Brad Stulberg

It's fun to talk about it.

Great.

But if your identity becomes, oh, I pull all-nighters, that might be great for a year.

But try to build a career on that kind of working habits and you're going to burn out.

So presence is owning your attention and energy.

And I think a lot of people hear presence and they think of it as just being where you are.

And that's true, but it's hard to be where you are if where you are is an environment where you're constantly being distracted.

So in the book, I argue that presence actually happens upstream of the moment.

And if you can own your attention by designing your environment and you can own your energy by being really diligent about what you say yes to and what you say no to, then that actually gives you a chance of being present in the moment.

So I think.

Obviously, there's so much more in the book, but from this podcast, the important thing to take away is we can't just think about present in the present moment.

Ironically, we have to think about presence upstream of the moment in trying to design your physical environment and your mental, your psychological environment to allow you to be present.

If you want to be really present to meditate, probably not great to scroll political Twitter for the 20 minutes before you meditate.

Yet we think that presence is just this thing that we turn on, but it's actually a lifestyle that again says, what does it mean for me to be successful?

What does it mean for me to profit?

And how can I then start building a life that allows me to be present for those things?

And for a lot of people, it comes down to identifying the things that distract them, that encroach upon their attention, that are almost like little addictions where it feels good the first little hit that you do, but eventually it makes you feel bad.

and then trying to gradually make those things smaller parts of one's life.

So that's how I think about presence.

So patience is really about this paradox that for most big meaningful projects in life, going slower today helps you go faster tomorrow.