that you were doing day in and day out.
37:18 If you are new to a craft or new to an activity,
37:20 or maybe you're even new to setting goals to begin
37:23 with, a really advantageous and helpful framework is called SMART.
37:27 And it stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relatable, and Time-bound.
37:33 So an example of a SMART goal could be deadlifting 405 pounds.
37:41 So it's very specific, right?
37:43 It's a deadlift.
37:45 It's very measurable.
37:46 There's a number.
37:47 I want to get to 405 pounds.
37:49 It's very actionable.
37:50 You can back into a training plan that you can show
37:54 up and try to engage in and do every single day.
37:57 It's very relatable if you value health
37:59 or you value performance or you're in the gym.
38:01 And then finally, it's time bound.
38:03 You could say, I want to deadlift 405 pounds by the end of this year.
38:06 That would be an example of a SMART goal.
38:08 SMART goals are really useful because they hold you accountable.
38:12 They're not wishy-washy.
38:13 They give you a specific time frame to work toward that goal in.
38:17 And again, they're very actionable.
38:19 You can say to Deadlift 405 pounds,
38:21 these are the four workouts I need to do every single week for four
38:25 years that is going to help me achieve that eventual goal down the road.
38:29 So as this comes together,
38:31 you can see that when we pursue a goal, we're working toward that goal.
38:35 But that goal is also working on us.
38:37 We want to get to the peak of the mountain,
38:40 but all the growth happens on the side.
38:41 So the peak of the mountain might be a 600-pound deadlift.
38:45 But we are growing as a person.
38:47 We are learning about resilience and overcoming failure and being uncomfortable
38:50 and the power of community and vulnerability and failure and showing up.
38:54 That doesn't happen when we hit the 600-pound lift.
38:57 That happens in the years of training to get there.
39:00 So if we're pursuing our goals in a way that aligns with our values,
39:04 we have this beautiful closed loop where the process is energizing,
39:07 it's satisfying, it's fulfilling, it's shaping us as a person.
39:10 And if we achieve the goal, if we get to the top of the mountain,
39:14 we'll have brought a lot of zen, a lot of aliveness,
39:17 a lot of satisfaction up there with us.
39:20 Log on to the internet, any social media, and there are so many influencers
39:25 that just are showing their absolute heroic days.
39:29 So it's the workout that leaves you shredded and you go till you puke.
39:33 It's the tech bro that is bragging about the string
39:35 of all-nighters that he or she pulled to launch their company.
39:39 The runner that talks about that epic workout where
39:43 they did 16 400s at 5k pace, whatever it is.
39:47 And what can happen is we can mistake the goal
39:51 of excellence as having these single heroic days, when in fact,
39:54 the way that you make progress at something,
39:56 the goal of excellence is not to have a heroic day.
39:59 It's to string together many very good days over long periods of time
40:04 to create a heroic year or a heroic decade or a heroic body of work.
40:09 If I wanted to be the best writer,
40:12 the most proficient writer I could be over a one week period,
40:15 I would not sleep and I would exist on a diet of Red Bull,
40:20 Celsius, espresso, and cigarettes.
40:22 And truly, I think if I did that for one week,
40:24 I would produce an enormous volume of very high quality work.
40:27 That would be a heroic week.
40:29 But if I tried to build a career writing like that, my writing would go to crap.
40:34 And that is the trap of optimizing
40:37 for short-term intensity for what plays really well,
40:39 for what makes us feel heroic versus long-term progress,
40:43 which is much more a function of consistency.
40:45 It's not to say that there aren't times to be intense.
40:47 It's not to say that there aren't times to go to the well.
40:50 There absolutely are.
40:51 One of my friends and collaborative partners,
40:53 Steve Magnus, calls this going to see God.
40:55 There are times in every pursuit where we want to go see God.
40:59 But the only way that we give ourselves the fitness,
41:02 the ability to have that intensity is by being super consistent.
41:05 We have to build up to those moments when we go see God.
41:09 And even then, we can only go see God a few times a year at most.
41:13 There's this popular framework in personal development and in performance
41:17 that is just get 1% better every day.
41:20 And as a mindset, I really agree with it and I like it.
41:25 What it says is that you don't always have to hit home runs.
41:27 You just have to put the ball in play, right?
41:29 You don't have to be a hero.
41:30 Just show up every day and just get a little bit better.
41:33 Just get 1% better every day.
41:35 And as a mindset, that is a wonderful driver of consistency.
41:39 However, what often happens is that people start
41:41 to take that a little bit too literally,
41:44 and they expect that they'll actually get 1% better every day.
41:48 But progress doesn't work like that.
41:50 If I got 1% better every day as a powerlifter,
41:53 my deadlift would be over 1,000 pounds right now.
41:55 I'd be the best deadlifter to ever live.
41:56 It's not.
41:57 If I got 1% better every day as a writer,
41:59 I would have nine Pulitzer Prizes by now.
42:01 But I don't.
42:02 So how progress actually works is when we're relatively new to something,
42:07 we get more than 1% better every day.
42:09 We get 100% better every day.
42:10 Then we get 70% better, 50% better, 20% better, 10% better.
42:15 And then we get to this phase where we're making these little incremental gains.
42:18 We're getting 1% better every day.
42:20 And that sense of concrete progress is so addictive.
42:23 It's so motivating.
42:24 But what happens to anyone on a journey of progress is that eventually
42:28 they hit a plateau and they stop getting 1% better every day.
42:32 And at this point, the motivation has got to shift from these observable
42:38 concrete bits of progress to curiosity about what you're doing, into commitment,
42:44 into an unwavering consistency that acknowledges that sometimes
42:48 you are going to get a little bit better, but sometimes for a week,
42:51 for a month, maybe even a year,
42:53 you might be on a plateau where you don't yet see observable progress.
42:57 But if you keep showing up underneath the surface,
43:00 you're building experience, you're building progress.
43:02 To bring this point to life in the book,
43:04 I tell the story of the world champion powerlifter, Lane Norton.
43:08 And Lane Norton deadlifted 723 pounds.
43:11 So for his age and weight class, the best in the world.
43:17 Guess what Lane Norton deadlifted 10 years prior?
43:21 715 pounds.
43:22 So over 10 years, Lane Norton added eight pounds to his deadlift.
43:27 So he wasn't getting 1% better every day.
43:30 He wasn't even getting 1% better every year.
43:32 He was getting about 0.8% better every year.
43:35 Now, if you divide 0.8% by 365,
43:37 I would need someone that's better at math to tell me,
43:41 but there would be a decimal and a few zeros.
43:43 So if Lane Norton was addicted to that kind of progress, if Lane Norton said,
43:47 I just need to get 1% better every day, he would have quit.
43:50 He worked 10 years to gain less than a percentage point of performance.
43:54 And I asked Lane, I said, what kept you on the path?
43:57 And he said, it was curiosity about the craft.
44:00 It was self-discovery.
44:01 It was community.
44:02 It was commitment.
44:03 It was discipline.
44:04 And it was this mindset that whether or not I made observable progress,
44:08 I would stay consistent.
44:09 There's a lot of fascinating research that comes out of sports science
44:13 as the main field that shows
44:16 that when athletes increase their acute training load,
44:20 which is often defined as what you do this week,
44:24 by more than 10% of their chronic training load,
44:27 which is often defined as what you've done the past month,
44:31 rates of injury and illness skyrocket.
44:34 So what that means is that if you try to take
44:37 too big of a jump from your historic body of work,
44:39 from what you've been doing, you set yourself up to get injured to burnout.
44:44 So while that is very measurable in sport,
44:46 in my reporting, I saw this in just about every field,
44:50 that when we go on these benders of just
44:52 trying to do an enormous amount of work,
44:54 when we get caught up in hustle culture and we try
44:56 to be hero of the day or hero of the week,
44:58 we have a really good day or a really good week.
45:01 But then the following month or two months or in some cases year goes to crap.
45:06 And then you end up on this performance
45:08 trajectory where you have a couple of great days,
45:10 but in between those great days are shitty months.
45:13 And that's not how lasting progress is made.
45:15 You don't go to the gym and kill yourself once a week.
45:19 to gain muscle and to gain fitness.
45:21 You gotta go to the gym four days a week.
45:22 And in order to go to the gym four days a week,
45:24 you can't kill yourself on any one because the goal isn't to destroy yourself.
45:29 The goal is to build a consistent rhythm
45:31 that allows you to incrementally gain over time.
45:34 If you're interested in establishing consistency for yourself toward a goal,
45:38 here are a couple ideas that can help.
45:41 You generally want to stop one rep short
45:43 or one sentence short or one meaning short.
45:46 So very rarely do you just want to leave it all out there on any given day.
45:50 You want to have a little bit in the tank
45:52 so that you can pick up that rhythm the next day.
45:54 Another way to think about it is you want most efforts
45:57 to be somewhere between a 5 and a 7 out of 10.
46:00 Because once you start tapping into that 8, 9, 10 out of 10,
46:03 You're drawing from the bank that you're going to need
46:05 for the rest of the week or the rest of the month.
46:08 If you go below a 5 out of 10,
46:10 you can kind of get into that easy going through the motions,
46:12 you're not really challenging yourself zone.
46:14 But a 5 to 7 out of 10, a just manageable challenge,
46:18 that is like the proximate zone of consistency,
46:20 the proximate zone of development.
46:22 And then the final thing I'd say is be an anthropologist of your own progress.
46:28 So look back at the times that you overshot the target.
46:30 And what led you to do that?
46:32 Was it a lack of confidence?
46:34 Was it insecurity?
46:35 Was it comparing yourself to what other people do?
46:37 And how can you try to short circuit that temptation in the future?
46:42 Patience means understanding that there's no
46:45 such thing as an overnight breakthrough.
46:47 Every great accomplishment, every great attainment,
46:49 every great achievement in science,
46:51 in the arts, in sports, in business, it was always years in the making.
46:55 So we've got to play the long game.
46:57 We have to commit to showing up through those ups
46:59 and downs and turns and setbacks and highs and lows.
47:03 And we've got to zoom out and really give ourselves a chance to stay
47:08 on the path over a long period of time and not rush our progress.
47:11 Because when we rush our progress, we get in our own way.
47:14 That's when we get injured, when we burn out.
47:17 I think it's a very natural human inclination to want to rush.
47:21 And I think that it's perpetuated by the modern world,
47:25 which is very high velocity.
47:27 Everything moves fast.
47:28 The news cycle moves fast.
47:30 Entertainment moves fast.
47:31 Our cars move fast.
47:32 We communicate in microseconds with the click of a button.
47:35 There's so much velocity in life.
47:38 But the path of excellence, of making progress in a heartfelt pursuit,
47:42 it's often a nine inning game.
47:44 It takes time.
47:45 And you can't rush your way through a nine inning game.
47:48 And as badly as you might want to be in the bottom of the seventh,
47:52 it could just be that you're in the top of the third.
47:55 When thinking about patience is a integral factor of excellence,
47:59 it's really important to understand and expect plateaus.
48:03 Plateaus are a feature because they're what happens
48:06 when you stop getting 1% better every day.
48:08 And in many ways, when you're on the plateau,
48:11 that's when all the interesting stuff happens,
48:12 when you can't predict progress, when it becomes nonlinear,
48:16 when you really have to lean into discipline
48:18 and you have to practice your values and find
48:21 the rewards intrinsically because you're not getting that external
48:24 validation and that external little dopamine hit of progress.
48:27 Plateaus are also a feature because generally speaking,
48:31 before we have a breakthrough, we experience a plateau.
48:35 So it's like pounding a stone.
48:37 And the stone might crack on the 32nd pound,
48:40 but the first 31 pounds, you're building tension.
48:43 And even though you're not seeing the stone crack,
48:46 tension is building in the stone.
48:48 And when we work on goals,
48:49 we're going to get to a point when we need to build that tension,
48:53 when we're going to be on this plateau.
48:55 And if we stick to our process, if we stay consistent,
48:57 we give ourselves the best chance at eventually having the breakthrough.
49:02 Micro objectives are so important in the pursuit
49:05 of big goals because they keep you really present.
49:08 So let's use the metaphor of a mountain again.
49:11 If you're constantly looking at the peak
49:13 of the mountain at the start of your climb,
49:16 you might get really discouraged because it's quite far away.
49:19 You might also trip and fall because you're not looking down,
49:23 you're not climbing where your feet are.
49:25 But if instead of looking at the peak of the mountain, you say,
49:27 my goal for today is to gain momentum,
49:30 200 meters, 300 meters, whatever it might be in elevation,
49:34 then instead of having to look all the way up
49:35 at the peak of the mountain and be overwhelmed and potentially trip,
49:38 you can just look up at the next section.
49:40 And that is such a powerful focusing mechanism
49:42 to keep you climbing where your feet are.
49:45 And this is true on an actual mountain, but it's also true metaphorically.
49:49 The other reason that micro objectives are really
49:52 important is because they serve as a motivating force.
49:55 Right.
49:55 If you view the mountain is just getting
49:58 to the peak and the peak might take four months,
50:00 it's really hard to sustain motivation.
50:02 But if you give yourself some contrived
50:04 little victories along the way, some milestones,
50:07 you can feel that that progress being made in route to the bigger goal.
50:12 A profound example of this that's not a mountain climber,
50:15 but another athlete, comes from the bobsledder Kelly Humphreys.
50:18 Kelly Humphreys is a three-time gold medalist and a five-time world champion.
50:22 She's competed in five Olympics.
50:23 So you can do the math.
50:25 She's been atop this sport for 20 years.
50:28 Just incredible longevity.
50:29 And I asked Kelly, I said, Kelly, tell me about your goals.
50:33 She said, my goal is really simple.
50:35 My goal is to win a gold medal every four years.
50:38 And I joked, I said, simple, simple doesn't mean easy.
50:41 And then she said, here's how I go about this goal.
50:45 I break that big goal of win a gold
50:47 medal every four years down into two by two years.
50:50 And the first two years is about building a base.
50:53 And the second two years is about sharpening the edge of the sword.
50:56 And then each of those two year increments gets broken down into one year.
51:00 And each year has a specific training focus, a specific training objective.
51:04 Each year gets broken down into quarters.
51:07 Each quarter gets broken down into months.
51:09 Each month gets broken down into weeks.
51:11 And each week gets broken down into days.
51:13 And every day, I just have to show up and execute my workout.
51:17 That to me is this wonderful example of a process over outcome mindset
51:22 that embraces the power of consistency and that requires a lot of patience.
51:27 So there is this really nice interplay between setting goals,
51:31 which again, gives your path, gives your activities some form.
51:35 Committing to consistency, which is what keeps you working toward your goal.
51:40 And then having an attitude of patience,
51:42 which is what allows you to play the long game
51:44 to give your consistency a chance to manifest into progress.
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