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Brad Stulberg believes excellence has been misunderstood.
Too often, people equate excellence with perfectionism, obsession, or some kind of hyper-optimized, performative lifestyle. But in this conversation, Brad makes the case that true excellence is much more human—and much more accessible. It is not about being the best in the world at everything. It is about fully engaging in something worthwhile that aligns with your values.
In this episode, Peter talks with Brad about the core ideas in The Way of Excellence, including how to define what matters, why the “arrival fallacy” keeps so many ambitious people dissatisfied, how to manage competing identities without burning out, and why relationships and community are essential to a meaningful life. They also explore how routines, focus, and even AI fit into the pursuit of excellence in a chaotic modern world.
If you’ve ever felt pulled between ambition and fulfillment, or wondered whether there is a healthier, more sustainable way to pursue greatness, this conversation offers a thoughtful framework.
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Brad Stulberg On What Excellence Is—And What It Is Not (0:00)
Brad begins by clearing away some of the most common misconceptions about excellence.
He explains that excellence is not perfectionism. Trying to be great at everything, all the time, is a fast track to burnout and mediocrity. It is also not “internet excellence”—the kind of performative self-optimization culture that turns life into a never-ending productivity protocol filled with supplements, cold plunges, and elaborate routines for the sake of appearances.
He also distinguishes excellence from obsession. While obsession may drive performance in the short run, it often becomes unsustainable over time. And importantly, excellence is not winning at all costs. Outcomes matter, but excellence also includes the values and integrity behind how those outcomes are pursued.
Brad’s definition is simple but powerful: excellence is involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values. That means caring deeply about what you’re doing, while also making sure the thing you are pursuing is shaping you into the kind of person you actually want to become.
That, he says, is what leads to both mastery and mattering—the combination of tangible progress and a feeling that your efforts mean something.
Why The Pursuit Of Excellence Should Be Available To Everyone (4:30)
One of Brad’s big goals in writing The Way of Excellence was to democratize the pursuit of excellence.
He makes an important distinction between excellence as a process and excellence as an outcome. Not everyone will become world-class in their chosen field. Standards of craft and community still matter. But anyone can pursue excellence in the way they approach their work, their growth, and their daily life.
Brad uses the example of triathlon to explain this idea. Finishing an Ironman in 14 hours may not make someone an elite triathlete by competitive standards, but that person can still embody excellence through the way they train, grow, and engage in the challenge. On the flip side, someone can post elite results while feeling robotic and disconnected from the process.
That distinction matters because the internal rewards of excellence—meaning, fulfillment, growth, and self-respect—are not reserved for a tiny group of world-class performers. They are available to anyone willing to pursue something worthwhile with intention and integrity.
How To Identify Your Values And Figure Out What Really Matters (5:04)
Peter asks a question that sits at the center of the entire conversation: how do people actually figure out what matters to them?
Brad explains that values are the north stars that guide a good life. They are qualities like truth, creativity, respect, wisdom, integrity, kindness, and community. Research suggests that people tend to flourish when they can clearly identify three to five values they want to live by.
Once those values are clearly defined, they become a tool for evaluating the goals you pursue and the work you do. Does your job align with the kind of person you want to become? Do your ambitions fit with what you say matters most? If not, that tension will eventually show up somewhere.
Brad makes the point that goals do not just sit out in the world waiting to be accomplished. They work on us while we work on them. Building a company, training for a marathon, growing a practice, or pursuing a creative craft all shape your character in the process. That is why values alignment matters so much. The pursuit itself changes you.
The Arrival Fallacy And Why Achievement Never Feels The Way We Expect (9:10)
The conversation then turns to one of the most relatable traps for ambitious people: the arrival fallacy.
Brad explains that human beings are not wired to arrive and feel permanently content. Evolution favored strivers, not those who became satisfied and stayed still. That means even when we reach a major goal, the sense of lasting fulfillment we expected often fails to materialize.
Rather than treating that as depressing, Brad sees it as liberating. If achievement itself will never fully satisfy us, then the answer is not to keep chasing bigger milestones and hoping the next one will do the trick. The answer is to learn how to enjoy the process.
He shares the story of Ray Allen, who felt unexpectedly empty the morning after winning his first NBA championship. Allen later realized he had attached too much meaning to the outcome itself. What actually made the experience meaningful was everything that led up to it—the season, the work, the teammates, the struggle.
Brad’s lesson is memorable: the work is the win. When we believe fulfillment lives only in the destination, we set ourselves up for disappointment. When we learn to value the process, we not only enjoy the journey more, but also appreciate the wins more when they come.
When The Pursuit Of Excellence Creates Tension Across Work, Family, And Health (12:29)
Peter asks where he sees the pursuit of excellence backfire for high performers who otherwise have a lot going for them.
Brad says the biggest source of tension comes when someone has multiple important identities competing for limited time, attention, and energy. A person may want to build a world-class business, be an involved spouse and parent, maintain their health, and remain connected to their community. All of those aims are worthwhile, but they cannot all be pursued with maximum intensity at the same time.
That is where self-awareness becomes crucial. Brad argues that people often run into trouble not because they make trade-offs, but because they make them unconsciously. They become so consumed by a primary pursuit that they fail to recognize what is being neglected until the consequences become unavoidable.
Excellence, then, is not just about intensity. It is also about honesty—being clear about the trade-offs you are making, how long you are willing to make them, and whether they still align with your values.
The Identity House: A Better Way To Think About Balance And Burnout (15:30)
One of the most practical frameworks in the conversation is Brad’s idea of the identity house.
He argues that “balance” is often an unhelpful standard because it implies you should be everything, to everyone, all at once. In real life, that is impossible. No one doing meaningful work lives in a perfectly balanced way.
Instead, Brad suggests thinking of your identity as a house with multiple rooms. If your house has only one room—say, work—and that room catches fire, the damage is devastating. But if your identity house has several rooms, then when one area becomes stressful or unstable, you can take refuge in the others.
The goal is not to make every room the same size. Some rooms will naturally be bigger than others depending on the season of life. The key is to have more than one room and to make sure none of the important rooms become neglected.
For Brad, the largest rooms are family, craft, and health. During a book launch, the craft room may take up far more of his time and energy, but he still tries to make sure the other important rooms do not get “moldy.” That means he may not have five family dinners a week during a busy stretch, but he still makes sure to have at least two. He may not train as much as usual, but he still moves his body enough to maintain the room.
It is a helpful framework for anyone trying to go all-in on something important without losing themselves in the process.
Why Community And Relationships Matter More Than Achievement In The End (18:13)
As the conversation shifts toward retirement, identity, and later life, Peter raises the importance of community.
Brad points to research showing that at the end of life, people rarely reflect most deeply on external achievements. They do not tend to focus on the gold medal, the bestseller list, the IPO, or the net worth target. What stands out instead are the relationships formed along the way—the teammates, colleagues, friends, and loved ones who shared the journey.
That is why he believes the pursuit of excellence cannot be a solo endeavor. Trying to climb a mountain alone is harder, and even if you reach the top, the experience is thinner. The people you work beside, compete with, and grow with are not a distraction from the pursuit. They are part of what makes it meaningful.
Brad illustrates this with a story about the Detroit Lions after their first playoff win in more than three decades. In the locker room celebration, the most repeated word was love. Not love of the game in the abstract, but love for one another. Brad sees that as deeply revealing. Even in an ultra-competitive environment, what people remember and value most is not merely performance, but shared struggle and connection.
Why Excellence Is Not A Lone-Wolf Pursuit (21:26)
Brad pushes back on the romantic idea that greatness is built in isolation.
He says that in every example he has seen of someone getting into the “slipstream of excellence,” there is a strong support network in the background—mentors, collaborators, teammates, and even competitors. Excellence requires people who can encourage you, challenge you, ground you when things are going well, and pick you up when they are not.
He even extends this idea to competition itself. The root of the word “compete,” he explains, comes from Latin and means to rise up together. In that sense, rivals are not just obstacles. They are part of what sharpens us.
Peter and Brad discuss how this shows up in the financial advisory profession. Many advisors know exactly who their most respected competitors are. They want to outperform them, yes—but they also admire the way those people operate. That respect becomes a source of inspiration and growth.
Why Focus Feels Harder Than Ever—And What To Do About It (23:04)
Peter then turns to a challenge that nearly everyone can relate to: focus.
He asks whether saying it is harder to focus today is just an excuse, or whether something real has changed. Brad is clear that it is real. Modern technology is not just distracting in a general sense; it is specifically designed to capture and fragment attention.
He argues that the old idea of focus as a muscle that simply needs to be strengthened is no longer enough. We are now competing against tools engineered to be addictive. In that environment, the answer is not just more self-control. It is better environmental design.
Brad recommends physically removing your phone from the room during meaningful work or meaningful conversation. Not face down. Not turned off beside you. Out of the room entirely. He cites research showing that even a silent phone nearby reduces cognitive performance because part of your mind remains tethered to the possibility of checking it.
He compares focused work to sacred time. Just as people might put away their phones in church or synagogue to be fully present, he believes we should treat meaningful work with the same seriousness.
Building Routines That Raise The Floor On Bad Days (26:28)
Peter shares his own approach to planning an ideal week and asks Brad how routines can help people maintain progress toward excellence, especially when life gets chaotic.
Brad describes two approaches. One is a top-down style of planning, where you time-block your ideal week and then try to execute against it. The other is a bottom-up approach, which is the one he personally uses.
His system is built around three daily habits, three weekly habits, three monthly habits, and three things he never wants to do.
His daily non-negotiables are at least 45 minutes of physical activity, at least one hour of deep, undistracted work on something that matters, and going to bed when he is tired rather than fighting sleepiness.
His weekly habits include two long walks outside, five family dinners, and a 24-hour digital Sabbath with no phone or computer.
His monthly habits include meaningful community involvement, extended time with friends, and spending the majority of a day in nature.
And his “never do” list includes never having more than two drinks in one sitting, never watching cable news, and never using tobacco.
The beauty of the framework is that it is flexible enough to accommodate real life. Brad is not trying to hit 100 percent perfection. He says that if you can hit 60 to 70 percent of your ideal, you are probably doing quite well. The point is not to control every hour. It is to have enough structure that you continue moving in the right direction even when life gets messy.
How AI Affects Excellence, Creativity, And Truly Meaningful Work (32:01)
In the final stretch of the conversation, Peter asks a timely question: how does AI change the pursuit of excellence?
Brad acknowledges that AI is already a powerful tool and will only become more useful. But he draws a sharp distinction between using AI to support your craft and using it to replace the parts of life that make your work feel alive.
He uses a vivid thought experiment: imagine a button you could press that would instantly produce a Grammy-winning song or make you a top-tier financial advisor without requiring any struggle or effort. Would pressing the button actually feel meaningful? Brad’s answer is no. The satisfaction comes from doing the work, not just receiving the result.
That does not make him anti-AI. He is happy to use AI in ways that support his process, such as for grammar or editing. But as a writer, he would never want AI to do the deep human work of wrestling through a first draft. That struggle is part of what makes writing meaningful to him.
He compares AI to the Industrial Revolution, but for knowledge work. Just as industrialization removed physical labor from many parts of life—making us more efficient, but also less active—AI may remove thinking from more and more of our work. If that happens, Brad wonders whether we will need to deliberately carve out time to think, just as we now have to deliberately carve out time to exercise.
His conclusion is clear: if AI alienates you from your primary craft, it is probably undermining excellence. But if it helps you get closer to that craft, it can be a useful tool.
Why AI May Make More People Good—But Not Great (37:06)
Peter pushes the idea further and asks whether AI will raise the bar for excellence, lower it, or change it entirely.
Brad offers a strong opinion. He believes AI will make a lot of people pretty good. And pretty good may be enough to make a living in many fields. But he does not think AI will help people become great if they are dependent on it.
His reasoning is that AI is built from patterns in the middle of the bell curve. Greatness, by definition, often comes from moving beyond that middle—doing something more original, more emotionally resonant, more deeply human.
As a writer, Brad believes his edge is not logic alone. It is feeling. AI can arrange words, but it cannot feel what a sentence does in the body. It cannot test a metaphor against lived experience. It cannot connect with readers on a human level.
He applies the same logic to financial advice. AI may eventually outperform advisors on many analytical tasks. But it cannot sit with a grieving widow, navigate family estrangement, or hold space for a client during one of the hardest seasons of their life. Those deeply human moments are where trust, care, and judgment matter most.
Brad’s takeaway is one that fits the broader theme of the episode: the more authentically human and authentically yourself you can be—while using technology where it genuinely helps—the better your odds of achieving something that resembles true greatness.
Resources:
- Check out Brad on Substack
- Read “The Way of Excellence” by Brad Stulberg
- Follow Brad on Instagram
- Connect with Brad on LinkedIn
The Long Term Investor audio is edited by the team at The Podcast Consultant
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