My new book The Way of Excellence is out now. You can buy it here: wayofexcellencebook.com/ Writing it changed my life. I hope reading it does the same for you.

Ambition is not an excuse to be a sociopath. Be wary of people driven primarily by status and power. They will do terrible things and try to convince you, and even themselves, it was fine. Elizabeth Holmes is an extreme case, for sure. But her story is a tale as old as time. Success begets expectations. And if those expectations aren’t met, it’s easy to compromise your integrity. Don’t do this. Holmes is a profound example of what researchers call obsessive passion: It’s when you begin to love the fame, fortune, power, and status more than the integrity of the work itself. Study after study shows obsessive passion is linked to burnout, anxiety, depression, delusion, and insane levels of fraud. It’s easy to say “Elizabeth Holmes is so extreme.” But you see the same story in business and on social media, albeit on a smaller scale, all the time. Everyone wants to grow, myself included. But if growth is a higher value than “honesty” or “integrity” or “craft,” then you end up going down grifter highway. You don’t need to look far for examples. Power, fame, and fortune are intoxicating. Nobody is immune to it. But you, me, all of us have a choice. You can do your best to uphold higher values. To do the right thing, even when it’s hard. To support people who do the same. The moral order of the universe depends on it.

Mental toughness is not about always feeling good. It’s about staying anchored when you don’t. You can feel nerves and still perform at your best. You can feel down and still support a loved one. You can feel insecure and still step into the arena. Your brain is plastic. Your mind is adaptive. You are not fixed. Every time you sit with discomfort, approach challenges, and return after setbacks, you’re building capacity, you’re building mental toughness.

This interview is incredible. Devin Cooley is essentially reading directly from TWoE: having fun as a step toward flow states, turning off the conscious mind for unconscious competence, the utter satisfaction of full immersion. You can learn this too: bit.ly/4uCzeQ7

1. Dig where your feet are. 2. Care deeply. 3. Intensity and joy can coexist. 4. Confidence comes from evidence. 5. The secret is there is no secret. 6. Show up, show up, show up. 7. Live life in seasons. 8. Only doing the thing is doing the thing. bradstulberg.org/p/8-all-tim…

Loved appearing on the Inner Game podcast to talk all things excellence. Check it out here: piped.video/Jerof3QRbgc?is=clEn…

A small market team with less Instagram followers than most B-rate influencers is going to the World Series. In an age of money and the enshitification of everything, the Brewers are exactly what we need right now.

It’s great we are paying more attention to mental health but big a problem with therapy-culture is so many people think they need to “fix” a feeling before they can act and this sort of belief is severely limiting and not at all true: bradstulberg.org/p/one-of-th…

We dedicated an episode to YOUTH SPORTS. • Private equity problem • Death of rec sports • Specialization pressure Author @BStulberg was 🔥🔥. (Full episode: piped.video/1LWxiv9fJ4Y) Watch a clip:

In defense of human excellence: We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like synthetic, digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love. The enter-a-prompt, press-a-button lifestyle removes texture, satisfaction, and fulfillment from life. A life of ease and immediacy is not the same as a good life. Prompting a song is not the same as writing a song. Watching a robot go sub-2 hours for the marathon is not the same as watching a human do it. A machine that scours the internet, rips off other people’s work, and then makes a statistical projection about what comes next is not an embodied being any more than a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is. The whole point of music and art and sport and craft and love is that it’s filled with heart and soul. You gain satisfaction and make meaning not from the result of your pursuits but from the process—from facing resistance, overcoming setbacks, and struggling to create something worthwhile. This shared experience is also what connects us as humans. To outsource this process to machines would be a tragedy. AI is fine as an advanced version of Google search or as a way to clean up and analyze massive data sets. But the more AI encroaches on our essential humanness—our ability to exert effort, to struggle, to create, and to connect—the flatter our experience will be. And so it is on us—people who care about craft, quality, and human excellence—to resist and hold the line: • Do not outsource to AI anything that is core to your craft. • Do not replace meaningful effort with AI. • Be skeptical of grand proclamations from tech overlords. • Eschew AI-generated slop. • Celebrate and support human work. It’s not hard to imagine a world with much more AI and much less soul. The massive valuations of companies like Anthropic depend on us surrendering to this world. But it is not inevitable. You can be the counterculture. You can be ultra-human.

The Pope is right: F*ck the machine. Defend human excellence. On how to protect your brain, mind—and yes, your soul—from AI slop. Be the resistance. Be the counterculture. Be ultra-human. bradstulberg.org/p/in-defens…

We worry about machines becoming more like humans but I think there is a greater, and certainly more immediate danger of humans becoming more like machines. We’ll feel less. We’ll strive less. We’ll understand less. We’ll care less. We’ll love less. It would be a tragedy.

The pope is right. A central theme in my new book is that the pursuit of human craft, quality, and excellence has intrinsic value and is an essential part of what makes life worth living, and we must protect it from machines: bit.ly/4uCzeQ7

Coach Bowman is one of the best. This is some great advice.

Trust your training. Hold your position. Stay patient. Keep pushing. What’s true in the gym is true in life.

A decade of work goes into a book—sleepless nights, feeling totally lost, hours of editing—and then people want to wait until "AI gets a hold of it" to read a summary. Well that's like super demoralizing!! Anyways, please go get a copy of "The Way of Excellence."

Driven people should treat life in seasons instead of trying to balance everything every single day. Living in seasons means a few years where you focus substantially on your craft, a few years where you commit to a physical challenge, a window when family takes priority by a mile, then maybe another window where you go all-in on work again, a year or two for a big creative project, and so on. When you look at the highest performing and most satisfied people and zoom in on one moment of their lives they don’t look very balanced at all. But when you zoom out and look across their entire lives, they actually start to appear quite balanced. Stop thinking about balance as optimizing sleep, family, work, fitness, friends, creativity, and so on every single day. Start thinking about balance in terms of years, or even decades. Think about having different seasons of life for giving your all to different things.

25 lessons from The Way of Excellence: 1. That you must suffer for greatness is a dangerous lie. Having fun is the greatest competitive advantage there is. 2. Doing hard things that align with your values is crucial for growth. You gain self-discipline, self-respect, and self-confidence. You gain evidence that you can navigate discomfort. 3. Just get started. People think you need to feel good to get going, but it’s usually the opposite: you need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good. 4. There are going to be periods of darkness. Stay patient. Keep showing up. Don’t be scared to ask for help. 5. The modern world is characterized by persistent distractions. Be intentional about deep focus work. 6. Giving things your all makes you a humble-badass; it hardens you and softens you at the same time. You learn you need self-discipline. You learn you need self-kindness. 7. You are not going to be the best at anything with an attitude of nonchalance. It’s a cop-out, a way to never make yourself vulnerable to failure. But if you never give anything your all, then you sacrifice so much of what makes life worth living. Try hard and give a damn. 8. Instead of trying to be “balanced,” think of life as having different seasons for different things. 9. Finish what you start—starting is easy and exciting. The middle is where most people quit. Finishing is a skill in its own right. Be the kind of person who follows through. 10. Confidence comes from evidence. Put in the work. Trust your training. Build your faith. Let it rip. 11. Don’t gamble away your self-worth in an existential casino. Likes, shares, followers, comments—sometimes this stuff matters professionally, but it doesn’t mean sh*t for who you really are. 12. Build an identity house that has more than one room. If you live in a house that only has one room—for example: athlete, parent, writer, or physician—and that one room floods, you have to move out of the house. But if you live in a house with multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage. It’s important to have more than one room, because you never know when you’ll need to find strength and stability in the others. 13. Get good at something real. It doesn’t matter what the thing is—basketball, guitar, watercolor, public speaking, writing, running—what matters is that you develop skill and strive for progress at something. Competence is good for your soul. 14. Stop comparing your first draft to someone else’s final. We see the finished product but overlook the months, years, and at times decades of work that went into it. 15. Do not feel guilty about resting. If you never go easy, eventually you run yourself into the ground. 16. Be the type of person who shows up—at work, in community, in relationships. The little behaviors you do repeatedly compound to create something big. Become known for your consistency. 17. You are your surroundings—people, places, and things. An excellent life requires creating micro- environments that support your goals amid default environments that work against them. 18. Depression hates a moving target. Just because you stay busy or exercise doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t experience depression, but it’s the best prevention there is. 19. Adapt. The things that work, work—until they get in the way. This is true for tools, trackers, and even mindsets and routines. Don’t be scared to let go once it’s no longer serving you. 20. Failure is inevitable. Accept that it’s going to happen; give yourself a set amount of time to process and learn; then get back to work. It’s as simple and as hard as that. 21. Discipline is not a chest-thumping performative act of toughness. It is being the kind of person who shows up and does what you need to do. 22. Sleep when you are tired. 23. You are not the stuff inside your head. You are the awareness that decides what to do with the stuff inside your head. The ability to choose which thoughts to pursue and which to leave behind is key to everything. You don’t have to believe everything you think. 24. Stop trying to be perfect. It’s such a f*cking drain. That’s not permission to drop your standards altogether. It means being realistic. It means remembering you are a human, not a robot. It means being decent, giving what you’ve got, and showing up as best you can. 25. Achieving the goal isn’t going to change your life, but who you become in the process will. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides. Keep going.

The entire stadium honoring the occasion. Verlander’s catcher, Dylan Dingler, there to support him the entire time in his full gear with the camera on his back—as if a catcher would want it any other way. His teammates, one by one, saying their goodbyes. And of course, young Genevieve, hanging on to her dad tight, as if to say, "Now you are coming with me, Dad." It doesn’t matter if you are a baseball or fan or not, if you are a person with a pulse this moment will rock you. Hang this scene in the Louvre.

The end of Justin Verlander's last start is one of the greatest moments in sports: bradstulberg.org/p/one-of-th…