Ep. 383: The Way of Excellence in BJJ, feat. Brad Stulberg

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 383. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm here today, this is exciting. I got one of my favorite authors on the line. I got Brad Stulberg. Brad, how are you doing? Speaker 2: I'm doing great, Steve. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Speaker 1: Happy to have you, excited to have you. Now, you were connected to me through someone in our community who like me is aware of and a fan of your work, but I specifically wanted to get you on and talk about that work because it is so relevant to the kinds of problems that are common in our sport of jiu-jitsu. Maybe you can go ahead and explain it though. Why don't you introduce yourself and the work that you've been pointing out? You've got a book that just came out that is going to be the topic that we discuss here today and it's going to explain the concepts that we get into. Speaker 2: I am extraordinarily fascinated by human performance and human flourishing. So, what makes us be our best and also feel our best? And for the last decade, I can't get this idea of excellence off my mind. So, what does it actually mean to be excellent? How come excellence as a personal and cultural pursuit is too often kind of been been shoved to a back shelf? Why did that happen? How can we reclaim genuine heartfelt excellence? And how can we have more excellence in our pursuits, whether that is in sport, in the creative arts, or more broadly in our life? And the culmination of that work is the latest book, The Way of Excellence, which recently came out, is twofold. The first part of the book takes a big comprehensive swing at excellence, again, asking questions like, what is excellence actually? Why does it matter? Why do people lose touch with it? And then the second part of the book, which is the the lion share of the book in terms of of pure page number, deals with a decade of research and reporting on the factors that give rise to excellence itself. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, the first thing I want to ask you, and you kind of touched on how this can maybe even be a topic in and of itself, but explain to me what is excellence? Might sound like an obvious question, but I feel sometimes like the lack of definition there leads people to feel like they're just never doing good enough because they're kind of striving towards this poorly defined goal. How have you defined excellence in your work? Speaker 2: Well, the first thing that I would say is I don't think of excellence as a destination. I don't think of excellence as a goal that you ever reach. Excellence is an ongoing process of becoming the best performer and the best person that you can be. And this goes all the way back when the ancient Greeks first started exploring this topic. The word that they used was arete. And arete was never about achieving a specific end or getting to the top of a certain mountain peak. It was always about a commitment to an internal standard of self-improvement and personal development and growth and in shaping one's character through the pursuit of big goals. So, I define excellence in really simple terms as involved engagement and caring deeply about a worthwhile project that aligns with your values. And both parts of that definition are really important. So, the involved engagement and caring deeply means that there has to be a level of focus and intention. And then the worthwhile projects that align with your values, you want to care deeply and you want to throw yourself into things that not only are outcomes and achievements that you want to attain, but also are journeys and paths that you want to shape you into a person. Because I think with my definition of excellence, not only are you working toward the goal, but the goal is also working on you. So, a lot of people make this mistake and think, I'm going to be the best jiu-jitsu athlete I can be, and I'm going to work so hard at this goal. And what they don't realize is that jiu-jitsu is also working on you as a person. It's teaching you about resilience and setbacks and getting uncomfortable being uncomfortable and doing hard things and patience and persistence and community and longevity and all of these qualities that don't just shape you as an athlete, but that also shape your character. And that is excellence at its zenith, when it's this bidirectional relationship between you and something you care about, where you are working on it and it is working on you. Speaker 1: I like that a lot. We've said many times that you should put the process before the outcome. You should focus on building habits instead of chasing results. I don't think that is particularly new or novel information for our audience, but I like what you talked about with excellence being a two-way relationship, not just a goal that you chase, but almost like a feedback loop if I'm understanding correctly. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And I think that that's what makes the pursuit so invigorating is that you really get into this almost like a conversation or a dance. I use both those metaphors between you and your your activity, where you are paying close attention and you are picking up on cues and you are adjusting as you go. And that sort of focus is just so gratifying. And that's always been gratifying, but especially in today's hyper-distracted, frenetic, frantic, overstimulated world, to have a craft that you bring deep focus on and that you're in this two-way relationship with and you're working towards betterment, regardless of where you end up, whether you are a national champion, a world champion, or you are just an average age grouper, it is so satisfying. Speaker 1: So, in our sport in jiu-jitsu, one of the things that kind of differentiates it from a lot of other martial arts is the massive prevalence of practitioners who just play it for fun as hobbyists. So, if I were to compare this to similar sports like amateur wrestling, a lot of people age out of that really quickly. People get big into wrestling in high school and then in the university career, and then as an adult, they've got a a relatively short time window to achieve whatever their athletic goals are, and then most of them just leave the sport and just go on to do other things. It's a kind of sport that probably is hard to do as you get older. There's a lot of athleticism involved in wrestling. And so you tend to see that it's a sport for young people. The interesting thing about jiu-jitsu is it's a sport that you can do into your later years. And a lot of people discover jiu-jitsu in their later years. So, instead of getting a bunch of young people coming into the sport who are really competition focused, it's common for people in their 40s or later to discover jiu-jitsu for the first time. And these are people who are well past their athletic prime. Very unlikely they're going to go off and win world championships if it takes 10 plus years to get a black belt and they just discovered jiu-jitsu at 40 something years old. So, this creates an interesting melting pot of different backgrounds in the sport, where yes, you do have young dedicated people who understandably are chasing excellence, but then you've also got people who come in and they're older and maybe their goals aren't competitive. How does a person like that have a healthy relationship with excellence in a sport like jiu-jitsu? Because this is an area where many people kind of beat themselves up, you know, they if a 40-year-old walks into a gym and they're already older than everyone else and they're already way less experienced than all of the kids, it's easy to feel like I just got no chance here. What does the science teach us about people who are, you know, they're maybe their goals aren't that aspirational. They're just doing this for some other reason. How can they still chase excellence and see value out of that? Speaker 2: I think the first thing to clear up is there's a difference between an excellent result, which is determined by a field of practitioners. So that might be winning a national championship. And the process of pursuing excellence, which is extremely intimate and personal. So, you can pursue excellence and have all the mental health and satisfaction benefits of it without ever achieving a result that is deemed excellent by your field. So, I am a powerlifter. And the most I'm ever going to deadlift, if everything goes perfectly, is probably 570, 580 pounds. Now, it's a huge deadlift for me, but you know, that doesn't even make me nationally, let alone internationally competitive. So, by the standard of the craft, I am not an excellent result, but I pursue excellence in the sport and I get all the benefits. So, what are the benefits that someone gets even if they come to jiu-jitsu at age 50 and they've never been an athlete before? I think there's two primary ones. The first is a sense of mastery. And mastery simply means you are making concrete, tangible progress on something that you can trace directly back to the effort that you put in. So, you train, you practice, and you get better. And that feedback loop of training, practicing, and getting better is so nourishing. And again, in today's hyper-connected, increasingly digital world, it's hard to find. Like there aren't too many pursuits where again, you can trace the result of your work back to yourself. And I think sport is beautiful because sport allows you to do that. And then the second thing that you get out of it is a sense of mattering. So, my understanding is that jiu-jitsu really thrives in these communities, right? You've got gyms, you've got clubs, you've got an online community that listens to podcasts like this and discusses the sport. When you are pursuing mastery in a community, it also gives rise to mattering, or a sense that you are part of something that is bigger than yourself. And it is so great to involve yourself in a community of other practitioners. And again, the benefits there are are study after study shows that our mental health, our overall well-being and our flourishing goes up when we have mastery and mattering. And as I argue, I think the pursuit of excellence, right, the disciplined, focused pursuit of worthwhile projects, that gives rise to mastery and mattering. And that is agnostic of age. So, you could take two people. You could take a young person who's been training for 15 years and who wants to be the best in the world, and a 55-year-old grandmother who's brand new to the sport and has never been an athlete. And well, the end result is obviously going to be extremely different. Both of them can get the intrinsic benefits of giving something their all, caring deeply, and pursuing mastery and mattering. And that is such a beautiful thing about sport, and jiu-jitsu in particular, because it is so welcoming to people of all ages and all backgrounds. Speaker 1: The challenging thing a lot of people have about combat sports is you are ultimately in a one-on-one situation where you are battling someone else directly. And the goal is you want to win, you want them to lose, and they're bringing in the same mindset. And many people struggle because the process of losing in jiu-jitsu is very direct. I mean, if you're in a soccer match and you lose, well, you know, ultimately it was a sport, it was a game, there are teams of people. That impact of the loss is sort of distributed amongst the team and it's not felt as directly as it would be in a one-on-one sport. I mean, if someone pins you down and sits on you and chokes you until you give up, that's a very direct humbling experience. And my findings are that many people in jiu-jitsu take those losses seriously to heart. Much, much more than they should. People take it very personally sometimes when they lose in a one-on-one combat situation. And I get that, but it does make it hard sometimes for people to get on that ladder and chase the the process of mastery and excellence because the feelings of inadequacy come so sharply and so directly. Do you have any thoughts on that and what to do in a sport like jiu-jitsu where the impact of losing is so direct? Speaker 2: I mean, I think that this is one of those things where everyone thinks their sport is unique. And and yeah, I guess it's direct to have to submit. But when I miss a lift, like there's no explaining it away. There's no teammates, right? Like I didn't lock the lift out. It is in my face. It is discouraging, it is frustrating, it's disappointing. I increasingly think that the goal is less to win or to lock out the lift, is it is to put yourself in a position to win or to put yourself in a position to lock out the lift. And for the book, I talked to hundreds of elite athletes. And those that have the best longevity and the best winning percentages, they actually don't talk about obsessing over winning or losing. What they talk about is just trying to put themselves in a position to win as frequently as possible. And then acknowledging that once you're in that position to win, there are so many variables that impact whether or not the chips are going to fall your way or not. But if you constantly make the goal, put myself in a position to win, eventually the chips are going to fall in the right direction and it's going to happen enough times. So, I just think it's detaching from the result and playing the long game and reframing the goal away from winning as put myself in a position to win. And then of course, this isn't rocket science, but when you don't win, when you lose, when you get pinned, when you have to submit, when you miss the lift, you can ask yourself, hey, was this bad luck? Was I underprepared? Was I just overpowered by the bar? In the case of powerlifting, I took on too much weight. In the case of jiu-jitsu, my opponent was just that much better than me. What can I learn from this? Let me process and feel the pain and the grief and the frustration of loss. Let me take whatever I can learn, and then let me get back to the craft. In the book, I call it the 48-hour rule. And it essentially says that after a big win or a tough loss, give yourself 48 hours to celebrate the victory or grieve the defeat, but then get back to doing the actual work itself. Because the best medicine for a bloated ego after a win or despair after a loss is to do the work itself. And people are very literal and they're like, well, 48 hours, would you tell an Olympian if they just missed the podium, they should only be upset for 48 hours? No, like, I don't know, give yourself two weeks. The the point isn't the exact time frame. The point is this focus on getting back to the craft itself. So, learn what there is to learn, get back to the craft, obsess less about winning and more about putting yourself in a position to win over the course of the long haul. Speaker 1: I'd love to get your thoughts on the biology of excellence. This is something unique in your book that I haven't seen many other people talk about. It's often discussed at a philosophical level, but you mentioned that there's a degree of biology and even psychology behind why we chase excellence and why this even matters to us in the first place. I'd love to hear more about that. Speaker 2: All right, so biologists use the term homeostatic upregulation. And it is an innate drive in all living organisms to persist and flourish. And this goes back to the very beginning of life in bacteria and single-cell organisms. And it's been passed down through billions and billions of years of evolution all the way to us. So, every living species has this homeostatic upregulation drive. And for the longest time, that simply meant moving towards conditions that were advantageous to our survival, and moving away from conditions that were disadvantageous for our survival. But we humans, we have lives and values and goals that extend so far beyond survival and passing on our DNA. So, for us, flourishing, it means creating art, challenging ourselves physically, doing science, building companies, leading teams, making music, competing in sport, inspiring others, and and so on. And it's that same innate life force, homeostatic upregulation, that drove the earliest organisms toward environments that were good for their survival, that pushes us towards flourishing. And this is precisely why we feel so good when we do activities that are worthwhile to us and when we do them with integrity and involved engagement. Something that I found fascinating in my reporting for the book is when I ask people about excellence, when they observe it in others and when they feel it in themselves. So, what do you what happens when you watch Steph Curry hit a three-pointer? Or when you're grappling and you're just on it, like you're firing on all cylinders, or you're standing before a Rothko painting, or you're tasting the creation of a master chef. Nobody told me that they're thinking about what's happening. No one said I watched Steph Curry and I think, well, you know, the ball's a perfect parabola, his his elbow's locked in at 90 degrees and he's shooting at the top of his jump. No one says that. We feel these things, right? And we create this feeling for ourselves when we pursue excellence. And that feeling really gets back to like this biological need we have for this. It is 100% pre-intellectual and that's part of what makes excellence such a satisfying, incredible thing and why I think that all of us should find ways to pursue it in our lives. Speaker 1: Something that I know you have talked about is the difference between excellence versus pseudo-excellence, which I guess is when you look at modern hustle culture and a lot of the performative stuff that you see online, there's a difference between excellence and the image of excellence. And I know that you draw that distinction and tell people to focus more on the process, but I'd love to understand what you mean when you talk about performative excellence. What is that all about? Speaker 2: So, pseudo-excellence is essentially, and I'm painting in broad strokes here, the person that wakes up at 4:00 a.m. with a 47-step routine, gives a hype speech from their cold plunge, takes 142 supplements, is constantly cycling from fad diet to fad diet, picks up a new sport every three weeks and and tells everyone how they're going to be the best in the world at it and then moves on to the next sport three weeks later and on and on and on. It's essentially performance art for the internet. It does great on the algorithm, it attracts a lot of attention, but it's so different than actual excellence. Actual excellence in many ways is the opposite. It's about caring deeply, it's about consistency, it's about ruthless execution of the fundamentals. Um, yes, it includes those transcendent peak moments when we get in the zone, but it also encompasses all the tedious, mundane practice that comes before and that will inevitably come after. And I just think it's so important to separate the performance of excellence from the real thing. Because I think what happens is a lot of people, they see the performance of excellence and they're like, I can't be excellent. Like I don't want to be like one of those clowns on Instagram. And that's not actual excellence. Actual excellence, it's the people that you admire most. It's the the surgeon that operates on your kid to save their life, that has given their all to a craft. It is the woodworker who builds a table that is so elegant and so functional. It is the athlete who shows up at practice with full intention and full focus and pours their heart and soul into their pursuit and gets satisfied as a result. That is real excellence. There's nothing performative about it. So, I think it's really important to separate pseudo-excellence or hustle culture or internet excellence from the real thing. And what I'm talking about in this book is the real thing. Speaker 1: I love how you described it as internet excellence because I think that's really hitting the nail right on the head there in terms of where all of this comes from. My observation has been that when you look at these people who create this image of excellence online, much of the time, their excellence is more in the realm of being an influencer than it is at whatever they're claiming to be an an expert at. And that is its own skill set. Speaker 2: 100%. Speaker 1: Yeah, being an influencer is its own skill set. And if you laser focus on that, you can make yourself appear to be a certain thing, but that doesn't mean you truly are a domain expert in that area. Speaker 2: That's so well said, Steve. The way that I talk about it is you're maybe kinder than me by calling them an influencer. I just say like there's a difference between attracting attention on the internet and actually becoming a master of a craft or even pursuing mastery at a craft. And generally, if you're pursuing mastery at a craft, you don't have all the time and energy to be a talking head doing elaborate Kabuki all day on the internet. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, in your book, I know that you spend the majority of the book talking about habits and practice and what to do about this. And so I want to make sure that in this conversation we do the same and I want to give you ample time to go over what actually works. So, for the listener, whether they are a serious practitioner looking to achieve high-level performance and win medals, or whether they are a casual person who just wants to be the best they can within the parameters that they've set for themselves. What does the science say about excellence? What works best in terms of building habits and building practice that lead down that road? Speaker 2: Oh, where to start? There's so much to unpack here. I'll pick a couple of my favorites, Steve, and I'll I'll let you react to each of them. I think the the first thing that I would say is that you have to care deeply and you have to give a damn. There is this kind of epidemic of nonchalance where people are like too cool to care. So, you're like, ah, like I kind of do jiu-jitsu, but like not really. Or like, yeah, I go to the gym, but like I don't really care about my results. And what that is is is that's just a cop out. Researchers call this self-handicapping. And it's essentially what all the kids back in middle school and high school did that were too cool to try, right? They sat in the back of the classroom, they never they phoned it in in gym or in music. And those kids weren't actually cool. What those kids were is they were scared and they were insecure. Because if they gave something their all and they failed, it would be embarrassing. So, it's easier not to try than to try hard and risk failure. But to receive the benefits of excellence in anything, you have to try hard. Like by definition, you have to give a damn, you have to care deeply. And you have to give yourself permission to care deeply, knowing that when you fail, it's going to be that much more frustrating and heartbreaking, but that's just the price that you pay for the texture and meaning and satisfaction that the pursuit gives to your life. So, the first thing I'd say is you've got to care and don't be too cool to care, don't be too cool to be earnest, that is nonsense, right? Care, give a damn. Say that I am setting this big goal and I'm going to give it everything that I can in this season of my life and own that. And own that whether you succeed or fail and continue to come back to the process. The second thing that I would say is to adopt a mindset of curiosity. Curiosity is one of the ultimate antidotes to fear. So, I'll I'll tell a story from my own pursuit as an athlete. About seven years ago, I was training in Oakland, California with my then training partner Justin. And um, I was about to attempt a a PR deadlift and and he looked at me and he's like, how are you feeling? And I'm like, I don't know, man. And he could probably tell I I wasn't feeling too good. And he said, brave new world. Brave new world. And what he meant by that is not the Aldous Huxley book. What he meant by that is, I don't know if I'm going to make or miss the lift. He doesn't know whether or not I'm going to make or miss the lift, but it's a brave new world, it's a new horizon, so let's go find out. And that mindset towards any challenge is so beneficial. Neuroscience shows that it is literally impossible to be fearful and curious at the same time. Impossible. The neural circuits compete for resources in our brain. So, when we take on big challenges, if we can approach them with a mindset less of I'm scared, less of I need to win, and more with I am curious to find out what I'm capable of, we open ourselves up to have the best experience and the best performance. And this is true at even the highest levels. Before his his tragic death, Kobe Bryant was asked, are you the kind of athlete that plays to win or that plays not to lose? And Kobe said, I'm neither. I play to figure things out. And I just think that that's so, so powerful as a mindset. So, approach your craft with curiosity, with curiosity about yourself and with curiosity about what you can do. I think that I'll give you one more and then I'll shut up for a minute, Steve, and and let you ask further questions. I think one more is is around consistency. So, I think a lot of people think, and this comes back to internet excellence, the goal is to like have a heroic workout. And anyone can have a heroic workout. It's not hard to train until you vomit. I could go make myself vomit in 15 minutes. Like there's nothing hard about that. What's hard is to be able to string together day after day, week after week, month after month, session after session of good effort with integrity towards your goal. And in the book, I talk about consistency over intensity or consistency then intensity. And we often get this backwards. So often we start something and we go all in and we try to be super intense, and then we burn ourselves out or we get injured, instead of focusing on consistency, right? You don't have to hit home runs. You just have to put the ball in play over and over again and eventually those gains compound. So, I think those are those are just three of, I don't know, hundreds in the book. But but those are the three that that immediately come to mind. So, caring deeply, not feigning nonchalance, really committing yourself to something. This notion of of consistency over intensity and how important that is. And then not being so caught up in winning or losing, but being really curious. Speaker 1: Caring, curiosity, and consistency. I like it. Three Cs, that's going to be easy to remember. Now, I want to dig into the first one here, caring, because you you said something really interesting. You talked about self-handicapping, basically the people who are too cool for school. And I've talked about this in the context of jiu-jitsu before under the lens of defensive thinking. Sometimes people pre-make excuses before the actual performance to justify a poor performance. So, before a competition, they'll say something like, oh, well, you know, I'm not real good at this. I'm just doing it for fun. And that may be true, but they're providing themselves an out. They're creating a public excuse for a performance that hasn't even happened yet. So, they're giving themselves permission to lose in advance. And to me, that's always come across as being a defense mechanism. I think similar to what you're talking about here. Speaker 2: Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, that's it. It's a cop out. You're giving yourself an out instead of saying, this is where I am. This is my fitness, this is my skill. I'm going to give it everything. Because there's a million excuses for what can happen, always. In the book, I tell this story of JJ Spaun. Does that name mean anything to you, Steve, or no? Speaker 1: No, tell me about it. Speaker 2: All right, so JJ Spaun, um, is a golfer. And the the night before the final round of the US Open, he's staying in a hotel room with his wife and his two daughters, one of whom is a toddler, she's three years old. And she gets like violently ill, you know, super nauseous, worst thing you could imagine. This happens at 1:00 in the morning. And JJ Spaun has to go find the only drugstore that's open 24 hours at 2:00 in the morning, and then he is up the rest of the night with his daughter. Okay? If JJ Spaun would have been wearing a whoop or an aura ring or a recovery device, his his sleep score would have been zero. He was up all night. Okay? He had every excuse in the world. And you know what JJ Spaun did the next day? He won the US Open, the biggest golf tournament in the world. That is incredible to me. Talk about someone that could have self-handicapped, that could have bailed out, that could have told himself all of these stories. And by the way, you hadn't heard of JJ Spaun. You know, we're not talking about Rory McIlroy. He's an underdog. So, he had every reason to self-handicap. But he went out there and he owned it and he said essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, that going into the final round, it was chaos, but I know that I can perform well even when I'm not feeling my best. And that is such an anti-fragile mindset. And I think that so often, to your point, like we look for these sources of fragility is a way to create outs and excuses, but that we're we're on our heels. Like the minute that you start doing that, you're on the heels. The minute that I had a bad night's sleep, or I've got a little cold, or yeah, like I didn't really execute my training because I was busy with work. Again, all that can be true, but if you hit the mat with those thoughts in your mind, you are literally psychologically putting all your weight on your heels, you're going to lose. If you hit the mat and you say, I gave everything I had given the circumstances in my life, I want to be really curious. Like brave new world, let's find out, then you give yourself a chance to win. I know this in my own life as an athlete, right? I am not a professional athlete. My primary craft is writing. I'm a parent of two young kids. I coach. I have a full, hectic life just like everyone else. Which often means that when I come to the gym for key workouts, I am not 100%. You know, I tell myself, it's brave new world. Like let's start. Let's see what it feels like to train when you've got a newborn that's not sleeping. How am I going to adjust my training? But it's never pre-making these excuses, because that just, just, just gets in the way. Speaker 1: Something that I've learned talking to a lot of athletes is whenever they go into a big event and they win, man, things never went well. Um, one of my friends, Dominika Obelenyte, she's a a multi-time jiu-jitsu world champion. In my opinion, one of the best women of her generation in the sport. And I remember her telling me a story about a major tournament that she ultimately went in and won. And and everything beforehand went completely wrong, you know, as you can imagine. Similar stories to what you talked about. Had some bad food the night before, messed up her stomach, her schedule got all screwed up, and she wound up having to panic to hustle to get there. It's never an easy process to get to these events and no one ever comes in at their ideal 100%. I mean, the only time I can ever think of a a combat athlete saying they came in at 100%. I think it was Brock Lesnar versus Alistair Overeem or maybe it was Cain Velasquez. In any event, it was a fight that he got his ass kicked in in the first round. And he said, no excuses, I came in 100%, got my ass kicked. It's very rare to go into any sort of sporting event at 100%. And so if you're requiring that of yourself, that's an example of thinking defensively, of giving yourself an excuse before it happens, right? There is no such thing as being 100% prepared for any any sort of competitive endeavor. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it. You hit the nail on the head. And one of the best things that you can do for your confidence as an athlete, but really just for a person in life, is to not feel great and still perform really well. Researchers call this self-efficacy. And self-efficacy essentially says that you gain confidence based on evidence, so you have to give yourself evidence, examples of this, that you can navigate challenges and uncertainty and in in less than ideal circumstances and make your way through. And the only way that you do that is by practice. So, it's all the more reason when things aren't 100% to show up and to give your best shot and to try to break that cycle of needing things to be perfect versus this kind of self-handicapping, creating an excuse beforehand. And let me be clear, listen, if you've got 104 fever and the flu, yeah, you probably shouldn't compete. We're not talking about that. We're talking about kind of like all the the more day-to-day excuses that each and every one of us could make all the time. Speaker 1: My coach, Emily Kwok, she's a a well-known jiu-jitsu legend, and I remember her telling me a story about when she won one of her world championships and she talked about how she um apparently had broken her ankle or injured her ankle shortly before the event. And she said to me, I know this probably isn't the smart thing and I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to other people, but in her case, she refused to acknowledge the reality that she was injured. And I thought that was wild. And again, maybe not the smartest thing to do, but it also gave me an interesting understanding of the mindset of someone in that space, right? To try to bend reality into what they want it to be. And it also kind of helped me understand that, man, you know, me having a bad day, look, everyone has bad days. That's not just something that only happens to normal people. Even the very best in the sport have bad days. It's more about what do you do about it? Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%. Like can you respond, not react, and can you own your seat and still bring your best to a situation with a mindset of curiosity? I think that's not just true on the mat. That's true in life. Speaker 1: Now, when we talk about caring, this can also go the other way. Now, you'd mentioned earlier this idea of performative excellence, pseudo-excellence. And in a culture like ours where there's so much visibility on everything we do and so many expectations about how we should present ourselves, it's easy to care performatively about something too, where you don't really care about this goal or this objective, or at least you don't care about it to the extent that you say you do, but you put on a show of caring because of the people around you. Where I would bring this up, my background is in corporate. And man, I've worked a lot of office jobs where, you know, there's this whole HR culture about how, you know, we're a family here and we go 100% and we love it and we're all committed to the mission. And I have been asked to care deeply about really ridiculous things. You know, I've been in jobs where I was expected to care extraordinarily deeply about digital records management systems or something like that, right? And this creates this weird process of lying to yourselves. And there's many times in my career where I had to leave a job because I realized after doing something for a few years, you know what? I really don't care about this. And and no matter how much I tell myself I care about it, I can only delude myself for so long, right? Maybe I'm just saying it because I need to believe this in order to survive and get ahead in this particular environment where everyone else claims to care about this passionately. Is that a real thing? Like is it possible to fake care about something for performative reasons? Speaker 2: I think you can say that you care, but I think deep down inside, you weren't caring. So, to me, there's like probably some cognitive dissonance that would happen between creating the illusion of caring versus actually giving a damn and caring. And what I would argue and what I do argue in the book is that you don't have to care deeply about everything in your life. Okay? Some people work jobs that are boring as shit and they're nine to five jobs and they don't really care, but it enables them to have this wonderful life where they can have pursuits like jiu-jitsu, where they can coach their kids sports, where they can travel, whatever it is, and they can care deeply in those other areas. So, some people are wired where that's totally acceptable and that's fine. Other people are wired and that would be hell, right? To try to work a job where they don't care would be absolute hell. And there truly is not a a right or wrong, it's just we're temperamentally different. But I think that you've got to have at least one thing in your life that you actually truly care about. And then yeah, if someone's asking you to care deeply about something that you just think is like a crock of crap, you kind of have a choice. Like you can feign caring and kind of fake it to get your paycheck, or it sounds like, you know, in your situation, Steve, you could say, I I should probably find a new job. And I think both are valid paths forward. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think any sort of endeavor that you chase, you have to have an honest relationship with yourself about what is your level of personal investment. How much do you care about this? And I agree with you that, look, sometimes in life we got to do things we just don't care that much about. And maybe we don't want to be excellent at some chore or routine we have to do or some aspect of our job. If if that's not our goal, that's okay. But I agree with you that we all need an outlet. We need something that we really truly do care about and can pour our emotions and our efforts into. You'd also talked about curiosity as being another pillar of this. And I think that's a, man, you're not the first person who's told this to me. I've heard before, like you said, that fear and curiosity cannot coexist in the brain at the same time. And this is a somewhat common reframing technique that coaches will use when their athletes are getting in their own head, they're getting stage fright before a performance. You know, the coach will say to them, afraid, why are you afraid? You should be excited. This is an awesome opportunity. You should get hyped. It's not about winning or losing, it's about this is what you worked for. This is an opportunity to show the world what you can do and try to get them out of that I'm afraid mindset and into that I am excited mindset. And I think curiosity is a really powerful tool as well. I find this to be a really helpful reframe whenever I'm feeling bad about not just something I'm doing, but even something someone else is doing. If I think I'm being like unreasonably critical or unfair, trying to flip that to a mindset of curiosity and asking why and being inquisitive has been super helpful for me. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I referenced the research that you're referring to in the book and my favorite study is actually amongst swimmers. And what the researchers did is they essentially looked at elite swimmers, which they classified as national and world class, and then swimmers who were really good, but never made it to national or world class. And on the the start blocks of a race, so before the gun goes off and you jump into the pool, the researchers took a whole battery of these various measures of what they called arousal. So, they didn't label it as nervousness or anxiety or stress, they just called it arousal. So, these were things like perspiration rate, heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and so on and so forth. And what they found is that the elite swimmers, the national and world class swimmers, and those that didn't make it to that level, they had the same exact physiological sensations. The same levels of arousal. The difference was, the elite swimmers, they framed that arousal and they genuinely taught themselves to believe that that was their nervous system getting ready to perform its best. That was explosiveness. The butterflies in their stomach, I once had an elite athlete say, those are the butterflies getting into the right file to crush it. Okay? Whereas the non-elite swimmers, they felt the same feelings, but they labeled those feelings as anxiety. And that was the only difference. So, same sensations, just how we label them. For the book, for the chapter on curiosity, as a matter of fact, I interviewed world-class performers in different pursuits and I had the Grammy award-winning uh solo violinist. So, talk about pressure. I mean, it's probably similar level of pressure to to trying to win a world championship jiu-jitsu, right? It's just her, she's a soloist. She's in front of the the whole auditorium. The opera's at her back. And I asked her what she feels before she steps out onto the stage. And what she said is, I feel adrenaline that is preparing me. And I'm like, well, tell me more about what that means. Like what do you actually feel? And she said, my heart rate is soaring. My palms start sweating. Sometimes I even feel like tingling throughout my body. Now, you could tell that to someone and they said that sounds a lot like a panic attack. But what Hillary Hahn said is that is adrenaline helping her perform. So, if we can train ourselves and we can learn that these sensations are neutral. They only take on valence when we label them and when we give them valence. If we can train ourselves to view those sensations as adrenaline, as excitement, as our nervous systems getting primed, it truly does help us perform better. Now, this isn't just a switch that you get to flick, right? You can't just listen to this podcast and the next time you go compete and you're nervous as shit, say, well, Brad and Steve said just be, you know, tell yourself you're excited. Like, no, you're lying to yourself. This is an ongoing practice and it starts in practice. It starts when you're feeling a little bit off about an exercise, or when you're about to grapple in practice and and you're feeling a little bit intimidated. In those lower stakes moments, can you try to bring curiosity to it? Because I think that's what it's ultimately about. Like reframing nerves as excitement is essentially just getting curious about what's happening in your body and then trying to use it to your advantage. And the truth is, you're not lying to yourself. Like the nervous system, stress is stress. And stress can lead us to our greatest freaking feats and stress can absolutely cripple us. But biologically, it's the same thing. So, how we appraise it really does make a big difference in in what happens next. Speaker 1: I love it, man. I love it. Now, you'd also talked about consistency and I know this kind of dovetails into a lot of things you discuss in in your book like habits and discipline. I'd love to hear you expand on consistency because I think everyone knows, right? You got to be consistent. But what does that really mean? I feel sometimes that people when they talk about consistency, they feel that that might entitle them or guarantee them some particular result. And the big reframe, the big challenge for a lot of people is coming to terms with the fact that consistency and excellence might not mean a particular result. I mean, there's amazing athletes who just, you know, they were maybe the favorite to win some major event, but they never made it for reasons outside of their control. Maybe something political happened or there was a current event that prohibited them from getting to the event. Maybe they got catastrophically injured right before. There are so many factors that can prevent you from being in the right place at the right time. And I know that's not always the most satisfying thing for people to hear, but we've said many times the same that you do, which is that consistency is really the key for everything. It's the key for habits, it's the key for putting yourself in the right place at the right time so you get good opportunities. It's the key to seeing your results compound, which is such a huge thing, right? I mean, in the context of jiu-jitsu, if you come in as a white belt day one, you are going to be so cognitively overloaded because the complexity of every movement is so huge. It's going to take your full attention just to get through the class. And probably you won't retain that much. But if you do this enough, after a few years, all of that thinking and practice starts to solidify into ideas in your head that are a bit easier to manipulate and move around. And before you know it, you can start doing relatively complex motions without too much thought. And that allows you to then start building a higher level of thinking on top of that, like strategy, right? How do I chain all of these specifics together into a strategy that can take me through the match? So, you all of this benefit compounds over time. But especially if there's any science behind it, I'd love to hear you expand on consistency and why it's so important. If there anything we haven't added yet. Speaker 2: The first thing that I would say is I'd echo what you said about the compounding effect. So, the gains that you make today are is your new starting point for tomorrow. And that simply means that the more days that you show up and you make a deposit in the bank, the more you're going to get compounding interest on those gains. It is very similar to investing. The way to amass wealth over time is you make these incremental little investments and you start when you're young and you keep on investing and you get compounded returns and that is no different with how skill development works. So, that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is that for all that we know about human performance, and we know a lot, there's still a lot that we don't know. Like there's a lot of magic. Every performance scientist that I interviewed for this book is kind of like also at heart a mystic. Because for as much as we can measure and know, like they all have experiences when like the stars just aligned and and they had their best performance. And as I was saying earlier, like we can't control when that's going to happen. We can't control when the external factors and internal factors align. All we can do is put ourselves in a position to receive the gift of the universe when it comes. Well, how do you do that? By being consistent, by showing up day in and day out. In the book, I call it increase your surface area for luck. So, anyone that says that performance is all skill, there's no luck involved, it's nonsense. Anyone who says you just got lucky, you didn't work hard, you just got lucky, it's nonsense. All great performance, hell, all progress is a mix of skill and luck. And we can't control when we're going to get lucky, so all we can do is stay consistent, develop skill, and then put ourselves in a position to be lucky time and time again. The other really interesting thing about consistency, and I think this is one of the more nuanced points that that people don't often make, is there is in self-improvement writing and in personal development and and in like the performance space. So, books that are similar to mine, and I guess a lot of listeners have probably heard of this. There's this very popular saying, get just 1% better every day. And as a mindset, that is great. I totally agree with it. That is like the bedrock of consistency, right? It's exactly what I said earlier. You don't have to hit home runs, just put the ball in play. Those 1% gains, they compound on each other and little by little, you get something big. It is an extremely powerful mindset. However, I think what sometimes happens is people go into the sport with that mindset and then they see that they actually are getting 1% better every day. So, when you're new to jiu-jitsu, when you're new to powerlifting, when you're new to learning the clarinet, when you're new to Spanish, when you're new to pottery, it doesn't matter what it is. You actually do get 1% better every day. Hell, sometimes you get 20% better every day. You're making a ton of progress. And the mix of that mindset of consistency and the feedback loop where I exert effort and I get a little bit better and then I come back tomorrow and I do it again. That is addictive in all the best ways. And just about every single craft, for the first one to four years that you do it, you get 1% better every day. And those concrete observable gains, that's what keeps you coming back again and again and again. But then, very predictably, in every single craft, there comes a point where you stop getting 1% better every day, right? You are on the path of mastery. You can no longer get 1% better every day because you're simply too good. And at that point, you still need to retain the mindset of show up, be consistent, get 1% better every day, but you have to detach from that reward cycle where you're actually making 1% gains, lest you'll quit what you do. So, in the book, I profile the world champion powerlifter, Layne Norton. And Layne Norton told me that when he started the sport, he did it for all the reasons that so many people do. He had low self-confidence, he needed an outlet for mastery in his life. And what drew him into the sport was the fact that he got 1% better every day. It was incredible, right? Okay, fast forward 10, 15 years into the sport. His deadlift was 716 pounds. Guess how long it took him to get his deadlift from 716 to 723 pounds. Any idea? Speaker 1: I'm going to guess that that took him probably as long as like the first 90% up to the journey took him that long again. That's my guess. Speaker 2: Yeah, bingo. I mean, you're elite, so you got it. It took him eight years. So, I was joking with Layne. We actually did the math. Layne Norton got significantly less than 1% better every year. He got 0.00003% better every day. And Layne was saying that at that juncture on the path of mastery, you can't be addicted to the concrete progress. You have to be addicted to the self-discovery, to the community around you, to again, the curiosity that you bring to what you're doing, to the feeling of training, just to the fact that you are committed, that you are the kind of person who says you're going to show up and you show up. Like that's what brings you the value. And Layne told me that there's a chance that he never moved up. He could have spent those eight years and not in his words, not gotten lucky, not had that performance breakthrough, those eight pounds that he added to the bar. And it still would have been okay. Excuse me, seven pounds. It still would have been worth it. And I just think like to me, that's the bedrock of consistency. It's all of this. So, when you're a beginner, when you're a newbie, those those early gains are incredible and they keep you coming back and you need to be consistent. And then when those gains wear off, you can't start doing stupid shit because you're bummed that progress plateaued. You have to remain consistent and your motivation just has to shift to be more intrinsic. You know, there's this saying in jiu-jitsu that comes from the Gracies, I believe, and it is uh keep it playful. This is tremendously important both to in terms of how it sets the culture of a training room because if, you know, your students are trying to actually kill each other, you're not going to get very far. But also because it talks about the importance of keeping joy and play in the sport, right? Ultimately, sport is about play. And I have always found that the truly great performers, they have that element of joy and play in the work they do. They do it because they love it, because it's fun, because it makes them happy. If you're not actually enjoying what you're doing, it's going to be really hard to sustain the motivation to get good at anything. You just you're going to burn out, there's going to be all sorts of problems that come up, you're going to get distracted by things you actually do enjoy. And so finding things that you truly have a love for and can create a sense of joy in doing, that's so key to performance. It's going to be very hard to be good at anything if you don't actually enjoy it. Speaker 1: You hit the nail on the head. Well, sir, let's plug the book. If people want to dig deeper into your work here, talk about The Way of Excellence. What's it all about and where can people find it? Speaker 2: So, I love this conversation. It's truly the tip of the iceberg. All of these topics and and so many more factors, it's actually 15 factors of excellence. I think we addressed three in detail here are in the book, The Way of Excellence. I'm Brad Stulberg. You can find the book wherever you get books. It's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop.org, your local bookseller. It's available in hardcover, in ebook, in audio. So, if you found this conversation resonant and valuable, uh there's so much more in the book. I was telling Steve offline, I really am committed to getting this book in the hands of people that quote unquote get it, that like understand this kind of excellence, that want it in their life. In a way, it's a weird counterculture thing right now and I think that makes it all the more important. So, if you want to go deeper, get the book, The Way of Excellence. If you like the show, I can almost promise that you'll love the book. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. And I mean, as listeners can probably tell, I am a big fan of your work, so I encourage people to check it out. I'm also aware that listeners are probably listening to this while they're driving to work or falling asleep or sitting on the toilet or something. So, I will make it easy for people and I'll put a link to Brad's book in the show notes if people want to check that out, or you can just Google The Way of Excellence and I'm sure you'll find it. I will also put a link to everything we make. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com. The podcast is free. We've got mini episodes plus full-length episodes like this. Our newsletter is, I think, one of the more popular ones in the sport and it's also completely free. So, at the bare minimum, please do check out those resources if you haven't already. And the way to level up with us is BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest audio resource for jiu-jitsu content. If you're into strategy, tactics, concepts, mindset, or the type of things that don't fit into a classic jiu-jitsu video instructional, you're probably going to like our stuff a lot. Think Audible, think Masterclass, but focused on jiu-jitsu. Many of the courses that we make and publish there are really in line with what we talked about here today. So, I think people have probably figured out, I generally reject the whole alpha bro warrior hustle mindset that's so prevalent on the internet. So, we've got some awesome mindset courses specifically for jiu-jitsu athletes, competitors, and coaches that debunk a lot of that internet mindset BS. So, again, I think very culturally aligned with your book there, Brad. But again, I'll put a link to all of that in the show notes. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com for people who want to check that out. But Brad, thank you so much, man. A huge honor to have this chat. I've been wanting to get you on for a while. Probably again, obvious, I'm a fan of your work, but thank you so much for your time today. Speaker 2: Thank you. This was a pleasure. Those feelings are mutual. Speaker 1: Absolutely, sir. And thank you to the listeners too. Appreciate you greatly and I will see you next time. Take care.