Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson How to Create a Meaningful Life with Brad Stulberg
Excellence As Involved Engagement
- Excellence is involved engagement in something worthwhile aligned with your values and goals.
- It’s a process of becoming, not a destination.
Process Over Outcome
- Focusing on results alone undermines longevity and satisfaction in a craft.
- A high-quality process reliably produces the best possible results.
Use The 48‑Hour Rule
- Use the '48 hour rule': celebrate or grieve wins and losses for ~48 hours, then return to the work.
- This keeps your reward circuits tied to the work itself rather than external validation.
Top performance coach and author Brad Stulberg joins Forrest to reframe and reclaim excellence. Brad explains how real excellence - involved engagement with something you care about - is the healthy middle path between over-the-top hustle-culture and detached nonchalance. They discuss the current culture of pseudo-excellence, the risks and rewards of caring deeply, how modern life can derail us, and how the real prize is the person you become while trying to reach your goals. Brad shares practical tools to build the habit of excellence: clear aims, micro-milestones, consistency over intensity, constraint-based discipline, and connection.
About our Guest: Brad is a regular contributor at the New York Times, the co-host of the Excellence, Actually podcast, and on faculty at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health. He’s also the author of a number of books, including The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World.
Key Topics:
0:00: Life feels better when we’re “trying well”
1:56: What does Brad mean by excellence?
3:42: What excellence is not
5:06: Staying on the path: how to keep going when results are slow
11:56: Excellence vs. skill
21:10: The Nonchalance Epidemic
27:29: Building your “identity house”
35:29: Specific tools for excellence
44:12: Excellence vs flow
50:10: Finding the enjoyable aspects of hard things
1:01:11: Gumption
1:03:57: “See the ball go through the net”
1:05:56: How to finish a process that never ends
1:13:22: Recap
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