Brad Stulberg

How do we keep ourselves out of the traditional health care system to begin with?

And that set me on this path to exploring all things human performance, health and well-being.

And through a whole bunch of just grind and pitching and getting rejected and getting rejected some more, I eventually got lucky and got some of my writing placed, which led to getting more writing placed.

And it's just been an upworld swirl since then, though I still get declined more often than not.

Yeah, and what I didn't realize and what's so interesting in hindsight is that I was training to become a nonfiction writer at McKinsey & Company.

Because if you think about what a big consulting study is, a client comes to you and says, we've got this thorny problem and we want you to solve it.

And then you do all kinds of research, you interview experts, and you craft a bunch of hypotheses as to how to solve that problem.

And then you explore them.

And then if you're any good at your job, you come up with a decent solution and you also tell the client all the ways that you might be wrong.

And that is the exact same framework that I use to do my nonfiction writing.

I define a problem.

I do research.

I interview experts to try to get to a solution.

And then I also ask myself, well, how might I be wrong?

What are some other solutions that could work, too?

So I never realized it at the time.

I certainly wasn't thinking to myself, oh, this is good training to be a consultant, or excuse me, in consulting to be a writer.

It's only something I saw in hindsight.

Yeah, it definitely did, as you mentioned, blindside me from nowhere.

I had no prior history with depression or anxiety, at least not that I knew of.