YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Stulberg

lines on the record: 88
first: 2026-01-25
most recent: 2026-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
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“And you can go back to your values and you can say, all right, of the areas of my life where I can devote time and energy right now, what are the areas that align with my values? What are the areas that I want to go all in on? And most people can be highly focused on somewhere between two and three things at max at any given point of time. Now, what's fascinating in my reporting of highly successful high performers who aren't jerks, who aren't assholes, like who are also good people, who are deep into their career, in some cases long retired from their professional life. When you zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don't look balanced at all. They appear to be going all in on one or two things. But when you zoom out and you look across the totality of their life, they actually seem quite balanced. So they have different seasons of life for emphasizing different parts of their life. Now, that's a beautiful intellectual concept. How do you actually put this into practice? In the framework that I”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Balance is it's popularly conceived tends to mean you're going to devote equal proportion of time and energy to equal things. So you're going to be the best husband and wife, the best parents, the best friends. You're going to master a craft. You're going to be a great employee or a great manager or a great CEO. You're going to stay up on all the latest pop culture. You're going to have a fantasy football team. You're going to cook dinner. You're going to have a clean house. You're going to coach the kids' sports teams and on and on and on. It's sold to us as the self-help idea, but it just makes you miserable because nobody can do all those things. And as a result of trying, you stretch yourself way too thin and you end up mediocre at best across the board. Now, that is no way to live a deeply meaningful, rich, and fulfilling life. So I think that the antidote to that is to step back and to say, hey, I'm going to have to be an adult here. And I'm going to have to realize that unlike my eight-year-old who wants to do everything, you can't do everything. You have to pick and choose. You have to make trade-offs.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pocket during dinner with your family, and you're constantly peeking under the table to check your email, that is in dissonance with your stated value of presence. So if you want to live a values aligned life, then during dinner, your phone's got to go in the living room, in a drawer somewhere, where it's not on your person. So you go all the way from this high fallution value of presence down to where is my phone going to be during dinner? And that's how you begin to design a values aligned life.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That tends to be another pretty good inroads to qualities that you value. You could also imagine yourself a decade down the road or maybe even longer, maybe 20, 30, 40 years down the road, and you could say if older you was looking back on current you, what would older you be proud of? What kind of person would older you want current you to be? Another good inroads to your values. And I think that if you triangulate between those three things, most people can come up with a nice set of values and then spend some time really defining what each of those terms mean and then putting them to the litmus test of is the way that I'm living my life in alignment with those values. And what ends up happening is you get a very lofty term such as I want to be present. So your value is presence. And then making this up on the fly, let's say that someone defines presence is being fully there for the people and activities I care about. Well, if you've got your cell phone in your”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These five groups, then you take these five groups of terms and you say, well, what's really at the essence? Like what's the word that to me is going to capture this? And that becomes your value. And then you have to define it. So it's easy to say you value presence or wisdom or intellect or health or reputation or family or spirituality, all these buzzwords. But they can't just be on a little three by five note card on your desk. You actually have to understand what they mean because when the rubber meets the road, when you have to make decisions in your life, you can ask yourself, does this align with my value? That's the very methodical way into your values. Now, a couple of people here this and they say that's great. I can't wait to go through that program. Some people say, I don't even know where to begin. You can show me 100 words. I have no idea which ones to pick out. And there, what I would say is that if you think about some people that you really admire and then ask yourself what you admire about those people, like what is it that you admire about them?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that I've come to think about values, and a lot of this is based on clinical psychology research, is they're most powerful when you have between two and five, any more than five of them are really as meaningful and any less than two, you're kind of just all focused on one thing and you never have to deal with the tension of trade-offs. There's a couple inroads to the values, and all of these are outlined in detail in the book. The one that I like is you just start with a list of 100 commonly held values and you pick out whatever one's resonate with you. Most people end up with somewhere between 15 and 30. And then you take those 15 to 30 terms and you group like terms together. And then most people end up with somewhere between three and seven groups. And then if you've got more than five groups, you take those groups and you say, all right, which of these groups are like really core to the person that I want to be, that I aspire toward that I want in my eulogy? I want these things mentioned.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And love, and to build a life around deep care and love is a good life. And to have an alienated life is not a good life. And you're not going to create quality. You're not going to contribute that way.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's at the core of every ancient wisdom philosophy. The Greeks call this arete, and it was held up as maybe the utmost value in ancient Greece. In China, this was called Wuwei in Warring States, China, which was this burgeoning philosophical epoch. And Wuwei was essentially the sense of mastery that you gain by caring deeply about a craft and pursuing it. The Buddhists call this right effort and it is a way of going about what you're doing with full intention in full focus. So like so many things, I think that the ancient wisdom traditions were well ahead of the science. And now in science, we call this flourishing. And now there's a whole performance science, you know, around how do you perform your best? But at the core of it is really the sense of deep care and love, which again all comes back to this dichotomy. Well, what is the opposite of alienation and remove and going through the motions? It's deep.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, yeah, we need those dashboards. We need those metrics. We need all of those things to keep us on the path. But at the end of the day, the same kind of that giving it your all, that caring, that's what love is all about. And love is really satisfying and the pursuit of excellence is really satisfying in whether it is raising a family together or an intimate relationship or Steph Curry hitting a jump shot or building the perfect investment team in your eyes, that is all love.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On his deathbed, Aveeda Donobin was interviewed by a prestigious medical journal, and the interviewer asked him, after all these years, you know, what do you have to say about quality? And you know what he said? He said quality is love. And I just think that that's so beautiful.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love. It's describing love. It's describing excellence. And some of the greatest thinkers on this topic have said that quality and excellence is a lot like love. The founder, it's a short aside, but I think it's an interesting one. The founder of the quality movement in healthcare is a gentleman named Avitas Donabaden. So before Avitas Donabaden, there were no quality metrics for hospitals. They didn't track infections. They didn't track outcomes. It was the Wild West. This is some decades ago. Donabeta came along and he said, this is crazy. You know, we track supply chains in the corporate world, but we're not tracking infection rates after surgery. Like, we need a quality movement. And he engineered the beginning of quality in healthcare. And now it's a gazillion dollar industry, how we measure quality. And it's very meticulous. It's very rigorous. It's very analytical. All good hospitals, they have dashboards and quality metrics, and it's updated in real time. I've been in these hospitals. It's remarkable the level of analytic rigor they bring to this.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get chilled down my spine just hearing you read that quote Hillary Hahn is, I think, the greatest of all time international violin soloists, three-time Grammy winner, does things that no one else has done before. And she says that when she is up there on stage, there is zero thinking happening. Now, there's a lot of thinking before she gets up on stage, and there's a lot of deliberate effort during her practice sessions. But all of that is to prepare her for this moment when she just feels her way through the note and she's totally present and she's totally connected to it. And I write in the book that when I use these terms, the other word that comes up is love. And I actually think that excellence is a lot like love. Because what is caring deeply in repeated practice, in commitment, in consistency, in showing up, in closeness, in falling off the path, and then getting back on the path, like what is that if not describing?”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You. It's that Jerry Seinfeld quote about you work that joke and you put hours, in some cases, months, in some cases years into it, and you get it just right in it lands. The satisfaction that comes from that is just so immense. But it's boring I mean, think about how boring it is to work the same joke for a year. Like, a lot of people would find that very boring.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what I mean by that is, you know, you can choose to have an extravagant social life. You can choose to really pursue status in being on all the current cultural events. But there's only so many hours in the day. And if you really want to master your craft, a lot of the hours in the day have to be devoted towards things that are going to help you master your craft. And if you want to have good relationships, which I believe is a, and I know you feel the same way as a core part to living a good life, you also have to spend a lot of hours towards maintaining those relationships. And that requires foregoing a lot of the bright and shiny objects on the side. In what looks boring from the outside is actually incredibly exciting and interesting from the inside because the deeper that you get on the path of excellence, the more curious you get about what you're doing and about who you're becoming, the more intrinsically rewarding it is. And it's the kind of reward that no fancy car or fancy watch or sense of status will ever give.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist. And what he meant by that is if you want to live a full maximal life and get your all out of yourself in a couple of domains, you've got to be willing to forego a lot of the bullocks, to quote your friend.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limited things I care deeply about. I want to be a great fund manager. I want to be a great investor. I want to be a great athlete. I want to be a great husband. I want to be a great wife. I want to be a great mom. I want to be a great dad. I want to be a great community member. I want to be a great musician. I want to be a great consultant. Well, then you can say, what does it take to do that? And outside of all of this, how do I eliminate all the noise around that to the best of my ability and really focus? And it's simple, but simple doesn't make it easy, but it's simple and it's attainable. And all those people from across domains that you mentioned, they all do this. When you look in at their lives, their lives, they don't look very ordinary. Their extraordinary lives, but not because their genetically such an incredible next level, no, it's because they're willing to say no to a lot of the default to craft a life around the couple things that really matter to them. There's this wonderful quote in the book that came from my mentor, Mike Joyner, and he says that”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. You need to try to engineer an ecosystem around you that is supportive of your values and goals in the pursuit of excellence. And in many ways, it does require intentional design of one's environment, one's physical space, intentional design of one's technology. And to some extent, intentional design of the people with whom you surround yourself, because that's also an enormous impact in part of your environment. Another way to think about it, William, is that all of these objects around us, they have a gravity, a sense of gravity. And that gravity can either pull us toward our goals and toward our values and toward the person we want to become and toward our craft, or it can pull us away from our craft. And the default in many ways is just to be pulled in 19 different directions at once in a very frantic and frenetic way. And trying to move against that gravity is extremely hard. But if you can step back and you can say, here are the”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This illusory promise that if you just do this one thing, if you just do this new hack, this new trick, then, my friend, you'll be happy, you'll be strong, you'll be calm, you'll be more intellectually wise. And it's very tempting to fall for that. I mean, Ponce de Leone searched for the fountain of youth in the 1500s. So the longevity influencers, there's nothing new about this. This is a tale as old as time, and it is extremely tempting, but what can happen is we can cycle from fad to fad, kind of trying to chase this quick fix, which actually gets in the way of the kind of commitment and consistency and intimacy that is required to truly experience the joys and satisfaction of excellence. And you put those two things together, ubiquitous distraction in the grift of pseudo-excellence, and it's the perfect storm for alienation, especially for someone that in good faith really wants to live a good life and wants to be good at a craft and master a craft and have that sense of satisfaction, it's very challenging because this is the environment that we have.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to have two and a half minutes of silence, just a moment to just be with myself, to reconnect with myself. And on the pump, on the screen, there's this woman that starts jabbering about how every problem that you have is figure outable trying to sell me her masterclass. And I sat there and I thought to myself, I can't even connect with myself to fill up my car with gaps. We're just constantly bombarded with distraction and noise, which really gets in the way of intimacy, of knowing ourselves and of intimacy with a craft. So that's one broad bucket is what I'll call the ubiquitous distraction. And the book I call algorithmic mass distraction because it's very much engineered to keep us hooked. The second big bucket is exactly what you alluded to, and I call this pseudo excellence or hustle culture greatness. And this is the entire industrial complex of hacks and quick fixes in 10-day programs and diets, in fads, and on and on and on.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the biggest real challenge here is just distraction is utterly ubiquitous. We walk around with these powerful digital slot machines in our pockets and the reward is actually greater than money. It's existential validation. It's an email, a text message, a like, a comment. It says that you exist in the world and you matter. And it's very, very tempting to just constantly pull down on that lever and try to get that reward. And that can be extremely alienating from whatever it is that you're trying to do. I'll share an example from my own life. It came in the process of writing this book. It was an extremely busy day. I was shuttling my kids from sports that I coach to my daughter's dance class and so on. And they're both in the back of the car. It's extremely loud. They're young. They're arguing over what music we're going to listen to. And the car needs gas. So I get to a gas station and I start to fill up the pump and they're in the car and I finally think to myself.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the rest of the book is essentially well, what's the execution, right? The rituals, the routines, the consistency, the gumption, the sense of patience, the joy, the curiosity, all of these other factors, but it all starts from a place of commitment, caring deeply, involved engagement, and then ensuring that there's good values alignment.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not go your way. And if they don't go your way, if you fail, if you come up short, then you have no excuse. You put your heart into it and it didn't work out. So to care deeply requires guts and it requires vulnerability because there's no self-handicapping. There's nothing to hide behind if things don't go your way. And I think that that is just a prerequisite. It's a precondition to excellence is having that vulnerability and saying, all right, I want to give this project my all. I want to give this fund my all. I want to give this relationship my all. All the while knowing that it might break my heart. But that's okay. That's just the price that I have to pay to have that kind of involved engagement, that kind of intimacy. So there's this deep level of caring and really putting yourself on the line that is necessary for performance at the top level and for excellence. And then it also has to be bounded in a way that has integrity with the person that you are and with your values. And once you have”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working on is also working on us. So, what I've realized is across fields and across domains, people that are really in the pursuit of excellence, they master both parts of that definition. So they create the conditions for deep focus and concentration and commitment and intimacy, herring with what they do, and they're constantly making sure of it the way that they're going about it aligns with their values and the person that they want to become. In the caring part is worth double clicking on because everybody can remember in school, maybe in university, in high school, there were always those kids that were too cool to try. And they sat at the back of the classroom. They always horsed around. They never tried in gym class. They phoned it in, right? Those kids weren't cool. What they actually were, they were insecure and they were scared of failing. Because when you give something your all, when you care deeply, when you step into the arena, you open yourself up to vulnerability because things”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In so many ways. Let's start with my definition of excellence. Excellence is involved engagement. It's caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. And I really think of this definition as having two integral parts. So the first is involved engagement or caring deeply. There has to be a sense of commitment, a sense of focus and intention that I want to give my all to this craft. The second part, something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals, that is going to live in the eye of the beholder. But it can't just be mimicry. You can't be pursuing something because you think it's what you should be doing or what other people think you should be doing. You can't just be pursuing it for some external results that you think you're going to get at the top of the mountain. No, you have to be pursuing it because it is an alignment with your values with the person that you want to become. It gets back to this paradox that we think that we're working on something, but what we're”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ground at the release point, no, you just know it's beautiful. And it sounds like that's the experience that a skilled investor might have is they walk the halls or they look at the documents of a company. There's just this innate feeling that we are so deeply drawn to and we're drawn to it as witnesses when we are observing and witnessing excellence in someone else. And we're also drawn to it in ourselves when we're creating it. That is why just about every high performer, when you ask them to talk about when they enter a groove, when they're having a good day, they never give you an intellectual answer. The first word out of their mouth is always here's what it felt like. It's a feeling. It's a feeling tone. And it's so satisfying and so powerful. And it can help us understand when we're on the right track. And as I argue in the book, it's a big part of what makes life worth living is appreciating that feeling when we witness it and doing everything we can to generate that sense of aliveness and energy in our own lives through our own pursuits.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For just about every other species, survive persistent flourish really only meant one or two things. It meant avoid getting hunted by an apex predator and passing on your DNA. And quality guides us very well towards those two objectives. However, us humans, we outlive reproductive age. We have these long, beautiful lives, but that innate drive to flourish hasn't gone away. We need to find other outlets for that innate drive to flourish. And that is where this life force to create, to contribute, to produce comes from. And it's also why we're so attracted to excellence in other people. When you are in front of a Rothko painting, you don't think intellectually it's beautiful because the lines and the colors, no, you feel it in your heart. When you watch Steph Curry hit a jump shot, you don't say, well, the arc of the ball is a perfect parabola and his elbows at 90% and his feet are exactly 18 inches off.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And that innate ability to sense when something is beautiful in high quality and good is built into our DNA. So long before we had nervous systems or consciousness all the way to the very beginning of life, single cell species, bacteria, they rely on this ability called sensing and responding to survive, flourish, and proliferate. And it means exactly what it sounds like. A bacteria can sense when an environment is conducive to its survival and it can move towards those environments. That's what biologists now call a high quality environment. Or it can sense when an environment is not conducive to its survival and move away. Single cell bacteria. From bacteria evolved multicellular creatures, from multicellular creatures, evolved nervous systems, and eventually long down the chain came us. But that innate sensing and responding ability to be drawn to things that help us survive, persists, and flourish hasn't gone away. And up until humans,”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tangible result that can be traced back to your effort. And you're going to fail sometimes too, right? It's not always just about winning and succeeding, but it's better to fail at something concrete than to kind of just wander in subjective, wishy-washy no man's land.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blank page is a writer, but I also get it in the weight room because the bar is either going to move or not, and I can trace that back to the work that I put in. So there is something that is just deeply, innately fulfilling about making concrete tangible progress that you can trace back to your cell. And I think that that really is at odds with so many talking heads and people that have opinions on everything and everything's kind of wishy-washy in corporate mumbo jumbo. There's something really objective about like, did the bar move or not? Are the words on the page or aren't they? Did the fund make money or did it lose money? And I think that we often overlook the satisfaction that comes from that. And I think that when people don't have that kind of concrete, objective sources of confidence in their life, they can feel a little bit empty or long for it. So it's become instrumental to my philosophy of life is to make sure that you have at least one domain in your life where you are pursuing something with a very concrete.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's this, yes, I can absolutely share. Jerry Seinfeld, he's interviewed about what really makes him tick and why he fell in love with the craft and why he still pursues the craft. Jerry Seinfeld still does stand up. He doesn't have to do standup. In what he told David Remnik is essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, that there is no kind of satisfaction, like the satisfaction that comes from gaining skill in exerting that skill. And for him, it is telling a good joke. It is seeing the audience's reaction to that good joke. And there's nothing contrived or wishy-washy about it. Either the joke glands or it doesn't. And when it lands, the sense of satisfaction that he gets from all the practice that went into it, from all the times that that joke didn't land, it's enormous and it's immense. And we see this in so many different domains. For me, I get this skill every time I face the”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, you know, I think that I want to try to pick up the torch where he left it off and take this more philosophical meta-theory and build on it and try to make it into something practical around the way of excellence. And that's what the book became.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way the team that you built and your commitment to excellence. And that commitment to excellence is going to not only shape the fund, but it's also going to shape you as a person. And you're going to carry that into all domains of life. So yes, it is highly, highly resonant to me. And Perseig, after he passed away, his wife and his publisher published a short series of collection of essays called On Quality. And they were some notes that he had written to colleagues, some chapters from manuscripts that didn't make it into the book. But what became really apparent in that book is what Persig was working towards is really also a theory of excellence. And then he died. And he's been my intellectual role model forever. I wrote his obituary for New York magazine when he passed away. And I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier, but for whatever reason on this walk a couple of years ago, I was rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the time. I was reading this new book on quality.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't agree more with that approach to life. I think that oftentimes we overemphasize the goal that we're working toward and underemphasize how that goal is also working on us as a person. So you can say that you want to build this fund that has this much investment from LPs or that does this margin over the course of a decade. The way that you build that fund is also going to work on you as a person. And at the end of the day, when you are on the path of mastery and when you are pursuing excellence, you are committed for the long haul. Yes, the outcomes, the external measures matter. And investing, it would be how well your investments perform. Like that's how you judge yourself against your peers. That is very important. But at a certain point, you're going to perform really well and you're going to realize that actually no dollar amount is going to fulfill you or satisfy you. What's going to actually fulfill you or satisfy you is the person that you became along with.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That perhaps the greatest modern ale of any is alienation. So it's a disconnect and a distance people feel from each other, from their work. And in some cases, from their own lives. And alienation is associated with all sorts of maladies. Individually, it's associated with anxiety, depression, culturally. It's associated with authoritarian movements. It's not good to have alienation. And if alienation is a sense of remove and distance, the opposite of alienation is quality, a sense of intimacy with what one is doing. And out of quality really came this idea that that's kind of what excellence is too.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The closer that we can get to what we are doing, the more quality our lives will have and the more quality our work will have. And what Persig argued, and I think did a really good job arguing, is that quality is really on the cutting edge of evolution, on the cutting edge of evolution at a species level because survival of the fittest is really about understanding your environment and being able to move towards conditions that are conducive to one's survival. What's fascinating is when I was researching the book, I saw that just 10 years ago, so 50 years after Persig's book, biologists started to use terms like quality to talk about how evolution works. People thought Persig was crazy in the 70s for saying that. It turns out he was quite right, but it also charges personal evolution and cultural evolution and intellectual evolution. So if we can get really, really close to crafts, if we can develop a quality relationship with them, that is how we grow is people. And ultimately, that's how cultures grow. And why now is I think...”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I first read Robert Persegue as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, and it was really the first book that I became completely absorbed in. Since then, I've read that book easily 15 times. I've also read this T. Waltersen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lila. My daughter is named Lila after Robert Persig's work. So it is not an overstatement to say that more than any other thinker, his impact on my life and my work has been immense. At the heart of it is really this quest that Persig was on to capture what he called quality. And Persig defined quality as a sense of deep caring between an actor in his or her act that essentially evaporates the space between the person doing the activity and the activity itself. So you are no longer playing basketball as just happening. You're no longer in a conversation, conversation is just unfolding.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Excellence is I've come to firmly believe that is a philosophy of life orienting around the pursuit of genuine excellence, not pseudo-excellence, not hacks, not quick fixes, not 37-step morning routines, but actual heartfelt, soulful, caring deeply, giving something your all, developing confidence and intimacy with a craft and trying to master it is really the key to a rich, meaningful, and textured life. And it's a life that I try to live. I would say that if you had to ask me, what is my philosophy of life, it would be aspiring toward excellence. And as I'm sure we'll come out in the conversation, you never actually reach it. There is no destination. It's just an ongoing path that you stay on as best you can.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really has become a central focus of my life. And I think it's twofold. The first is as a writer, I view my job first and foremost to find language, to find words for things that people feel. And maybe they already deeply know, but they don't yet have the words. They don't yet have the language for. And excellence just lends itself so well to this challenge because excellence is a feeling. It's not something that is intellectual. It's something that we know in our bones. And my job as an author is trying to capture that feeling that we know in our bones and explain how it got there, how we can create it, what it is, and why it's so special. So it's this term that everybody knows or thinks that they know, but they don't have words for. So as a writer, it's an extremely gratifying challenge to try to find words to break this thing down. The second reason that I am just so obsessed with.”
2026-01-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH065: Joyful Excellence w/ Brad Stulberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT