YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Stulberg

lines on the record: 88
first: 2026-01-25
most recent: 2026-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, no, there you go. Well, then maybe that's a plug for my book. I think you might be the first person ever to have said that. So I'll take it.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He combines these two qualities. He is the mastercraftsperson, the best in the world at the short story format. And whatever the opposite of arrogant is, just like humble beyond belief and kind and warm and giving. So when I think about how I would like to be perceived back to core values, bringing some of these themes together, I often think about George Saunders. He's also been happily married for 30 plus years. He lives off in nature. He's not really one for the scene. He cares deeply about his craft and being a good person. So he's an enormous role model to me.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“George Saunders. Don't even have to finish the sentence George Saunders is, and I've never actually met him. I've just studied his work and I've heard him in other interviews. We've exchanged emails. George Saunders is the best at what he does. He is the best short story writer and I think the best living novelist. If you haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo, read it. Just make sure you read my book first because if you read his book first and then read mine, I'm in trouble. He's just the ultimate craftsperson. And there's nothing romantic about how he works. He lays brick by brick. That's how he teaches writing. He is the opposite of the Shakespearean lightning strikes passion idea. He is a craftsperson, right? He chisels away. It is extremely hardened, meticulous process, but he is the warmest, just most kind, softest person. And I am utterly convinced that is because his work is so hard. And the fact that his work is so hard has made him so soft and so kind.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then what's the point of it all? I mean, you could tell me that I could write 10 best-selling books, but if I'm a miserable asshole, I don't really care. I want to be a good person.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the point of it all? Like, we're all going to die one day. And I think the point of it all is to try to love deeply and make a contribution. And I think that if you go about what you're doing with care and intention and you make yourself vulnerable in the process of doing it, you can't help but become stronger, kinder, and wiser because life is hard in trying to do big things is hard. And in the process, it's going to make you softer. It makes you into a humble badass. Like you can't help but be a humble badass because you realize that it's really tough and you realize that other people that are stepping in the arena are going through the same challenges. So on the one hand, you become very hardened by the pursuit of excellence. But on the other hand, it softens you quite a bit. And you get to live in that paradox of being a humble badass. And I think that if we're not working towards those qualities, those more intrinsic characters.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What matters is that you pick something with meaningful and then you step back out of the normal day-to-day grind to really reflect on it and to celebrate it.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we're already going to start training camp for the next season. So he'd schedule these, as you mentioned, these elaborate team dinners. And the point of a team dinners was to just mark time to step back from the grind and to reflect on the relationships that the teammates were forging and how the team was playing and where they were going. And what I take out of this is that we can all do this in our own life. Like if we are type A pushers, we're going to go, go, go. In a blind spot is that we go, go, go, go so fast that we never step back to pause to celebrate, to savor, to grieve, to learn, to reflect. And much like we need to think about rest as a part of the work, I also think if the goal is to not just be great for a year, but to be great for a career, we need to think about having these completion rituals is a part of the work. And what's nice about them is we get to define our own completion. It can be the day that you finish raising the fund. It can be the next big hire that you make. It can be one year of being in business. It doesn't matter what it is per se.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because without those milestones and points of completion, it can very much feel like we're just kind of floating amorphously. And every accomplishment bleeds into the next. And when we never get to step back and take stock of the effort that we exerted and the person that we're becoming and the success or failure that we had. So Greg Popovic is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, like you mentioned. And the NBA season is long. It is a grind to 82 games. And if you're lucky, you make the playoffs, it's more. And what ends up happening is this thing that should be the most joyful thing in the world, coaching and playing on the biggest stage at the highest level in the planet becomes this joyless grind. You're just on the road. You're going from city to city. You're constantly playing. And Popovich realized this, and he's one of the greatest coaches, I would argue probably the greatest coach across any sport, the most winning basketball coach ever that we can say definitively in what Popovich said is like, no, no, no. I got to break this season up. Like we need some completion rituals. Because otherwise, we're just going to wait till the end of the season.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I love that you ask about this. There's a chapter in the book on rituals and completion. And excellence is a never-ending path. When you get to the top of one mountain, there's another mountain to climb. But that doesn't mean that it's not important to inject milestones in points of completion”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just think that is the wrong approach to greatness. And to his credit, David Goggins is a great social media marketer. He's got an enormous following. But he's not world-class at anything. He's never won a race. The people that are actually winning races are not always angry and suffering. They love what they do. They love the craft. They find joy in it. That doesn't mean that they're not intense. It doesn't mean they're not fierce. It doesn't mean that sometimes they can't put a chip on their shoulder. But they have reverence for what they do and they find it fun and joyful. And once we lose that, that's, again, that's a sign to reevaluate how we're spending our time and energy and the people around us.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, so on and so forth. But another one of these misnomers, kind of like fear self discipline and fear self-kindness going together is that intensity and joy can't coexist. And that's utter bullshit. There is so much joy to be found in working intensely toward a meaningful goal. There's a famous coach, Mark Wetmore. He coached the Colorado Buffalo's cross-country team during their heyday, and he said, to be serious is one of the greatest joys there is. And what I get out of that is, again, to care deeply about something, to give something your all to try to master a craft, like it's an extremely joyful thing. If it aligns with your values, again, if you're mimicking someone else, these are constant themes. If you're alienated from what you're doing, then it's not going to be very joyful. But if it aligns with your values, you should love it. There's this influencer that people like, his name's David Goggins. He gives a great hype speech, but he's always angry and he's always suffering.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, not every day has to be joyful. Not every moment has to be joyful. But the totality of the pursuit should be full of joy. If it's not fun, you're not going to last and you're not going to perform your best. So you better learn how to have fun. What ends up happening is that there's all these joy-killing vampires. And it's exactly what you said. It tends to be when we're overscheduled or when we let the minor cannibalize the majors. We stop keeping the main thing, the main thing, and we start to become resentful. It's got all these emails. I'm overscheduled. I'm busy. I'm tight. I'm pressured. And no one works well from that. So I actually think that a loss of joy is a really good first sign to evaluate how are you spending your time and energy. And when you do this, what you're inevitably going to find is you're spending too much time and energy on superfluous bullshit and not enough time on the main thing. Now, if you're not finding joy when you're doing the main thing, then there's some more serious questions to ask. Are you doing the main thing in the right way? Are you doing it with the right?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a picture of Robert Persig in a first edition copy of Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because I'm inspired by that book and I want to carry that torch. I have a banner that sits above my desk that says give a damn. And it reminds me that I need to care deeply about what I'm doing. I've got another banner from my favorite recording artist, Jason Ispulov, that says lucky to have the work. So whenever I get frustrated about those emails, I have to respond to, I can remind myself. I'm actually very lucky to have this work. And the way that we set up our physical environment can really have an impact on our ability to settle into work and to continue to work in a values aligned way. It's back to something we talked about earlier is we live, the default ecosystem is very discordant with excellence in our values. So what I try to do is I try to set up a micro ecosystem that I work in that has that gravitational pull toward excellence and toward my values.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most important thing I'm doing is what you said last is keeping the technology at bay. So right now the room that I'm recording in, my email client is completely closed. You're on my full screen. In my phone, I'd have to go through my garage and down a floor to get to my phone. So there's no temptation. There's no urge to check the phone. And even if I don't check it, the phone's not there to remind me of all the emails that are undoubtedly stacking up because I want to be here fully focused with you. I write the same way. So when I sit down to write, when I sit down to read in the library in my office, there's no digital device in there because even if I don't check it, the amount of cognition and willpower requires not to check would encroach on what I'm doing and how I'm thinking. So that's the most important is what is there an absence of? There's an absence of digital distraction. Then what do I surround myself with is essentially, like you said, objects and artifacts that bring out quality. It's art from my favorite sculptor who's a close friend, Emile Alzamora.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main thing of my job is to read and write. But if I don't block off time, undistracted time to read and write, I'm never going to read and write because all this other stuff is going to encroach on it. So it's completely twisted and inverted to try to fit reading and writing in. That's the main thing. Everything should fit in around reading and writing. But if I don't block off deep work time to read and write, it's not going to happen. The way that this is from the practice of grounding in a prior book that I wrote, I wrote that your calendar is a moral document. Like, don't tell me about what you value. Show me your calendar. Show me how you spend your time. So the things that are important to us, we need to create time for undistracted focus on those things.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He just made it so concrete. He said, put it on your calendar. Block off an hour, two hours, one day a week, two days a week, three days a week, every day, whatever it is, and during that time, have a goal that you want to work toward and work toward that goal and expect the first 10 to 15 minutes to feel a little bit rough and edgy and face some resistance and just be disciplined, stick to it, get through that resistance, and that's how you actually make progress. It's so important because I can pull up my email and see I'm behind 100 emails. But responding to emails is not the main thing of my job. I can pull up social media and say that, oh, I'm not posting enough. But posting on social media.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's something that Kell and I obviously talk about all the time. And that's right, when Kyle wrote Deep Work, it was predominantly a book, not predominantly, it was exclusively a book about knowledge workers and how to start to deal with at the time it was email. Wasn't even really Slack, but how to deal with email and in all the ubiquitous distraction and knowledge work and carve out times for this deep effortful, undistracted work to make progress on big projects. And since then, and what I've realized and in conversation with Cal is that it's no longer deep work. It's really deep living. And Cal's actually working on a book that'll come out, I think, a year or year and a half from now called The Deep Life, which is very similar to pursuing an excellent life. Like there's a lot of complimentary nature between our ideas. Unsurprisingly, we talk for hours and hours every week about these ideas. But I think that deep work is important, but it's really just deep connection, deep effort. It's that lack of alienation. It's saying no to distraction. What Cal did really well is.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often listening to music, engaging in my neighborhood or my community, so going to a community event, something like that. And then longer than an hour out in nature. So maybe at the half a day hike or going camping or just something to get out of nature to really reset. Just do those things, then I tend to be in a pretty good spot. So rather than try to have all this elaborate complex stuff, it's like, what are the basics? And honestly, the monthly stuff, I don't always hit that. But if I can hit the daily and the weekly stuff, I know that I'm going to have a strong foundation from which to perform my best.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These for me are a digital Sabbath, which is an idea I stole from Brad Feld, which essentially says once a week I'm not going to have access to my phone or my computer for somewhere between 12 and 24 hours. And that's my time for rest and renewal. It is one longer walk outside, ideally two or three, but over an hour where I can really let that creative engine start to churn and reconnect with my creativity in that way. And then it's planned with friends. is someone that has a tendency to become obsessed and a little bit of a workaholic, something that goes by the wayside is social life. And I don't need to hang out with friends every night. I don't need to be the star of the party. But like once a week, it's good to get together with friends. It doesn't need to be an elaborate social outing. It can be training with my buddy at the gym. It can be going to dinner with another couple. But just some social interaction is good for me once a week. And then I have these three monthly practices. And those monthly practices are some way to reconnect with myself in a spiritual way. For me, that's.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's three things every day. Pretty simple. It's an hour to an hour and a half of deep focus work. So distraction free, phone in the other room, making effortful, tangible progress on a project I care about. It's at least 45 minutes of movement, sometimes that's going to the gym and having a formal training session, but that can also be taken a walk. And then it's not biting evening sleepiness. So we've got young kids. The kids are tired. They're in bed by hate. Often I get tired at nine. I don't fight the sleepiness. I just, I go to bed. Sleep is really important. That's it. If I exercise for 45 minutes, I even exercise. If I move in my body for 45 minutes, if I make sure to block off an hour and 90 minutes of deep focus work on good days, I get more, but that's the minimum. And if I don't fight evening sleepiness and I do that 70 to 80% of the time, day to day, I'm really good. Then I zoom out and I ask myself, what are my three weekly practices?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, whatever the three things I need to do every day that will put me in a position to do that, whatever the three things I need to do once a week, and then whatever the three things I need to do once a month. And for me, it's helpful to go through to get really concrete.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, first, let's talk about the problem I'm trying to overcome here, which is I think that we're in this moment where everyone wants to find the perfect routine. And what ends up happening is people build these truly, these like 19 step morning routines where you have to do 19 things before 7 a.m. And the goal is not to be the world champion of having an elaborate routine. The goal is to be a great athlete, a great parent, a great fund manager, a great physician, a great musician, a great leader, a great coach, so on and so forth. So your routine shouldn't stress you out. Like you shouldn't work for your routine. Your routine should work for you. That's the first thing. So the goal is not an elaborate routine. The goal is to get yourself ready to do what you need to do. In my case, that's really simple. Like I want to be the best writer I can be. I want to be the best coach I can be and I want to be the best family man I can be like those are the big main things in my life So rather than have all these routines that I drive myself nuts trying to do it here to I simply say”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It right that's the me, but within that, there's probably tons of complexity to do that correct. Yeah. But that's it. That is the whole thing. And once you lose sight of that, then again, you start to run into all sorts of problems.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Majoring in the minors. They were doing all this stuff that's supposed to support the training at the expense of the actual training. And it's just really important not to fall into that trap. You never want to invert the period. Like some of this stuff actually does make a difference in the margin, but it only makes a difference if you're actually spending 99.99% of time on the fundamentals. And this is true for every craft. And then every craft has a whole bunch of kabuki that people tried to sell you to make a buck. And you got to tune out the kabuki that people sell you to try to make a buck and nail your fundamentals.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And secrets and queak fixes and supplements, and on and on and on, you can spend 99% of your time and energy chasing all of these answery things and not actually focusing on the fundamentals when it's the fundamentals that are going to move you towards excellence. This expression first came to me from an old time throwing coach named Dan John. He's coached a whole bunch of world-class discus shot put and hammer throwers. And he said about 10 years ago in the gym, he started to notice something really interesting, which does he go to the gym and all these people, they'd be spending 30 minutes foam rolling and stretching and mobilizing and doing breath work and all these elaborate warm-ups. And then when it came time to train, they trained for 15 minutes and they wouldn't even train that hard. And then they'd go home because they had to do all their recovery. They had to take their supplements and put on their normatech compression stockings and on and take their cold plunge and on and on and on. And he said that they were.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the case of the Bob Sledter, Kelly Humphries, she's trained for an Olympic cycle every four years. And what she told me is that while you break that four years down into two by two year blocks, and each of those two years has a purpose. The first two years is foundation building, the second two years is sharpening the knife. Then you take each of those two-year blocks and you break it down into a year, and each year has a purpose. Then you take each year and you break it down into a quarter, and each quarter has an emphasis. And then you take each quarter, you break it down to a month, and each month has a goal. And then each month gets broken down to a week, and each week has an objective, and then each week gets broken down to a day, and each day has a workout. And how do I become the best bobsledter in the world? It's by executing the workout in front of me today. That is the core of a process mindset. So yes, you need that big goal, but then, man, you have to break it down into these small component chunks that you actually can execute on day in and day out. Keep the main things, the main things. In today's world, we talked about this a little bit earlier. There are so many distractions in Bright and Shiny objects and hacks.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that excellence requires a process mindset. And what that means is, yes, you pick a big goal. And once you pick that big goal, then the next step is immediately to ask yourself, what are the levers that will help me accomplish that big goal? What are the things I need to do? And what are the things that I actually need to do versus whatever the things that everyone else is doing? And those can look very different. Once you define the things that actually bend the needle, for each of those, you want to ask yourself, like, all right, well, how do I break it down into these incremental steps?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Altogether. So the biggest badasses I know, like ultra marathon champions, head of Marine Battalions, like just true badasses in every sense of the word, when you peel back the onion, these people also have immense self-kindness and immense compassion for themselves because they realize that what they are trying to do is hard and they've learned to have their own back. So it's not a self-kindness or a self-compassion that lets go of accountability and says anything goes. It's a self-kindness and self-compassion that realizes that doing hard things is hard and that you can have your own back as you try to do those hard things.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True that you need to have personal responsibility and you have to take accountability, and sometimes you do have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. All of that is true. To be excellent requires fierce self-discipline. But the only way you're going to be able to sustain that level of self-discipline is by also learning to be kind to yourself and have your own back. Because pushing yourself hard, doing hard things, being someone who cares deeply. We talked about the vulnerability involved. Caring deeply about starting a company or a fund or being an Olympic athlete and feeling like you're letting down your wife or your kids at the same time or vice versa, feeling like you're letting down your colleagues and your coach. Like it's really, really hard. It is extremely hard to try to be excellent. And if you can't acknowledge that and be kind to yourself, then you're never going to last. Because if every time you step into the arena and fail or make a misstep or come up short, you judge yourself, then you beat yourself up. Eventually you're going to stop. It's not fun. You're going to stop stepping into the arena.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so you go to a bookstore and you see these two shelves. And one shelf is the self-discipline shelf. And these are books that are written by Navy SEALs and Marines and football coaches. And they say you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. You have to take accountability. The world is a cruel, unforgiving place, and you have to exert your agency in it. There's another shelf that is the meditation yoga teacher self. In those books, I'll say you have to be really kind to yourself. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, which is all the more reason that you have to be kind to yourself. And let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya. And these are pitted against each other as opposites, but in my study of excellence, what I found is that the people who really embody excellence and get the best out of themselves, they take those two qualities and they combine them. So it is true that no one is going to do your bidding for you.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of making these little tweaks that in hindsight seem so small, but when you're in the thick of a depression seem major, and it's just a commitment to show up, even when it feels hard and when it feels impossible. And I wouldn't wish a clinical depression on my worst enemy. Wouldn't wish it on anyone. There are no silver linings. I don't like that term because it's just pain and suffering. However, if you're fortunate enough to get to the other side of that, it certainly makes showing up on a normal bad day a lot easier.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and it wasn't a white knuckling plugging away necessarily. Like, I had a wonderful therapist that was holding my hand as I kept plugging away. But at a certain point, I realized that there wasn't going to be any quick fix to this. I was just going to have to show up and refuse to quit. And when you're depressed, refusing to quit means like you just, you value your life more than the loss of your life. And you show up as best as you can and you trust the process.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm glad that comes through because I think that I want to become known for my consistency in all facets of life. Is a writer, is an athlete, is a father and is a husband more than anything. I want to be known for my consistency. And what that means is you just show up. Like there's no negotiation. You show up and you get what you have to get out of yourself on the day. And then you sleep at night. And then you rinse and repeat. And you just do that for a decade and you're going to be great. Everyone wants the secret to greatness. But the secret is there is no secret. Like you have a process. You have a system. You pick a thing. You do that thing for a decade. You learn from the greats. You read a lot of books. You stay endlessly curious. And then a decade later, you start to get pretty dang good at that thing. And so few people do it because they're all chasing the secret. But consistency and patience, like that is the secret.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyone can perform great on their great days, but a part of excellence is also getting a little bit more out of your bad days. And that's all wrapped up in this notion of consistency little by little becomes a lot. You just constantly chip away and the day-to-day work can seem mundane and the day-to-day progress sometimes isn't even measurable, but the compounding effect gets you to something huge.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is what you do on your bad days. I call it raising the floor. I think what you do on your bad days is arguably more important than what you do on your great days. Because great days are magical. For all that we know about human performance, it's very hard to engineer a great day. If you commit to the fundamentals and you show up day in and day out, they're just going to happen. And when they do, you enjoy them and you ride the wave. But bad days, we have a lot of agency over. So when we're not performing our best, when we're not feeling great, how can we make those bad days just a little bit better? Instead of spiraling and catastrophizing, how can we nip those bad days in the bud? Or how can we prevent a bad day from turning into a bad week? How can we prevent a bad week from turning into a bad month? In investment terms, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's kind of like in a really rough market, you're going to lose. But how can you lose less than the competition or how can you minimize your losses? And over time, the fund that can minimize their losses in rough markets performs just as well as the fund that crushes a good market. Anyone can crush a good market.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this will be easy for your audience, I think, because if you want to generate wealth and you want to, you know, let's say you want to go from 1 million to 10 million dollars, you can make one enormous bet and hope for the best. Or you could make a bunch of small investments over time and have those small, smart investments with a high probability of return compound. And maybe you've got a couple listeners that have made that one big bet, but my guess is most people would say, no, you take the compounding route. Like that's how you generate wealth. That's how you make progress in your portfolio. That same law applies to making progress in anything. I think that we all too often fall for like having a heroic day or a heroic week or being super intense when what leads to sustainable lasting excellence is really a resolute, relentless, consistency. So it's showing up day in and day out and making deposits in the bank. And part and parcel of this.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way home from work. But you also see this in more macro cycles. One of my favorite The idea for Hamilton came to him on a vacation. He credits taking a vacation, stepping away from work, reading Chernow's biography of Hamilton, not reading it because he was doing research for a play, reading it because it was a biography that was recommended to him from a friend. And on vacation, it just clicked that, oh, I should reenact Hamilton as a Broadway musical. Imagine if Miranda wouldn't have allowed himself to take a break because he would have said, I need to push. I want to be a world-class. I want to be a world-class musical director and playwright. I can't take two weeks off. But by taking those two weeks off, he had the biggest breakthrough of his career. And I'm sure investors that are listening to this show have all had the experience of just having that rainmaking idea that came when you finally took a break.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for the longest time, the researchers thought this was a blood flow issue and that by taking a walk or swimming or exercising, you had increased blood flow that helped with the creativity and problem solving. But the mechanics, the physiology of that just never really made sense. And it also doesn't explain the phenomenon of why we have these thoughts when we're drive finger in the shower because you're not having increased blood flow when you're sitting still or standing still in the shower or certainly not in a car. But what all these activities have in common is just what you said. They're fairly implicit, so you don't have to think too hard about walking or showering or driving, but you have to think just enough about what you're doing to occupy those effortful thinking parts of your brain without stressing them too much. And it's that perfect mix that allows your default mode network, which is just a fancy way of saying your subconscious mind to come online and have those breakthrough aha moments. You see this in a micro sense when you take a 10 minute walk or a five minute shower where you're on the subway.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. And the funny thing is, I was actually working on my prior book, Master of Change. I was working on the promotional plans. So the book had been written, but it was before that book came out. And I was stuck. I was working on an op-ed for the New York Times, an adaptation from the book. And I was wholly stuck on the op-ed. So I said, I'm going to practice what I preach. I'm going to go take a walk. And on that walk, I didn't solve the op-ed problem, but I had the idea for this book. And here we are having the conversation.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to think of it as part of being a great performer. My long meandering walks are not something I do at the expense of being a writer. That is an integral part of me being a good writer. And I know this because 40% of my best sentences, I didn't write at the keyboard. I wrote on walks. I carry a notebook with me. I jot that stuff down so I don't lose it. And then I get back to the walk.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, having one day where I really step away, it allows me to come back so much more refreshed with so much more creativity and intensity and insight. Throughout the day, we can take these short micro breaks. It might be a 10 minute walk. There's fascinating research out of Stanford that shows that just after a 10-minute walk, creativity improves by between 40 and 60%. So when you're feeling stuck, there's this tendency to lean in and try to solve the problem. Often the best thing that you can do is step away and take a walk. We inherently know this because everyone has had the experience of being stuck on a problem and then the answer pops into their mind in the shower or on their commute home or while they're walking the dog or in the gym. So on and so forth because it's only when you find a step away that your subconscious mind can come online and do the work of solving some of those thorny problems. So it's a long wind away to the ultimate answer, which is I think that you cannot think of rest and renewal as something that you do at expense of being a great performer.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that if you're a highly driven pusher and if you have these obsessive qualities, you have to stop thinking of rest as something that is separate from the work and start thinking of rest as an integral part of the work. So it has to be built into your program. Athletes know this extremely well. Athletes have recovery days. They have rest days. They are built into the program. So they're not separate from the training. They're a part of their training and they're strategically placed so that they can adapt to the hard work. And I think for cognitive and intellectual pursuits, we need to build in the equivalent of REST breaks and rest days. Now, again, it's going to look very different depending on the person, their phase of life and what they're trying to do. I have come to believe that it's best to work a six-day week for me. So five days, I'm too obsessed. I got it, you know, there's not enough hours in the day. But if I start working seven days a week, what I gain in additional working time, I lose about twofold in the quality of my work because”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control your obsession, or does your obsession control you? And that's a fine line for high performers. And it's very hard to stay on the right side of that line and the stakes are extremely high because you cross over it. And the research shows that it's associated with anxiety, depression, and unethical behavior. I mean, Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos was like fully obsessed with her company and it did not take her to great places.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very dangerous if you're all in all the time. So, how do you have enough structure in your life where you can be all in? Maybe it's a 10 hour day, maybe it's a 12-hour day, maybe it's a 15-hour day, but it can't be 24-7 all the time because you're just going to burn yourself out. And I think that what ends up happening is sometimes we have these stories of reckless subsession in documentaries that get made. But if you really follow like the long arc of these people's careers, they tend not to end so well. Or they tend to accomplish a lot of what they did in spite of their reckless obsession, not because of it. And I think most very successful high performers somewhere along the way, they figure out that their obsession is trending towards the reckless variety and they figure out how to control it so it doesn't control them. So you're right. It is a little bit of just linguistical difference, but there's an important nuance, which is not don't be obsessed, but it's do you.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's at the forefront of excellence. It does take an outsized amount of your cognition, of your energy, of your time, but you still control it. It doesn't control you. And what I mean by that is that if you've got a kid that really needs you or that is sick and in the hospital and you need to step away for two hours, you can step away for those two hours. Well, you can realize when you're in so deep that you are no longer thinking clearly because you're just fatigued. And you actually need to step outside of your domain, read outside of your domain, go walk the halls of companies that are outside of your industry to get these new perspectives. You can do that. Another very helpful way to think about it is that in order to be excellent, you have to be all in.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is a great tension, and I'm glad that you're asking this question. So I think that there are different flavors of obsession. In reckless obsession to me is when you cannot stop doing what you're doing even when you want to stop. So it's very much like an addiction, okay? So you cannot stop thinking about the work or doing the work even when you want to, even when you think actually stepping away from it would be good because it would allow you to renew, to recover, to take that new perspectives. But you're just so freaking addicted to that feeling of tightening the screwdriver. It's like this compulsion to keep going. That kind of obsession, and not just in my reporting or my opinion, in the research, that kind of obsession is not associated with high performance. It's actually associated with the degradation in performance. That's reckless obsession. I think a healthier obsession is you care extremely deeply about what you're doing, right?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your body looks like all the evidence shows that if you care about your brain and your cognition, then the number one thing you can do is stay relatively fit. So maybe instead of exercising five days a week for 45 minutes during that season, you're only going to exercise three days a week for 30 minutes, but you're never going to leave it completely behind. So the minimum effective dose is just that. It's whatever allows you to make sure that nothing important in your identity house completely goes moldy. You got to tend the room just enough so that you can come back to it. Because one of the ultimate laws, I think, of anything, I got this from fitness, but it's true in anything is that it's easier to maintain than to build. So once you've built something, it's not that hard to maintain. You can just check in every now and then and keep a quality, keep a capacity strong. But once you let it go, completely, it takes a long time to build it back.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean by it is if you're in a season of disharmony because you're going all in on something. So let's say that you're trying to raise a fund that's bigger than you've ever raised before. Maybe you're trying to start a business. Well, you're going to spend the vast majority of your time and energy in the fund or the business room of your identity house, the entrepreneur room of your identity house. So then the question that you have to ask yourself is, well, how do I stay in touch with the marriage room, with the parent room, with the health room? Enough so that those things don't blow up on me and fall apart. And this is where the concept of a minimum effective dose comes in. So what's the minimum effective dose to keep a healthy marriage while you go all in on being an entrepreneur? It's going to look different for everyone. For some people, it's one date night a week. For some people, it's one date night a month. For some people, it's three family dinners a week. For some people, it's five family dinners a week. For some people, it's two family dinners a week. For health, we all should take our health extremely seriously, even if you don't give a damn about what”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To rupture in any one room. Now, what I like about this analogy, and some listeners might be thinking, well, Brad, you just said don't be balanced, but now you're talking about a house with different rooms. The rooms don't have to be the same sizes. You don't have to spend the same amount of time in each room. If you're pursuing excellence, you won't. You'll be spending a lot of time in one room. You just want to make sure that none of the important rooms get moldy because you don't know what season of life, you're going to need to rely on those rooms in. So rather than think about perfect balance doing everything always, I think about what are the rooms in my identity house? What room do I want to be spending the most time in right now? And how can I make sure of it the other rooms don't get multi? And if you do that, it allows you to zero in and have these seasons of deep intensity and focus on one or two things without losing a sense of who you are in the process.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Introduce in the book is to think about identity like a house. So if you have a house and the house only has one single room in it and that room catches fire or floods, it's extremely dislocating. You're going to have to move out of the house. You're not going to know where you live. You're going to have to find a new house. But if you have a house that has multiple rooms in it, in one room catches fire or floods, you can go seek refuge in the other rooms while you work on resolving the fire or flood. And it's so helpful to think of our identities the same way. So if you have an identity house with only one room, only room in your identity house is fund manager. Well, then when things get chaotic or something goes wrong at the fund, it's going to be extremely unmooring. But if you have a room in your identity house for husband, wife, or for parent or for athlete or for religious member, community member, for coffee lover, for book nerd, whatever the things may be, then you start to diversify your sense of self a little bit, which makes you much less fragile.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT