Brad Stulberg
speaker
1,230 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 31 Mar
Brad Stulberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And groundedness is not about checking out into a monastery and letting go of striving and desire.
What it's about is trying to channel striving, desire, motivation, energy, drive in more skillful, productive ways.
So if you think about there's two ways to climb a mountain, and this can be a real mountain, but it can also be a metaphorical mountain.
You can think of this as career advancement, relationship advancement, you name it.
And one way is to constantly be thinking about the top of the mountain and thinking about the selfies that you're going to take when you get there and how good you're going to feel when you finally arrive.
The other way is to just be where you freaking are and to even enjoy the view from the side, to have fun as you're climbing.
And what I argue in the book and what the science supports is not only do you obviously feel better if you're having fun and you're grounded as you're climbing, but you also perform better.
Because carrying the weight of that anxiety to need to get somewhere is never, never, never, ever helpful.
Whereas if you can be free and you can be both good enough now and truly have self-confidence and believe that you're good enough now and want to get better because you're curious and it's fun, that kind of energy and drive is so much more sustainable.
The last thing I'll say, because I think that it is such a ripe topic for listeners of this podcast, is it's not all or nothing.
We're all on a continuum between heroic individualism and groundedness.
The point of this book is just to help people shift a little bit more towards groundedness.
I know this myself.
The week that my book comes out, I am spending more time than I want to admit in heroic individual mode.
I'm checking my sales rank.
I'm trying to get app ads placed in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and I'm constantly checking to see if I got emails back from editors.
I did it for a week, but then I put this really hard boundary on it because I know that that's ultimately unhealthy.
And I'm using myself as an example to elucidate that A, it's very hard to be like 100% on this.
And if you get it 60% right, it's good.
And then B, so much of heroic individualism is the environment that we operate in.
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