Brad Stulberg

I don't think this is going to happen because you're great, but let's just imagine that.

It's so helpful to have another part of your identity that you can lean on when that happens.

I see this all the time with the Olympians that I've worked with is they're so singularly focused on the medal.

And then after the Olympics, it's just empty.

because their entire identity was this one thing.

So I counsel entrepreneurs, I counsel elite athletes.

It's okay to go all in.

Part of what makes life meaningful is intensity and building something and giving something your all.

Just protect a couple percentage points of yourself, of your identity outside of that thing.

It's really hard and really important.

Don't have to be an Olympian to move your body, thankfully.

This was an interesting back and forth with my publisher, because the first five principles are like these broad, ambiguous, but also really aspirational, we get to create our own definition principles.

And then it's like, you're telling people to exercise?

But the reason that I felt really strongly about this is that back to that three-legged stool, movement comes up in all the recent academic inquiry on mental health and groundedness.

When you actually talk to people that are grounded,

whether they have always been that way or whether they've experienced heroic individualism and worked their way out of it or depression or anxiety, what have you, some sort of physical activity is generally a part of their process.

And then I got looking to the ancient wisdom traditions and particularly in the West, so stoicism in the Greeks, they didn't separate mind and body.

School was the gymnasium and intellect.

And it always fascinates me because you look back thousands of years and then today there's all this research that shows that when we're regularly in movement practice, we're more creative.

We have better emotional control.