Brad Stulberg

I really enjoyed this.

I really enjoyed this.

It means a couple of things, Mike.

The first thing that it means is that you have to be okay with making yourself vulnerable and risking failure.

So it's one thing to say you're going to give something your all.

It's another thing to actually put yourself in the arena and make yourself vulnerable and risk failure.

All this today on Something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me.

I think that there is a lot of confusion between what I call pseudo excellence and actual excellence.

So pseudo excellence is so much of what you see on social media where folks think that they need to be perfect at everything.

They need to wake up at four in the morning.

They need to have a 37 step routine and a super restrictive diet and take a cold plunge four times a day and on and on and on.

And the question there is, what's it all for?

What's the 37 step routine serving?

What's the cold plunge doing?

Are you just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things?

That to me is pseudo excellence.

I think genuine excellence

is, again, when the mountain that you're climbing is one that you chose because it aligns with your values, and it's one that you genuinely want to climb.

And the reason that I think that, yes, this is for everyone, it's not just for elite athletes or master chefs or Grammy-winning musicians, is because so many people that I spoke with in the reporting process said that they have a sense of longing in their lives and kind of a sense of going through the motions and almost numbness.