Brad Stulberg

You want to be extremely present for what you're doing.

And in the modern world, that often means that you have to design your environment to help you become more present.

Depending on what your activity is, it might mean leaving the phone behind.

It might mean trying to select certain people to do it with.

It might mean having a 10-minute prep session where you get into the right headspace to approach your craft.

But it really demands a level of intention and focus that feels different than just the going through the motions of everyday life.

and then i think the third factor that is really important is consistency so it's less about a commitment to intensity and it's more about a commitment to consistency and to showing up again and again over time and as you do that the relationship that you forge not only with your activity but also with yourself becomes that intrinsic reward that keeps you coming back but don't you ever have days where you just go through the motions that i just don't have it today and it's okay

Oh, absolutely.

To deny that is really to deny our humanity.

We're not optimized robots.

We're people doing the best we can in a chaotic world.

I think there, the practice becomes, how do you try to stop a bad day from becoming a bad week?

And then when you have a bad week, how do you try to stop a bad week from becoming a bad month?

There's this concept that I think is so important, and it's called raising the floor.

And oftentimes we think about, well, how can we make our great days better, right?

We all index on our best days.

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.