I'm Brad Stulberg. I'm author of The Way of Excellence, and I'm on faculty at the University of Michigan. Today on Big Think, we're going to tackle three big ideas on excellence. The first is what excellence actually is and how excellence is different from so many of the common imposters to excellence. The second are barriers and pitfalls that are very common on the path toward excellence. And then the third are going to be essential factors to help in the pursuit of genuine heartfelt excellence. There can be this thought that what excellence is, is waking up at 4 a.m., having a 47-step routine, taking three cold plunges, having nine supplements, tracking your sleep and your heart rate variability, and telling all your friends about how great you are. But that's not real excellence. That is elaborate kabuki that is masquerading as the real thing. Simply put, excellence is involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values. That simple. Involved engagement with something worthwhile that aligns with your values. We often assume that it has to do with what we are going to achieve. But genuine, heartfelt excellence, it's actually less about getting to the top of the mountain and more about the person that you become on the sides. So you could have very strong involved engagement at tapping a white wall, but that probably wouldn't align with your values. That wouldn't be excellence. That would just be tapping a white wall. That would be very different than saying, I want to become a great physician because I value intellect.

I value contribution. I value helping people, so on and so forth. So we are working toward running a marathon. We are working toward starting a company. We are working toward graduating from medical school. We are working toward publishing our first book. And while all that's true, the things that we work on and the way in which we work on them also work on us. So we might be working on the marathon, but the marathon is working on us. We might be working on writing a book, but the process of writing a book is shaping us. We learn about doing hard things. We learn about overcoming setbacks. We learn about resilience. We learn about the power of consistency, of discipline, of self-kindness. So the big goals that we set, the mountains that we climb, they shape our character along the way. And if we're climbing mountains, if we're setting goals that are out of alignment with our values, we're not shaping our character in a way that is concordant with who we want to be. So when we connect this kind of involved engagement, this deep caring with something that aligns with our personal values, we gain a sense of mastery and mattering. Mastery is competence. It is making concrete, tangible progress. That is a very satisfying feeling. And mattering is a sense that we belong and that there is more to life than our own teeny little ego. We are a part of something bigger. Most people have somewhere between three and five core values. And example values are things like mastery, craft, integrity, community, spirituality, discipline, intellect, wisdom, kindness, creativity. These are just a few of truly hundreds of example values.

And when we have our values, when we select our values, and there's a whole process for how to do this in the book, you want to not just have words on a poster on the wall that are empty and meaningless. You really need to define your values. If one of your values is health, what does health mean to you? How do you practice health? And from that value, you essentially want to say, what can I do day in, day out, week in, week out to live in alignment with this value? And when you have your core values, when you select goals, you can check those goals against your values. And you can say, if I pursue this goal, will the process of pursuing this goal allow me to live in alignment with my values? If you are someone who values health and you choose a goal that is going to make you work 22 hours a day and never sleep, that's going to be pretty discordant with your value of health. So these values are a really good way to make sure that what you're doing on the side of the mountain is helping you become the person that you want to be versus just staring at the peak and thinking about what it might feel like if or when you get there. I think that quality is, to me, the overarching umbrella over all of this. Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974. And at the center of that book is this term quality, which Persig stylized with a capital Q. And Persig's quality was the relationship between an actor and his or her act. And when that relationship was so close, was so intimate, that the subject and object ceased to exist. So it's no longer Rachel playing basketball. Basketball is just happening. It's no longer Joe on the guitar. Music is just being made.

And what Persig argued in this book is that quality really drives all of evolution. Persig's quality very much tracks with what modern evolutionary biologists call homeostatic upregulation. And homeostatic upregulation is this innate, deeply hardwired drive of all living species to persist and to flourish. And you can observe homeostatic upregulation in the earliest forms of life that we know. Bacteria, they have no brain, they have no cognition, they don't think, they have no nervous system. Yet bacteria sense and respond, this is the term that scientists use, they sense and respond their way toward environments that are conducive to their survival and away from environments that are not, that are ill-conducive to their survival. And again, they had no cognition. There was no consciousness. Yet these early organisms, they just innately knew how to move towards conditions that were right for them to flourish, which for a multi-celled organism simply meant to survive. From those multicellular organisms grew more complex organisms. We have nervous systems, still all precognitive before any thinking. Species felt their way forward. We navigated the world using feelings. Only more recently do we have cognition. Do we have the ability to think complex thoughts? And we can use those complex thoughts in tandem with our feelings to drive us towards flourishing, but it's that innate drive that is all of us, that homeostatic upregulation to move towards conditions that support flourishing. And for the longest time, Flourishing simply meant survive and survive to an age when you can procreate, when you can pass on your DNA, right? Those are the two evolutionary imperatives, survive and pass on your DNA.

But we humans, we outlive that survival age. There's so much more to finding meaning and satisfaction in life than surviving and procreating. So it's that same drive, that same homeostatic upregulation that leads us to admire and try to pursue great athletic feats or great musical feats or to contribute or to become a better leader or a better parent. But we all have this innate drive to flourish, to grow, and to aspire toward excellence. Situated cognition was a term coined by Richard Sennett, who is a sociologist that studied craftspeople. And what he observed in Craftspeople is that when they are doing their best work and when they're feeling most satisfied and fulfilled, they are very much not thinking with their head, but they're thinking with their entire being. So they're having this mind-body relationship as they build a table or as they make a sculpture. And Sennett called it situated cognition because as you are performing your activity, as you're performing your craft, you're situated in yourself and you feel at home and situated in the world. So you're very much feeling your way forward. You're using your entire nervous system, not just your mind, to create your work. And at the zenith of excellence, we get situated cognition. So an example, for instance, is me as a writer.

When I first started writing, I did not go to journalism school. I had no formal training. I didn't know what I didn't know. I needed to sit with the blue book of grammar and all types of style guides and learn. And then as I progressed as a writer, I had to very much effortfully try to write. I would get to a break in a sentence and I would think through, should this take a semicolon, an em dash, a period? Should this be offset with parentheses? So on and so forth. It was a very effortful experience of writing. And only after I'd been writing for 10 years could I leave all that behind and not have to think about what edits made sense, not had to think about rules, but rather feel my way to good turns of phrases and good sentences. Situated cognition is a close cousin or perhaps even a sister or a brother of unconscious competence. There are four phases of competence. Unconscious incompetence. Conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. So unconscious incompetence is when you don't know that you don't know what you're doing. And at this phase of progress, you need to read books, you need to study video, you need to hire a coach, you need somebody to help you understand your activity, your craft. The next phase is conscious incompetence. So here we know that we don't know what we're doing. So we at least have a heuristic or a schema for how it should be done, whether it's shooting a basketball or playing the violin or building a table or leading a team. And we know that we're not doing it. So we're very aware of what right is. And we're also aware that we're not yet there. The third phase is conscious competence. So this is when we know that we're doing it right. We are effortfully trying. We are using the heart rate monitor. We're following the checklist. We are thinking our way to a really proficient performance. And at the top of the ladder is unconscious competence. And this is when we leave all of that effortful thinking and tracking and measurement and trying behind.

And we enter the zone and we let our feelings guide us to our greatest performances. In masters of craft, they progress through these four phases of competence extremely predictably, but they also cycle through them. So nobody stays at unconscious competence. So what masters of craft do is they understand when they need to be in the conscious competence phase of the ladder, where they actually need to effortfully try, where they need to go back to the drawing board, where they need to learn. But then they also have the courage to let go of that thinking and And when they're going to have a magical day, they trust the magic and they ride that wave. In a world that feels increasingly distracted, in which people often feel alienated from their activities, in some cases alienated from their own lives, having an orientation or a philosophy of life that centers around excellence, it's a great source of intimacy. intimacy with a craft and intimacy with yourself. So it really helps connect you to what you're doing. And again, connect you to yourself. It's the opposite of alienation. It's the opposite of going through the motions. So, excellence is not perfectionism. It's often confused with perfectionism, trying to do everything incredibly always, trying to get all the gold stars. Excellence is not obsession, being controlled by your pursuit. Excellence is not happiness. Happiness is often a byproduct of the pursuit of excellence, but it is not a hedonic pursuit. Excellence is not optimization. It is not trying to turn yourself into a machine or to a robot. Excellence is actually a very human and humane pursuit. And finally, excellence is not flow. While flow can be a part of excellence, excellence also encompasses all that happens before those flow states and everything that comes after. Excellence includes all of that. I mentioned earlier that we have this hard wiring to move towards what feels right to flourish. And what has happened in the modern world is there are all of these temptations, distractions that feel really good in the short term, but leave us wanting and empty and in some cases quite frustrated and that are not concordant with our values in the long term.

So I've identified six barriers to the pursuit of excellence. There's this term disevolution that was coined by the evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman. And it essentially says that our modern environment has all of these traps that we didn't evolve for. So a prime example of disevolution is fast food. So, humans for the longest time lived in scarcity, and if a caveman came across a Krispy Kreme, the caveman would eat all the donuts. But now we live in times of abundance, but that hardwiring to crave the donuts hasn't gone away. So we are dis-evolved for an environment that has donuts. hence a problem with obesity that is in so many developed countries. Another source of disevolution is confusing social media with genuine community, right? We long, we're a social species, we long for community, we long for connection, and now we are fed connection in these little 10-second bursts of external validation, of likes, of comments, of retweets. So of course that feels good when we're getting it, but that's nothing like having an actual relationship with another human being. The difference between a Pornhub and actually having an intimate relationship with a partner. The former is really easy. There's no friction. It can feel very good, but it doesn't have the fulfillment and the satisfaction of the latter. And when it comes to more conventional ways to think about excellence, I think that there is standing on the sidelines and constantly being an observer of other people doing something and kind of almost feeling good like as a passive observer. I'm getting to watch all these people do all this cool stuff. And that feels good in the moment, but you're not actually stepping into the arena. You're not putting yourself out there. So the biggest trap is when this hardwiring to feel good gets co-opted by things that feel really good in the short term. But in the long term, they don't align with our values and they often leave us feeling worse off. Another trap to excellence is optimization culture. So it is definitely true that we live in this environment that often preys on our hardwiring for connection and for satisfaction with these kind of short-term things that feel really good, but as I mentioned, that leave us in the long-term wanting. There's a kind of equal and opposite reaction to this, which is optimization culture, which essentially says, I'm going to try to control everything about my life.

I'm going to try to control not only how long I sleep every night, but how long I'm in REM sleep. I'm going to count and monitor every single calorie that I eat. I'm going to measure literally the space between heartbeats. I'm going to track everything about my life. And in doing so, we risk turning ourselves into robots and And as I mentioned, excellence, it's deeply human. So much of excellence is a felt experience. And if we over-optimize our life, then we never get to tap into that felt experience that is so satisfying. Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong with using devices that help you monitor certain things. There's nothing wrong with using a sleep tracker or a device that helps you count how many steps you're taking. These things can be really integral to behavior change. But when we let these devices control us instead of controlling them, and when we build an entire life around row optimization, it sucks the feeling out of life. It sucks the humanity out of life. It sucks the joy out of life. And we struggle to have our best performances. The last thing about optimization is it can make us really fragile. So I want to tell the story of the golfer JJ Spahn, who won the most recent US Open. And the night before he won the U.S. Open, J.J. Spahn's young child was up at 2 a.m. vomiting. Really sick. And J.J. Spahn was staying in a hotel room with his young child and his wife, and his wife needed to stay home with his kid, so he went to CVS, the only 24-hour drugstore that was open, at 3 in the morning, and he was up the rest of the night. Now, if J.J. Spahn would have been wearing a recovery device because he was so concerned with optimizing his performance, it would have told him, your recovery score is zero, you didn't sleep, you should stay home. J.J. Spahn won the U.S. Open the next day. So when we become too focused on all of these optimization tools, it just makes us fragile. We have to think that everything needs to be going a certain way or everything needs to be perfect or we always need to feel our best to perform well.

But that's utter nonsense, right? Performance, for all that we know about the science of performance, there is so much that we don't know. And when we over-optimize our lives, we shortchange ourselves. We don't give ourselves a chance. And it doesn't account for the messiness of life. Flow is a term that was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and it is the experience of being completely immersed in what you're doing, being totally in the zone. And Flow states can be absolutely remarkable. They can be the stuff of meaning in life. If you are in a flow state playing an instrument or coaching a team or in a relationship with someone or doing math, right? These are such great experiences. We yearn for these experiences. However, you can also be in a flow state scrolling Twitter and You can be in a flow state gambling, right? These are other experiences where we lose our sense of self. Our perception of time and space becomes warped. They have the hallmarks of flow. Like these things can light you up. They can lead to that sense of aliveness, but it's a pseudo aliveness. It's a kind of aliveness that is not connected with your values. And again, that over the long haul often leads you feeling worse. The psychologist and philosopher David Pizarro coined this term shitty flow to describe these experiences where we're in flow, but it's shitty. Like at the end of it, we wish that we weren't in flow. And what Pizarro says is that so often in the modern world, we mistake good, genuine flow for shitty flow. And then we wonder why we feel so crappy. So What separates excellence from flow, one thing that separates excellence from flow, the first big thing that separates excellence from flow is that flow is values neutral.

You can be in flow doing something completely aligned with your values and it can be wonderful, but you can also be in flow doing something that is very discordant with one's values. The second big difference between excellence in flow is that flow happens in acute moments. Maybe you get into the zone for a couple of seconds, a couple of minutes, a couple of days. If you're lucky, you can enter the slipstream for a week or two. But nobody stays in flow forever. Excellence is so much broader than flow. Excellence includes all of the things that happen before flow, all of the effortful trying, all of the fundamentals, all of the unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence and conscious competence that leads to a flow state. And then it also includes what happens after the flow state, how we come down from those great experiences. Because there is this inherent risk of becoming addicted to flow and constantly chasing flow and thinking that in order to have a good life, in order to perform well, you always have to be in a flow state. But that's nonsense. It doesn't work like that. By definition, flow states are extraordinary. Excellence is also concerned with what you do on your ordinary days. It's about making your average a little bit better, too. So good flow... is a part of excellence, but it's a small part of excellence. Excellence includes everything that happens before and after it. And excellence, by definition, cannot be shitty flow because it's got to be in alignment with one's values. So I think of flow as a small component of excellence and excellence is a much broader concept and broader term to build a life around. A telltale sign of shitty flow is when you come out of the zone, you feel kind of gross, right? or you feel anxious, or you feel regret. So when you're in the zone rage scrolling on X, you feel really good. Like you just get warped in, right? You get sucked in.

And maybe it's not good, but like you're just, you're immersed. But when two hours has passed and you've just been rage scrolling and you come out of that, you tend to feel restless, impatient, like you need a hot shower, aggravated, If that was in alignment with your values, you wouldn't feel that way. You'd feel satisfied and fulfilled. So one of the best ways to figure out if you're spending time in shitty flow is to ask yourself not how you feel during the experience, but how you feel after. And if you feel exhausted and like you were just on a bender, it's probably shitty flow. If you feel exhausted but fulfilled and satisfied, it's probably the good kind of flow. There's two kinds of burnout. There's the kind of burnout that most people talk about, which is burning out from working too hard, doing 90-hour weeks back to back to back. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Eventually, you're going to burn out. You're going to suffer from loss of motivation and fatigue and perhaps injury and illness. But there's another kind of burnout that we don't talk about too much. And this is the term that I coined in the book, zombie burnout. And zombie burnout doesn't come from doing too much. It comes from not doing enough of what lights you up. So you could only be working 30 hours a week, but if you're just kind of going through the motions, if you're a passive observer to life, if you don't really care deeply about anything, you can start to feel all the signs of burnout. You can feel exhausted, you can feel apathetic, you can feel dread, even though you're not working very hard. If your life has no meaningful friction in it, if you don't have to ever overcome challenge, that can zap the feeling out of you.

And I called it zombie burnout because it's this kind of numbed out sensation of going through the motions that on the one hand, you're not really working very hard, but on the other hand, you're really exhausted. And I think that, well, over the last decade, there was so much talk about conventional burnout and And conventional burnout is certainly still a problem for some people. I think that a lot of people actually suffer from zombie burnout. Let's take a tale of two people and assume that they're both working 40 hours a week. And one person is pretty into their work. They're focusing intently, they're challenging themselves, and they're working in a way that is aligned with their values. The other person working a 40-hour week is just totally going through the motions, right? Doesn't really give a crap about what they're doing. The first person might absolutely flourish and the second person might feel burnout even though they're both working 40 hours a week. So I just think that when we only think about burnout in terms of the quantity of what we're doing, we really miss the boat. We also have to think about the quality of what we're doing. And as I mentioned earlier, when you have excellence, you're filled with the satisfaction and aliveness and intimacy towards your own life, toward the activities that you're engaged in. And to me, excellence is the ultimate antidote, the pursuit of excellence. The aspiration toward excellence is the ultimate antidote to zombie burnout. Because if zombie burnout is just kind of passively going through the motions and smoothing your life over and numbing yourself to death, the pursuit of excellence is pouring yourself into things that align with your values and make you tick. I think that there's a couple of small shifts that can help thwart zombie burnout. The first is in a traditional workplace, if you work a job, to ask yourself, can you job craft?

Can you massage what you're doing day in and day out to be a little bit more aligned with your values, to be a little bit more in touch with the things that you care about? Because sometimes we just have boring jobs, right? And we work to pay the bills. We're not passionate about our work. And we fill out spreadsheets all day, whatever it might be, but we make good money and we go home. And in those instances, I still think generally there are a couple small levers that one can pull to bring a little bit more engagement and a little bit more interest into their work. However, a lot of people say, you know, Brad, you're very fortunate. You get to pursue this craft. You're a writer. I just work to pay the bills. I want to send my kids to school. I want to pay my mortgage. And to that person, what I would say is, well, what are you doing in your leisure time? And if your leisure time is very passive, if it's passive consumption, and if it's not active, if you're not stepping into the arena, if you're not challenging yourself, then I would say that actually what's going to make you feel less exhausted is is trying harder in exerting effort towards things that you find meaningful. So replacing the passive consumption of mind-numbing television with reading a book, a lot more active, a lot more engaging. Even better, train for a marathon, learn an instrument, go garden. In my own life, I pursue excellence in three primary domains. The first is as a husband and a father. The second is as a craftsperson, and my craft is as a writer.

And then the third is in my leisure time in a hobby, which for me is powerlifting, in particular of a deadlift, which is just lifting a bunch of weight from the ground up to your waist. It's a very simple movement. And I got into deadlifting about seven years ago because I love the objectivity and the concrete nature of it, right? Writing can be very subjective. Whether or not someone likes a book is completely outside of my control. It depends on what's going on in their own life and in their own mind. But a deadlift, it's just lifting weight. And like the bar doesn't lie. You either get better or you don't. So the tangibility of it in the feedback loop is really satisfying for me. Now, you might be thinking that spending all this time just lifting weight from the ground to your hips is kind of futile and meaningless. But as I stated earlier, the goals that we work on also work on us. So I'm never going to win anything in deadlifting. I'm not that good. However, what deadlifting does for me is it teaches me about doing hard things, about embracing discomfort, about vulnerability, about failure, about commitment, about discipline, about patience, about consistency, about the power of coaching and mentorship and community and showing up in all of these other things that don't just make me a better deadlifter, but make me a better person. There's a misconception that excellence can only happen in one's career, but you can aspire toward excellence and get all the benefits in hobbies and leisure time. And in some ways, it's actually easier because you have full agency. I think zombie burnout happens when you have this perfect mix of a job that you don't really care about and you're going through the motions and then leisure time where you're just kind of floating through life with a passivity.

Another barrier to excellence is what I call the happiness industrial complex. And the happiness industrial complex says that the whole point of life is to be happy and that we should just chase happiness. However, happiness is just like any other emotion. It comes and it goes. And happiness is never the result of aiming for happiness. It's always a byproduct of doing something else. And I think that sometimes what happens is when we think that we should always be happy all the time, we put all this pressure on ourselves and we judge ourselves when we're not happy. But the truth is, life is full of discomfort, of challenge, of suffering, of heartbreak. And in my last decade plus of reporting, individuals who really live good lives, who flourish, they experience happiness, but they don't chase happiness. What they chase is satisfaction, meaning, and fulfillment. In my own life, the things that make me feel most alive, most situated in the world, when I'm writing, When I'm in the gym deadlifting, when I'm coaching my son's basketball games. If you were to ask me, in those moments, am I happy? The answer would undoubtedly be no. When I'm working hard on a manuscript, I wouldn't say that I am happy. When I'm on the sideline coaching my kid, I'm not happy, I'm engaged. When I'm in the gym deadlifting, I'm often very uncomfortable. But what I am in all of those instances is I am deeply satisfied and fulfilled. And I think that it behooves us to not put happiness on a pedestal, to not chase happiness, and instead to try to orient around what I call excellence, which then leads to mastery and mattering and satisfaction and fulfillment. And satisfaction and happiness are very different things. Happiness has this hedonic tone to it. that is very ephemeral. Whereas satisfaction, it's deeper. Like we feel it in our bones, it's more lasting. And don't get me wrong, satisfaction, like a life of satisfaction is going to have moments of great, great happiness, but it's like a butterfly.

The more you try to grab happiness, the more it's gonna flow away from you. And there's a wonderful, very, very popular hypothetical that's often used in undergraduate philosophy classes to make the point that I'm making about happiness. And I'll give it to you all real quick. Imagine if you had two options. And in the first option, someone will put you in a tube for the rest of your life. So they take you away from your friends. They take you away from your family. They take you away from any hardship that you have, any suffering. And they'd put you in a tube. But here's the catch. They would give you two drugs. The first drug would make you forget that you're in a tube. And the second drug would make you feel euphoric for the rest of your life. Or... you could choose not to go in the tube and just go on living your life. And the vast majority of people choose not to go in the tube. So the tube is like a happiness machine. You're just happy all the time, right? But you would leave behind all the stuff of fulfillment, of meaning. And that is really what makes for a good, flourishing human life. And if you step back and you think about the tube, you know what the tube starts to sound quite a bit like? Like a heroin addiction. right? I mean, it shrinks your life. And those are very serious issues that cripple lives and they blow up communities and families. But someone in the throes of heroin, when they're actually using, they get a rush of euphoria. So I just think there are so many examples that show us that, well, happiness is great. If we make happiness the thing, it can often backfire. And as I said, I call it the happiness industrial complex. There's all these books about how to be happy But the best way to be happy is to stop trying so damn hard to be happy and to throw yourself and care deeply about things that matter.

And when you're having good days, enjoy them. And when you're having bad days or you're feeling pain, realize that that too is a part of the human existence. Another trap or misconception about excellence is that it's a standard. So it means making it to the Olympics or becoming the first chair violinist or graduating from medical school or getting straight A's or playing Division I sports. Those outcomes, they're wonderful and we should want to attain them. However, they are a very small part of excellence. They are the peak of the mountain. But the truth is that you spend 99.99999% of your time on the sides of the mountain. And that is where so much of life is lived. And that's where so much of excellence unfolds. I also quote Robert Persig in the book. And I just I love this so much. And I think it really encapsulates this point. And Persig says that the only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen that you bring up there with you. We think that all the Zen, all the good stuff is what we get on the summit of the mountain when we achieve our goal. But actually, the only good stuff that's going to be on the top of the mountain when we achieve the goal is the experience that we have to get there. And that's very true as an actual mountain climber, but that's also true metaphorically in whatever goal we pursue. If we pursue a goal of starting a company, but we're miserable the whole time we do it, we're angry, we're resentful, we're not building relationships, we're not living in alignment with our values, when that IPO bell rings, we're still going to be an empty, miserable person.

There's going to be no zen on the top of that mountain. But if we pursue the goal of starting a company, of having a company IPO in a way that aligns with our values, that shapes our character, that builds relationships, we're actually having fun. Then when we ring that bell, it's going to be a really joyful experience. So we've covered a lot of grounds that really mirrors the first part of the book, which is this big swing at reclaiming excellence, reclaiming it from optimization, from the hustle culture bros, from perfectionism, from the happiness industrial complex. And I argue that excellence is our birthright. It's what makes us feel alive and good in the world. And then I explore the biology, psychology, and philosophy of excellence, which we've discussed at length. Caring. Goals, consistency, trade-offs, focus, discipline, renewal, confidence, patience, routine, gumption, curiosity, failure, community, joy, and completion. While there are 16 factors of excellence, for the purposes of today, let's go into three. Goals, consistency, and patience. Goals give you a target to shoot for. It's important to pick a mountain to climb. And without a peak, there is no mountain. And a goal is very much a peak that you're striving for. So it gives your journey, it gives your pursuit some shape and some form. A process over outcomes mindset says that first you do, you want to pick your big aspirational goal. And then after you set that big goal, you want to break it down into its smaller component parts.

Because just thinking about this big goal can often be overwhelming. But if you can break it down into small parts, it gives you these manageable micro milestones along the way. Then the third step of a process mindset is to largely forget about the big goal and instead focus on those small daily, sometimes weekly steps that you can take to work toward that big goal. Now, the fourth part is if you catch yourself stressing out or worrying about the big goal ahead of you, use that as a cue to ask yourself, what could you be doing right now? How can you re-immerse yourself in the process? And fifth and finally, remember that occasionally, inevitably, you are going to fall off the path. And when you fall off the path, your job is simply to step back on. A process over outcomes mindset is so important because when we set a big goal, There's often this temptation to talk about the goal, to think about the goal, to dream about the goal, but these things all become stand-ins for actually working toward the goal. And the only way that we accomplish really big goals is by focusing on the small steps that we take along the way. Oftentimes we think that the achievement of some goal is what's going to bring us fulfillment, but it's actually not the achievement. It's all the work that we do to get to the goal. That's where the joy and the satisfaction lives.

Don't get me wrong. Achievement feels good. As I said earlier, Excellence is not a let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya and pretend that winning or accomplishment doesn't matter. But it also acknowledges that if we if we tell ourselves, if I just win this or if I just accomplish that, then I'll be happy. We are falling for a trap that is as old as time. In the book, I tell the story of Ray Allen, one of the best basketball players ever, a craftsperson, phenomenal technician, three point shooter. And Ray Allen had done everything in his career except win a championship. He had been in all-star games. He had won three-point shooting titles. He'd even starred in a Spike Lee movie. He got game. But Ray thought that if he just won a championship, then the hole inside would be filled. Then he'd be content. And finally, after years of trying, he won his first championship with the Boston Celtics in 2008. And you know what Ray Allen said? He said the morning after winning that championship was one of the most disorienting mornings of his life. because he realized that it didn't fulfill him. Now, if that is not a perfect encapsulation of this trap of this arrival fallacy, I don't know what is, but we all feel that, right? My guess is every single individual watching this has at some point in their life told themselves a story that if they just get to this achievement, then they'll be happy or then they'll be content. And perhaps you had contentment and happiness for a couple hours or a couple days or maybe even a couple weeks and but then you're back to striving. In running, it's called the post-marathon blues. So you train so hard for this big goal, you run a marathon, you achieve it, and then the next day you're sad. Why? Because you built up achievement as if it was gonna be this thing that would give you lasting satisfaction when you were actually more satisfied in the training because that's the work that you were doing day in and day out.

If you are new to a craft or new to an activity, or maybe you're even new to setting goals to begin with, a really advantageous and helpful framework is called SMART. And it stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relatable, and Time-bound. So an example of a SMART goal could be deadlifting 405 pounds. So it's very specific, right? It's a deadlift. It's very measurable. There's a number. I want to get to 405 pounds. It's very actionable. You can back into a training plan that you can show up and try to engage in and do every single day. It's very relatable if you value health or you value performance or you're in the gym. And then finally, it's time bound. You could say, I want to deadlift 405 pounds by the end of this year. That would be an example of a SMART goal. SMART goals are really useful because they hold you accountable. They're not wishy-washy. They give you a specific time frame to work toward that goal in. And again, they're very actionable. You can say to Deadlift 405 pounds, these are the four workouts I need to do every single week for four years that is going to help me achieve that eventual goal down the road. So as this comes together, you can see that when we pursue a goal, we're working toward that goal. But that goal is also working on us. We want to get to the peak of the mountain, but all the growth happens on the side. So the peak of the mountain might be a 600-pound deadlift. But we are growing as a person. We are learning about resilience and overcoming failure and being uncomfortable and the power of community and vulnerability and failure and showing up. That doesn't happen when we hit the 600-pound lift. That happens in the years of training to get there. So if we're pursuing our goals in a way that aligns with our values, we have this beautiful closed loop where the process is energizing, it's satisfying, it's fulfilling, it's shaping us as a person. And if we achieve the goal, if we get to the top of the mountain, we'll have brought a lot of zen, a lot of aliveness, a lot of satisfaction up there with us.

Log on to the internet, any social media, and there are so many influencers that just are showing their absolute heroic days. So it's the workout that leaves you shredded and you go till you puke. It's the tech bro that is bragging about the string of all-nighters that he or she pulled to launch their company. The runner that talks about that epic workout where they did 16 400s at 5k pace, whatever it is. And what can happen is we can mistake the goal of excellence as having these single heroic days, when in fact, the way that you make progress at something, the goal of excellence is not to have a heroic day. It's to string together many very good days over long periods of time to create a heroic year or a heroic decade or a heroic body of work. If I wanted to be the best writer, the most proficient writer I could be over a one week period, I would not sleep and I would exist on a diet of Red Bull, Celsius, espresso, and cigarettes. And truly, I think if I did that for one week, I would produce an enormous volume of very high quality work. That would be a heroic week. But if I tried to build a career writing like that, my writing would go to crap. And that is the trap of optimizing for short-term intensity for what plays really well, for what makes us feel heroic versus long-term progress, which is much more a function of consistency. It's not to say that there aren't times to be intense. It's not to say that there aren't times to go to the well. There absolutely are. One of my friends and collaborative partners, Steve Magnus, calls this going to see God. There are times in every pursuit where we want to go see God. But the only way that we give ourselves the fitness, the ability to have that intensity is by being super consistent. We have to build up to those moments when we go see God. And even then, we can only go see God a few times a year at most.

There's this popular framework in personal development and in performance that is just get 1% better every day. And as a mindset, I really agree with it and I like it. What it says is that you don't always have to hit home runs. You just have to put the ball in play, right? You don't have to be a hero. Just show up every day and just get a little bit better. Just get 1% better every day. And as a mindset, that is a wonderful driver of consistency. However, what often happens is that people start to take that a little bit too literally, and they expect that they'll actually get 1% better every day. But progress doesn't work like that. If I got 1% better every day as a powerlifter, my deadlift would be over 1,000 pounds right now. I'd be the best deadlifter to ever live. It's not. If I got 1% better every day as a writer, I would have nine Pulitzer Prizes by now. But I don't. So how progress actually works is when we're relatively new to something, we get more than 1% better every day. We get 100% better every day. Then we get 70% better, 50% better, 20% better, 10% better. And then we get to this phase where we're making these little incremental gains. We're getting 1% better every day. And that sense of concrete progress is so addictive. It's so motivating. But what happens to anyone on a journey of progress is that eventually they hit a plateau and they stop getting 1% better every day. And at this point, the motivation has got to shift from these observable concrete bits of progress to curiosity about what you're doing, into commitment, into an unwavering consistency that acknowledges that sometimes you are going to get a little bit better, but sometimes for a week, for a month, maybe even a year, you might be on a plateau where you don't yet see observable progress.

But if you keep showing up underneath the surface, you're building experience, you're building progress. To bring this point to life in the book, I tell the story of the world champion powerlifter, Lane Norton. And Lane Norton deadlifted 723 pounds. So for his age and weight class, the best in the world. Guess what Lane Norton deadlifted 10 years prior? 715 pounds. So over 10 years, Lane Norton added eight pounds to his deadlift. So he wasn't getting 1% better every day. He wasn't even getting 1% better every year. He was getting about 0.8% better every year. Now, if you divide 0.8% by 365, I would need someone that's better at math to tell me, but there would be a decimal and a few zeros. So if Lane Norton was addicted to that kind of progress, if Lane Norton said, I just need to get 1% better every day, he would have quit. He worked 10 years to gain less than a percentage point of performance. And I asked Lane, I said, what kept you on the path? And he said, it was curiosity about the craft. It was self-discovery. It was community. It was commitment. It was discipline. And it was this mindset that whether or not I made observable progress, I would stay consistent. There's a lot of fascinating research that comes out of sports science as the main field that shows that when athletes increase their acute training load, which is often defined as what you do this week, by more than 10% of their chronic training load, which is often defined as what you've done the past month, rates of injury and illness skyrocket. So what that means is that if you try to take too big of a jump from your historic body of work, from what you've been doing, you set yourself up to get injured to burnout. So while that is very measurable in sport, in my reporting, I saw this in just about every field, that when we go on these benders of just trying to do an enormous amount of work, when we get caught up in hustle culture and we try to be hero of the day or hero of the week, we have a really good day or a really good week. But then the following month or two months or in some cases year goes to crap.

And then you end up on this performance trajectory where you have a couple of great days, but in between those great days are shitty months. And that's not how lasting progress is made. You don't go to the gym and kill yourself once a week. to gain muscle and to gain fitness. You gotta go to the gym four days a week. And in order to go to the gym four days a week, you can't kill yourself on any one because the goal isn't to destroy yourself. The goal is to build a consistent rhythm that allows you to incrementally gain over time. If you're interested in establishing consistency for yourself toward a goal, here are a couple ideas that can help. You generally want to stop one rep short or one sentence short or one meaning short. So very rarely do you just want to leave it all out there on any given day. You want to have a little bit in the tank so that you can pick up that rhythm the next day. Another way to think about it is you want most efforts to be somewhere between a 5 and a 7 out of 10. Because once you start tapping into that 8, 9, 10 out of 10, You're drawing from the bank that you're going to need for the rest of the week or the rest of the month. If you go below a 5 out of 10, you can kind of get into that easy going through the motions, you're not really challenging yourself zone. But a 5 to 7 out of 10, a just manageable challenge, that is like the proximate zone of consistency, the proximate zone of development. And then the final thing I'd say is be an anthropologist of your own progress. So look back at the times that you overshot the target. And what led you to do that? Was it a lack of confidence? Was it insecurity? Was it comparing yourself to what other people do? And how can you try to short circuit that temptation in the future? Patience means understanding that there's no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. Every great accomplishment, every great attainment, every great achievement in science, in the arts, in sports, in business, it was always years in the making.

So we've got to play the long game. We have to commit to showing up through those ups and downs and turns and setbacks and highs and lows. And we've got to zoom out and really give ourselves a chance to stay on the path over a long period of time and not rush our progress. Because when we rush our progress, we get in our own way. That's when we get injured, when we burn out. I think it's a very natural human inclination to want to rush. And I think that it's perpetuated by the modern world, which is very high velocity. Everything moves fast. The news cycle moves fast. Entertainment moves fast. Our cars move fast. We communicate in microseconds with the click of a button. There's so much velocity in life. But the path of excellence, of making progress in a heartfelt pursuit, it's often a nine inning game. It takes time. And you can't rush your way through a nine inning game. And as badly as you might want to be in the bottom of the seventh, it could just be that you're in the top of the third. When thinking about patience is a integral factor of excellence, it's really important to understand and expect plateaus. Plateaus are a feature because they're what happens when you stop getting 1% better every day. And in many ways, when you're on the plateau, that's when all the interesting stuff happens, when you can't predict progress, when it becomes nonlinear, when you really have to lean into discipline and you have to practice your values and find the rewards intrinsically because you're not getting that external validation and that external little dopamine hit of progress. Plateaus are also a feature because generally speaking, before we have a breakthrough, we experience a plateau. So it's like pounding a stone. And the stone might crack on the 32nd pound, but the first 31 pounds, you're building tension. And even though you're not seeing the stone crack, tension is building in the stone.

And when we work on goals, we're going to get to a point when we need to build that tension, when we're going to be on this plateau. And if we stick to our process, if we stay consistent, we give ourselves the best chance at eventually having the breakthrough. Micro objectives are so important in the pursuit of big goals because they keep you really present. So let's use the metaphor of a mountain again. If you're constantly looking at the peak of the mountain at the start of your climb, you might get really discouraged because it's quite far away. You might also trip and fall because you're not looking down, you're not climbing where your feet are. But if instead of looking at the peak of the mountain, you say, my goal for today is to gain momentum, 200 meters, 300 meters, whatever it might be in elevation, then instead of having to look all the way up at the peak of the mountain and be overwhelmed and potentially trip, you can just look up at the next section. And that is such a powerful focusing mechanism to keep you climbing where your feet are. And this is true on an actual mountain, but it's also true metaphorically. The other reason that micro objectives are really important is because they serve as a motivating force. Right. If you view the mountain is just getting to the peak and the peak might take four months, it's really hard to sustain motivation. But if you give yourself some contrived little victories along the way, some milestones, you can feel that that progress being made in route to the bigger goal. A profound example of this that's not a mountain climber, but another athlete, comes from the bobsledder Kelly Humphreys. Kelly Humphreys is a three-time gold medalist and a five-time world champion. She's competed in five Olympics. So you can do the math. She's been atop this sport for 20 years. Just incredible longevity. And I asked Kelly, I said, Kelly, tell me about your goals. She said, my goal is really simple. My goal is to win a gold medal every four years. And I joked, I said, simple, simple doesn't mean easy. And then she said, here's how I go about this goal. I break that big goal of win a gold medal every four years down into two by two years. And the first two years is about building a base. And the second two years is about sharpening the edge of the sword. And then each of those two year increments gets broken down into one year. And each year has a specific training focus, a specific training objective. Each year gets broken down into quarters. Each quarter gets broken down into months. Each month gets broken down into weeks. And each week gets broken down into days. And every day, I just have to show up and execute my workout. That to me is this wonderful example of a process over outcome mindset that embraces the power of consistency and that requires a lot of patience. So there is this really nice interplay between setting goals, which again, gives your path, gives your activities some form. Committing to consistency, which is what keeps you working toward your goal. And then having an attitude of patience, which is what allows you to play the long game to give your consistency a chance to manifest into progress. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early, ad-free.