Brad Stulberg | How to Excel When Everything is Changing

Srini:  Brad, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Brad Stulberg: Thanks so much for having me. It's always great to be talking with you.

Srini: Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you back here. You have a new book out called Master of Change, all of which we will get into. But as you know, from our previous conversations, I want to start with something that has nothing to do with the book. And that is what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up influencing what you ended up doing with your life?

Brad Stulberg: So my father was a financial advisor and my mom was a journalist. And now I'm a writer. Now what's interesting is that neither of my parents really pressured me to pursue the work that they did. But I did grow up in a house where there was a lot of books and

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: just writing was something that was really important. However, I went to school, I didn't think I was going to be a writer. I thought I was going to go into business or something like that. I ended up taking my first job at a consulting firm and my path to becoming a full-time writer was quite circuitous.

Srini: death.

Brad Stulberg: But here I am.

Srini: Well, I mean, I think that's the case for so many people. What did your parents like explicitly or implicitly teach you about making your way in the world, particularly when you have your dad who's a financial advisor, mother is a journalist, and as we both know from having built careers in the arts, I mean, being a journalist is probably not the most lucrative thing in the world.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, that's right. And we're fortunate. So I grew up middle class. My father's income definitely was the income that subsidized my mom's writing. And when my mom had myself and my brother, she scaled back quite a bit. She really wanted to be all in as a mom, and it's basically impossible to be all in as a journalist and all in as a mom. So how did it help me to navigate the world?

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: I think just, you know... I'm so fortunate. I did have kind of this cookie cutter, middle class upbringing. Of course, my family was messed up in the ways that all families are messed up, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't have any adverse childhood trauma or anything like that. So more than anything, I'm very fortunate to have had a childhood that was fairly stable

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: because so many people don't have that good fortune. And it's a lot harder, I think, to do well in school or to compete in sport if you're not sure where your next meal is going to come from or if there's violence in the home. And I didn't have to deal with any of that.

Srini: Yeah. What did your dad teach you about money, particularly as a financial advisor? I would imagine that somebody who's a financial advisor might pass on some pretty useful lessons to their children.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, basically boring is the way to go. So anyone that tells you that they've got this plan for how to make money or they're going to beat the stock market or anything kind of sexy and bright and shiny, you just run the other direction.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: And the best way to generate wealth and to build wealth is the most boring way, which is to have a consistent, steady income, save as much as you can, and then invest that saving in really safe... boring index funds, municipal bonds, mutual funds. Stay away from trying to beat the market and pick a stock and just slow and steady compounding gains is the way to go.

Srini: Well, you know, it's funny because when you say that, I can't help but think about how true that is, not just for finances, but in damn near every area of life. Like you talk to somebody about, you know, how do you become a writer? I'm like, you sit down and you write every day and that's it. And it's like, wait, this is it. This is what you know, we paid a thousand dollars to take this course and you're going to tell me to do the thing that I know I should do, but I won't get myself to do them like, yes. But I feel like there's so much of this sort of shiny object syndrome on the internet where you see people who basically are selling people false hopes. It's like, oh, you can do this, you can be anything. And I just feel like the people just are so susceptible to that. Why do you think that is? Why do people want the easy way out or the shiny object?

Brad Stulberg: Well, I don't actually think it's necessarily even the easy way out. I think that what it is that people like to chase complexity

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: because complexity gives you excuses that you can hide behind.

Srini: Hmm.

Brad Stulberg: Whereas simplicity is right in your face. So did you save money and did you put it in a boring index fund or did you not? Did you sit down to write or did you not? Did you go to the gym and train hard for an hour or did you not? Like there's no hiding behind that. You either do it or you don't. And I think

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: what happens with all of these bright and shiny objects and fads are that they get so complex. And there are grifters and charlatans out there selling. Like you have to eat this exact food at this exact time and work out in this exact way. And it's the same thing for writing and productivity as it is for finance. This is across the board. And I think part of why there's such a demand for that stuff is because it makes it easier to procrastinate on doing the thing that you actually need to do, which is usually the simple thing. So it's

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: a lot easier to think about all the things you need to do to write and have this big master plan to write and set a Pomodoro timer and make sure that you've got the perfect supplement schedule with mushroom tea and all of these other things. Well guess what? You're hiding behind the thing. The thing is right. I don't care if you're tired. I don't care if you're a little bit dehydrated. I don't care if you've got 30 minutes or 30 hours. If you want to write, you gotta write.

Srini: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Well, so talk to me about the path that led you to becoming a writer. You alluded to it briefly and you said it was somewhat circuitous, which I think is pretty standard for almost anybody I talk to. I don't think that anybody I have ever talked to has been on a linear path. And I think that will make a perfect segue into the book.

Brad Stulberg: So yeah, as I said, as a kid I was always into writing, but never thought of it as a potential profession. And this started all the way back in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, I was also an athlete, and I really wanted to do one of two things in college. I wanted to either play college football or go to journalism school. And the funny thing is, I wasn't good enough to play D1 football, so I decided not to play at a small school, and I got rejected from the journalism school that I applied to. So

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: like most 17 year olds finishing up their junior year of high school, I said, all right, like, guess I'm not going to be a writer. I'll go to, you know, what was a great school still is University of Michigan. And I'll study economics and maybe I'll get a degree in business. So I did that. And throughout school, it was very clear that my skillset lied in English and communications, not in math and science. So I

Srini: Thanks for

Brad Stulberg: really

Srini: watching!

Brad Stulberg: struggled in the math and science and I was really strong in communications. And

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: I was able to hide that enough to get a degree in organizational behavior. So like I fudged my way through the econ classes, but the reason I didn't get a business degree is because I would have flunked out of school had I had to take like econometrics and the really math based econ. So I parlayed that into a job at a big consulting firm. And at the consulting firm, I was never the person that was building the financial model. I was always the person making the slides or writing the white paper. So I didn't really know it at the time, but I was doing a lot of nonfiction writing in that job. And then

Srini: Mm.

Brad Stulberg: I went back to grad school. and my graduate degree was not math based at all. I shouldn't say at all, but it was predominantly more analytical and language arts based. And I did a lot of writing there. And I started a blog, right? This is at WordPress 101 or Blogsphere, right? This is like the original blogging days of the internet. I know you're my age, so you probably remember this as like the golden era of the internet. We all had blogs.

Srini: Well, I think that basically everybody thinks that the era at which none of the things that they have were now was the golden era. It's like the golden era of television, the golden era of the internet. But yeah, I get it.

Brad Stulberg: But I do think it was blogs. There was no social media, there were no trolls in the comments. You had a blog and people had to comment on your blog. And

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: everything was really slow, which is easy to romanticize, but it wasn't terrible. So I had a blog and what that blog did is it made me write regularly. And I just kept at it. It was a side hustle during grad school. It was a side hustle after grad school. When I got out of grad school, I took a job at a big healthcare system doing internal consulting. But I kept writing and eventually some of these things that I wrote got read, they got passed around, they got shared, I got invitations to write more. I said yes to everything, at the time it was mostly unpaid. And

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: over about a five year time period, I slowly realized that hey, I actually think I can start making some money doing this writing thing. And then I transitioned into being a full-time writer, really just six years ago, not even, four years ago.

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: Which is kind of funny, because I'd published two books. before I let go of everything else and said, all right, I'm gonna be a writer. And here I am.

Srini: Yeah, I want to come back to publishing two books before you actually go and said that you're going to be a writer. But I want to go back to college because I think you and I have such a parallel path that it's almost freakish to see how they are because I was an econ major at Berkeley because for the very reasons, in fact, I wasn't even an econ major. I was an environmental economics major because my grades were so bad that I knew I couldn't get into the business school. And if I were going to be an econ major, that would have meant econometrics, as you mentioned. But more importantly, like I think that... The bigger thing that struck me was that you kind of saw this pattern and I wonder like if you could go back and do it differently and you were guiding somebody else who was in that same position where they kind of you know fell into a path or major by default. What would you change and you know what advice would you give them?

Brad Stulberg: It's hard to change anything for myself because it worked out so well.

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: So I don't necessarily think the advice is to change your major. I think the advice is to do something that you'll excel at in school where you'll do pretty well and define that really broadly. So yeah, like you can be an econ major, but econ can be a whole lot of math or it can be a whole lot of analytical analysis that is in words, not numbers.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: really like lean on the ladder. So I think that, you know, majors are important, right? And they do, they come with core curriculums and credits that you have to get when you're a college student. But I also think that more and more, like just the benefit of a liberal arts education itself is really strong.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: And don't be pigeonholed by your major. So your major is only as pigeonholing as you're gonna allow it to be. And I think you see this all the time because now you see there are PhDs in philosophy that are getting jobs in finance. And there are people that went to business school that are full-time newsletter writers.

Srini: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's funny you say that because, like, I discounted the value of having a degree in economics, and then I realized, like, how different it is when I'm actually working in my own business, that subconsciously I'm actually thinking through that lens at moments without even realizing it.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, I think that's right. And anyone is gonna, and this gets back to like a broad liberal arts degree. I mean, I think that the point of school isn't what to think, but it's how to think.

Srini: them.

Brad Stulberg: And whether you're an econ major, a psych major, a sociology major, a literature major, a philosophy, perhaps mostly a philosophy major, an extremist philosophy major, I think the real goal of like applying yourself as a youth or a young adult to intellectual rigor is really learning how to think.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: more than what to think. And then you can carry that with you into anything that you do. I mean, I know if I'm hiring for a role, I want someone that has a really good dynamic multifaceted toolkit of how to think, and I could care less what their major is, but if their major train them to think, then that's a person that I'm excited to work with.

Srini: Well, I feel like we could do an entire hour just on how to think, but let's touch on let's go a little bit deeper on this idea, you know, because I think that this is one thing I realized that I was totally not given, you know, in the mid 90s when I went to school at Berkeley was I didn't learn how to think, at least to the best of my ability. Like when I compare it to now from having read all these different books, like one of my friends. Watches me work with AI tool and mem and I told it he's like you're like a savant with this thing I was like, yeah but that's because I have a thousand books to draw from that I've read and a thousand people that I've interviewed so I'm thinking through the lens of all these conversations I've had and That is not something I knew how to do before

Brad Stulberg: Mm-hmm. So I you know, that's really interesting. So my experience is Similar but different I think where I'm similar is yes Like I've picked up a lot of tools since going to school But I still think like it's been a long time and like, you know, I went to University of Michigan So we have that in common too is like big state schools iconic campuses The whole deal. I do think just like the notion of a five paragraph essay

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: like have a governing thought try to prove it, prove it with evidence, be persuasive, and then if you're good, list all the reasons that you might be wrong and address those too. That is something I feel like I picked up in school. Now, how I've applied that over time has changed a crap load, but it's almost like the foundation comes from school, or at least in my case

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: did, and then you can build on that. Now, are there tons of counterfactuals? Absolutely, there are people that didn't go to school or that dropped out of school that are phenomenally rigorous thinkers. So it's... It's my path and it's my experience, but it's not to say it's the best one for everyone. And I do think that something that is really wonderful about the internet is that for all the crap that's out there, there's also a lot of good stuff.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: And you can build your own little mini education in a topic if you put in the work and you have the discipline and you set constraints

Srini: Hey Brad,

Brad Stulberg: and

Srini: I lost

Brad Stulberg: go

Srini: you.

Brad Stulberg: pretty deep on just about anything now.

Srini: Hey Brad, I can't hear you.

Brad Stulberg: Oh, I lost you, you back?

Srini: Yeah, okay, pick it up from your own mini-education. We'll have our editor

Brad Stulberg: Serenity

Srini: edit this

Brad Stulberg: hello.

Srini: out. Yep, can you hear me?

Brad Stulberg: Uh oh. Hello, hello, hello. Rene, are you there? No, it's just me. Oh no.

Srini: All right, sorry about that, Brad.

Brad Stulberg: Serenity

Srini: Can you

Brad Stulberg: your

Srini: hear

Brad Stulberg: back.

Srini: me?

Brad Stulberg: Yeah,

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: it looks like you got kicked out there.

Srini: Yeah, pick it up from the mini education piece. I'll have our editor edit this out.

Brad Stulberg: Okay, no problem. Give me one, two, three. I think what's really neat about the internet and just the world today is that there is so much good stuff out there. There's a lot of crap out there too, but you can go pretty deep on a topic and if you give yourself the routine and the structure, you can get a mini education in just about anything.

Srini: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Well, speaking of which, I mean, talk to me about what led to this book. Yeah, as the natural follow up. And also, there's one thing I wanted to touch on. You mentioned that you didn't let go of everything else until after publishing two books, which I think is really it's funny because a lot of people would have thought, oh, you got the book, you know, this is the time you get to quit.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, so let me touch on that first and then we'll dive into the new book. How does that sound? All

Srini: Sounds great.

Brad Stulberg: right, so I think that there's a couple of different ways of approaching this. At the time I did it, I wasn't knowingly doing any of these things. I was just doing what felt right. It's only in hindsight that I can look back and say, oh, this is kind of what I was doing. I'm going to start by quoting Nassim Tlaib, writer of Anti-Fragile. And in that book, he talks about the best way to be a rock star is to be an accountant. Because if you're an accountant, you're working the steady nine to five job where you have guaranteed income. And it's not that being an accountant is easy, but it's not the most intellectually rigorous thing. So you're making good money, you're showing up, you're working, but then what you do in your free time, you can take all kinds of crazy risks. Whereas if you say, I'm going to be a full-time rock star, there is so much pressure on you. to perform and to do well right away that most people are gonna fail. And I think this is especially true in writing. Because when you say, I'm just gonna be a full-time writer, it is so easy to need to make money, and rightfully so, that you fall into the trap of just churning shit out to make money. Listicles, clickbait, you know, maybe you get sucked into unethical behavior, to plagiarizing, because you've gotta make a paycheck. Whereas if you hold on to your day job, You might not write as often and you might not get to fancy your ego by saying, I'm a full-time writer, but you can take big risks because if you miss them, then it doesn't matter. Like you still have a paycheck. You can still pay rent and put food on the table. So I was really deliberate about having a very slow glide path into having the majority of my income come from writing because I never wanted to get pigeonholed into needing to make money as a writer. Does that make sense?

Srini: It makes complete sense. Like I had a guest here named Karan Bajaj who told me, he said the best thing that he ever did was for his writing was not to make his living dependent on it. And he ended up writing two books. A third one even got optioned for a movie and he still didn't quit his job. He basically said, he's like, no, he's like, writing is something I do for myself and it's fun. And he said, I think it's because of that, I've had success because then I don't have to cater to the whims of my audience. I get to write what I want. And he's, I think, a GM at Discovery Channel or something like that.

Brad Stulberg: There's some research too that shows that for not just writing but for any entrepreneurship, individuals that keep their day job while building their new company on the side

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: tend to have about a 33% greater chance of success than individuals who quit their day job to build their company. And I think that it really does come down to when you have that stable foundation, you

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: don't feel pressured to make short-sighted decisions. you don't fall into the easy thing to make money. You can stay true to your values and take bigger risks.

Srini: Yeah, I mean, I think that for the first year that we're building the podcast, I had a day job. And then for the years after I was probably at my parents' house for four years, so I never had to worry about it until. And so as a result, I was able to see your point, do things that were aligned with my core values. It was really, I mean, obviously the moment you become dependent on it for money, it changes everything. Like there are times where we have to say yes or no to advertisers and it's like, okay, do we need the money? Yeah, we need to take the money.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, exactly. And I think that there's nothing wrong with that. And like, listen, now, you know, outside of my small coaching practice, like my income is based on my writing and the speaking and everything that comes with it. And now I wouldn't want it any other way because like

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: going to a corporate job would feel so soul sucking. So I'm not saying like, yeah, you should stay in your soul sucking job, but I am kind of saying that like, don't leave your corporate job so fast. Like get your ducks in a row and really build a foundation, especially because it's such a common trap, I think, is just like

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: ego tells you. Like, Srini, your ego is probably like, I wanna be a full-time podcaster, and I wanna say like, I'm a podcaster, or I wanna have my online course, I wanna be an entrepreneur, I wanna be a writer, whatever it is. And that's just your ego. Like, you know, show up and work the day job until you are so confident that you're ready to make the leap, where

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: you're not gonna feel trapped to sacrifice on what you actually wanna do in a big way.

Srini: So here's the funny thing about this, right? As I think that there's another trap that falls somewhere in between, and that is people basically will keep telling themselves, yes, I'll do this thing when I'm ready. Because that whole ducks in a row thing, I think can also become an excuse where people are constantly talking about getting their ducks in a row and never doing a damn thing. So I'll give you an example. I had two friends who wanted to start businesses, one that I went to business school with and another from high school. Friend I went to business school with had a really high paying job. And he kept meeting me, telling me about this business that he wanted to start it. And he showed up one day. He was like, I got a business card made. I'm like, fantastic. So then I go and meet the other friend who was a friend from high school. You know, he had a day job, got laid off literally before, uh, I think six months before his wedding, he lost his job. Uh, and he had just bought a house with his soon to be wife. And I was like, holy shit. And instead of printing a business card or building a website, this guy put up a landing page. And basically said I'll offer air table consulting sessions. And I think he drove $5 a day with YouTube ads. And at the end of the first month he had made $10,000 and

Brad Stulberg: Yeah,

Srini: he didn't

Brad Stulberg: and it-

Srini: go back to his day job. Like there's a, you see where I'm trying to get to with this.

Brad Stulberg: I do. I also think a business card is... My first literary agent ever when I had a website, I was spending all this time building my website and he's like, dude, a website is just a brochure. Stop worrying about your website and start writing.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: I think that's a business card trap too, but I do see where you're going with this. I think that the tools that work, work really well until they get in your way.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: I think that you kind of have to feel your way into this and say, hey, am I staying in my day job because... I want to have this solid foundation, and I'm letting my ego, or I'm not letting my ego drive me to say I'm a full-time writer, or are you staying in your day job because you're scared and you're putting the thing off? And if it's the latter, then yeah, maybe you do need a little bit more pressure and you do need a little bit more of a forcing mechanism. There's this thing that actually I profile in the book Master of Change called the inescapability trigger, which basically says that it's easier to make a change once you determine something is inescapable. So if you're in a terrible job and you're like, well maybe the job will get better. I'm just gonna give it till the next performance review. Well maybe I'll do job crafting. I'll try to change the way that I work. Maybe I'll try to get like a new role within the same company. All these things allow you to work with the situation as it is. Instead of, at some point you just say, this sucks, I need something new. And once you say that, instead of trying to fix what is, you can start focusing on the future and on what might be. And I think that's maybe a little bit of what you're saying too. So it is like it's all truth is paradox, right? You jump your job too soon. You have all these pressures. You bend on your values and ethics. You start writing listicles. It sucks. You use your job as a crutch for too long and you never actually do the thing that you want to do.

Srini: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue into the book itself. So talk to me about why this was sort of the next natural follow-up. Like, what was the impetus for writing this book?

Brad Stulberg: So in the past five years, personally, I have undergone just a lot of big changes in my own life. So I became a dad and then I became a dad again. I had major orthopedic surgery on my leg that forced me out of a sport that had become a huge part of my identity and lifestyle. I quit my job or I guess more elegantly I resigned from my corporate job to go full time as a writer. I moved across the country. I became really painfully estranged from certain family members. The list goes on and on, and these are just in my personal life. Societally, well, guess what's happening? The pandemic, which is something that everyone lived through as a massive change, changes in how we work, changes in how we play, changes in how we grieve and relate to family members. Now artificial intelligence is on the horizon, and this is all just within five years. So What I do when I am experiencing something is I just like try to get really curious about it and dive into the research. And I realized that so many of the common ways of thinking about change and navigating change are pretty outdated and inaccurate. And this really came to a head for me towards the beginning of the pandemic, when all of these articles were running in major publications in the spirit of, well, when are things going to get back to normal? Or, you know, it'll be three months before they get back to normal. And it just struck me that like getting back. to normal is probably never gonna happen. And like, what if that's not how change works? What if change isn't about getting back to normal, but about ending up at a new normal, or stability somewhere new? And that was the kernel of the idea that became the book.

Srini: Yeah. Well, you open the book by saying, herein lies a problem. A central narrative in our culture urges us to seek stability, yet this doesn't reflect the reality that change is constant and that with the right skills, change can be a dramatic force for growth. And, you know, it's funny you mentioned that, you know, back to normal thing, because Brian Holliday published an article about this on Medium, and he said, stop waiting for things to go back to normal. And he had listed all these historical examples of situations that were, you know, like parallel to the pandemic. But I think the thing that interests me is, why is this cultural narrative so pervasive even though it's in conflict with reality?

Brad Stulberg: Well, that goes back to the foundational science on change. So in the late 1800s, a physiologist named Walter Cannon came up with this model for change that he called homeostasis. And I'm sure you've heard of it, many of your listeners probably have too. Homeostasis describes a pattern where you have stability or order, then you have change or disorder, and then the goal is to get back to stability or order as fast as possible. So the example in the human body is your temperature is 98.6. You get sick, there's change, there's disorder, you run a fever, and then the body's goal is to get back to 98.6, right, to self-regulate, to get back to homeostasis. And this has been the prevailing model of change for the last 150 years. More recently, researchers have pointed out that while homeostasis is the right model for very specific things, like that of a fever... For 99.99% of changes, it's actually not the best model to conceive of change. Healthy living systems, they like stability, but that stability is always somewhere new. So homeostasis describes a cycle of order, disorder, back to order. What researchers now call allostasis describes a cycle of order, disorder, reorder. So yes, we crave stability, but that stability is somewhere new. The goal of homeostasis, is to be stable by not changing, by resisting change. The goal of Allostatius is to find stability by adapting to our environments and by changing with grace and grit.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: So that's it. I mean, it's this fundamental shift, right? Homeostasis, change is bad, get back to where we're going, order, disorder, back to order. That has been the conventional thinking for so long, when in fact, the literal root of the word homostasis, homo means same, stasis means stability. So you get stability by staying the same. That is homeostasis. That's what we've been sold, that's what we've been taught. Just in the past two decades, allostasis, allo means variable. Stasis, as I just said, means stability. So the way we get stability is by being variable, by changing. And it

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: is this mind-blowing shift. Like it's so simple, but then you embrace it as a mindset and you realize how true it is. Like we're always changing. Forget externally, internally we're always changing. We're aging, we become ill, we recover. Our families grow, our families shrink. We get new jobs, we lose jobs, we retire. Like there's so many moments where we change. And then just throughout the day. You know, like we think we're gonna do X and then our dog vomits, and now suddenly we're X minus 20 minutes. So we're never, like we're never stable by staying the same.

Srini: Yeah,

Brad Stulberg: The way

Srini: well, sounds

Brad Stulberg: to be

Srini: like the

Brad Stulberg: stable

Srini: way that my

Brad Stulberg: is by changing well.

Srini: well, my morning started, you know, like I said, by telling you that I had planned and come to read for 40 minutes. And then I was like, damn it, that preview didn't save my highlights from your books. So now I got to go through and change all of this. So there goes that x minus 20 minutes.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, you know, and I think that is such a great example of how, yes, this is the big stuff, right? This is marriage, divorce, a terrible health diagnosis, losing your job. It's also the big stuff in a good way. I guess I said marriage. Marriage is generally a good thing, but it's having kids. It's graduating from school, starting a new job. But change also just happens all the time. It often throws us off because we think that in order to be stable, we've got to stick to the plan. instead of viewing stability as just an ongoing dance with everything that's changing always.

Srini: Well, let's talk about how to prevent it from throwing us off because I will tell you like moments like that, you know, I mean, I've gotten better at recovering from them, but there are days when something like that will happen and the whole day just goes to shit. You know, and it's fine because I recover within a day. So part of that maybe is just my expectations of, okay, maybe it's okay not to be productive for a day. But I get annoyed. And one of the things that you say is the goal is not to be stable and therefore never changed, nor is the goal to sacrifice all sense of stability passively. Surrendering yourself to the whims of life rather the goal is to marry these qualities to cultivate what I call rugged flexibility So how do we deal with this like when you know shit hits the fan in our lives or in our day to day?

Brad Stulberg: All right, so in the day-to-day, let's start with the day-to-day example. I think that there's a really helpful heuristic here, and it is two P's versus four P's. I don't have a better name for it, but if you can come up with one, let me know. So the two P's are you get thrown off and you panic and then you pummel ahead. And this is just getting really caught up in hot emotions and then you just react. The four P's, it's much more deliberate, it's much more thoughtful. So something happens, something disrupts your day. First thing you do is you pause, and you just give those emotions time to cool down a little bit. Then you process what happened, what does it mean? Then you make a plan, what am I gonna do about it? And then you proceed. And that space, getting those extra couple P's in, right? That buys you the ability to respond instead of react. And when we go from reacting to responding, We make such more skillful, better decisions and we feel better because we're not in that frantic, frenetic state. So day to day, I really think it comes down to just a lot of practice of when these things happen, just in 30 seconds, just gathering yourself, saying like, all right, like shit, this just happened, here's what's happening now, here's what it means, here's what I'm gonna do or not do about it, all right, and now I'm just gonna get on with my day and

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: my reference point has gone from A to B and that's fine. because that's how life works. For bigger, more dramatic changes, I think that there's so many different ways to go into this topic here. But I think the first is this notion of rugged flexibility. So to be completely rugged is basically to be rigid. That's like back to homeostasis, to not change. To be completely flexible is just to go with the flow always. And while that sounds nice in theory, oftentimes it's not so nice in practice because we're humans, we have agency. We wanna use that agency. People often think about ruggedness and flexibility as being these diametrically opposed opposites. But what I argue is that they're actually complements. Like the best way to navigate big changes is to be both rugged and flexible. So to be strong, to know your strengths, to know what those things are, and then to be very flexible in how you apply those and how you adapt. So it's not rugged or flexible, but it's rugged and flexible. And I think that is ultimately the best mindset to bring to the bigger changes in our lives.

Srini: Yeah. Well, you talk about a number of sort of layers on top of this in terms of emotions. So let's talk about a few of those because one of the things that you say is recent studies demonstrate that expectations don't just influence our perception of current experiences and remembers the past ones. They also affect how we approach the future in a multitude of ways. And I think that, you know, I've read this over and over that, you know, happiness basically is this idea that your expectations meet reality. The problem is that often our expectation or reality doesn't meet our expectations.

Brad Stulberg: That's right. So it's so important when navigating change to update your expectations for reality. Because like you said, the equation that I've heard and that I use is that your mood at any given time equals your reality minus your expectations. So if your expectations are really high and then a change happens and your reality is really low, your mood is going to be very negative. And that's normal. You're a human. But the more swiftly you can update your expectations and say, all right, I thought reality was gonna be this, but it's actually that, well, that puts you in a position to deal with it, to take productive action instead of just wallowing in despair.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: So one of the biggest traps that we fall into when things change is we hold on to our old expectations for what things could have been or should have been instead of updating our expectations to meet the situation where it is. And expectations are so powerful. A prime example of this happened during the pandemic where I don't know if you remember, but the first summer, so like, excuse me, not the first summer, geez, the second summer of the pandemic, I think it was. I know, it's pandemic time. So excuse me if my chronology is a little off. But basically there was a period where all over America and in most parts of Europe, case numbers during the summer basically went to zero. Like I distinctly remember my three and a half year old son just like being completely like... enchanted by the fact that he was going inside to play at his friend's house,

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: because his whole life of memory, at least, had been like during COVID times. And everybody was feeling great. It was like the best summer of all time. And then the Delta variant came along and it just gut punched us.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: Now, what's fascinating is most people felt a lot worse when that happened than at the beginning of the pandemic, even though we had so many more tools. We had therapeutics, we had vaccination, we knew more about how the virus spread. So we were in a much better place to confront the pandemic and COVID, yet people still felt like it was as bad as when it first happened. And why is that? Because our expectations shifted. We all got really used to that summer. And the people, and more importantly, the organizations that were able to get through that period with as little suffering as possible were the ones that were very quickly able to update their expectations.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: And that happens to us in life all the time. Another example that is perhaps less extreme, but even simpler is a marathon. So a marathon's 26 miles, miles 20 to 26 suck. If you go into a marathon thinking miles 20 to 26 are gonna be rosy, you are going to have such a terrible time, I can almost guarantee you you're gonna quit the race. But if you go into a marathon knowing that miles 20 to 26 are gonna suck, you know what? you'll get through it and on a good day, you might even be pleasantly surprised. And I think that that's a really important metaphor for navigating change. It's not to say always have really crappy low expectations, but it's to realize that change is hard and our job is to meet reality as it is, not as we thought it would be.

Srini: Yeah, I appreciate this perspective so much because I know you talk about this idea of tragic optimism, which I think is often in conflict with so much of the rah-rah, new age, self-help stuff that basically is like, oh, think positive and everything will come to you and your life will be amazing. I'm like, this is some serious horse shit. It's not true.

Brad Stulberg: Hehehehe

Srini: There's nuance, which I really, that's why I think I like your books because you acknowledge nuance, you're aware of context, which I feel like there's so much literature and self-improvement that just kind of glosses over.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, so tragic optimism is one of my favorite concepts in the book. It was a term that is first coined by Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, psychoanalyst, most well-known for his book, Man's Search for Meaning, much lesser known for this essay that he wrote later on called The Case for Tragic Optimism. And Frankl tells it like it is. He says that being a human is wonderful and it sucks. because we are the only species that can think way ahead and know that we're gonna die and everything and everyone we love is also gonna die. And our work is to have that knowledge and still show up and embrace all the joy and beauty of life. And he coined this tragic optimism that we can't bury our heads in the sand about the tragedies of being a human. There is inevitable pain and suffering. No one gets through this life without it. So we can't be Pollyanna's, we can't fall into what people might call toxic positivity, but despair and nihilism is not a good stance either. So our work is to embrace the fact that the suffering and the pain is gonna be there and to be optimistic and hopeful nonetheless. And I think that especially in today's world, I'm so glad that this was a concept in the book that stood out to you because it's really easy. and I think particularly on the internet, to fall into one of two extremes. So one extreme is the Pollyanna toxic positivity extreme, where you just bury your head in the sand, you never turn on the news, and you just say everything is great, like I'm just gonna ignore all that's wrong. The other extreme is everything sucks, we're all doomed, you know, it's just terrible, despair. And I think both of these are complete cop outs. because they both absolve you of the need to actually do anything to make the situation better. If you bury your head in the sand and you tell yourself a lie that everything's great always, well, then you don't even realize that there are things that are broken about your life or broken about the world and you don't need to fix them. Whereas if you say that everything sucks and there's nothing I can do, I'm just one person, you know, despair is the way to go, well, then that also absolves you of the need to do anything. And I think if Frank were alive today, what he would say is in between those two extremes, There's this huge chasm and that's the chasm where we need to be. I think what I wrote in the book is like, if we're to fix a broken world, we can't become broken people. And to me, that's what tragic optimism's all about.

Srini: Well, you talk about the two components of a rugged and flexible mindset working together and you say first we've got to drop the weight of denial and resistance and instead open to the flow of life, accepting that the only constant is change and seeing it clearly for what it is. Second, we've got to expect it to be hard, which paradoxically makes everything easier. Expand on that for me and talk to me about that idea.

Brad Stulberg: So if you think about these two traps, right, the first is that we resist change instead of accepting it. And the more that we do that, the more that we suffer. There's another equation that is suffering equals pain times resistance. So whenever there's pain, you're always gonna suffer and change can be really painful for people. But if you resist that change, the suffering's just worse. Because eventually, it's gonna come and it's gonna get you and the longer that you push back against it, the more tension that's building up. So the first part of a rugged and flexible mindset is just that, it's accepting that change is a part of life, that change isn't always bad, change isn't always good, change just is, and while we can't control everything, we also have some agency in how we work with change. And then the second part of a rugged flexible mindset is understanding the importance of expectations and updating our expectations to meet reality. Because as we said, if your expectations are rosier than reality, you're gonna feel like crap. But if you can adjust your expectations when change happens, then instead of living and resisting change and kind of like being in an orbit that's not real and being mad that you're not where you thought you'd be, you're living exactly where you are. And that's the only place that you can start taking productive actions to work with where you are. And this is true at the most minute individual level, all the way up to societal concerns like global warming.

Srini: Well, let's talk about this idea of complexity and differentiation and integration as it relates to the concept of having a fluid identity.

Brad Stulberg: All right, so this is probably my favorite topic in the book. So we talked about a rugged and flexible mindset. We talked about navigating specific changes. Now I wanna zoom out and I wanna focus on what does it mean to be a strong person, to have a strong sense of self when everything is always changing, including you. And this is literally the subtitle of the book. And the key to this, I believe, is very paradoxical. It is to diversify your sense of self. So the way that I like to think of it, is your identity has multiple rooms. And those rooms could be athlete, creative, family member, husband, parent, son, daughter, spouse, employee, community member. What I think a common trap is, is when we over identify with any one of those things, then when that thing changes, we become really fragile, because we lose a sense of who we are. Whereas if we have multiple rooms, multiple components of our identity, when things suck in one, or when things really rashly change in one, we can lean into other components of those identities. So this isn't to say that it's not okay to go all in or really care about something, but we should never define ourselves solely by one thing. We should diversify our sense of self. So in my own life, my big rooms of my identity are as a husband, father, a writer, a coach, and an athlete. And what's nice about that is when things change in one of those areas, I can lean on the others for a sense of stability and predictability. Because odds are all five of those things aren't going to change at the exact same time. And

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: the story that I told in the book came from an Olympian named Niels van der Poel who set the world record in long course speed skating in both the 5K and the 10K. And what's fascinating about Vanderpool is prior to his breakthrough, he realized that he was just way too fused. His identity was way too fused with being an Olympian and that made him really fragile. It's really dangerous. Like you spend your whole life focusing on this one goal. You conceive of yourself just based on this one thing. Well, what happens if you get injured or you get beat? Like it just doesn't set you up to do well. And he was carrying all this pressure and it was getting in his way. He was underperforming. So in the buildup. to the Olympics in which he set the world record and won two gold medals, he decided that he wanted to go on a project, not just to be a good speed skater, but to make himself a more robust person. So he only trained five days a week, which for Olympians is insane, not to train six or seven days a week. And he started going out for beers and pizza with his friends, he started reading books. So he became a more complete person, and that freed him up to be a better speed skater. So, not only do we feel better and not only do we become more robust to change, but I think it also helps us get out of our own way when we can diversify our sense of self.

Srini: Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of two things that I heard from two podcast guests. One was Annie Duke when she was talking about her previous book, Quit, the power of knowing when to walk away. And the other was with Jenny Tate's wrote a book called How to Be Single and Happy. And Jenny Tate's, I remember telling me, she said, you know, like your person can't be your everything. You need to diversify your portfolio of meaning. And that really always stayed with me. And then when it came to Annie Duke, she said, often this identity trap gets people not to quit things. And I'll give you a personal example. I mean, you and I are both people who publish books and we know how it goes. Your first books don't sell enough. You don't get a book deal. And I remember there was a time when I had to come to terms with the fact that, okay, maybe this part of my career is done. That me as a published author with a publisher is over. And I realized once I was able to let that go, I was like, Hey, great. Now I can go on and do something else. But the longer I'd stayed in that trap and tried to get book deals, like just kept me, you know, like spinning my wheels.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, and I think that that's right, and it's not uncommon when you do that. Because you do, you get identity foreclosure is the term that psychologists use, which is basically like, this is who you are, so you better make it work. Instead of realizing what the poet Walt Whitman said, which is we all contain multitudes. And then even within your own experience, I think that defining these things that you care about, not based on the what, but based on the why. So what I would argue, and it's quite obvious just based on everything that you do and literally the title of your podcast, is your actual value and what you care about is creativity. And writing a book is one way to express it, but there are many other ways to express it. So the part of your identity that I would say is rugged is someone that is creative or intellectual. You could pick which of those resonates more, but. Writing a book is just a pretty narrow way to define yourself. Like, no, you're creative, you're intellectual, and there's multiple ways to practice that value.

Srini: Yeah, I mean, even the podcast, I'd always swore right from the get go. People, you've done all these different things like animated shorts, you know, writing books. And I was like, yeah, that's cause I never wanted to be defined by any one project. There's something Sam Altman actually, uh, had said. And I remember Neval Rabicant repeated this on his podcast. He said, Sam Altman always says that, you know, whatever you do next should make whatever you did previously look like a footnote in your career.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, I like that. I mean, that's like a big swing approach.

Srini: Mm.

Brad Stulberg: And yeah, you know, I don't know if I'd exactly agree with that quote, but I think the spirit of it is really good.

Srini: down.

Brad Stulberg: But I just, I keep coming back to this notion of like, hustle culture says you need to go all in. And what I'm saying is not that like, you should phone it in. It's okay to spend a whole year or two years, or maybe even a couple years of your life in one room. of your identity, but you can never leave the other rooms completely behind.

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: Another trap that people fall into here is with just their careers, and it's why retirement is so hard for people. If your whole identity is your career and then you retire, well, of course, it's going to be completely disorienting. And then parents, when they become empty nesters. So if their whole identity was as a parent, and a specific kind of parent, a parent of kids in the home, when those kids leave, their world falls into disarray. And it's not to say that we should not care about our jobs or care about our kids and give those things our complete all. And it's not to say that it's ever easy to see your kids go off to school or leave the house or to retire from a job. They're still going to be hard, but it is to say that if there are other components of your identity, it's a little bit less hard and a little bit less disorienting. So part of what makes us so rugged throughout change is having these different parts of our identity that we can lean into.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: I think

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: it's one of the most important parts of the book, to be totally honest. Sorry, I know that we're belaboring

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: it a little bit, but

Srini: No, no, I-I-I-I-

Brad Stulberg: I really do because I think that I identify so much with being a writer.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: It makes my ego feel good. It's just great. I have to ask myself, if this book flops, would I be okay? The only reason the answer is yes is because I've really built up a strong identity as a father, as an athlete, as a husband, as a community member. and I'd find something else to do for work and it would suck, it wouldn't be easy, it would be really, really shitty, but I don't think I'd fall into a depression because these other elements of my identity are strong.

Srini: I appreciate that so much. I think that is such a big trap for so many people, particularly creatives. We are so tied to our work that it's very easy to assume that who we are is our work. I wonder about that. At times, I was like, oh, if I weren't hosting the Unmistakable Creative, who would I be?

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, and I think that it's important to answer that question. And it's an important room in the house that is your identity. So not taking that away from you, but yeah, who would you be? And maybe the answer comes back to you'd be a really creative person, and you would find other ways to exert your creativity.

Srini: Yeah, well, I always knew that this was never going to be the one thing that I did. Like I was like, I, one of my friends asked me, what would you do after you, if you sold on mistaken creative for a fortune? I was like, probably go teach at university and start another company.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, but that gets back again, that gets back to this notion of being really values driven. So, I don't know you that well, but maybe another value of yours is growth or innovation. So, then you're just exerting that value. And right,

Srini: Hmm.

Brad Stulberg: I think this is like, we're going to get to this, but you've got these different rooms and these different things, whatever metaphor you want to use, components of your identity, that's really important. That allows you to be flexible and rugged. But... You also have these core values, which are the parts of you that don't really change. These are things like wisdom, growth, spirituality, intellect, creativity, health. These are just a couple of many examples. Over

Srini: Yeah.

Brad Stulberg: time, the way

Srini: Sorry.

Brad Stulberg: that you apply those things can become different as you change and the world around you changes.

Srini: Let's talk about this idea of target fixation, because I think this really stood out to me only based on a personal experience. You said, define broadly, target fixation is when a person becomes so focused on a particular target that they are headed towards that they end up driving, riding, or flying right into it. And if we focus, if we become too focused on the next thing in front of us, then we risk thoughtlessly crashing into it. And the... Sort of example I thought of for my own life about this was I had for the longest time had this goal to publish a thousand copies of it or to sell a thousand copies of a self published book. And, you know, another one was to get a book deal. And the irony of that whole thing was the book deal, the book that the self published book that sold 15,000 copies and led to the book deal was the result of me having given up on getting a book deal.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, that's so funny. So like you stop looking at the target and then you hit it.

Srini: Yeah, well, I was like, nobody's coming. I'm like, I've waited this long. Screw it. I'm done. And that book was what basically catapulted me into, you know, it's funny to this day, that's still my most popular book.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, and I think that is so often how it goes, is that when we over-try or we over-focus on something, it doesn't work out as well. Target fixation comes from fighter pilots, and you'll often hear about it in driver's ed courses as well. It's why there are crashes on the shoulder, because everyone's looking at the crash and then they drive right into it. And it's this very real measurable notion that when a pilot or a car or a motorcycle, when the captain or the driver is staring at something ahead of them, if they completely lose peripheral vision and they kind of zone in on that thing too much, they end up driving right into it. And the metaphor for life is exactly what you said. We have to keep our peripheral vision because there's so much stuff happening on the side that could be great opportunities or could have us veer left or veer right. And if we just focus on the target, then yeah, we can blow ourselves up. And even if we achieve it, like, okay, so then you achieve that target and then you die. That's no way to live life.

Srini: So let's talk briefly about the seeking pathway that you talk about here in the book as something that facilitates planning and problem solving.

Brad Stulberg: All right, so seeking versus rage pathway. And it's important to name them both because it's a zero sum game. And I'll get into why this is so important. So the, when we're faced with big changes, neuroscientists, really one specific neuroscientist, Jak Ponsky came up with this notion of circuitry in our brain. And there's the rage pathway, which is when we are really angry and like we're anxious and we're panicking. This can't be happening to me. It's resistance. It's like the hot emotion. And then there's the seeking pathway. And the seeking pathway is when we view something as a challenge in a problem to solve or a goal to strive for. And what the research shows is that these pathways cannot be activated at the same time. So by turning your seeking pathway on, you turn your rage pathway off. And we can see this when we look at fascinating MRI studies of people's brains in different emotional states. But we also kind of know it. It is impossible to be really pissed off and thoughtfully planning something at the same time. So what the seeking pathway is all about is when there is a big change or something does throw us for a loop, the more quickly that we can get into viewing that as a challenge and dealing with it, the more likely we are. to down-regulate the feelings of anger or denial or panic or resistance. So accept it, update your expectations, and then make a plan, start to engage with it. And the ultimate way to turn on the seeking pathway is just to start taking productive actions. Like you cannot be working to solve a problem and despondent at the same time. The research literature, they call this behavioral activation. I've heard the podcast host Rich Roll say mood follows action, but it's basically just that. The best way to snap out of the rage pathway is to start taking productive actions to make your situation better.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we've talked extensively about routines and rituals on the show. I know you alluded to them, and I think they're important. But I actually think people have heard enough of this. But there's something that really stood out to me in the book where you said the conventional wisdom on getting through challenges says that on one extreme, there's taking responsibility and picking oneself up by the bootstraps. On the other, there's taking it easy and showing one's self-dominant love. While these are often pitted against each other, the truth is that they're complementary in most circumstances. you need at least some measure of both.

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, that's right. So this is the not self-discipline or self-compassion, but self-discipline and self-compassion. So doing hard things is hard. Being a human is hard. Navigating big changes is really hard. And if you can't be your own friend, if you don't have your own back, if you can't be kind to yourself, then it becomes that much harder. And at worst, you stop even trying. Like why show up and step in the arena? if you know that if you mess up, you're just gonna judge yourself and be super hard on yourself.

Srini: Mm-hmm.

Brad Stulberg: So we think that these things are opposites, but in order to be really self-disciplined, in order to step up into the arena and do hard things, you also have to learn how to be kind to yourself and how to get back up quickly when you fall down.

Srini: So I think there's one other thing that really stood out to me in the book, and this is something that I've always wondered about, given the sheer volume of knowledge and information I've had access to for 13 years. I get to spend my days talking to people like you, and it's this difference between understanding something intellectually versus being able to put that information to use. And I think that stood out to me so much, because it's so easy to get caught up in this endless consumption trap, thinking that you're being productive by you know, reading all these self-help books and listening to all these podcasts and subscribing to a million newsletters, but then never doing anything with it. How do you bridge that gap?

Brad Stulberg: I think that the answer is first to become aware of it. It's like the knowing doing gap, right? You can know something, but that doesn't mean that you're doing it. So, if you get stuck in a knowing cycle, just saying like, hey, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about, reading about, dreaming about, talking about this thing. What would it look like to actually do it? And then back to something where we started. Make your first actions really simple. Don't resolve to boil the ocean. Pick one or two things that you cannot hide away from. in measure whether or not you do those one or two things. I think part of the reason that we like to spend so much time in knowing mode is because it allows us to procrastinate, it allows us to make things complex. It's like intellectual masturbation is a lot easier than actually doing the thing that you learned. So

Srini: I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Brad Stulberg: I think simplifying, right? Really saying this is what I'm going to do. The next time I'm thrown off in my day, I'm going to remember two P's versus four P's and I'm going to give myself 30 seconds to pause and process what happened. The next time there's a change, I'm going to say, what would it look like to be both rugged and flexible? Just those two things. People walk away from my book and they do those two things for three months. That's great. But I think you've got to get that small and that specific so that you can be consistent and you don't hide behind complexity.

Srini: Yeah, I think I wrote somewhere that like mental masturbation basically deludes you into product, you know, the idea that your productivity and you don't even get the pleasure of an orgasm from it.

Brad Stulberg: That's it, man. I think, and there's so much of that, especially with the think boys and the thread boys on the internet now. You could spend your whole day just reading tweet threads, or I guess now they're called X threads, or whatever X is.

Srini: Yeah, I didn't even know that that's news to me as like somebody told me that yesterday on podcast was like Twitter change this name to X

Brad Stulberg: Yeah, it's interesting decision making. But you can really trick yourself into all this stuff. And there's layers. It's like even there, get off Twitter and listen to a podcast like this or read a book. And then it's like once you've listened to enough podcasts like this or you've read enough books, then it's like great, put down your phone or book and start doing the thing. But I think a lot of people get stuck at the surface level, which is like the think boy Twitter thread.

Srini: Well, this has been amazing and really just such a pleasure to have you back. So I want to finish with my final question. It's always interesting to see how people answer this when they've come back a second time. What do you think it is? Make somebody or something unmistakable.

Brad Stulberg: Oh, I don't even remember what I said the first time.

Srini: Well, that's good

Brad Stulberg: Yeah,

Srini: for me.

Brad Stulberg: I mean, I think it's a realness and not a performative realness, but like a real realness. I think there's so much performative crap out there right now that it's pretty easy to get your BS detector up and like say like, you know, is someone actually... how they portray themselves to be or is there a lot going on? You know the metaphor, it's not mine, I forgot where I first heard it, is there's a lot of swans out there on the internet where they look beautiful above water but underwater they're paddling frantically. And I think just showing up as yourself and being fricking real in just all of it, that I think is what makes you unmistakable. And I think especially younger generations, their bullshit filter is gonna be really good. So showing up like honestly and integrity, or excuse me, honestly and with integrity is I think how I'm gonna answer this go round.

Srini: amazing.

Brad Stulberg: I mean,

Srini: Well.

Brad Stulberg: I could also say, you know, deadlift 500 pounds, because that's pretty real. But that's another thing. You know, it has nothing to do with my answer, but now that I joked about it, I think that it gets back to like knowing versus doing. I think especially for knowledge workers like me and you, it's so important to like do real things in the world. And I joke, it doesn't have to be deadlifting. I sound like such like a masculine meathead. It can be gardening, it can be yoga, it can be dancing, it could be carpentry. But like have some pursuit where the weights are on the ground and then you either pick them up or you don't, you either succeed or fail. There are no flowers, you plant the seeds, you water them, they either grow or they don't. You know, the table's not there, you build the table, then it's there. I think it's so important to do real things in the world to help us stay grounded throughout all the crazy change that we're facing.

Srini: Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the new book and everything else?

Brad Stulberg: So my website is my name, www.bredstahlberg.com. Try to keep that really easy. And Master of Change is available wherever you get books. So your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, of course it's on Amazon, it's on Audible, it's on Kindle. So you really should have no problem finding it.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Awesome.