Brad Stulberg

But the truth is we don't often control when our best days are going to happen.

For all that we know about human performance, there's a lot of magic to it.

but what we don't think about nearly as much as our bad days and how can we make our bad days just a little bit better or as i was saying earlier how can we ensure that one bad day doesn't ruin the rest of our week um and i think that all that is part of the practice too so yes it's a long-winded answer to your original question we are absolutely going to have bad days everyone does but then the practice becomes well how can you get curious about why you had that bad day and how can you try to short circuit it from ruining the rest of your week

I think it's just about being in the moment, acknowledging that, all right, it's just not there today.

So in the moment, what you can do is you can tell yourself, all right, I'm acknowledging that it's just not there today.

I don't feel my best.

what what's the best i have to give today so it's quickly acknowledging what's happening not denying it not resisting it not trying to power through and then adjusting your expectations for what you have to give giving it and then not beating yourself up after because what happens when you beat yourself up is then you get into this guilt and the shame spiral and that's when a bad day becomes a bad week whereas if you can just say like all right it wasn't there today i adjusted i gave it my best shot i'm gonna rest i'm gonna recover i'm gonna try to get a good night's sleep and we'll see what happens again tomorrow

Yeah, so what I would say is that you're going to the gym for probably a different reason.

My guess is you're going to the gym because you value your health.

You probably value your cognitive health because your brain is your greatest asset and you've got a really good one on your head and inside your skull.

So you're probably not pursuing excellence in the gym.

I would turn that around though, Mike, and say, what about when you podcast and when you're in the pocket of just recording a really good episode or a good string of episodes or where you feel like the last month you've just been putting out bangers?

My guess is that you enjoy that a lot more.

And this is the area of your life where you're excellent and where you're pursuing excellence.

And that's OK.

It's unrealistic to try to be excellent at everything because you're not going to be excellent at everything.

But in order to really be great at something, yes, you have to enjoy it.

And I think this is another one of these misnomers with pseudo excellence.

You have all these guys on the internet and they run around pretending to be Navy SEALs talking about how great they are at suffering and how hard everything is.

Guess what?