Introduction

Patrick: [00:00:46] This week's conversation is about performance. More specifically, it is about the ins and outs of steady progress and growth. My guest is Brad Stulberg, who co-authored the book, Peak Performance, which combines research from many fields into a description of how athletes, creatives, and others continue to push boundaries in their respective crafts. As someone who is intermittently lazy, the growth equation framework that Brad and I explore has impacted me often since I first read the book several months ago. I hope you enjoy this conversation, which isn't about investing, but which is at its heart still about the power of compounding.

Finding Your Why

Brad: [00:01:32] Vic Strecher, he's a professor affiliated with The University of Michigan. When I was studying public health there in graduate school, pretty much everyone I came across told me that I should enroll in Vic's class. I think he was teaching a class on health communication and behavior change. I went to enroll in the class and I saw that Vic was no longer teaching that class. I went to my advisor and I said, "I want to take this class. Vic's not teaching it." It turned out that Vic wasn't teaching that class, because his daughter, who was in nursing school, so a young woman, I think she was either 19 or 20, had passed away. His daughter, her name was Julia. She was born with congenital heart issues and actually ended up requiring a heart transplant at age nine. It was the youngest heart transplant ever. At that point, Vic thought that he was going to lose his daughter, and she made a miraculous recovery. As far as they knew, she was in good health. Then she suddenly passed away at age 19. This put Vic in a completely dark hole. He told me that he just retreated into himself and really wanted nothing to do with the world. That's why he wasn't teaching that semester. He went to a lake house in Northern Michigan alone and just tried to cope, and manage, and deal with his grief. He had this revelation one morning, out as the sun was coming up. He was out on either a canoe or a kayak on the water. He claims that it was as if his daughter, Julia, was talking to him and saying like, "Dad, you've totally lost your way. You've got to find a why." For the longest time, Vic's why had been his daughter, his girl. He says it was if she was telling him that, "This can't be your why anymore, because I'm not here, and you need to find your why. You can't just live your life like this."

Vic is one of the smartest people I know. He's so wise. He's a public health professor, but the man could teach philosophy. He'd spent years in India before. He'd studied zen. He says that this revelation kind of triggered thinking in him, which was to start exploring the power of why and the power of purpose. What he found is that when individuals lose their purpose and they lose their why in whatever it is that they're doing, they tend to flounder. It made him realize that this voice inside his head, that he accredits to his daughter, that was telling him, "You've got to find your why," was actually pretty correct. There's a ton of science behind it. Vic totally shifts his career, shifts his research priorities from health behavior and communication to understanding the power of purpose and starts to find all this research that was validating what he was experiencing, which is if you can come back to and find your why, you can overcome the deepest depths of darkness. In a nutshell, that's Vic's story. How this fits into our book is Vic is an extreme example of the why, but if you have a why, it can help you and help you get through all kinds of uncomfortable times.

Patrick: [00:04:31] Maybe before we get into some of the how, you could expand a bit on you mentioned the science behind this idea of purpose or why. Sometimes when you hear the words like purpose, it can seem sort of new age-y or idealistic, maybe a little magical or something. But I have found it fascinating that there is a lot of real good, hard science behind the potential value of having I'll call it a compass of sorts, guiding principles. Maybe talk about some of that science and why that is an important feature of any sort of performance goal or just performance in general.

Brad: [00:05:03] With Vic, he ended up coming up with a new why, a new guiding principle, a compass for his life. His why was to help others discover their purpose and the power of purpose. Once Vic came up with that, the grief didn't disappear overnight, but he started to feel better, and he was able to, "perform", and go back to his job, and find fulfillment in life. What the science shows is something exactly mirroring Vic's experience, which is that if we can cultivate some kind of true north or a why, and particularly if the purpose, the why, is a self-transcending one. So it has to deal with something beyond immediate self-concerns, our performance improves. At a very reductionist level, they have studied this using fMRI technologies, which allow researchers to look at brain activity in someone's brain. They put individuals inside a machine and they give them threatening messages. The individuals that were primed to think about their core values beforehand, the part of their brain that's associated with fear, it doesn't light up. Whereas individuals that weren't primed to reflect on their core values, their purpose, beforehand, they had this fear response to a threatening message. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. If we're confronted with something that can cause us pain or can cause us distress, we're programmed to retreat. We protect our, "self". But if we can hone core values or a purpose that is beyond ourselves, we can literally turn off the part of our brain that would otherwise freak out and say, "No. No. Need to shut down. Need to shut down," to then get through a challenge.

Again, I find studying the extreme is fascinating, so an extreme example of this is the stories that you hear of individuals that lift a vehicle off of a kid or maybe a pet that's stuck under a car. These things happen. They're extremely rare events, but they happen more frequently than I thought when I started reporting on this book. They happen enough that there's an entire field of academic study. It's called the study of hysterical or superhuman strength. What the researchers postulate is, very much like Vic's research on the power of purpose, is that when someone else is stuck under that car, the part of your brain that would otherwise say, "You're going to throw out your back. You're going to injure yourself. Don't lift the car," that part of your brain just completely goes dim, shuts off. That allows you to access all this other strength because you're not worried about protecting yourself to lift the car. You can't really do a controlled study, because you'd never get IRB approval to put people under cars, but you can offer individuals who have completed these acts of superhuman strength to help others, you can offer them a billion dollars the next day and say, "I'll give you a billion dollars if you lift this car," and there's no way they can do it. But when their daughter, their neighbor, their pet was under the car, they can lift it, because, again, it's that notion of a self-transcending purpose that really influences your biology or your brain science to allow you to override your fear and your central governor that would otherwise shut you down.

The Growth Equation

Patrick: [00:07:58] We'll come back at the end of the conversation to sort of the discovery of purpose and specific methods for doing that, but I think it's important that this can be pervasive everywhere. One of my favorite examples is in corporate ethos. Of course, Amazon, as it so often is, is one of the best examples, where there's two ideas that you could argue are its purpose or its sort of timeless principles. That's another way I like to think about this is that a really good purpose is one that is not specific to a given setting or period of time, that sort of would survive any sort of external changes or circumstances. Of course, their two are customer centricity, which is just put the customer first at every single decision. That's obviously a perennial concept that should work pretty well. It clearly has for Amazon. The second is this idea, they call it day one, day one being the sort of early, entrepreneurial, innovative mindset that they try to foster, regardless of their growth or their size. They try to keep that kind of fresh mindset. Those are just two simple examples in the corporate sphere. You really can see this anywhere. Anyone that has a kid kind of has this purpose baked into them as well. We'll end with that and more specifically how to craft one if you don't explicitly have one, but the meat of the book and a lot of your writings has more to do with some of the how. We'll start with the very high-level framework that you built out for growth. It's a simple equation. Maybe you could just start by explaining that equation, how you got to it, and then we'll go into each of the variables in some detail.

Brad: [00:09:29] The equation that Patrick's referring to is what I call the growth equation. It's very simple. It's this notion that stress + rest = growth. The way that I refer to stress in this equation is not necessarily how most conventional definitions, at least everyday definitions of stress, work. Stress is not being in an argument with your significant other or being nervous before a performance review at work. The way that I like to think about stress and the way that it's being represented in the book and in this equation is it's some kind of challenge or stimulus that makes the mind or the body work and even makes the mind or the body uncomfortable.

The easiest way to explain the growth equation is to do it in physical terms. Let's take your bicep muscle, so the big muscle in your arm. If you think about how to make your bicep muscle grow, you have to go to the gym and you have to lift weights. If you pick up way too heavy of a weight and try to lift it, two things are going to happen. You're going to injure yourself, tear your bicep tendon or throw your back out, or you're just not going to be able to pick up the weight, and you're going to be like, "Screw this. I'm done. I quit." That's an example of way too much stress. Now, the flip side is if you go to a gym and you just start curling a 1 or 2lb weight, you could sit there and curl that weight all day, and your bicep muscle's not going to grow. It's not enough stress. The first part about making your bicep muscle grow is you've got to find the right dose of stress. It's a weight that really challenges you and almost works you to fatigue, and maybe even by the end you're so close to failure, but it's not such a great weight that you're going to injure yourself. That's only half the battle though, because even if you find that perfect weight, if you sit there and you lift that weight all day, every day, eventually your arm is quite literally going to fatigue and burn out. You have to follow a hard workout with rest and recovery. Your bicep muscle, actually doesn't grow while you're stressing it. It grows during the period of rest and recovery. You get into this nice rhythm of stressing the muscle, letting it recover, adapt, grow, and then it can take on ever so slightly more stress, and that's how you build capacity. What's really interesting is that what my co-author and I learned in our research and reporting on the book is that this equation, while it absolutely applies physiologically and in athletic performance, it also holds true in artist, creative, and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Patrick: [00:11:46] Can you talk about that latter category a little bit, maybe a simple example like the bicep one to flesh out how this works in all sorts of different pursuits?

Brad: [00:11:56] Why don't we start with creativity, because I think that parallels the athletic realm quite well. If you look at how creativity happens and creative breakthrough and insight, it tends to follow a pretty common pattern. The first part of this pattern is what researchers call immersion. This is when you throw yourself deep into your work. That is stress. You're really, really working hard, whether you're working hard to understand something or you're trying to solve a thorny problem, but you are in the weeds. You are in the work. You're working on the whiteboard, staring at your computer screen, reading the research, whatever it might be. Then the second part of breakthrough thinking is a period of incubation. That is when you step away from what you're working on. In the growth equation, that mirrors rest. Then the third part of this pattern is insight, which is when you have a eureka moment.

At a very micro level, this explains why so many people have creative thoughts when they're in the shower or on a walk, because they've stressed themselves, whatever they were working on before, working hard, and then they've incubated. They've gone into the shower. They've gone on a walk. They've done something separate from their work. It's only when they're doing something separate for the work, when their mind has a chance to shut off a little bit, that a creative insight emerges. On a more macro perspective, this is why so many people report being more creative at the tail end of a vacation, when they take a sabbatical, if you disconnect for the weekend. It's almost as if, very similar to the body, when you immerse yourself in the work, you're only setting the stage, you're priming yourself for true mental growth, and you need to step away from it and rest. That's when the breakthrough thought happens or the growth occurs.

Patrick: [00:13:39] When you were doing the research across physical and mental iterations of this formula, how did you think about the ratio between those two things? I'm sure it's different from discipline to discipline, but is there anything high level that you can say about how much stress versus how much rest? Then we'll get into some of the specifics of those two things.

Brad: [00:13:57] That's a great question. I think like you said, it's very contextual, and it will definitely depend on the activity that you're doing and also how much you've built up the capacity to handle stress. A prime example is myself. When I first started writing, I could probably not write effectively or well for more than 30 minutes at a time before needing a little break. Now, I can put in a good 90 minute writing block and feel okay.

You asked for a high-level recommendation? Across the vast majority of pursuits, on a micro-scale, quality of work tends to top out at between 90 minutes and 2 hours. It's very, very hard to produce high-quality work for over 2 hours without a break. We cite a bunch of research in the book that shows that, again, depending on the task and depending on one's skill and capacity to do that task, working in cycles of about 45 minutes to 90 minutes of deep focus work, followed by short, I don't know, 5 to 20-minute breaks, that tends to produce the highest quality work and also the greatest quantity.

Just Manageable Challenges

Patrick: [00:14:56] We've talked a bit on other episodes about this formulation called MAYA, (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) when it comes to advertising, and sales, and branding, and things like that. There's an analog here, which is this idea, I think you call it Just Manageable Challenges. One of my missions always is to study the concept of boundaries or barriers, understand what each person's are or what yours are in a given context, and then kind of play with them, but not necessarily break them or be this nutcase about constantly pushing the edge, but just kind of toy with boundaries to see that in many cases they're kind of stories we tell ourselves. Talk about this idea of just manageable challenges and the role that they play in this kind of whole growth equations.

Brad: [00:15:40] The cycles of work, right, on the 60 to 90 minute duration that I just talked about, I consider that a very micro application. Throughout the day you want to stress yourself, rest, stress, rest. What Patrick's referring to is actually, to me, equally as important and equally as interesting, which is how do you apply this equation over the course of a career or a lifetime? In the book, we write about what we call just manageable challenges. A just manageable challenge is something that pushes you ever so slightly outside of your comfort zone. I firmly believe that it is through taking on these just manageable challenges that someone grows. I also think that they can be an enormous trap because if you take on just manageable challenges in every aspect of your life at the same time, it's just too much pressure in the cooker. It's going to explode.

A very concrete example of a just manageable challenge would be, let's say, that whatever you work on, you're accustomed to projects in one content area. You've been doing that for 5 years, and you feel like you've really mastered that content area. A just manageable challenge might be to work on a similar type of project, but do it in a different content area. Maybe you've worked on healthcare projects for a long time and you're really good at org development in healthcare. Well, take on an org development project, consulting gig, in finance or in retail and sales, some other kind of industry. Like you said, it's not completely going off the cliff, but it is a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Where you run into trouble is if you decide to take on that just manageable challenge project at work, at the same time that you're having your first child, you're training for your first marathon, you're caring for an ailing parent. Those are all just manageable challenges. Anyone that's tried to push the envelope in all areas of their life at once will tell you that it's fricking impossible. You can't do it.

I think it's really good and healthy to be pretty deliberate and kind of say, these are the big buckets of my life. For a lot of people, it's family, it's personal hobbies and pursuits, and it's work. Maybe to have one just manageable challenge across those three, maybe two, but to be pretty deliberate. This is where I want to grow right now, and here's the kind of challenge I think I'm going to take on to grow, and how am I going to recover from that challenge? After you take on that project that pushes you outside of your comfort zone, are you going to go right to the next one and continue pushing, or are you going to give yourself some time and space to kind of recover, reflect, adapt, before you go take on the next one?

Performance Athletes

Patrick: [00:18:06] For stories like these I'm always fascinated by performance athletes. I think everyone is because it's something we can obviously relate to, understand, watch, appreciate. I also am fascinated by the research process. I think your research process is very much like mine or like any scientific method type thing, which is subjects, variables, outcomes. In stocks, it's stock X, Y, Z, price to earnings ratio, return. If you can draw across a wide sample of a relationship kind of down that chain, maybe you've found something. I know that you have personally met, talked to, studied dozens, hundreds, I don't know how many, performance athletes. I'd be curious if you could pick one and tell part of their story or the relevant part of their story for this idea of just manageable challenges and how it helped them grow, and get better, and set a record or whatever the story might be, whatever the outcome might be.

Brad: [00:18:55] It's a tough question, because almost every world-class athlete I've had the privilege to interview, go through this process of taking on just manageable challenges, and never being satisfied, and continuing to push the envelope. I think that one example right now that is in the news is the free solo climber, Alex Honnold. He recently free soloed up El Cap, which for those that don't know is a multi-thousand foot sheer rock face in Yosemite.

Patrick: [00:19:22] Just go Google it to be terrified.

Brad: [00:19:24] Right. There you go. You don't need me to tell you. Free soloing means you're climbing with no ropes, no support. You fall, you're dead. I had the chance to interview Alex for Outside Magazine about two years ago. We talked a lot about fear. One of the things I asked Alex was, "How do you handle fear? How do you manage fear?" He said that he feels fear. He didn't deny this. It's just that he takes the fear and he channels it into what he's doing. But what allows him to do that is the fact that he has gradually built up over time to being able to free solo El Cap. To him, it's just the next just manageable challenge. That started when he was a kid. You start with bouldering, and then you start with climbing something a little bit higher with ropes. Then you maybe take off the ropes and you free solo something, but if you fall, the stakes are low, because you're 20 feet off the ground.

We look at these world-class athletes and we see the end result, which is the end of the trajectory, which for him is free soloing El Cap. Who knows what he'll do next? But what we don't necessarily see is that no one just does that overnight. It's a very, very slow, steady, and methodical buildup, and especially amongst adventure and extreme athletes. I think that there's a huge misconception that these guys and these gals are reckless, but it's the total opposite. They are so calculated and so methodical. It's just that what we see blasted on the news is Alex free soloing El Cap or Jimmy Chin skiing down Mount Everest, but we don't see the body of work and the years of pushing the envelope to get to that point.

Patrick: [00:20:53] I think many people listening will be starting to think of absolute versus relative change and the idea of compounding. That we almost always read about things, magazine covers for example, that are great examples of absolute change or are understood on an absolute scale. Whereas the relative improvement that whatever that feat represented was likely the same call it percentage increase as early changes. It's just that because of the power of compounding..

Brad: [00:21:18] That's such a good analogy.

Patrick: [00:21:29] ... the percentage change later on produces bigger absolute changes.

Brad: [00:21:22] Man, I wish we would have had this discussion before I wrote the book, because this would fit this framework perfectly. It's totally that. Every time you take on a just manageable challenge, you're investing in yourself, and it compounds. Even though it can be very uncomfortable to take on that challenging project at work or to have your first child when you're not sure if you're ready in a marriage, whatever it is. If you take on a challenge that is appropriate, even if it makes you uncomfortable, if you can recover from it, then you grow the capacity to take on the next challenge, which will be more, and it all compounds on itself.

I love that analogy, because every single world-class performer that I've had the privilege to interview, are all perfect examples of just the power of compounding, because they start small, and they're fricking consistent, and they're constantly pushing the envelope just a little bit at a time. But a little bit at a time compounded over years ends up to being able to do some pretty ridiculous things.

Patrick: [00:22:17] Alex has been in the news, but I'm wondering what your favorite example of a crazy feat of physical performance is in all your research? What thing stands out as something that to you just seems, understanding that you appreciate the process behind it, but just that the face value just seems so incredible and out there?

Brad: [00:22:36] I think Alex has got to be one of the most...

Patrick: [00:22:38] He's one right now.

Brad: [00:22:40] ... one of the most mind boggling. He might be on top. What aging athletes are doing, when we're talking about compounding, is also pretty incredible. Roger Federer I think is 35 and looks as good as ever and is winning Majors. Serena Williams, I want to say is 34 or 35. Tom Brady's like 40 or 41. That intrigues me. The common thread with a lot of these athletes, it gets back to that growth equation. Right? Stress + rest = growth. At least in how they're speaking to the press is they're saying that the reason that they feel so good and they're on top of their game is because they've really prioritized recovery and they've learned how to nail that notion of recovery. Over the course of a career, you can almost think of all the training that you do when you're young, that's just stress in the bank. Then you get to this older age and it's more important to focus on the rest side of the equation, and the outcome's still growth.

Patrick: [00:23:28] Before we get to recovery, which I found to be the most interesting part of all this, because it seems like you're doing nothing, but it's actually the period that may be most important or the science is starting to say is most important. The idea of stress though, before we leave that idea, I'm curious what you think about mentorship, coaching, outside influences that kind of push yourself to always be advancing. I found, just out of personal experience, I'm curious if you've found the same, that I'll go through bursts where I'm very good at this adjacent state thing, but then you just get tired. You just get worn out of doing so much. Once you've made some improvement, it's very easy to coast, and it feels great to coast for a long period of time. In your research across some of the performance athletes or high performing people in general, is there any commonality in terms of uses of coach or mentors and how people use them to kind of help stay accountable to that equation?

Brad: [00:24:24] Totally. Almost everyone has a coach or mentor. Having a good coach or mentor is priceless. It's funny. If we end with concrete action items, finding a good coach or a mentor is going to be high on that list. In terms of how they use them, it's interesting that you say your example of complacency. I think that there's a use for that, but I think that often what happens is, especially for driven, high performing people, the coach is holding them back, so they don't get to a point where they're so fatigued that they become complacent. It's almost like the coach is holding them accountable to the stress + rest cycle and particularly the rest part.

My co-author, Steve, who coaches runners that are Olympic caliber, some have competed in the games, world championship level runners. He often says that it's not hard to push a highly motivated, driven person to work hard. It's hard to hold them back. I think that that holds true across a lot of my experience with reporting on great performers with coaches. Yes, the coach can come there and say, "You need to keep pushing," but it's often the coach that says, "Hey. You've pushed pretty hard. I don't want you to start feeling fatigued, so let's scale back for two days, so three days from now you can start pushing again." Over the course of a career maybe it's it actually makes sense to make sure that you carve out 30% of your time that's something that is completely in your wheelhouse because that gives you the capacity to really put in the work elsewhere.

Importance of Rest

Patrick: [00:25:49] Let's bridge that into rest. You talk about this difference between catabolic and anabolic states. Maybe, again, using the physical, since it's helpful, describe what those states are and why the anabolic becomes such a key part of this equation.

Brad: [00:26:03] Sure. Then we can go into the mental, like we did, because I think it's a nice transition. When you work on a muscle, you think that you're getting stronger when you're at the gym, but you're actually completely breaking down your muscle when you're at the gym. Your body enters something that's called a catabolic state, which is a state of breakdown. You apply the stress, and your muscle's broken down. Your body only enters an anabolic state, which is a state of building, it's when all the good growth-promoting hormones flood the muscle, that only happens when you rest and in particular when you sleep. Physiologically, it's in our sleep that testosterone, human growth hormone, all of these things that make us stronger, that's when it's released.

Again, the common notion is, oh, I'm going to go to the gym, and I get stronger at the gym. No. You actually get stronger when you sleep. All that you're doing when you're at the gym is breaking your body down and providing the stress, the stimulus for your body to grow, but the growth doesn't happen until you're at rest.

Patrick: [00:27:01] What's the actual thing that's happening in the catabolic state? You say breaking down. What does that physically mean, like at the cellular level or as deep as you're able to describe it?

Brad: [00:27:12] The main things that's happening that is a biochemical, a hormone called cortisol is being released. Cortisol is an innate part of the stress response. What cortisol does is it literally signals to your body. At a cellular level, you're tearing your muscle. I guess that's not a cellular. At a soft tissue level, you're tearing your muscle. The cells, they're being hurt in that process. This hormone called cortisol is flooding your system, which is saying to the body, "We are under attack. We are in a state of breakdown." Then when you sleep, anabolic hormones, such as human growth hormone or testosterone, they flood your system. They go to the site of the tear, and they rebuild the area that tore. They make it stronger. It's the whole notion of tear and repair, which actually is something that meatheads have been saying forever, and it's quite true. When you're at the gym, you're tearing the soft tissue. You're degradating the cells. You're having this stress hormone flood your system. It's not until you recover, and again, mainly when you sleep, that the body goes through the process to build up. But the tear is real important, because when you tear, you're signaling to your body, you're literally saying, "I just got embarrassed and broken. You better come back stronger, so you can handle this challenge next time."

Patrick: [00:28:25] I don't know why this is making me think of this, and I have no idea where this is from, but there's I want to say it's an Irish folksong or something like that, but there's this idea, kind of medieval castle idea that the higher someone builds their wall, the stronger we become on the outside. There's an interesting parallel here where basically what's going on is the more stress you put something through, the more the body or the mind kind of overcompensates in the other direction.

Brad: [00:28:52] As long as you give it the other direction.

Patrick: [00:28:54] As long as you let it. Right?

Brad: [00:28:56] Exactly.

Patrick: [00:28:57] It seems almost like an arms race of sorts.

Brad: [00:28:59] Yeah. For sure.

Patrick: [00:29:00] That you're effectively building the equivalent of a taller wall by putting your body through this stress. Then on the other side, if you allow it to rest and recover properly, it gets stronger.

Brad: [00:29:10] Same thing happens for the mind, which I think is fascinating. We expose ourselves to all kinds of stimuli throughout the day, reading a book, having this conversation, doing research, driving to the parking lot, and seeing different color cars parked. Right? It's literally infinite stimuli. It's only when we sleep that our brain actually goes through all that information, figures out what to retain and what to throw out. Of the things worth retaining, figures out what to connect them to, and what neural network should be activated, and where in the brain to store them. Which, again, it's just mind boggling how it parallels the physical so cleanly, but it's almost as if having this conversation we're both flexing our mental muscle. We're totally present. We're engaged. We're thinking deeply. But for these concepts and the things that we're discussing to really sick in you almost literally need to sleep on it.

At a micro level, anyone that's been sleep deprived knows that their thinking goes to crap. Their will power goes to crap. Their emotional control goes to crap. At a macro level, across all the world-class performers that I've interviewed, not just athletes, but artists, entrepreneurs, they all say that during their periods of their best work, quality, and creativity have been periods following lots of sleep. The scientific research points a direct line, like I said, to your brain really doing its best work when you're sleeping, which gets to something that you said in the opening, which is rest is actually, it's not a passive process. It's extremely active.

Gradation of Practice

Patrick: [00:30:45] I want to talk a bit about practice and varying degrees of stress within some specific contexts. Let's say it's something elemental, like sprinting, 100-meter sprint. It might be tempting to think that to get faster at the 100-meter sprint you should just go all out in the 100-meter sprint, every so often rest and recover, and rinse and repeat. But I think that there is more variability than that. I think it was with running as well. You'll find say marathon runners not running at pace, but at half pace, or quarter pace, or something much more manageable. How does that kind of more practice-oriented, context-specific thing factor into this whole formula? Is it all out and then rest, or is there more of a gradation?

Brad: [00:31:27] It's completely a gradation. I think that's because if you just go all out and then rest, you only have so many all-out efforts in you. So the cumulative stress is actually lower if you were to go all out and rest versus if you were to go maybe 80% and rest because you can just do a lot more reps at 80%. Athletically, that's the rationale for the gradation. From a more intellectual problem solving standpoint, and I guess this holds athletically true, I like to think about looking at a problem as what are all the things, what are all the levers that we can pull on to solve this problem?

In your example, if the problem is running 100-meters as fast as possible, one lever is acceleration off the blocks, how quickly you start. Another lever might be how fast you hit top speed. Another lever is how you decelerate, so you don't injure yourself when you finish. I'm pausing because even after you hit top speed, there's probably a lever of how you sustain top speed. You want to probably train, I'm not a sprint coach, but you want to train all four of those skills slightly differently. If you were just to run all-out sprints, you're giving up a chance to stress the system of firing off the blocks more. It's almost like you break down the problem into component parts and then you stress each part and follow that with rest.

Patrick: [00:32:46] The idea of high-level performance seems very popular today. I think it probably kicked off with the 10,000 hours notion popularized by Gladwell. I think Anders Ericsson just came out with a book called Peak.

Brad: [00:32:58] Peak. Yeah. A year and a half ago.

Patrick: [00:33:00] I have not read that book, full disclosure. But the notion is straightforward, so everyone glommed onto it, which was if you just practice enough at something, 10,000 hours, you're going to get really good. But there's not a lot of nuance in that idea. Maybe you could flesh out some of that nuance around practice and why every hour of practice isn't created equal and there can be good and bad practice.

Brad: [00:33:21] Yeah. For sure. Like you said, exactly. The notion of 10,000 hours to make an expert caught on. What Ericsson's research actually shows, however, is that it's less about the quantity of hours and more about the quality of what you do in those hours. Two writers could put in 10,000 hours of writing, and the end result at the end of those hours will look extremely different. If one of those writers has their cellphone on the table and is scrolling through Twitter during their writing time, is checking their email browser, is only writing in the syntax that they're comfortable with. Versus the second writer that is in a completely undistracted state when he or she is writing, that is toying with different forms, that's constantly pushing themselves, that ends writing not feeling chilled out and refreshed, but ends writing fricking fatigued. My hunch is at the end, if both those writers write for 10,000 hours, the latter is going to be performing significantly better.

Designing Your Day

Patrick: [00:34:21] There certainly is no one formula for success about how your day should look, but it does seem to be the case that many people that have done very interesting things, while the exact pattern of the day is extremely different, there still is that pattern, that they tend to repeat things. It could be at different times and different lengths, et cetera, throughout the day. Describe this idea of designing of a day and how people might think about applying that in their own lives.

Brad: [00:34:46] You picked up on something that is 100% spot on, which is that routines are extremely powerful in N of one, but there is no routine that works across a population. Anyone that says, "I've got the routine for you. You've just got to wake up at this hour, drink this kind of tea, do this kind of work, do this workout, take this long of a nap," they're charlatans. There's zero routine that works across an entire population. The flip side of that is if you can figure out your N of one routine, it's an enormous performance enhancer. Then the question becomes, well, how do you figure out your N of one routine? The first place to look and where there's a lot of evidence and research is this notion of chronotype, which simply means are you more alert and more able to focus, and think deeply, and physically primed in the morning or at night? This is largely biologically determined, and there's a lot of variation. Researchers tend to put people into these two buckets, which I think, like everything, it's not so black and white. It's gray. But you have morning larks and night owls. The morning larks are able to focus, put out more energy in the morning, and night owls tend to work better at night.

The first step of designing an ideal day is to just do some introspection. You can get blood work and stuff to tell you, but you really don't need it. Most people tend to know, am I most aware, firing on all cylinders in the morning, between, I don't know, 5:30 and 9:00, or do I love to get home after dinner, start working at 10:00, and the wheels start turning at night? Once you have that information, then the next step comes. How can you start to manage your energy, not time? I like to think about designing a day in terms of managing energy, not time. What I mean by that is if I know that I am going to be able to do deep focus worked better in the morning, because I'm a morning person, how can I try to set up my day so I protect my mornings for that type of work? I'd be foolish to schedule meetings, and conference calls, and things that don't demand deep focus work in the morning if I know that that's when I have a window of opportunity to really be the best at deep focus work. There's this notion of managing energy, not time.

I think the second important thing is trying to work in discrete chunks of undistracted work. We spoke about this a little bit earlier. All kinds of research shows that between 45 and 90 minutes of deep focus work followed by a short break tends to lead the greatest quality and quantity. Deep focus work though, that doesn't mean that I'm just working on something and I'm checking my email every now and then, I'm scrolling down my Twitter feed, I'm getting a snack, answering the phone. Deep focus work is defined as the most extreme form of single-tasking. You are only working on the task at hand, and there is nothing distracting you from that. I think that a lot of people think that they're doing deep focus work, but it's very hard. I write about this stuff. I'm here preaching the benefits of it. On a good day, I can get in two blocks of deep focus work.

Patrick: [00:37:46] This is something that, this is the classic example of easy to say, hard to do. The good thing about doing it is how good it feels maybe like mid to later stages of that block and immediately afterward.

Brad: [00:38:00] You know you've done it. You're fatigued. Right? It feels like you just ran a hard workout.

Patrick: [00:38:03] Yeah. It's kind of like the clarity you have after a good run. The reward itself for me is not so much the work. It's the feeling of doing the work itself. I feel like that's an interesting shortcut to make this work. Is find stuff where what usually starts as very, very stressful when you first get into this and get in the habit of doing it, but you can kind of get this perverse enjoyment out of really stressful work.

Brad: [00:38:30] And you build up to it, like following that equation. If you've never done deep focus work, like I said earlier, at first I would sit down to write and in 30 minutes I'd be tapped out. Don't just shoot for 90 minutes. Gradually build your capacity to do deep focus work. I think the other important I hate to use the word hack, because all of these principles are kind of the anti-hack, but if there's something in the book that I would brand as a hack, it's just the importance of rigging your environment. Rather than rely on willpower to resist doing something, and for me that something is always checking my phone. When I do deep focus work, I remove the temptation completely. That means going to a coffee shop and not bringing my phone. If I'm in my apartment, it means turning off my phone and actually putting it in the other room. It's super important to have the thing out of sight.

This was eye-opening for me in the research for the book. I used to sit down to work, and like most people, I'd have my phone on the table on silent turned over. I often wouldn't check it. I'd do an hour of work and I wouldn't check it. I'd think that's great, deep focus work. But in fact, just the fact that my phone is in my visual field, it's occupying probably between 5% and 10% of my cognitive energy. Part of that is my brain resisting not checking the phone, because I'm like, "Huh. I wonder if I got an email. I wonder if someone retweeted me. I wonder what's happening in the world." Another part of that is just by having the phone there, on a subconscious level, researchers have found that it primes your brain to want,a little part of you is just, it's a cue to make you think about what's happening elsewhere because the phone is a venue, an avenue to everywhere, versus what you're working on.

One of my favorite studies in the book was they had individuals have intimate, intense conversations. They had three groups. One group, nothing was on the table. One group, they had a notebook the size of a phone on the table. The third group, they had a cellphone turned off, face down. The group with nothing and the group with the notebook, they reported the same quality of conversation, and on objective measures on what they retained, they scored the same and quite high. The group with the cellphone on the table, they performed significantly worse than those other two groups. It gets even crazier. They repeated the study, and this time the cellphone wasn't even one of the participant's. It was the researcher's. Simply having a cellphone, even if it's not yours, detracts from your ability to focus and do deep work. Again, they suspect, and it makes a lot of sense, it's because the way that our brains have been conditioned to think about cellphones, even if the cellphone's not yours, it's making you wonder, "I wonder what's happening on my cellphone," and it's occupying a little part of your cognitive energy.

Being in Nature

Patrick: [00:41:07] Let's talk about environment for a second. I was actually doping this independent, or actually before reading your book, trying to craft this set of guiding principles I guess I'll call them. The guiding principles are meant to serve not just me, but to kind of find a tribe of sorts, to try to attract a group of people that have at least highly overlapping guiding principles. One that I kept coming back to, even though it's not one that I expected to, was to be spending a lot of time outside, that if I just study my N of one and sort of subjectively rank what makes me happiest versus unhappy, the most consistent thing is if I'm outside more, everything else is better.

Brad: [00:41:48] Preach on, brother.

Patrick: [00:41:50] I'm curious, and I know you're going to be biased, given that you're a writer for Outside Magazine, but talk about the evidence or interesting findings when doing the reporting for the book that you found about the magnitude of that being true.

Brad: [00:42:04] It is 100% true, and there's a fair amount of hard science behind it, that time spent in nature is extremely beneficial for you. For your health, and your cognitive function. From a health standpoint, when we're in nature, our stress response tends to diminish. In urban settings, even in an office, where there's traffic, there are people, there's cellphones, there's email, there's all these inputs, we kind of operate in this state where our stress response is always humming along, because there's so many inputs. The whole point of the stress response is to be able to respond to those inputs.

When we're out in nature, particularly if we don't have our devices with us, it's literally like a virtual letting your shoulders down. Your body just knows that, ah, this is where I've evolved. I can chill out. You see all kinds of physiological benefits. After just a 2-hour nature walk people have lower blood pressure, less of the stress hormone, cortisol, in their system. They report sleeping better that evening. I mean, I could go on and on about all the benefits, better oxygen saturation, lower heart rate. Almost every physiological indicator improves after time spent in nature.

Patrick: [00:43:16] Have they isolated that variable, so if people took a 2-hour walk in the city?

Brad: [00:43:22] Yeah. You're a smart guy. They've done exactly that. They've had people take an urban walk versus a nature walk and then measured these variables because you're right. You could argue that it's just the exercise that led to those changes. But they've found that all exercise is good, but it's significantly better to do it in nature.

Effects of Physical Activity

Patrick: [00:43:37] I ask the next batch of questions very selfishly, which is about running. What I'm always interested about is how far it's healthy to run. With training obviously, I can get up to higher and higher distances but is there any evidence that there's too much. That you should contain your running, or really I guess, running is an example here for any sort of physical stress and activity, to some shorter period of time, so that you don't create negative long term results.

Brad: [00:44:08] It depends on how we're defining negative. If it's negative in terms of your relationship with your significant other then absolutely. If we're talking about just health and longevity, it's an intriguing area of research. It's relatively new because people haven't been running 100-mile ultra marathons for all that long. What the evidence shows right now is that more is better with a few caveats. The first caveat is there are definitely diminishing marginal returns. You get almost all your bang for your buck out of running 20 miles a week, and anything over 20, you're still getting some bang, but it's minuscule. The second caveat is if you're going to run over 20 miles a week, and especially if you get up to 50, 60, 70, you can't do it recklessly. The individuals that have issues with their health, they jump to that distance too soon. Back to the growth equation, stress+ rest = growth. They skipped some stages of that, and they got there too soon, so their body, the system, the organism hasn't been stressed enough, and all of a sudden it's got this huge stress on it, and it can't adapt, and it fails. That's one caveat.

The second caveat has to do with just how you support that kind of training. Where people run into trouble is the type A triathlete that works an intense corporate finance job, that's struggling to keep his or her marriage alive, that has two kids and a third on the way, that all they want to do is qualify for the Iron Man World Championship, so they're also training 25 hours a week. I mean, they've shown in lots of athletes that that can lead to deteriorated health and even heart problems, which is so ironic because you'd think all of these endurance sports would be good for your heart. When you look at athletes that have built up gradually and they've gradually and incrementally developed the capacity to handle increased stress and they support it in other elements of their life, it fits in nicely, they're only health improvements. But I come back to that diminishing margin of returns, but I think it's important. For most people, mile 0 to 20 you get almost all your bang for your buck, so that's like the public health hat that I have on says do that. The crazy endurance hat that I also wear says if you want to run ultra marathons, there's zero evidence to the contrary, so long as you incrementally build the capacity to do so and you don't do it recklessly.

Ego

Patrick: [00:46:22] Talk about how ego figures into all of that. How is ego a barrier? What does it do to either help or hinder our performance?

Brad: [00:46:32] We need to be careful here. I don't want to say the ego always hurts performance, because I think in an entrepreneur you have to have some ego. Not all ego hurts performance, but I think that uncontained ego absolutely hurts performance. It's for a bit paradoxical reasons. We tend to think of people with big egos as being on top of it and they just think they're so great. That's what they're portraying, but often under the surface, the bigger the ego, the greater the insecurity. When you have insecurity, you fear failure. When you fear failure, you don't take risks. You don't take just manageable challenges, because a cornerstone of a just manageable challenge is it's uncomfortable and you might fail. If you're worried about protecting your ego, you're never going to do it, because you're protecting your literal self. So, why would I challenge myself?

I think that you have to have, it's almost like you have to have confidence without ego or a healthy ego that allows you to have the self-confidence to take on a challenge or to think that you can do something that others can't. But not to be so egotistical that you think that you're the greatest, because the minute you think you're the greatest, A, you're going to be less likely to take on challenges, because you fear failure. And B, if you actually do fail, you completely degrade. If you have an enormous ego and your ego's completely tied up in investing and you have a bad quarter, you're going to feel like shit in all elements of your life, if your whole life is wrapped up in your activity. To me that a very, very fragile state to be in.

Patrick: [00:48:04] Maybe one way around this is the idea of who you surround yourself with and comradery. Touch a little bit on this interesting study of Air Force cadets, and the group that each cadet was in, and its impact on their performance.

Brad: [00:48:18] Air Force cadets are put it what are called squadrons. Squadrons are groups of I want to say it was either 20 or 30, I think 30 cadets. Squadrons live together. They train together. They do PT together. They take their classes together. They're like a second family. I guess they're your first family when you're at the academy. What the researchers found was that the group's performance had incredible impact on each individual's performance, somewhat common sense. What's interesting, at least what's interesting to me is that we often tend to think that a rising tide lifts all ships and that if a group has a really strong leader, he or she will bring everyone's performance up. What these researchers found is that the group actually gravitates towards the lowest common denominator. Groups that had someone with a poor attitude that didn't want to be there, all the individual members, when they controlled for everything, their performance suffered against those in a group, even if they didn't have a great leader, but that the lowest common denominator still had good energy, still had a good attitude. It's like negativity has a more powerful effect than positivity when it comes to groups.

Research Findings

Patrick: [00:49:26] I want to come back sort of in this closing section to purpose again. One of the more interesting things that I read in the book was this study by I believe his name was Tim Noakes about fatigue. Someone told me one time, rather cryptically, that fatigue is an emotion. Then I read this study and I kind of thought, "Yeah. I guess he was right. That's true." Describe Noakes's study, what he learned about fatigue, and we'll use that as an entry back into this idea of purpose.

Brad: [00:49:56] Tim Noakes, in the 90s, he had this hypothesis that fatigue happened in the brain, not the body. He came up with this, because he watched marathon runners, and they'd always kick at the end of the race. He'd be like, "This is fricking impossible. How are they speeding up? They should be depleted. Something's going on here." That led to this hypothesis that fatigue happens in the brain, not the body. To test this hypothesis he had individuals exercise the major muscles in their legs to complete failure, until they were totally tapped out. Think of yourself at the gym begging for mercy. Your legs are shaking and shivering. You literally cannot even begin to contract your muscle. Then he ran an electrical current through their muscles, and the muscles contracted with full force. What this told Noakes is that it's not the muscle that is completely shot and giving out. There's something in the central system, he calls it the central governor, the nervous system, the brain, that is telling the body to stop. This gets back to evolution and this notion of a protective mechanism. The reason that we feel pain and fatigue is it tells our brain that we are pushing pretty hard. We better slow down, or we might hurt ourselves. So then our brain slows us down. If fatigue happens in the brain, that would lend one to think that if you can overcome the central governor, your ego, whatever it is that's protecting yourself, you can probably eke out those last few percentage points of performance.

In athletics, every world-class performer that I've ever interviewed that has done something remarkable...Craig Alexander won the Iron Man Championship at age 41. I asked Crowie, I'm like, "Dude, what are you thinking about in the back half of that marathon? You've got to be completely falling apart." Crowie says, "I'm thinking about my family and how much they gave for me," something completely unrelated to himself. Meb Keflezighi, who just won the Boston Marathon at age 41, again, should have never happened. After the race, he was asked, "How did you do it? What were you reflecting on in the back half of the race, when you should have been falling apart?" He said that he had devoted the race to the victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing and he had written their names on his bib. Again, it's some kind of self-transcending purpose, something beyond himself. I could go on and on with examples. It gets you to start thinking that if you have this purpose that's beyond yourself and you're deeply focused on it, and coming back to where we started, with the research about what happens in the brain, maybe it's almost like you're overriding the central governor. The part of your brain that is so caught up with protecting yourself, and holding yourself back, and ego. It's quiet, because you're not thinking about yourself. You're doing it for something beyond yourself. Now, how does this apply to everyday life? It applies across the board.

There's another study that we reference in the book of hospital janitors. Let's say there were 100 janitors, and they divided the janitors into two groups. One group just went on, did their work as they always had. Another group became educated on staph infections and bacteria in the hospital and how if the hospital is not kept clean, patients die. Their job was reframed as not just cleaning puke and sweeping the floors, but as saving lives. The group that had that intervention, they ended up performing better on all kinds of objective measures of their job, and they had less turnover. On its face, you're like, "Well, what does janitorial work have to do with winning the Boston Marathon?" The answer is nothing and everything. Nothing, because they're completely different acts and draw on different capacities. Everything, because it's putting your head down and doing work that's not comfortable. In both cases, when there's some kind of greater purpose than oneself, you tend to endure fatigue, endure discomfort, endure perception of effort, whatever you want to call it, more. I'll ask people, "If you are doing something for someone else, are you willing to take a risk? Are you willing to make yourself a little bit more uncomfortable?" The answer's almost always yes.

Patrick: [00:53:58] What was the most memorable individual day of this research process for you?

Brad: [00:54:02] Probably speaking to a guy named Matt Billingslea. He plays the drums for Taylor Swift. Just the way that he was so humble. Here we are interviewing him. You could argue, based on who he's playing for, that he is the best pop-rock drummer in the world, certainly one of them. He's playing in front of 100,000 people, touring the world. It took us so many follow up emails and phone calls with him to get the information that we wanted, because he had all these questions for us. He wanted to know, what are the best athletes doing, and what are the scientists doing, and what are other artists doing? We're like, "No. Matt, you're the story in the book. We're learning from you." He just kept on asking us questions. He wanted to know from me about what adventure athletes are doing to deal with nerves. He wanted to know from Steve about endurance and stamina. He was the most profound example of that, but a switch in my head clicked, which is across all of these great performers, all of them had questions for us. A lot of the scientists we spoke with, they were less ... All scientists are excited to share their science to a mass-market book, and they were super interested to hear that we were looking in different domains. The motivation researchers that did the janitor study, they wanted to understand the physiology of purpose. It all comes back to humility. You might say that they're humble, because they're so great, and that allows them to be humble, but I actually think that they're great because they're so humble. It's that hunger to keep on learning more that Matt Billingslea embodied more than anyone, which is why that's what comes to my mind first. But, again, it really represented to me the most interesting part of all these conversations.

Creating Your Purpose Statement

Patrick: [00:55:40] One of the things I'm finding across these conversations is that humility, ego minimization, or even ego destruction is actually the rational choice to make because it creates the biggest open space for growth. I think everyone's got obviously purpose implicit in what they do, but sometimes it's helpful to kind of go through an exercise and draw it out of yourself a little more explicitly. What's the method through which you did it for the book, that you've seen successfully others kind of apply, a simple method to find theirs?

Brad: [00:56:15] This is all in the book, if you really want to go through the exercise in detail, and it's based on Vic Strecher's research. He actually now has a whole company that is devoted to helping people find their purpose. It's called JOOL Health, J-O-O-L Health. I'll go through it really, really briefly, but if you want to get into it either in the book, and/or Vic's new company has a mobile app, all kinds of neat stuff. Super simple.

It starts with selecting your core values. Core values are things that you hold near and dear to your heart. In the book, we've got a list of 50. I'm not aware if there's a validated list, but if you just were to google "psychology list of core values", you can probably find lots of good ones. These are things like community, creativity, health, relationships, expertise, power, authority, humility, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we have about 50 in the book. I'd recommend looking at a list of at least 25. You don't necessarily have to pick something off that list, but it helps prime for these types of core values. Then you select 5 core values.

The next thing that you do is you individualize those core values. Let's say I picked creativity. Well, what does creativity mean to me? Or if I picked humility, what does humility mean to me? I'd write, I don't know, 1 to 3 sentences describing that core value. Now, you're left with a list of 3 to 5 core values that are each defined personally by you. Then the next step is to rank order them from most important to least important. This is really hard, because you've already narrowed down from, I don't know, 50, even 100 core values to 5, and you've just given them thought and about how they're all probably intimate to you. Now, you've got to rank them. As far as I'm aware, the only purpose of this ranking mechanism is just to help you even think more deeply, like what do you really stand for? After you've ranked the core values, then you step back and you try to come up with a purpose statement that embodies your core values and what you stand for. That can be anywhere from one sentence to a short paragraph. What I like to do is actually above my desk where I write I have a list of my core values and my purpose statement, just so it's always kind of there as a visual cue.

Patrick: [00:58:24] A very appropriate closing question. It's always my closing question, but given a lot of what we've talked about and the importance of ego minimization, doing things for others, et cetera, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

Brad: [00:58:34] Probably my wife agreeing to marry me.

Patrick: [00:58:37] A common answer.

Brad: [00:58:39] I mean, I am super fortunate that people have been kind to me throughout my life. You probably know this. The process of writing a book, you kind of go out there and then all these people are offering positive reviews and blurbing your book. It's just fricking incredible. I don't think it's the kindest thing ever, not to sell her short, but in the context of this conversation, it's the one I'll mention, is there's a woman named Kelly McGonigal. She's a psychologist at Stanford. She herself has written two books. A long time ago, I interviewed her for one of the first articles I'd ever written for Outside Magazine. We had a good conversation. She read the article. She's like, "This is great," and she started reading some of my other stuff and emailed me one day. She said, "You should write a book on this stuff, because you have a really interesting approach to performance, and I think it would benefit a lot of people." I had just started writing for Outside, and I was like, "That is so kind of you." Here is someone that I look up to. I've read both of her books. I'm floored. I didn't really think anything of it. Then a year later, a bunch of stuff happens, and now I'm actually thinking somewhat seriously about writing a book. It's actually a year and a half later. Writing a book, you have to have an agent. It's very hard to write a book without an agent, and it's quite hard to find an agent. I didn't really know where to start. So, I emailed Kelly. I'm like, "Kelly, I don't even know if you remember me, but we had this talk." She's like, "Oh, yeah. I told you to write a book." I'm like, "And I think I'm going to do that. Do you have any tips?" I sent her a draft query letter, which is what you'd otherwise basically cold call pitch an agent. She said, "Far better than this query letter, why don't I just email my agent, tell him that you're super smart and that he should work with you?" So, she did that. Her agent, Ted, is now my agent, and he's fricking awesome and is instrumental in getting this book deal and the thing being in the world. I never met Kelly in person. I still haven't. Right? This is from phone interviews. So kind. The end result is this book, this conversation, so thank you, Kelly.

Patrick: [01:00:30] Fantastic place to close. Really interesting research. I highly recommend everyone check the book out. It is intuitive but very helpful to remind ourselves constantly that, especially for me, the thing I'll remember more than anything is the power of rest. That we tend to think of performance as go, go, go, but if anything, it's sort of the opposite, that in that ratio you don't need as much go as you think and that simple rest can go a long way. Thank you for your time.

Brad: [01:00:56] Yeah. Thank you. This was great.

Created by @_Nick_Diller