The Daily Stoic - Brad Stulberg on the Practice of Groundedness | They Are Us And We Are Them

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to author Brad Stulberg about his new book The Practice of Groundedness which you can pre-order at https://www.bradstulberg.com/tpogpreorder, how the path to peak performance is inevitably tied to compulsive behavior, practical steps to alleviate the anxiety that comes with the lifelong pursuit of greatness, and more.Brad Stulberg researches, writes, and coaches on human performance, sustainable success, and well-being. He is bestselling author of the books “Peak Performance” and “The Passion Paradox”. In his performance coaching practice, he works with executives, entrepreneurs, and physicians. He is also cofounder of TheGrowthEq.com, a multimedia platform dedicated to the art and science of success.GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Brad Stulberg: Homepage, Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Take this motto to heart. Of people who rise to position of power, there are two types. Those who think they can do it alone and those who know that is insane. This is as true today as it was when the ancient historian Cassius Dio was writing his Roman history in the early 200s AD. In it, Dio examines

what differentiated Marcus Aurelius from Comedis. Given Comedis's deranged reign, it might seem like he was destined to fail from the beginning. But Dio points out something fascinating about this young man. He was not naturally wicked, he says, but on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived when his father died, Dio continues, Marcus left him many guardians among whom were numbered the best men of the Senate. But their suggestions and counsels, Commodus rejected.

This was the critical difference between father and son, Dio believed. Even when he was emperor, he writes of Marcus, Marcus showed no shame or hesitation about resorting to a teacher. Seneca's instructions were along the same lines. Here and take heart this useful and wholesome motto, he said, cherish some man of high character

and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them. Though Marcus never mentioned Seneca in his meditations, it is clear that he heard and took this motto to heart. The first 17 entries in meditations, 10% of the entire book, are spent reflecting on the men and women of high character. He kept before his eyes over his lifetime. From his deathbed, he was arranging the best and the brightest of them to advise his son. He knew he was nothing without Antoninus and Rousticus and Herodus and Atticus and Fronto and Apolognes.

Their greatness guided him to his greatness because he allowed them to, because he wanted them to. And that's the question for you today. Are you living by this motto? Are your actions guided by someone of high character? Do you show no hesitation to resorting to a high teacher? Or do you think you can do it alone? And look, that's one of the reasons I keep a bust of both Marcus and Seneca on my desk. I want to put a man or a woman of high character up there for display to inspire me to act as if they are watching my actions as Marcus said,

to be as the ruler upon which we make crooked straight as Seneca said. And you can actually check out the statues I have. We sell them in the Daily Stoke store, put a store.dailystoke.com and you'll see them there on the front and just type in statues. Don't have to get these ones. Check out any, I do think the importance of statues is an underrated one and so why we talk about it here so much daily still it. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

Weird. I sometimes give you guys updates about what's going on with me in my life. I don't know when you'll be listening to this, but I am probably, it'll probably be well-passed, but I am getting on an airplane tomorrow for the first time since March 2020, like early March 2020. And the longest I've ever not traveled slash flown somewhere in probably my entire life. I mean, we traveled a fair amount as a kid. So I've got to imagine it's the largest longest streak I've gone without being on a airplane.

The bittersweet part of it, it's more bitter than, there's no sweet part about it, but the saddest part for me is it's now ending at 18 plus month, uninterrupted streak of bedtime with the kids. Before Delta happened, I'd agreed to a talk that I'm giving in Evanston, Illinois, and I don't feel worried about it.

It's a relatively small crowd. Everyone's vaccinated and wearing masks and the filtration for some reasons I won't go into. The ventilation and filtration better than basically anywhere else. I feel good about it, but I also feel, and it sort of ties in today's guest. I feel a little anxiety, I feel

anxiety about having to break what has been an uninterrupted routine for all this time. And then I know that that's really just the beginning of it because then after that starts all the marketing and PR stuff. For the new book, Courage is calling and putting out a book just blows up your whole life and there is no normal and everything's a crisis. It's a stressful sort of marathon of a period. So it's kind of like I know like this season is ending and I feel sad about it, a little anxious about it, feel stressed about it. But I also feel grateful for what has transpired as well. And I feel grateful for even the privilege of getting to go out and do what I do. All of which is to tie into today's guest, my friend Brad Stolberg, the author of the practice of groundedness, a transformative path, the success that feeds,

not crushes your soul. Brad is the co-author of a book we actually sell at the Painted Porch, which I really like called Peak Performance. It's also the author of the Passion Paradox. He interviewed me as we talk about in this episode. He actually interviewed me on stage, it's scribbed a few years ago when stillness was coming out.

He and I have gotten to know each other. I'd say we're friends. I've shared some personal issues that we're both going through which we allude to the episode. So I was really excited to have this when he told me he was doing the book. I was like, of course, you should come on and we should talk about it. He's an internationally known researcher, writer and coach on human performance while being in sustainable success. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, wired in Forbes and more, and he's a contributing editor outside magazine. And his coaching practice Brad works with executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, and athletes on their performance and well-being. And he's also the

co-founder of the growth equation and online platform dedicated to these topics. You can follow him at at B. Stolberg, on Twitter and BradStolberg.com. This book is published by Penguin Random House, which is also the publisher of my many books, Nikki Poppidopolis is his editor, who is my editor on all of my books. Portfolio is the home of my new book, Courageous Calling. By the way, which you can pre- at dailystoic.com slash preorder.

I hope you check it out. Anyways, Brad is a great guy. This is a great episode. The idea of being grounded is something I think a lot about and I'm thinking about it literally having to approach getting on an airplane tomorrow for the first time in so long. I don't want it to stress me out. I don't want to make decisions out of anxiety.

I don't want to be worried. I want to be focused. I don't want it to be disruptive. I I don't want to make decisions out of anxiety. I don't want to be worried. I want to be focused. I don't want it to be disruptive. I want to go and do what I need to do. Be safe while I do it. Come home. Make sure I'm safe. Not bringing anything home to my kids

who are not able to be vaccinated. Having been very safe and cautious during the whole pandemic. Don't want to blow it all up just because I had a work opportunity and get right back to my life and show, and this is the important thing for me, and we talked about this in today's episode, I don't want the pandemic to have been a productive, fruitful, creative period for me, simply because I just abstained from all the other things that I used to do. I want to find a way to integrate both the active and the more bubble parts of my life together so I can go in between each one and function more as a integrated individual in the world.

And I think Brad's book on the Practice of Groundedness will be very helpful for that. It's a great book. Here's my interview with Brad Stolberg on the practice of groundedness. So I read the Cal Newport article about you and the New Yorker, that was pretty cool. Yeah, wasn't that a fun little article that Cal wrote? I thought he did a great job with it. So walk me through that journey because I guess I have a similar one.

Walk me through the decision to leave Oakland and live somewhere quieter. Right, it really was ultimately about being able to practice what I hold deeply as a core value and perhaps I didn't realize it as much at the time as I do now, but it's really about autonomy, which I define is having as much control as possible over my time and energy. And life in the Bay Area ultimately became constraining against that core value. Financially, it just cost a lot more

money to live there, which means that as a creative is a writer, even in my coaching practice, I had to do things I otherwise wouldn't have done just to make more money. And just from an amount of time and energy to get around, things is concrete, is traffic going from Oakland to San Francisco. The bar, which is the public transportation running slowly, not necessarily just being able to walk down the street to a coffee shop. All those things started to add up, and you put the two together and it's like, hey, if what I really value is autonomy, then perhaps there are other places where I could have

more of it. Yeah, I think about that too. That's why I moved to Austin from New York, and then why I moved out into the country, I think, autonomy. To me, if success does not equal autonomy, it doesn't sound that much like success. And look, I realize like certain people, whether you're the president or there are certainly jobs that for a season involve sporadic amounts of low autonomy. But I'm always surprised when you meet really successful people who could have a lot of autonomy and continue to do what they do, but don't seem to have it. Either made up obligations or compulsion,

or just sort of an inability to question, like, where am I happiest, and what should my life look like? For sure. And I think there's a lot of inertia and path dependence that gets in the way of people being able to recognize that and question it. It's a literal and figurative keeping up with the Joneses.

And I think that once you're kind of going down a path of more and more, more bright and shiny objects, I can't picture myself living anywhere else, I can't picture myself doing anyone else. It's easy to get on the treadmill. Yeah, and I was thinking about this idea of groundedness, which is the new book like I was thinking about how much more literally grounded my life is.

Like I was walking on a dirt road this morning instead of concrete. There were no cars going by. I was outside. Like I think there's also, almost nowhere you can live in the United States at this point is like sort of pristine nature. But I do think the,

at this point is like sort of pristine nature. But I do think the, a, even the suburbs are more natural than the sort of concrete jungle busy city life, which I find like, I think it wasn't until I moved out of New York city that I was quite, and then I went back, like I moved out, and then I, now when I travel there, particularly as I've gotten older,

how much, how viscerally the noise pollution affects me? Like, you go through your life not hearing large trucks or horns or jackhammers, and then you hear them and you're like, oh wow, this is awful. Like, this isn't natural to hear all the time and you can get really used to hearing it so you're not aware of the harm, the procussive harm that's having having an antibody, but it is there.

Yeah, you know, the biologist E. O. Wilson has done fascinating research that basically shows that if you think of our species on a 24 hour clock for about 23 hours in, I don't know, 57 to 56 minutes, we lived in these open spaces in bands and tribes of between 10 and 150 people. So the frenetic tumult of city living to an extent, even suburban living, is very unnatural to how our mind and bodies evolved. Now are we evolving with it in some ways? Yes, but I think that a lot of

modern illnesses, anxiety, depression, you can throw burnout in there are very much because the pace of cultural evolution has outpaced what our mind-body systems can do. If you put someone in an environment that is extremely frenetic, then it's not surprising that that person will have a tendency to become more frenetic themselves. Yeah, although one thing I struggle with and I talk about this at the beginning of then it's not surprising that that person will have a tendency to become more frenetic themselves. Yeah, although one thing I struggle with and I talk about this at the beginning of stillness is the key. I sort of tell this scene of Sennaka in his apartment in Rome. There's all like shockingly modern sort of busy noises. And he says, you know, I force my mind to concentrate and I keep it from straying to things outside itself. All outdoors may be bedlam provided there's

no disturbance within. I don't want to say it's guilt, but there is a part of me that thinks like, you know, if you really are Zen or you really are Stoic or you really have done the philosophical work, you should be able to have stillness or peace or quiet or happiness in any environment. And so is there, again, it doesn't, it's not weakness, but is it somewhat of a, of a, of a cheat to just opt out of all that entirely and live sort of an artificially out of all that entirely and live sort of artificially isolated or, you know, protected or privileged lifestyle. Do you know what I mean? For sure. And I think there's a huge spectrum. And perhaps one extreme is living in a monastery

where the outside world is completely kept at bay. And then on the other extreme might be living in, you know, manhand, excuse me, living in Manhattan. And is either right or wrong? No, I don't like to put a value judgment around it. I think what I am saying, and certainly what my research and reporting has showed is that for most people, your temperament can get you so far, doing your individual work can get you so far, and

environment matters a lot too. Are there people that have achieved tranquility of mine and calm, and as you would call stillness, that can be in the midst of just total circus and remain at ease in calm? For sure. Are those people few and far between and is that harder than what most people have the capacity for? Yes, I think so. And then it's like, if you have a choice, why not make it a little bit easier on yourself? I mean, I'd certainly find myself more creative, more calm, more grounded, living outside of a big city than in it. And life is for me more than just like a big self-improvement project.

So I might as well be happy here. Yeah, right. No, it's sort of like, I think this is something you see in meditations a lot, Mark Sirilis. There doesn't want to be emperor. It's sort of forced upon him. And so he's writing to himself about how you can be happy anywhere, how you should focus on, you can retreat inside your soul any moment, which is all well and good. But if there actually was a path

in which he could not be emperor and it wasn't an abdication of duty, then I guess I don't see anything philosophically wrong with taking it. So, yeah, if you're fleeing to a monastery to escape bingo problems or responsibilities, then, you know, that's not what we're talking about. If you're doing it to optimize or refiner, you're doing it because you have a spectrum of options and you're choosing the best option for you, there's probably no problem with that.

Yeah, I said bingo because I think you hit the nail in the head there, man. I think in general, not just when it comes to a place to live, but if you're running away from something or trying to escape something, generally speaking, that's going to come back to butt you in the ass. If you are moving towards something, generally speaking, that's a good decision. And it's a subtle nuance difference, but I think that it takes you either all the way in a route towards avoidance and diminishing your life or all the way in a route towards enlarging your life. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's well said. Is, are you stepping towards the challenge or are you running away from the challenge?

Yep, or in ground in this, the framework that I use is core values. So what are your core values? What do you really value? And are you escaping something that's scary? Or are you moving to being greater alignment with those core values? There's all kinds of extreme examples.

Somebody that's in recovery might make the decision to leave a community where there are users, or even just where the physical environment triggers use. Sure. Now, is that person weak? I guess it depends on who you're asking, but if that person's core value of sobriety or clear-mindedness trumps their core value of community, then of course they're gonna leave their community. And I think that so many people, myself included, I think it's almost impossible to live in the 21st century, and not be a little bit addicted to conventional definitions

of success and all the striving that comes with it. I think place for me plays a big role in that. So if I could get out of a place that felt like I was more in this conventional success, you're defined by what you have, everything is super expensive, to a place more where success is like, you know, I actually spent two and a half hours working on my garden. I just feel better as a result. Yeah, and I think, I think if you're, Yeah, and I think if you're, is running, is moving away because it triggers you or, you know, makes it hard to be sober, is that a move of weakness or is it just as easily a move of strength?

Because it's coming from a place of self-awareness. So you're saying, look, I have this sort of problem, I don't wanna say addiction is self-discipline, but you're saying, I have a problem being disciplined about something, so I'm going to make a giant move out of discipline to reduce my exposure to potential lapses in discipline. So I like that. Yeah, I mean, are you resisting the peanut M&Ms

on your counter, are you not buying them at the grocery store? Yes. And for a lot of people, it's easier not to buy them at the grocery store. And I think it's important to call out like the ability to move does require a certain set of like, I don't love to use the word

privilege broadly, but I'll use it here, a certain amount of privilege. And I think it's really funny because I first started tinkering with this idea back in 2017, and the story I wrote for outside magazine when my family was getting serious about leaving the Bay Area. And I got all these notes saying, well, how know, how could you ever suggest that people move? It takes so much privilege. You're just another person that is out of touch. And of course, all those notes were coming from people that lived in like New York City, LA or San Francisco.

Yeah. So, this isn't necessarily for everyone, but I think probably for lots of people that tune into this podcast, I think that it's often not a lack of privilege or a lack of autonomy. It's a lack of imagination to make decisions like this. No, I talk about moving an immigration a little bit in the new book on courage. And it's interesting, some people use sort of lack of resources as a reason to move. And some people use it as an excuse not to move. But I'm always amazed when people, you know, they find out that I live on a farm

or that I move to Texas or whatever,'m always amazed when people, you know, they find out that I live on a farm or then I move to Texas or whatever, they're sort of like, how did you, how could you do that? And it's like, by making a lot less money than you do, right? Like the people that are often amazed that one could do something like that are actually not, are not impressed or surprised by the lack of, that are not impressed or surprised by the lack of, by the privilege that made it possible. It's mostly about the commitment or the actual want or desire or sort of, again, sounds like an overstatement, but also courage. Like, I guarantee you that what I purchased my farm for is less than many people I know is apartment in New York City. So, so it's often not so much an issue of resources,

but about determination, commitment, or as you said, sort of core values. If it's important to you, you can figure it out. Again, this is not true someone someone who's trapped in a, you know, in a projects, in an inner city or something. That they're obviously some people who are unable to change circumstances or environment for a bunch of reasons that are outside their control. I think you tend to find the people who are quickest with the, oh, I could never do that. Actually, could very easily do it.

They've just decided not to. Exactly. So you do open the book pretty early on, you get into the Stokes, you talk about sort of acceptance and you talk about like life is not, which I think is a sort of very core stoic principle, which is like life is not easy, life is not always fun. And if you don't understand this, you will suffer on top of that because you will be

surprised, you will be resentful, you will be, you will be bonnet, you will, you will be a bonnet, you will suffer doubly as opposed to the person who simply comes to terms with the reality of existence, which both the Stoics and the Buddhists say is not without suffering. Right, in the Taoist too. I mean, that's a theme throughout the book is, you know, my whole model is to go after truth, I call it truth with the capital T. So, principles that I can be DM near certain are broadly applicable and reliably play out the same for people in different situations. So, I'm interested in like, what does the modern science have to say? What is ancient

wisdom? Not necessarily just one tradition, but where is their convergence? And then, what's like real life practice. In here and acceptance, all the ancient wisdom traditions point towards this truth in the same way. Stoicism, you said, there's that quote in the book. If you're going to use your exact quote, it might be a little bit different, but if you're going to use your hands in your feet, like your hands in your feet are going to get soaring calloused. Right. And what that means, if you're going to live a life, you're going to get beat up. And Buddhism, there's the parable of the second arrow, which says that the second arrow, which says

that the first arrow, which is something that you can't necessarily control, either internally, illness, externally, something in a relationship, in your work, whatever it might be, that hurts. But the second arrow, which is your judgment, your repression, your delusion, your magical thinking, that ends up hurting worse. And then in Taoism, the whole notion of the way is dancing in the flow of life and not resisting the dance. So yeah, it's such a powerful thing. And something that the traditional model of success pretty much like swings the entire app as it went.

If something's going wrong, like you buy stuff in tweet, or you numb it with substance, or you go on social media and you airbrush whatever image is wrong, so it looks better. So, that's a theme throughout the book. I know it's core to your writing too, is that so much of what we're doing in modern society and really is causing so many of our modern ailments because we're wired away from these values that ultimately lead to like a deeper, more fulfilling kind of success.

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Yeah, Mark is really, it says that life is warfare and a journey far from home. Which I love because literally like if you were to sort of zoom out and just try to describe his life in a couple sentences, you'd be like, you spent a lot of time away from Rome and a lot of, you know, his reign was spent, unfortunately, at war. And to me, this is so it's both literal and metaphorical, which is that it's not easy. And there's stuff that's happening, as you quoted from Epictetus, like you're using your hands and your feet and they're going to get sore and tired and blistered. But if you add on top of that, this sucks, this is unfair, why does it have to be this way, so on and so forth, you're making it worse than it needs to be.

Yeah, or potentially even more detrimental than those negative value judgments is if you repress or numb it away. Sure. Because then you're working on problem why when the real problem is ABC and D. So, you know, if the core problem is that you're not sleeping enough,

but you're doing everything that you can to optimize your schedule and you're taking all these supplements that are going to keep you awake and on and on and on, because you're deluding yourself that you can get by in four hours of sleep, then you're going to get caught in this cycle of not actually improving because you're not working on the thing that needs to be worked on. And this is chewing the professional context, it's chewing relationships and it's chewing personal context.

Well, I think to go to the earlier discussion about moving, I do think that's been a big part of the pandemic for people where suddenly, even if it was only for the first couple of weeks or months, because they resumed life, or their profession was more essential than other professions. But I think a lot of people got home like to where they lived, spent time with family or whatever,

or all the things that they used to do, as you said, all the things they used to do to numb or distract or keep busy from whatever was stripped away. And then they realized, oh, I fucking hate it here. Like, I hate this house. Like, that was something my wife and I, we were like, oh, our house is just like very poorly designed.

And then it is the source of a lot of conflict between us. And it's the source of behavioral issues for our kids. It's the source of this or that, because just the way it put us in relation to each other was not how any sensible person would design a house or people with the means that we happen to have in our case would very easily or quickly pay to have be different, right? And I think I think about this with people I know who move from Manhattan to upstate New York or people who move from wherever to to Montana or people who move from one climate to another or people who are just not going

back to work or changing careers because they just all that stuff was stripped away and what they were forced to examine is like what their life actually was, what its actual effect on them was, and there was no other avenue or access to avert their gaze from these sort of fundamental, unpleasant conclusions. Yes, it made everybody vulnerable, like both literally and figuratively, right? Literally, depending on your age and health condition, the risks are worse for some than others, but everybody was forced to reflect on their mortality, stoic principle, Buddhist principle. So that's the literal vulnerability. And it made you vulnerable because so many of the things that you can normally do to

numb, distract yourself from issues in your life were swept away and you couldn't necessarily do those things. And when those things are gone, well, you've got to go to your cracks because you have no choice. And then I think some people turned toward substance abuse, which sadly has gone way up in the midst of the pandemic. And I think for other people, it was the source of significant life changes. Because again, there's the normal ways of numbing were gone. And I think a lot of people just got bored. You know, that was another part of Kelln Newport's article in the New Yorker that I spoke at link with him about when we were talking before he wrote it,

is I think a lot of what's happening on job changing is twofold. I think one is a fair amount of people are like, this is bullshit. I don't wanna spend the rest of my limited time on earth doing this job that provides me no fulfillment, no autonomy, whatever it may be. I think the other thing is you can't go to concerts, can't go to sporting events,

weddings are canceled. Shit, depending on where you live, you can't even go out to dinner. Like normal sources of stimulation and novelty are gone. You can't hook up with people on apps. And they're like, I'm going to switch my job. Like that's exciting. That's something new. And you're interesting. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Right, you can't hook up with strangers, you can't go drink, you can't, you can't do the things that used to make life exciting so you can change your location.

Which is, I would agree, a bad reason to move across the country. That's an escape, right? Like we talked about that earlier. Yeah, that's escaping like boredom or escaping an addiction to novelty. Yeah, which I would say is probably a pretty poor reason to move in, a poor reason to switch your job.

I think it's well worth asking. Am I switching my job because I'm just searching for novelty? Or am I switching my job because I'm truly going towards something that's better? Right. Well, so let's talk about being vulnerable. You got an email, you talk about this in the book. You basically get this email from someone like good admirer,

who's like, how have you done all these things? I'm so impressed. I want to be like you. And I could see on one day under different circumstances, that makes someone feel very good, but it had the exact opposite effect on you. It hit you in a very vulnerable place. What was that?

What happened? So, that email, I distinctly remember where I was when I got it. I was in Charlottesville on a trip with my younger brother, supposed to be a fun vacation. It was not. It was about three months after my first book, Peak Performance, came out, which had, by then, established itself, was going to be a pretty solid commercial success. And I was in the thick of struggling with very rapid, stark, unsuscessive, compulsive disorder. And I'll just say a few things about OCD because it's one of these

things that's so often misportrait and popular culture. OCD is not about being neat and organized. If you saw mine desk right now, you would laugh because I'm certainly none of those things. It is really a very serious anxiety disorder where you have these intrusive thoughts and feelings and then you do anything you can to try to make them go away or escape them, which only makes them worse. In OCD tends to latch onto things that you can't control and that you find important. So the prototypical hand washer or person that's terrified of germs probably finds their health real important or they value cleanliness. Well me, so much of what I value is just the

ability to engage in life into build meaning. So my variety of OCD is often what's termed as existential OCD. So I'm constantly stuck in this ruminant cycle of thoughts around, no one's going to remember me a hundred years after I die anyways. What's the point of life? They say we make our own meaning, but we're all gonna die anyways. All of these things which are true, right? But with OCD, not only do you have those thoughts, it's accompanied by just terrible feelings of anxiety and despair.

And it got to a point where I didn't wanna leave my house. Three months after freaking peak performance came out, right? Didn't wanna leave my house because I was so stuck in the cycle, so despairing, trying to figure out the meaning of life and answer unanswerable questions, just leading to more anxiety and more depression. And I get this note saying, you're only 30. You've got this bestselling book, you've done all this stuff, like how can you help me?

And at that point, I remember thinking, either either I'm never gonna write in the public again about anything that can be construed as self-help or personal development or I'm gonna have to share this story because the amount of cognitive dissonance I was feeling is a performance health well-being expert externally and internally into those closest to me, just completely, utterly fucking broken. That cognitive dissonance was just another layer of this terrible cycle that is OCD

because now I felt shame and guilt that I misportraying myself and all of these things. So after multiple conversations with my therapist, I decided that I did still want to keep writing. So I wrote an essay, one of the longer things I've written that just outlined my experience going through OCD and working with it. That was published about eight months

after I first received the diagnosis. So by then, I was still very much in the woods, but I wasn't in the thickest part of the woods. I was working my way out. And what's interesting is I was terrified to write that story. And not because I was scared that people would think I'm weak. I think that we've come a long way and mental health stigma. And this was true a few years back when I wrote this.

But more so because, and this is the, maybe a window into the perverse mind that is anxiety, I was scared that if I wrote about my experience, it would be like, I'm taking control or ownership over my experience and it would come back to haunt me and kill me. So it's like, oh, if I wrote about OCD, in a way, that's asserting control over it. And I was so scared that if I conserted control over it, it would get worse.

So that's the state of mind I was in when I wrote this essay. But I wrote it anyways, my therapist said, hey, it's exactly what you need to do. Like talk about living in alignment with your values. You pride yourself on authenticity as a writer. And it's the best thing for your anxiety because you have to confront your fear.

Like you cannot let this thing control your life So I went ahead and wrote it Yeah, it's it's it's interesting. I think you know when you look at Like I think we're seeing we see this politically. We see it sort of on social media like you're sort of really broken people It motivates them to do bad, awful things. Like they say crazy things, they get caught up in conspiracy theories, all of that. But also I think you find with successful people, there's also the same sort of brokenness or compulsive behaviors.

It just happens to be that they found accidentally deliberately, temporarily, some sort of positive, socially acceptable way of manifesting that compulsive behavior. Like, work addiction is a great example of this where like, sex addiction, a little bit, as opposed to, say, heroin addiction, where, like, at first, it manifests itself as a thing that society incentivizes and encourages. Right? And so, I think oftentimes people are very envious of people they read about or hear about or have, you know, are famous and they don't realize that actually there's probably no one particularly at that moment that you would want to be less than that person.

Or certainly nobody who's having less fun than that person that you think is living like the dream life. Yes, and I think you particularly see this in athletes life. Yes, and I think you particularly see this in athletes in particular sports. So Michael Phelps is a phenomenal example. When he was at the height of his reign as an Olympic swimming champion, he would spend between six and eight hours a day in the pool. And if he missed a workout for any reason, he was filled with anxiety. If he was traveling, he'd get to a hotel, change time zones, if he'd be 2 a.m., he'd go to the pool to do his workout, because if he didn't do the workout,

he'd be filled with anxiety. Mind you, for six to eight hours, he was going back and forth across 25 to 50 meters, staring at a line. That is textbook obsessive-compulsive disorder. You have anxiety, you do something to make the anxiety go away. You get anxiety, who knows about not being enough

and not about not winning, he swam. But because swimming is a sport that we recognize on the world stage, Michael Phelps was a hero. Is it any surprise at all that Michael Phelps suffered from mental illness when he retired from the sport? Of course not. Because like we totally, and again, that's an extreme example, but workaholism is the same.

Creativity can be the same. Like if we throw ourselves into things to escape the harder parts of being a human, eventually those harder parts are going to catch up to us. And what I found really interesting in reporting for the book is that your performance doesn't get worse when you face those things, the hard things. If anything, for most people, it gets better because you start doing it from a place of acceptance

and love, not a fearing compulsion. So here's the example. I could write books and work and coach people because I have an ego and like many people, I'm pretty afraid to die. And I want to have legacy and all these things, all these stories we tell ourselves. So I'm kind of pushing that away by working really hard. For me, it freaking broke me open, but you can go to that place with the help of a coach, a therapist, a community, a friend, whatever it is, sometimes alone.

You can confront those things, they can scare you nearly to death, but then once you accept them, it actually completely opens you up. Because everyone's going to die, everyone's going through these fears, and now you can do your work from a place of love. So I may write the same number of books, they may have the same outcome, but the texture of the striving is totally different. Because I don't feel the need to do something. I'm doing it because I want to, I'm doing it from a more relaxed open place. Yeah, we talk about this with Jordan

where it's like for the love of the game. It sounds cliche and empty, but when you're actually doing it because you like it, because you're connected to it, I sort of say like, are you doing it from a place of emptiness or a place of fullness? And to the outside person, I think there is some visible difference. You could still be successful coming from a place of emptiness,

and maybe most people won't know. But what you find is that it's transformatively, transcendently different for you as the creator. It's like, does this have to suck while you do it? You find out, no, it doesn't. Actually, you can be a happy, well-adjusted person while doing something. It doesn't have to be this sort of white knuckled self-flagulation, awful torture session to do your work. Which, I think the other point is, because we are all going to die and life

is ephemeral in short. You're sort of like, oh yeah, it's really stupid to torture yourself to accomplish something that will give you immortality because it doesn't exist. So if you're not having fun while you're doing it, you probably shouldn't be doing it. Yeah, 100%. And I'm going to give you an example in book writing because it's the world that we live in at least most of the time. But listeners, you could replace this with sports, with the corporate world, with getting promoted, getting 10 years of professor, whatever it

may be. There are two roads to a number one New York Times best seller. Maybe curious what road you traveled at the time with stillness. There is the road of feeling like you need it to be whole, feeling like if you just get this thing a number one New York Times bestseller, then you'll be content. Call it like if then syndrome, if only this, then I'll be able to rest. And you can write a damn good book and hit the New York Times bestseller list from that space. Or you could do it from a place of total openness and love, enjoy, and having fun, and having great conversations,

and not really caring. I mean, you're going to care, of course, because these things matter, but not being so attached to the idea. And both routes could take you to a great book. It could be the same book, but how you feel along the way, the texture of the striving is totally different in each of those cases. My hypothesis, because I've never written a number one New York Times bestseller, but in smaller accomplishments that I've had, when I do it from a place of love, the accomplishment actually feels much better afterwards than when I do it from a place of fear or compulsion. Even though you think the accomplishment is going gonna make you whole, it doesn't.

Whereas if you're having fun, you're like, this is great. I'm gonna have a beer, I'm gonna smoke a cigar, and I'm gonna get up tomorrow and get back to work, because I like doing this. Yes. No, I think it was weird on Stolenstead's A Key, which was my first, I guess, my first New York Times bestseller, personally, number one New York Times bestseller, not my first number one, but it was the one in which I thought or cared about the outcome, the least. And so actually with courage coming out, it's a weird, it's actually, in a weird way, it requires more discipline and it's strange because the anxiety, as we talked about, is a coping mechanism.

So the book is out, my book's out in exactly a month, right? Or, yep, 31 days, something like that. And to not be stressed about the results, to not be wondering how's it gonna do? Am I doing enough? What about this, not taking it out on people that work for me, not being, you know, just sort of a tightly wound ball of stress, it feels like I don't care.

So almost feels like I'm being negligent or reckless, or, you know, even egotistical, like to not care feels like selfish or something. But you have to remember one, that's not constructive energy, it's actually destructive. But two, it's taking you away from the things you should be doing, right?

So I just try to remind myself, instead of feeling that, I'm just going to do something. I'm just going to do one thing that might make it a little bit that might contribute positively to potential success, right? An article, send an email, you know, think about what my answers are going to be in interviews. Doesn't really matter, but I'm just trying to say like, instead of feeling this sort of generalized anxiety, worry, self-loathing, I'm just going to do one thing to move the ball forward, which is also my strategy when I'm writing books. Instead of going like, this is so far away how I'm ever going to do it, it's not good enough, I just go, I'm just going to make a positive contribution to the book today, and that's enough.

And that is being grounded by definition, right? Like you're actually in real time being present doing something instead of being in your head, living in the future, and the past worrying about something. And the former not only feels better, but it actually works in service of whatever your goals might be because you're pushing the ball down the field. Who knows what will happen with Courage? It's phenomenal book. He ends. Well, I envy you because you have had that massive success. I don't envy you because it's also really freaking hard to win because then it's like, well,

what now? Do I have to win again? Ray Allen, one of the best shooters to have a play basketball, talks about the day after he won his first championship, being one of the hardest days of his life, because he's like, now what? Yeah, it's hard. And that's, again, that's the value of like, really trying to ground yourself in the present moment,

in doing the things that you want to do, living in alignment with your core values, doing it in community with other people, because the more you're in the moment enjoying it, like truly firmly situated where you are, the less opportunity your mind has to wander into what's next or what now, because you're just having fun doing the thing.

Another wonderful way to do this is to go outside and be in nature. Certainly over the last few weeks in the lead up to my book, I've had all those feelings. I could be emailing more people, I could be doing more stuff. And at a certain point, that gets futile, as you said. Not only is it not helpful, it's actually harmful.

So I would just go on long hikes with my dog. And for the first 30 minutes, I'd be like, oh, should I reach for my phone? Should I be doing something? Should I have my notebook and take notes? And then it kind of grew into the hike, and I'd forget about it completely. So that's like the willpower thing. In some ways, that's moving out of the big city. In this case, it's moving away from your desk to another environment.

If you realize that, hey, you are going down that path that you don't want to be going down, just changing your physical environment can make a big difference because it puts you somewhere else and it helps ground you. Yeah, it's funny you talk about this in the book and it's a big part of my practice, but you talk about sort of having some sort of physical activity that one does to sort of get grounded or to break the doom cycle loop or whatever that one gets in with their head.

And of all the people that you talk, you used to talk about it and you talk about someone you spent some time speaking with, but you talk about Kimmy Ghibler from Full House, who has not have been someone I would have thought of as a person, right? Like I just was someone I just thought. Kimmy Ghibler, right? Yeah, just someone I remember from childhood,

but then you realize like everyone's going through something and ends up as an adult dealing with the same sort of existential issues. And for her, it was running, right? Yeah, so she says in the book in my conversation with her that running saved her life. I mean, she takes medication, she's in therapy, she's very open about all this. But yeah, for her, it was running. And for you, it's weightlifting, right? That's what you do. Right, now it is. I define it broadly as just physical practice. It times it has been running, cycling.

I think eventually I'll get to a point where I'm just content to go on long walks. And because with stuff like running and weightlifting, even though you can say that you do it completely for fun, there are still these like very objective measures and you can get caught up in chasing those objective measures, which if you want, it was fine, but I'm gonna quote you. I remember I interviewed you,

what was it, the day stillness came out or the day after, the day before, this is someone great about running and why you don't do marathons or races and you said, I'm not trying to win at my hobby. And I think about that all the time because it's like, well, wait, lift things a hobby, but part of it is the mastery in the making tangible progress

in the getting stronger and in running, the getting faster, swimming, swimming farther. But the flip side is, like, am I stressing about this? Because the minute I'm stressing about strength training, I'm caring about it too much, because there are too many other things in life to stress about. It's a long-window way of saying, yeah,

it's strength training right now, but it's just something to put me in my body and to get, like, real live in the moment visceral feedback and it takes me out of my mind, which can be really helpful, and it's not just me, there's all this research in the book, doesn't really matter the sport. Physical activity just completely impacts your nervous system for the better.

Yeah, I've been doing this sort of, I've been tweaking my schedule a little bit while I've been writing the book that I'm working on now. And I started running in the morning again, but I run with my kids in the stroller. And it's this thing I keep thinking about, which is that like, that my, I mean, my time is abysmal because I'm pushing the stroller on this gravel road and my kids are getting heavier every day as they grow so fast. You

know, it's like I'm doing like 10 or 11 minute miles sometimes. And I have to remember like the first off, this isn't going in some fucking database somewhere and my average is going down. Second, I think about this when I'm like kids where it's like, wait, if the run is over faster, I spent less time with them, right? And so I try to remember like, it's good that it takes a long time.

Like, why am I, if I really enjoy this, why am I trying for it to be over as quickly as possible? And so that's a, that running and swimming are, are those where you're sort of like, why are you, why are you trying to finish this? And that's where for me, I say like eventually perhaps I'll just get to long locks in the wood with my son or my dog because during a quote unquote workout, there is a part of me that's like one will this be over. Whereas if I'm just on a long lock, I could do it forever. Yeah. And I think that some of that like wanting it to be over is okay too because we know from the research that a huge benefit of physical

practice is how you feel after. So even if you don't like moving your body, you'll feel better after. So is there anything wrong with like hopping on the peloton or whatever it is and you know, working up a sweat and moving your body for 30 minutes and kind of gritting through it? Not really, because we know that an hour later in the day you'll feel better, you'll be more creative, you'll have a better ability to focus and so on. Yeah, that's right. I was still to go back to what we were talking about earlier, we were serious, stripped things away and you realize what's actually going on.

I'm thinking about this. I have to get on a plane tomorrow for the first time in I'm thinking about this. I have to get on a plane tomorrow for the first time in since March the first the first day of March like 2020. So it's been a very long time and What I realized as like I thought like let's say like flying was stressful or I thought Travel was stressful or I thought all these things were stressful What I realized is that I'm stressful like I thought all these things were stressful. What I realized is that I'm stressful. I have anxiety. And that wherever, you know, as John Cavitzin says, wherever you go there, you are, I think one of the things the pandemic really did as it stripped things bare, you realize like,

yeah, you don't hate your boss, you hate your job or you don't this, you sort of like there's the there's the reason and then the real reason. I think one of the things I've been realizing is like, oh, I have anxiety. Anxiety is a force in my life. Often I think I'm acting this way or that way because of these logical reasons, but in fact, it's some other thing.

Mm-hmm. In anxiety, restlessness, I mean, all these things go together, it's like a compulsion to be doing instead of being perhaps, and that's not always problematic. As you said, I mean, you wouldn't have written your books, had you not had some of that. So the goal isn't to push that away or to make it go away.

I think step one is to become aware of it. Step two is to channel it in productive directions and then step three, which is the hardest step, is to say, hey, my doing is an overdrive. I may trick myself into thinking I'm making this choice, but this is just born out of anxiety. And now I need to kind of work the other end of the barbell, which is maybe the more being inside of me.

Yeah. And the pandemic did bring that to light for all the reasons we said earlier, because so many of the traditional sources of doing and kind of achieving were stripped away. So people had to sit with this. And we were in a society, as I mentioned earlier, not to get all meta that completely feeds into that anxiety.

Like, think about consumerism. You constantly need something to be whole. And then after you have that thing for a little while, you need something better to stay whole. An experiment that I did when working on the book was just really paying close attention to television commercials. And if you do this, your mind will get frickin' blown because you could be watching a commercial for dishwasher detergent or like a new roughing company. And

all the people are beautiful. They're not telling you anything about the detergent or like the solar panels or whatever, but what they're selling you the message is if you just use this product, then you two will be beautiful and happy. And that just fuels this anxiety to be more, have more, do more that is not very healthy. Yeah, no, it's true. You know what I was thinking about too in relation to your book and some of the stuff we're talking about earlier? I think one of the things you figure out as you get older, and I've seen this now having kids and then seeing how my parents interact with my kids,

or at least did before the pandemic, you're like, oh, and my wife and I have these sort of awakenings all the time when we talk about interactions we've had with parents or other people, you're like, oh, this is the way that I am, this is why I am the way that I am because this is a totally inappropriate way to act around a five-year-old. This is a totally insane thing to talk about in front of a kid or whatever.

Your idea about groundedness, about working on yourself, about actually addressing your anxiety, about dealing with these mental health issues, it strikes me that generationally, this is something we're just starting to grapple with, and the costs of not having grappled with it for the last hundred or so years have been immense. And I'm just sort of continually amazed at just how the lengths to which people will go even late in life to not have to look at, you know, sort of what's driving them or motivating them or like look in the mirror or delve beneath what's in the mirror. Do you know what I mean? Oh my gosh, yeah. I have intimate experience with this.

And now we're going to paint in broad strokes here. And there are people in every generation that are wonderful, beautiful, and there are people in every generation that could use a lot of work. That said, I do think that something in older generations is a stoicism that is not the kind of stoicism that you write about in real stoicism. It is more of a repression. It's more like I'm going to show any emotion. That's there. And I think also a self-confidence that is not born out of actually doing the work, but is born out of fear. And I can't show weakness, therefore I'm always right. And such an insecurity about being wrong or about needing work, or just about the normal

vulnerabilities of humans, that completely gets repressed and pushed away. And I think a lot of that has been passed on. We're both millennials to our generation. And I think that is perhaps, our generational have all kinds of fuck ups too, but I think one thing that we won't necessarily have is that because we grew up with it. And now I think we're realizing that,

hey, this is not the best way to work with the human condition. Yeah, you sort of, we're talking about like busyness and always doing. When I see like my parents are retired and then their friends, you're just like, you're not retired at all. You just went from getting paid for being busy all the time to unpaid activity busyness. And if that's how one is gonna spend their whole life, it begs the question like, what are you afraid of dealing with that you cannot sit still for three seconds? There always has to be an activity between you and other people,

between you and your life, between you and your somewhat impending death. That's the... That's what... I think it is helpful to be able to look and go, why, definitely, don't want to end up like that. Yeah. And all this stuff is non-dual. And that's another thing that I think we struggle with in this culture is like either

this or that. So doing fornatic energy, busyness, not a very grounded way to be, gets us into trouble, makes us feel not great. We're always kind of chasing the next thing. The flip side is just sitting on a couch and pondering all day, you can also really get yourself into trouble. So it's not either or it's both and. I think another place that we see this in our genre of books, and I think that's why

you and I have become such good friends is because I think that we hold both these ideas at the same time as in our work, but go to the self-help or personal growth or even business out of the bookstore. And you've got all these books on discipline and responsibility and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and unfuck yourself and whatever it is. And then you've got all these books on synchum by ah, hold hands, everything is about self-love, you are enough right now. And it's not either or it's both Ant and I think that people are so quick to go to these extremes You need the discipline of jacquillinic, but you also need the self-love of terabrock and if you like merge those two things

then you're in really good shape But for whatever reason we're stuck in this either or and I think that people get into these camps and they just end up Kind of shooting themselves in the foot. Yeah, I remember I watched that Tony Robbins documentary a few years ago, like, I am not your guru. And I like Tony. I did the marketing for two of his books, but I remember they're interviewing someone and

they're like, you know, this is my 15th Tony Robbins seminar or something. And you're just like, Oh know, this is my 15th Tony Robbins seminar or something. And you're just like, oh, okay, so you've just replaced not dealing with your crap, uh, escapism with dealing with your crap escapism, because if this is possibly working, you don't need to go to it 15 times and pay however many thousands of dollars each time. So it is funny. I think your point is right. It's not, oh, I'm not dealing with my problems, I'm denying they exist, is probably worse, but not that much better than, the alternative is not that much better,

which is obsessively dealing with your own problems, being obsessed with self improvement, which is still, at the end of the day, just a way to not have to sit and be with yourself, sort of warts and all. Yeah, it's its own kind of like, frenetic behavior. And I'd argue that that also pushes you farther away from the things that might actually nourish you. So you see this a lot in like optimization culture, right?

Where like everything has to be 100% optimized and efficient and we're going to track everything in on and on. And what ends up happening is any time for self-reflection gets cannibalized, community goes out the door because it's not efficient to meet up with people and hang out in person, like, you know, assuming COVID's safe. Sure. No, like you're gonna text someone. It takes too much time and it's too hard

to really be in community. It's not optimal. And those are the things that actually make us feel good and perform better. Again, non-dual is all tracking bad, of course not. Do people get tons of help from tracking their sleep, tracking their alcohol intake? Absolutely. But when tracking becomes the end in and of itself, it ends up crowding out these other things that can be really helpful.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think for me on the generational stuff, what I'm sort of struggling with or trying to work on is realizing that these are flawed people with their own sort of demons that they may, for whatever reason, have decided not to deal with. But now you have the ability to sort of see them for what they were, right? Like that's not healthy. This is what they do.

They mean well, or they're better than this, or you can see it. I think one of the things my wife and I talk a lot about is like, what was the effect of this on you when you were seven and you didn't understand how fundamentally unhealthy or abnormal or strange this was? And this was. And this was just the totality of your environment

was this person's anxiety or this person's insecurity or this toxic dynamic between these two spouses or the lack of dynamic between the spouses because one of them left, you know, and what did that say? It's sort of working on these sort of, because I think, I think in the end, you trace a good chunk of all of this stuff back to a wound and then the coping mechanisms that we made up as we struggled, usually on our own, to try to treat that wound. Yeah, and you know, it quote him in the book a couple of times, but Eric from the polymath of the mid-1900s.

He often talks about that original wound is being like pulled from the womb. Sure. And you're in perfect union with your mother and now you're out in the world. And humans are constantly caught between this yearning for autonomy and individuality, and that yearning for union and safety. And you can't have both, and you can't have either,

because we all depend on other people, but we can't be completely dependent on other people. And you can deal with that struggle in one of two ways. You can accept it and work with it, realize that it makes you vulnerable and makes other people vulnerable and connect with them in love and pursue success out of a place of like openness. Or you can repress it, deny it, run away from it, be scared by it, and work for quote-unquote success from a place of compulsion and tightness. And I think that we all inhabit both of those modes of being every week, every, perhaps

every day. And it's just the more that you can do it from that place of love, the better. From called this productive activity, I call it being grounded, forgetting the, the Stoics had a word for this. The Greeks called it Arate, in Buddhism, it's working towards enlightenment. So it's not repressing it, it's accepting in kind of like transcending. Yeah, I think that's right. And, and I think it's not just for your own ability to thrive at whatever you do, then you have kids and you realize, oh, I don't want to Oh, I don't want to continue this cycle of suffering. It's inevitable that you will pass on issues to your kids,

but can you not make it, can you not pass all of it on? Right? Can you just make it a little bit better? And that's that sort of what I think about it. And it's been really helpful for me having kids because I think for whatever I went through in my childhood, I just don't have really any, I have very few memories of being a kid. Like when I think back to who I was, I can find myself at like 10 or 11 or 12.

Like almost all my memories are me as sort of a moody like teenager-esque, right? So not quite who I am now, but like closer to who I am now than like a child, right? And so, and that obviously stems from experiences. But the result of that was that it was hard for me. The way I am, what I'm forgetting is due to, or have trouble connecting with or associating with is a result of things that happened at an age I don't remember. That's the paradox of it. And one of the benefits

of having kids is you're like, oh, this is what a four-year-old is like, or at least this is what a four-year-old that's like that hasn't been around X, Y, or Z yet, and starting to go, oh, so it's helped me sort of unlock and look at things and work on things because I am like, oh, this is what I was like at some point. And here's what I would have needed then.

And so can I do a slightly better job at giving myself that now to then be able to give my kid a much better version of that today? I love that so much. Or have you worked with like in therapy or with friends in trying to figure out why that's the case? Cause I know you and I share somewhat similar upbringings and backgrounds.

And I never really thought of it, but I just assume that that's all people. My first solid memories are probably from fourth grade. So holiday in fourth grade, 10, 11, I think younger than that. But like my wife can tell me about like a sandwich she ate when she was three. You know, I know, no, no. My first memories are fourth grade being very insecure and wrapping up my identity and being good at sports because kids wouldn't bully me and they'd accept me if I dominated recess football.

I have no memories before that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's probably like, if you done digging, I mean, I would make up that that's because whatever was making you insecure by fourth grade, that's what you're sort of not remembering. Like repressing, yeah. Yeah, and I don't even know if it's repressing, but it's just like, it was, it's just,

it probably wasn't a singular traumatic moment that you might have remembered, but it was just sort of day-to-day stuff. Like, I was reading, I'm forgetting the terms, but there's PTSD, and then there's this sort of ongoing kind of PTSD where you're just sort of not having your needs met, or you're just in a dysfunctional environment of some kind, and it's sort of just going back and realizing, oh, okay, the reason that it's like, when someone was taking care of me and I wasn't supposed to be aware of this stuff, I wasn't. And it wasn't until you got a little older that you started to first get the inkling of like, I have to do something about this because this isn't gonna work. That's sort of when you become, you know, that's sort of your, your, your Brad consciousness, you know, and so it's hard because you want to go back and go obviously you weren't born as a 12 year old.

So what was going on and contributing to this sort of, you know, the onset of whatever the stuff was. And I think it may be lost forever, but it's just been helpful going like, oh, here's how a five year old asks. And here's what happens when you don't give a five year old what they need. And imagine what not giving a five-year-old asks. And here's what happens when you don't give a five-year-old what they need. And imagine what not giving a five-year-old

what they need all the time would look like. Yeah. It would make them like exactly what I turned out as as a 12-year-old or whatever. So I think an insecure, like in you carry that into adulthood. Like that's a big source of drive. We know that. Yeah, like I tried to do do some inner child work in therapy

and it was very hard because I couldn't sit across for myself, but then having kids, I was like, oh, I can do this very easily now because, like, I know what a three-year-old is. Yeah, in me and just, the kids change everything. And if you don't have kids, you're probably sick of people saying that. But if you do, you probably got it.

And you know what? My guess is I have very close friends who are 35 to 45 that are single without kids, and they would say being single without kids changes everything. Sure, and that's also true. But from my experience, my parents raised me very much in a way

where they wanted to parent me, and they wanted me to be successful. And I've turned out pretty good, I think. And I think them for that. What's interesting is I want to raise my kid, my goal for my son, Theo, is to be friends with him. And if that happens at age, I mean, right now he's three and a half and he is my best friends. But if by age 12 I'm done quote unquote like really parenting him and now we're just friends, that's a win. It probably won't happen that early. You have to discipline kids.

You can't just totally let them off the reservation. But it's such a different goal for parenting and I think that's very generational as well. I think it's not just my parents and your parents. I think a lot of folks and boomers in the greatest generation, it was like parenting was something to win at and to do well at. And the way you did it was by having like a well-adjusted quote unquote successful kid. And I internalized that and realized, hey, like I actually just wanted me and my son's friend. Like I want to learn from my kid.

I don't want to teach my kid everything. The sooner I can start learning from my kid, Nernis, the better. And I'm gonna, you know, practice what I preach and say like, all of this is non-dual too, because if you're too hard on your kid, your kid will go to therapy. Oh, my parents were too hard on me. They pushed me, they did this and that. If you're easy on your kid,

your kid will go to therapy. Oh, my parents' baby'd be, and they never let me struggle. So it's also just really hard to be a good parent. Yes, very hard. Have you read the self-driven child? I haven't. Should I? Yeah, you should. I had them on the podcast twice actually, but it's really great. I would I would say, you

know, there is like some loaded thoughts like when you say, I just want to be my kid's friend, like I had a little reaction when I heard that, but I think what you're saying is what they're saying in the book, which is, you want your kid to be operating under their own power, as opposed to a person that you, whose life, you are constantly micromanaging and involved in, and making your problem.

And so the result of that, yes. I want to respect my son in being awe, and obviously, of course, correct. Like, if my son comes home with a joint at age 11, that's going gonna be problematic. Yes. And I want to just be an awe of him and learn from him and let him bloom into his own person

without the need to control. And I think I didn't necessarily get all of that. No, I totally agree. I think that's a wonderful target to shoot for. And I think there's healing in it because in struggling to do that, it will help you address. One, it will keep you grounded, but two, it will help you deal with the stuff that happened in your own life. Yeah, for sure.

Brad, this is amazing. Congrats on the new book. This is the first one under just as you, right? And so that it's a big milestone and I think it's gonna do really well. Yeah, thanks Ryan. I could talk to you forever, man. I view our work as like super complimentary and glad to call you a colleague and a friend

and thanks for having me on to talk about the practice of groundedness. Likewise, we'll talk soon. All right, take care, man. Hey, it's Ryan. If you wanna take your study of stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the Daily email.

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