 All right, welcome to the show, Brad. Great to have you. Thanks, AJ. It's really good to be with you all. Johnny and I would love to hear what your personal journey into groundedness has been and what sparked you to write this book. So all within the span of about a year and a half, I noticed with my executive coaching clients that there was this feeling of pushing, pushing, pushing, striving, striving, very successful by conventional standards, but something still feeling kind of off and not really knowing what that was or what to do about it. So a sense of languishing or exhaustion, and this is before COVID and before languishing or quiet quitting or any of these things kind of became a thing, it was still there. And these are some like super successful people. The number one symptom, a feeling that, man, I just want to turn it off. I just want to relax. I just want to be content. But then the minute that someone tried to turn it off and relax and be content, they got super restless and they had to work. So almost manifests as like an addiction to pushing that someone has a love-hate relationship with. So that's going on with my executive coaching clients. Then in my personal life, I get blindsided with this stark onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is quite misunderstood. It is not just about being organized or not wanting to get your hands dirty or being a neat freak. It's actually a quite severe anxiety disorder. And that flat out debilitated me for six to eight months. So I had to take time off of coaching. I had to take time off of writing. I get to the other side of that with the help of a phenomenal therapist. And I come back into coaching. So my own life was kind of shaken up and blown up. My coaching clients are feeling off. So I started to say, what's missing here? What would it look like to have a really solid foundation? And ultimately, that's what Groundedness Explores is. How do you build a foundation from which you can strive in a way that hopefully is more sustainable and more fulfilling so you don't enter this kind of languishing that my clients had? Or in my case, how do you build a strong foundation after a severe illness? Yeah, from both sides, what a journey, right? To experience that in clients. And we are seeing the same pattern in our clients. And I feel like Groundedness is one of those terms that is quite misunderstood and isn't always the same for everyone. So you could talk to one person about Groundedness and they'll probably give you a different definition. So what do you believe Groundedness is? And then we can start to break down the principles that you go through in the book to really help our audience. So the practice of Groundedness is going to come down to these principles. The outcome of it is a sense of strength and stability from wherever you are. Not that you're unflappable, but that when you get flapped, you'll come back up quickly. Not that you're never going to have hard days or lows or feel exhausted or feel that pieces of your work or your personal life are out of whack, but that it won't be all the time. Ultimately, it's about channeling your energy, channeling your striving in a way that aligns with your core values, because that is so much more sustainable than the kind of frantic, infranetic being pushed and pulled around, moving this way and that, that so many people, myself included, can all too easily fall into in our modern world. Especially that feeling of restlessness, this inability to unplug. I feel like we all daydream about the vacations and daydream about going and unplugging. And then even when we're there, we're right back to plugged in, worrying about these phantom notifications, worried about the stuff that's happening back that we're missing out on, even when we had spent months and months and months planning this opportunity to unplug. The way that I think about that particular issue is that at the end of the day, we all want to feel like our lives are meaningful, we have relevance, and we belong. When those things aren't being met by what I'm going to call more wholesome engagements, so by pursuing craft, by being a part of a community, by being involved with your family, with your friends, with your neighborhood, whatever it is, then the easiest way to get them is to go to your email or to go to your social media, where you're constantly reminded that you matter of it, that there are other people out there. So I know in my own life, right, it's a gift and a curse that through my writing, I've developed somewhat of a public platform. And I can tell you with direct correlation, the times that I spend more time on Twitter or Instagram are the times when I'm spending less time with my neighbors, with my wife, with my kid, in the gym, because I'm lonely, ultimately. And I think that there's a lot of loneliness too, that kind of goes with being up more or uprooted, long before I wrote Groundedness, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about what she called uprootedness, which is this deep loneliness. When you're not only lonely because you're not with other people, but you're also lonely with yourself because you're so distracted, you can't think your own thoughts. And the result of it is this superfluousness where you're kind of never really here, never really there, always kind of everywhere. And Groundedness is hopefully an antidote to firmly situate you. So, yeah, we'll get into it, but that deep community is such a part of it, and that's the outward connection and belonging. But then so is owning your own presence in your own energy and attention so that you can belong to yourself. I think that a trap that a lot of people fall into is that they become lonely on both fronts. So they're so reactive in their life, and they're so pushed and pulled by whatever's trending on the Twitter or Instagram or God forbid like CNN or Fox News or whatever. So they can't really think their own thoughts because they're just ping-ponging. And they're not spending time building deep community with other people. And the result is this feeling of being unmoored. It's no one's fault. It's like this is in the water. I think this is the biggest problem of the 21st century. That's why I wrote this book in part, is the culture just promotes this. So it's both a timeless problem, Buddhism, Stoicism, the mystical arms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they all originated to counter this problem of suffering caused by feeling like you're not enough and always wanting more. But man, it's intensified. Because back then you would strive to be the prince or to move up to the Brahmin class or what have you. And today you just develop a social media account and try to get verified and get a bunch of followers or whatever. I agree with all of that. The other thing that I think adds to this is, well, 50 years ago, if we put in our shift at the local factory or had done our job, we go home and we're with family. We are with friends. Any other extracurricular activity is going to be spent in a group setting or with our families. It was easy to unplug. Even if we have a family, we're now working from home more than ever and COVID expedited that process. And everyone's work is following them around. And without that grounding component, of course, you're in a never-ending worrying loop of what else you could be doing to satisfy the question of uncertainty that just life brings with it. 50 years ago, 60 years ago, what have you? I mean, even just 20 years ago, your sense of relevance really had to be local. Unless you were truly a celebrity, no one really knew who you were and that's actually fine. Today, you can get so caught up trying to be a celebrity on the Internet that you don't make time to have friendships with your neighbors. In the book, I was looking the other day because the book's been out just now. It's its first year anniversary. One of the most underlined passages, and I don't even remember writing this. I must have been in a good groove. I basically said, make sure that you're a celebrity in your neighborhood before you try to be a celebrity on the Internet. Because when things are small, that's like that you do have more control over and that is really nourishing. And now, listeners might think, well, easy for us to say, we all make a living being somewhat prominent on the Internet. And it's not to say if there's anything wrong with trying to build a platform and share your ideas, but the foundation of actual community and actual relevance. If people were to take away my ability to write another book and Yall's ability to do a podcast, it would hurt. But could you still be OK? Could you still feel whole? Hopefully the answer is yes. And I think that's what we should be working toward. Well, I know we've talked about this quite a bit on the show, the empty calories of social media, and how it's not a replacement for that nourishment that we get from being together with people in the same room, in the same community. And living in LA, I know a ton of influencers who their entire life is online. Their entire community is online. And they often unplug because they feel so empty. They burn out. They really struggle with that because they don't have the relationships in person and the support that you're talking about. The big fear that I have, and we see this time and time again with our clients, is they view groundedness as something that sounds great and they want. But they feel like they have to check boxes in their career first before they need to focus on that. So it's like, I just need to get promoted. I just need to move into the leadership role. I just need this one extra thing. I need to buy the house. I need to find the spouse. Then I'll get grounded. And we seem to be on this never-ending treadmill of chasing the next carrot and groundedness. They'll listen to a podcast like this. They'll nod their head in class. But it's really hard to then put into practice in real life. And that's why I'd love to go through the principles because I think as we go through the principles, you can start to see how just incorporating each one of these pieces into your life, even in the smallest way, is going to create that mental space that we need to avoid the burnout, avoid the quiet quitting, and all the other phenomenons that we're talking about. Groundedness is not about checking out and going to the monastery and retiring and becoming Alzen. It is about taking whatever passion, drive, motivation that you have and making sure that it's channeled in productive, meaningful directions. Very few people burn out when they're working in alignment with their core values. Like, I've never met a carpenter or an artist or a sculptor or like a surgeon that is actually spending their time in the OR not doing administrative tasks that burnt out from too much work. People tend to burn out when they have all this energy and they want to engage in meaningful projects, but they get sucked into things that aren't actually in alignment with their core values, either because some sort of inertia took them there or because it's what they think they should do or kind of like what society says that they ought to do. I think that's really important. Yes, groundedness is about contentment, but it's not contentment born from just being. It's actually contentment from doing that is in alignment with your being. A mentor of mine read the book. He's like, this is the yoga of do. I like that. That's a great way to put it. The misnomer I feel that a lot have is that their work, that which they get paid for, has to check that meaningful box. And that's just not always the case. As much as we would love to fantasize about that and there's certainly many people online who are living in alignment with that core value in their work, but if you're not, that's okay. Just find other ways to bring your core values into your daily life. I think that's the bigger takeaway because so many are like, oh, this is great for you and Johnny. You got a podcast. This is great for you, Brad. You're a writer. Like you're living in your core value. That's awesome, but I got to keep a roof over my head. I have children to support and I'm not finding that core value exposure in my day-to-day job because I may have picked the wrong major. I may have been stuck on this career path and now all of a sudden I can't really just jump and change and go towards my passion. So that's why I like taking the more holistic view, which you bring about in the book, that this groundedness is not just this idea of finding your passion and work and then running full blast in that direction. There are actually components to it and the more you can bring this into your life, cultivate this in your life, the more you'll be like that blow-up punching bag that gets punched and then pops right back up. You can take the punch, but you'll be there standing no matter what. Yeah, and I think you'll also have the confidence to job craft. So if you are in a role at work that doesn't feel right, maybe you don't do a wholesale change, but you slightly start to tweak that role or you approach it in a way that does feel a little bit more invigorating or you gain the confidence to say, hey, this is a job and that's fine. Like y'all can wax philosophical about mastery and crafts, but I'm going to work in nine to five and make decent money and then the rest of my life I'm going to build meaning, which is a really wonderful thing. I admire people that can do that. The first principle is to accept where you are, to get where you want to go. This is really about seeing situations clearly for what they are, not what you think they should be, not what you want them to be, not what you wish they were, not what you think other people see, but what's really happening. And so often we wear rose-tinted glasses and we refuse to acknowledge challenging situations, and as a result, we do all this work to make things better, but we're never actually addressing the root cause. So we're just chasing our tails. So the first step of being grounded is to accept reality, whether it's wonderful or really shitty. You don't have to like it, but you have to be able to see clearly and accept it for what it is. And there's all sorts of practices in the book for doing this. The one that I find most helpful is what psychologists call self-distancing. Self-distancing is this concept that basically says when you're in the midst of a really charged situation, whether it's good or bad, you can merge with that situation, you become it. And once you become it, it gets very hard to step back and see it clearly. You get really sucked into it. So self-distancing is all about creating some distance between what's happening, the situation, and your awareness of it. So the way that I talk about it in the book is it's the difference between being in an action movie and having a front row seat for the action movie. And if you can pull out and take that front row seat, then you can bring a little bit more wisdom to your decisions about what to do next. So the three ways that the research shows is most effective to do this. The first is through some kind of meditative or contemplative practice where you have an object of focus like the breath, thoughts come up, you go back to the breath, and suddenly you start seeing thoughts and feelings as separate from you. And therefore you have some space to evaluate them. The other ways that are actually a lot simpler, I think, is that you can envision that a close friend is in the exact same challenge that you are and then ask yourself, what advice would you give to that friend? And then you actually have to do the hard work of following that advice. And then the third way to do it is to imagine yourself older, wiser, maybe 10, 20, even 30 years down the road looking back on current you. And what advice would older wiser you give current you? And all these things are, again, I don't know if listeners can or if there's a visual component, but if not, I'm basically holding my hands together and that's being merged with the situation. And it's really hard to accept and see clearly if you're merged in self distancing is about creating some space. And part of that space allows you to see just how temporary those thoughts and feelings are. Right. So oftentimes we're so emotionally charged and those emotions can feel like they'll go on forever or it's always going to be like this and it's not going to get better. And of course, that's a really slippery slope. So that practice, whichever one of the three that you utilize and we love all three, creates that distance between the two but also that time and recognition that it's just temporary, like this anger will subside, this happiness will subside. That's just a part of feeling the emotion. There's fascinating research too that underlies exactly what you said. And I think it's worth going into for the listeners that are like really intellectually curious. So if you've ever been experienced like clinical depression or even just like been in a really bad rut, one of the telltale symptoms is a feeling that time is slowing down and it's going to last forever. What neuroscientists have shown is actually happening in the brain is that when we feel threatened, when our stress levels are high, the brain starts to see things frame by frame. So instead of viewing life as a continuous movie, it views life frame by frame by frame. Why? Because it's under threat. It's like, oh, I need to be aware of everything that's happening. So this is called the decompression of time. So one of the best things that you can do as a part of self-distancing if you find yourself in a hole is just to remind yourself, like, yes, this feels like time is slowed. Yes, it feels like this will last forever. Yes, time, like my perception of time has actually slowed, but it won't be forever. This is just my brain doing a protective mechanism. Once I get to the other side of this, I'll look back and it won't feel very long. Again, so common to folks that have experienced depression. Myself with OCD included is when you're in the middle of something like this, those six months can feel like a fucking eternity. But five, 10 years later, you look back on those six months and they feel like just a speck of time. And that's so important. If listeners take away anything, it might just be that. Just freakin' remember when you're going through it that when you get to the other side and you look back, that memory will sit amongst many others. It will be contextualized and it will not feel as all-encompassing as it does right now. Well, even at the start of the pandemic, we had this two-week window, right? It's like we're in a shutdown for two weeks. And it allowed everyone to just like charge ahead and be like, okay, well, there's a timeframe to this. There's an end date that I can see that I'm working towards. Of course, that never happened. But at the beginning, when they announced the two weeks, it made it a lot more manageable when they were closing down gyms, closing down everything around us. So to bring that perspective into those heavier moments, it's just such a powerful practice. All right, so the second principle is to be present to own your energy and attention. I'll start with some research that is profiled in the book that found that our happiness is more closely correlated to how present we are for an activity than the activity itself. So if you are having phenomenal sex but you're actually thinking about your inbox or like worried that you're going to miss something at work, you're not going to be as happy as if you're just sitting on the couch, kind of mind wandering, but you're not distracted. You're just there or you're playing a game with your kid, whatever it might be. So we think that we have to have all these great activities in our life to be happy, but we actually just need to be where we are to be present. Now, does this mean that if you're constantly doing terrible things, you're going to be happy? No, so this is within reason. So that study was aptly titled The Wandering Mind is Not a Happy Mind. And it traces directly back to the teachings of all the perennial wisdom traditions. So enlightenment and Buddhism is all about becoming this feeling of one with the universe. How do you get there through full presence? The Tao and Taoism is about the way and kind of merging with the rhythm of the universe full presence. Arete from ancient Greece is a kind of excellence and flourishing the number one precondition, full presence. The concept of flow, Mihalych, accept me high, being in the zone, full presence. So you've got all this ancient wisdom. You've got modern psychology, modern neuroscience, they all point towards the same thing, which is, hey, if you want to feel good and be happy, you have to be present. Now, what's fascinating is that the more present you are for your activity, the less you're worried about yourself. So your ego gets out of the way, right? Because egolessness is another part of like these in the zone moments, these moments of complete union. Because when you're doing the activity and you're fully focused for an activity, ideally one that you care about, the best feeling in the world is like when you wash away. Because you generally generate a lot of worry. And if you don't have to worry about yourself, you're just doing the thing, it's phenomenal. It's like being in a basketball game and you just become the game or writing a book and you don't even know that you're writing. Writing is just happening. And all these experiences rest on a precondition of full presence. How do you bring in full presence? So many different directions to go on. I think because we talked about distraction a little bit, I want to start there. And then I'll let you all tell me if it's suffices or if you want to dig deeper. So the analogy that I like to use with coaching clients is brown rice versus peanut M&Ms. So if you're really hungry and you're distracted and you're in a rush and someone puts a bowl of peanut M&Ms in front of you and a bowl of brown rice in front of you and you're anything like me or most other people, you're going to eat the peanut M&Ms. And they're going to feel great. They're going to taste delicious. And maybe you'll eat them for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. If you eat them for an hour straight, you might not feel so great. If you eat them for a day or a week or a year, you're going to start to feel absolutely gross. Whereas the brown rice, the first bite, completely boring like cardboard. It's really hard to resist the peanut M&Ms, right? When you got them right next to you. But if you eat brown rice for an hour, a day, a week, a year, you're actually going to feel great. And for listeners that are really literal and are telling me like they have an allergy to wheat or rice or whatever, brown rice stands in for nourishing food, right? Peanut M&Ms could be Swedish fish. The point is that there's often this trade-off where things that are really nourishing over the long term don't feel as good. The minute that we do them is cheap candy. And the metaphor holds away from just food. So so many of the activities of our life that require full presence are really hard to get into. A deep and intimate conversation, working on a creative project, even just going to the gym without your phone there is a distraction and like really getting into a good groove with some sort of physical practice. Relationships, whether they be intimate or just friendships. These things are brown rice. Peanut M&Ms? Checking the news that's trending. Binge watching, Netflix. Cheap thrills in relationships. And if you eat peanut M&Ms for a very long time, you start to feel like crap and you're just highly distracted because there's no need for sustained attention. Whereas if you can just break through that inertia and eat the brown rice and push through that first 10 minutes and maybe it not feeling so great, you actually have a much easier time focusing and your life becomes more fulfilling. I always like to put my own skin in the game. Again, I say that as authors, we write the books that we need ourselves. So my own pattern of this comes out any time I release a book or like a New York Times op-ed. So something that for me in my little world is considered big. More than I want to admit, I'll spend a day obsessively checking the internet to see like, well, how's it doing? Is it getting shared? What's the sales rank? And that's just like binging on M&Ms. And at the end of those days, I feel terrible. I'm irritable. I'm restless. I'm distracted. I call it internet brain. Like I have a bad case of internet brain. And that's actually a sign that I've been eating too much candy and I need to get back into the brown rice. And different people are going to have those vices elsewhere. But that feeling of grossness actually tells you everything that you need to know. Well, I think it certainly goes a long way in showing in our culture, being the richest nation in the world, what we choose to spend our time on. Because if we're the richest nation in the world, but yet we're also the most medicated nation in the world, then we're spending that money on peanut M&Ms. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of peanut M&Ms. And I've been heavily influenced by the Eastern philosophies in particular Buddhism. And a big part of Buddhism is this notion of the middle way, right? So the Buddha like tried to go live in his aesthetic and like not eat and just really like live this miserable life in the forest to try to get enlightenment. And he's like, screw this, like I'm no more enlightened, I'm just miserable all the time. And then he kind of went back to society and he lived as a young prince and he had everything he wanted. And he's like, this isn't really great either. So I don't think like either extreme is good. So when I wax philosophical about like the dangers of consumerism, like I have a Shinola watch. I freaking love it. It brings me a lot of joy. However, there is a real trap. Consumerism sets for all of us, which is, oh, you don't feel great. So we'll serve up some other kind of M&M, whether it is through entertainment, through acquiring stuff. That'll make you feel good for 20 minutes, but then immediately you need the next one. And you can get so swept up in the cycle that you don't realize that like you have to actually step off that hedonic treadmill and try to craft meaning in these slower pursuits that often don't feel is good right away. Those are the pursuits that are easier to be present for. And then the other thing around presences, I know y'all have had guests that focus explicitly on this topic, so I won't belabor it, but just really realizing the importance of your environment and trying to design your environment in a way that is easy for you to be more present. So if you're going to engage in full presence, work, play, connection, probably best not to bring your phone. Like don't even have it in the room with you, right? The mere sight of that thing is a signal to your brain to start thinking about everything else that could be happening in the world. I try to draw a lot from myth as well as science. And it's like in the Odyssey, Ulysses ties himself to the mast. So he won't be distracted by the siren song and come join the evil army because their song is so beautiful. And in today's world, we have to tie ourselves to the metaphorical mast in many ways because these distractions are so enticing. Yeah, I think that is the biggest problem is now we don't even realize subconsciously how wired and attached to our phone we are. You know, one of the biggest changes I made was just not use my phone as an alarm clock. So it wasn't the first thing that I'd grab in the morning because inevitably I'd turn off the alarm and then all of a sudden I'm hit with the notifications. And it is very pleasurable to look at that screen instantly get the gratification that you're looking for. And of course, all of the apps are fighting for our attention so they know exactly how to dial it to the max. In those situations where you recognize now that maybe you are being swept up, are there any other lifestyle designs that you recommend for your clients or you've done personally to help claw back some of that ability to be conscious of our attention? So I'm a big fan of like not limiting things but finding better alternatives. So limiting would be like I'm only going to go on social media for an hour a day or I'm only going to check my email twice a day. I find that that just doesn't work for a lot of people. So the better alternatives are, hey, I'm going to schedule this hour every single day to do really deep focus work and during that hour, I'm going to make sure my phone is in another room. Or at 6.30pm, I'm going to put my phone away until 9pm so I can have dinner and be with my family or maybe until the next morning. Like you said, AJ, and I see Johnny was nodding as well, I'm not going to have my phone in my bedroom. That is a limiting thing, but I think that's a really effective one. I think where people run into traps, especially now, is there are a whole bunch of folks that have like these allegedly perfect morning routines and I have no doubt that some of these are real. But it's like, you know, you wake up, you look at the sun for 15 minutes, you do a cold plunge, you take a hot sauna, you meditate, you exercise, like God forbid you have a child and then it's 10pm or 10pm, maybe 10pm, 10am, it feels like 10pm, and then you look at your phone. For a lot of people, that's just not reasonable and I think so many people see that stuff and they try to do it and it works for like four days and then they just quit all together. So I think in your case, it's like, yeah, like just start by not having your phone in the room. And then maybe it's like, try to like make your coffee and write down like in your journal, like the things you want to accomplish for the day or what have you and then go check your phone. So yeah, I think that again, it's the middle way and everyone's gonna land differently on what that looks like for them. The other thing in terms of like how to get yourself out of a spiral of distraction that is really, really wonderful is if you're physically able, go take a day hike in nature with no devices. I mean, I see you nodding and smiling like that is my go-to. After a period of internet brain, I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I just drive 40 minutes up into the mountains. I don't come back for five hours. And man, does that bring clarity. Like I am just completely reset. So that is like, I don't love to use the word hack, but I actually think that is a hack. And there's all sorts of fascinating research on the mechanisms of why that's the case. But I find the best thing to do if you're really stuck in like hyper distraction is to go out in nature without your device. The first 20 minutes, you'll be irritable. You'll be reaching for it. You'll be like, oh my God, I need my device. And then you'll just kind of sink into the hike and you'll get back to your car a couple hours later. And you'll be like, wow, I feel so invigorated. I completely agree. And I was able to do that recently in Tahoe. And it was frightening at first, just how much I was looking for my phone and thinking about running back to the car. Only then halfway through to relax and enjoy it and then get back to the car. Of course, no notifications, nothing was missed whatsoever. But that urge waned after about the first 15 minutes. Yeah. And again, I'm not an absolutist. So some people are like, oh, what do you think of a digital Sabbath? If that sounds enticing and it would work for you, great. I know some people who would rather wake up an hour and a half before their family, if they've got a partner and kids, and crank on work for an hour and a half because they scratch that itch and then it allows them to be present the rest of the day. That's a fine route too. I think it also depends on what stage of your career you're at. Like if you're young and you want to make it as an author or a podcaster, like you got to grind a little bit. It's a truth that might be uncomfortable and maybe you do need to be online a little bit more often. And then it's having the self-awareness to know, like what are those boundaries and when to stop. Because there are also people that have millions of people that read their books and listen and they can't get off. And then it's like, well, what is the next? There is no next thing. Like if you haven't arrived now, then like you're never going to arrive. So there's definitely some personal individualized application there. What's the third principle? So the third principle is probably my favorite in the entire book. And it's be patient to get there faster. For me, the biggest insight in my life that I took away from this is whenever we talk about words like optimal or optimized or efficient, we always should ask ourselves on what time scale am I talking? So the extreme example, if I wanted to completely optimize for writing, I would likely sleep five hours a night. I would destroy espressos and Red Bull. Maybe I would exercise for 10 minutes a day and I would not see my wife or my kid and I would never pick up the phone and call my friends. And if I did that for two weeks, I guarantee you I would have more creative writing output in those two weeks than any other two weeks. That would be completely optimized, totally efficient for two weeks. But then you zone out and you're like, what would that look like over a year or even like a month or a decade or God forbid a lifetime? The answer is it would look like a terrible mess of probably addiction. It would not be a healthy way to live. So that's a super extreme example. But I think that it's the most important question to ask because often what feels really efficient and optimized right now is not efficient and optimized on the time horizon that we should be thinking about. So even in the gym, it feels great to go in the gym and crush yourself in a workout and have an optimized, super efficient, high intensity workout on that day. But we know from decades of exercise science research that's actually not the right way to train if your goal is to get stronger, fitter over the long haul. You want to stop just short. You want to be patient. Why? So you can show up the next day and develop that rhythm and consistency. Now, this is in stark contrast to what we see, right? Because we see the overnight breakthrough or the so-called overnight breakthrough or we see the heroic Instagram workout or the all-nighter at the startup. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule, which is actually the way to make meaningful progress is to be patient and is to stop short so that you can pick up in a groove the next day. Two of the examples that I talk about in the book are Charles Darwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. So both of these fellas around the same age of their life appeared to be these overnight breakthroughs, right? So Ta-Nehisi Coates for his book Between the World and Me and his Atlantic cover stories and Darwin for his theory of evolution. And what people don't know is that Charles Darwin, it took him 25 years before he published this theory of evolution from when he had the idea to when he did it. In his diary, he wrote that the greatest asset that he had was patience. Straight up, Ta-Nehisi Coates, he had a blog that pretty much no one read for 19 years before his first Atlantic cover story. Giving a talk to a bunch of journalism students, someone asked him what's the key asset and he said patience. Yet these are two people that are like complete breakthroughs. But generally speaking, behind every overnight breakthrough is a body of consistent work and a lot of patience. With this patience, I feel again, we run into, well, if I'm in a constant mode of comparison, right, patience feels like I'm falling behind. And we're in this fun house mirror on social media of comparison. And certainly if you're listening to the show, you're trying to optimize your life to be more efficient in trying to find the hacks to a degree. So how do we square that? How do we find that patience that's right for us when it seems like others around us are moving faster, achieving faster, and we might feel like we're falling behind? Yeah, it's a really good question and it's a really hard thing to do is the Gestalt Shore answer. The longer answer is one to remind yourself that a lot of what you're seeing isn't real. Like in many cases, it's actually not real. Like it's the fitness influencer using performance enhancing drugs and telling you that his six pack is from the butter he puts in his coffee, not the fact he takes testosterone supplementally. Which there's nothing wrong with. Like if you're not competing in a sport that has a certification body that doesn't allow testosterone, you know, know the risks and do as you please, but don't go tell someone, like this is from my effort in the gym and then hide the fact that you're doping on the side. I think you see the same thing in knowledge work. Like you see the outcome and the output, but you don't see that, oh, maybe this person has a team of 30 people behind them that's helping them do that. So I think the first thing is remind yourself that a lot of what you're seeing isn't real. And then the second thing is just like really start to think of yourself as the kind of person that can be consistent. It's such a strong word. Often my coaching clients like pick a word for the year. They really want to focus. And a lot of them over time have come to this word consistent. And generally consistent means going right to your edge and then stopping a little bit short so that you can rinse and repeat over and over again. Now there is real value. I know you recently had, it was such a great episode, my collaborative partner, Steve Magnus, and do hard things. And there is such a truth to like going to the well. Steve calls it going to see God, like doing something really hard a few times a year. But again, it's got to be a few times a year because otherwise you burn yourself out. So I think it's reminding yourself that a lot of what you're seeing isn't real. And then just constantly saying like on what time horizon do I want to optimize. I think a lot of young men fall into this trap too because you can think that like, you know, you should have it all figured out by 35 or 40. But the research actually shows that in knowledge work, most people peak between 45 and 55. A. And then B, you can look at people like in our world or at least in my world of being a writer, you can look at people like Ryan Holiday or Tim Ferriss who like have really excelled by the time they're in their early 30s. And those are really special people. And you can strive, but even they'll tell you like that they're consistent and maybe they get lucky breaks that you don't get. Maybe they have more help. Maybe there's a little bit better than you, whatever it is. I think part of acceptance is realizing that and not trying to have your bar be the same bar of it's someone else's. And we do it in work, but we don't do it otherwise. Like we don't look at LeBron James and be like, oh, I should be as good at basketball as LeBron is when I'm 32. So I think there's a humility and realizing that like people's progress is nonlinear. It's different. People bring different skills. People come with different backgrounds. And then really coming back to consistency, consistency, consistency on what time horizon do I want to be great? And how can I make sure I don't burn myself out? So putting my own skin in the game, my goal is to be able to write and have conversations like this and just be in the intellectual conversation on mastery and excellence for my whole life. And I have no doubt that if I can do that, I'll write one book. I'll have a few podcast episodes that go nuts. And that'll be fun, but then I'll get back to doing the work itself. That is so different from like, I want to write a best seller if it sells a million copies. And if that was my goal, my life would look very different. I'd probably focus a lot more on writing like particular books at a particular time and marketing them. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like one is not better or worse, but it's just about knowing what the goal is and on what time horizon and then letting that drive the work. Yeah, that consistency I feel is so common in so many guests that we talk to, but it's often not sexy enough to post on social media, right? It doesn't get the likes, the comments, the views of the other 364 days of the year that you were putting in the work consistently. It's the one post that goes viral that we all look at and then compare ourselves to. Yes, that's what you have to come back to. Because what I was going to say is sometimes it does lead to longevity, but that doesn't mean it's in alignment with your values. Like there are a lot of dumb people out there. And there are a lot of grifters out there in our space, writing books and doing podcasts. And if you all wanted to have a podcast go nuts, you'd come up with some contrarian political idea, match it to a super restrictive diet that focuses on one nutrient, a specific kind of exercise, and you'd be golden. And you probably have a pretty long career selling that package of ideas. But if that's not your core values, then it's like, I don't know how you look at yourself in the mirror. And I don't say you, because obviously you don't do this, but the proverbial person, because there's a lot of those people out there. So ultimately, I think it's about also knowing what mountain do you want to climb. Like in podcasting, do you want to climb the grift mountain or do you want to climb the authentic to your core values, having a wide variety of guests mountain? The grift mountain might be a more exciting, higher, faster to get to peak. But then when you're up there, I don't know what the view looks like. Yeah, well, it's also a lot harder inside knowledge of it to keep up that upfront when you're faking it till you make it. And that becomes something that doesn't allow the groundedness of the presence that we're talking about when you feel like you have to keep adding the next check mark and get on the next fake list and get the more fake reviews and all the other stuff that goes with being the grift. So let's talk about the fourth principle. This is actually my favorite. So the fourth principle is embrace vulnerability to build genuine strength and confidence. I'll be really quick, and then I kind of want to turn it on you, AJ, and hear more about why this one resonates so much. But there's been phenomenal work done by a handful of researchers most well-known is Brene Brown on the importance of vulnerability for building deep, meaningful relationships with other people. And Brene Brown famously said that you think that you need to trust someone to be really vulnerable, but actually trust comes from vulnerability. And research bears that out. Like the more vulnerable we are, the more we build trust. Where I got really curious and where I tried to build on that is it's not just trust with other people, but also how much you can trust yourself. So if you can't be vulnerable with yourself, then you can't really trust your whole self because deep down inside your subconscious mind knows like there are some cracks in there that you're trying to look away from or you're trying to caulk without going into them. And eventually that stuff uproots you. So what I try to add in groundiness to so much of the great work done by Brene Brown and other researchers is that it's not just about gaining trust and connection with other people. It's also about gaining deep trust and connection with yourself. And that doesn't mean that you should immediately face all your worst fears and weaknesses at once. It doesn't mean you necessarily should do it alone. But generally speaking, if we're trying to push something away or not look at something or avoid something that's scary, that thing uproots us. Yeah, that strikes a chord with me and being an introvert, starting the show, thinking about what I want to share on the show and how it was perceived. And of course in my 20s getting caught up with the appearance of being and looking the part that goes along with it. There was a lot of vulnerability that I held back and didn't share on the show or didn't share with our clients. And it did lead to this inauthenticity. And we saw someone else on the team back in the day sort of hit the gas on that inauthenticity. And then again, as I was saying, the difficulty with keeping up those appearances and not living into who you are also robs you of the real connection. So instead of hoping to get to a place of trust when I lost my dad and started sharing that story in our classroom, in our boot camps, with our coaching clients, and then sharing that story on the podcast, sharing my journey into sobriety, all of these moments I've had audience members reach out to me and say, thank you for sharing that. Oh my God, I'm going through it too. I felt alone. And there is that connection in this unifying feeling you get when you're not alone in this vulnerability that you're sitting in that you're afraid to show. And the deepest connections that I've built are through those deep moments of vulnerability. You know, we shared this on the show and I want to say like five years ago, Johnny and I, we first met, we didn't actually like each other. Like we come from two pretty different backgrounds and we were brought together through happenstance and it just didn't click right away. And then we actually went on a tour in Europe and we were bunking together, basically sharing a room while we were running programs in Europe. And we got to a place of just deep vulnerability, sharing our backstory. And with that vulnerability came that connection. But before that, I had judgments about Johnny, he had judgments about me, and if we had just sort of let those judgments stay there and not shown that vulnerability, it never would have sparked the friendship that we have outside of doing business together. And now I look for moments to bring that vulnerability into the coaching, into the stories I share in the podcast. And then in my personal life, with the relationships, when you rob yourself of sharing that vulnerability, you then struggle with this fifth principle that we'll talk about, of building a real community and building people that will be there to support you through all of life's up and downs. Yeah, thanks so much for sharing all that, AJ. You're preaching to the choir. I couldn't agree more. In an ancient Greek mythology, there's this myth of the God named Pan. And Pan lived just outside of the village boundary. And every so often villagers would get lost and they'd stumble into the realm of Pan. And they would get paralyzed to death. They'd be so scared. Now, there were a few villagers that were really brave and they deliberately set out to go visit Pan. Into those villagers, Pan bestowed upon them strength, kindness, wisdom, and compassion. And I read that myth, and I think that Pan represents our vulnerabilities. So if we try to avoid them, if we don't go there, eventually we stumble on into them and they just tear our lives apart or at the very least they lead to very chaotic times. Whereas if we can go visit those things, again, with the help of friends, sometimes professionals, clergy, therapists, we come back with some strength, kindness, and compassion in more trust in ourselves. Yeah, that last part is key. So this fifth principle, I feel is the reason a lot of people listen to our show. That's what Johnny and I have been trying to build ourselves all over the country in places we've moved to and live. Let's talk about building deep community and the role it has in our groundedness. So I define deep community as having two components. The first is a feeling of connection or belonging. And it's important that this is a feeling. So this can be to the art of charm community. This can be to a spiritual practice or tradition or religious tradition. It can be to an organization, to a workplace. In my own life as a writer, I feel a sense of connection and belonging to certain authors who I think I'm like in a lineage from and these people aren't even alive anymore. But it's a feeling of connection to something or someone or some group of people that is beyond yourself. The second element of deep community is actual in real life physical connection to other people. And I argue in the book that it's really ideal to have both of these things and they don't have to be in direct proportion. And there are times such as a pandemic where the feeling of belonging might outweigh the in-person physical connection, but on the whole we should be working towards having both. And what ends up happening with our hustle culture, our heroic individualism, is that so often time that could be spent building deep community gets cannibalized by work and by trying to quote unquote optimize or be really efficient. So this is getting back to, you got to ask yourself on what time scale. Because if you want to optimize over the course of, I don't know, even a couple of years, it might make sense to spend no time cultivating deep community. But if you want to optimize for a lifetime, then deep community is the most important thing because that's what you're going to rely on when you experience loss. That's what you're going to rely on when you become ill. That's what you're going to rely on when you get laid off from your job, when you stumble into addiction, when you want to get sober, whatever it is. So any given day, yeah, I'm not going to want to meet so-and-so for coffee. I want to crank ahead on whatever it is I'm doing. But you're really glad that you met so-and-so for coffee when it hits the fan. Or when you have wonderful highs and you want to share those highs with other people. So, again, it's the middle way here, right? Because it's really easy to be like, oh, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't even have a real job. He's a writer and a coach. Like, he has time to go meet friends for coffee. This isn't like put everything aside and just hang out with people. But for most people, the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of so-called optimization that time for deep community gets crowded out. The one thing that I'd add that for a lot of people, I think, is an underlying cause and perhaps they don't even realize it. And I wrote an essay on this in The New York Times earlier this year is throughout COVID, we got so focused on quote-unquote optimization and for really good reason. Like, I have a young kid. I'm trying to work. My wife's trying to work. We had our groceries delivered. We scheduled Zoom calls down to the half hour. Life became very optimized and root-nized. And you needed to. If you're working, you got a kid. You don't want to get COVID. You're constantly assessing risk versus benefit of going out into the world. So it's no one's fault. During the period, that was the right thing. But there's an inertia to that. So now it's like, yeah, I'm just going to keep ordering my groceries. But what you lose is the conversation bumping into your neighbor at the grocery store or even just the interaction that you could have with the person at the deli counter. Like just basic human contact feeling rooted to your community. And you can exist basically without having any engagement in your local community and having everything delivered. And that would be really optimal. And throughout COVID, a lot of people needed that. And it's good that we had the ability to do that. But now it's yikes. Like maybe this doesn't feel so good. And it takes a fair bit of activation energy to break that inertia and to start carving out time to build deep community again. One striking thing, and we have a lot of clients who are in their 50s and 60s and we had Daniel Pink on the show, is just how much regret they had around prioritizing their career over community. And saying, I'll get friends later. I'll hang out with my coworkers later. I got to optimize for the promotion. I got to optimize for success in my career. And how hard it is later in life to spark that ignite that community that you're looking for. The second piece of science that's important to realize is just how many hours it takes to really foster a deep connection. It's not made through a couple of text check-ins and a hangout and grab some beers and watch some football or F1. It's actually involves a lot of vulnerability, a lot of one-on-one intimacy to get to that level of deep community, deep connection that we're talking about. And the third piece is oftentimes we see in clients that they would love to just walk in and join a community, but it often doesn't work that way. There are a few structured communities that allow that, but most of it is actually you have to welcome people into your community, even if your community is only one right now. So when we have people move to new town, so when we have people go through breakups or relationship shakeups in their life, friends move away, they'll come to us saying, okay, well, how can I find the CrossFit gym or this existing community and then I can just throw myself into it? And in actuality, you have to be the friend that you want in your life. You need to invite people to spend time with you, to join you, to do things, not wait around hoping for the invite to come your way. And without that level of effort, it's really difficult to foster these connections that we're talking about here that lead to the groundedness that lead to that stability in your life. Yeah, it's a brown rice activity, for sure. The building community. And you did mention, I think some of the best ways to tap into preexisting community are find a gym, find a mastermind group or a journal club or if you're in recovery, an AA circle or a new parents group. Like these things are out there, but yeah, it's not magic. Like you can't just show up and everyone welcomes you. Like you got to engage and put yourself out there and coming out of COVID, we're all out of practice, I think, a little bit. Something else that I really encourage people is if you live, whether it's suburban or urban or even rural, is try to get to know your neighbors and do it in a way where they don't need to know anything about what you do for work. I just think it's really like there's something in I'm sure that an evolutionary biologist or psychologist would say it's because we evolved in tribes and if we were alone, we'd be picked off by prey. So we just feel better when we feel like we're part of a group. And local neighborhood is a great place to start. Like, you know, buy your neighbors over, watch their dog, take out their garbage when they're out of town. Like just these little things that help you feel a part of something that is both intellectual, like in your mind and in real life. Like these are your neighbors. This is where they live. Now we touched on working out and this body piece to groundedness, I believe is the sixth principle. So let's unpack that. All right. So this was a really interesting conversation between myself and my publisher and my editor because, you know, you've got things like acceptance, patience, presence, vulnerability. And then suddenly they're like exercise. And I'm like, no, not exercise, physical practice. So first, let's let's step back because exercise gets such a bad rap and for somewhat good reason. In second, it would be intellectually dishonest for me not to include it in a book on being grounded. If exercise, physical practice, movement could be bottled up and sold as a pill. It would be a billion gajillion dollar blockbuster. It is completely unequivocal inarguable that some sort of physical practice is good not just for what we think of as our bodies, but also for our minds. And in the book, I argue that we're actually not minds and bodies. We're mind body systems. We're nervous systems. And physical practice is just so important to have a grounded sense of being. So it is it is in the book and I'm glad that it made its way in. So if you really like quote unquote exercise, you like going to the CrossFit gym or training for the marathon or triathlon, that's fine. Keep at it. If you don't and you're like, well, I'm not an athlete or those people are meatheads or those endurance athletes, they spend 30 hours a week on their bikes. What's that about? Physical practice is just about using your body in a way that elevates your heart rate consistently. It can be dancing. It can be yoga. It can be gardening. In the book, I profile all this research that shows that brisk walking gets you 99% of the way there in terms of the benefits for mental health, emotional control and physical health. So it is simply about having some sort of movement practice that you can incorporate into your life that provides that final pillar of foundational groundedness. And it makes sense. We're all living such cerebral lives. Many of us are in highly analytical, technical jobs, or we're forced to just be in brain mode constantly. And with that comes being sedentary. And the second you actually start to bring in that movement practice, all the other pieces that we talked about actually become a heck of a lot easier. It's counterintuitive in a lot of ways. I think also for those of us that work in more cerebral intellectual fields and traditional workplaces, there's a real humility that comes from physical practice. So I've got this, the same old timer mentor, his name is Michael Joyner, who said that after he read my book, he's like, you wrote a book on the yoga of dew. I remember when the news broke that Bill Gates in his office behavior was inappropriate and he was getting divorced from his wife and around the same time, Elon Musk was doing some stuff that just seemed to me a little bit crazy. And it was just like a low moment for me. Like we look up to these people as heroes and especially like Bill Gates, I never loved Elon Musk, but like Bill Gates, like such an admirable guy. And I texted Mike Joyner, I'm just like, Mike, is it possible to create great things without becoming a huge douchebag? And his response was keep deadlifting. And I think that what he meant by that, and I know because I talked to him, was that deadlifting, like you're doing something real in the world. Not everyone's telling you, yes. Not everyone's telling you your work is great. The bar either breaks the ground or it doesn't break the ground. You either lock your hips out or you don't. And it doesn't have to be deadlifting. It can be running, it can be kickboxing. But there is something that is so freaking humbling, especially as you experience success about physical practice that teaches you your limits, when if you're really good at your cerebral job, you might never face failure. And I think that's a very dangerous thing because then you do start to think, well, I can get away with anything. So I think that there's a real humbling effect too. Now, are there people that go to the gym and airbrush their abs and post on Instagram in our total douchebags that deadlift a thousand pounds? Absolutely. But I think that if you approach it holistically from a sense of mastery, there's a real humbling effect to physical practice as well that I think is so important for people in knowledge economy jobs. I also think that you get this sense of mastery from physical activity that you also don't always get in knowledge economy jobs. So whether or not the PowerPoint that you made is good is contingent on the mood of the client that receives it and the partner who you work for. If you are the partner on the associate who made it, all these other things. But when you go out and there's weeds in your garden and then an hour later there are no more weeds and you did that, that like is really freaking satisfying for the soul. And there are a few other arenas in life that are so concrete than physical practice. You either swam the laps or you didn't. You lifted the weight or you didn't. You pulled the weeds or you didn't. You walked the mile or you didn't. And in addition to all the health benefits, I think there's something to say for doing something concrete in the world that the success or failure is very objective and completely traces back to it yourself. With that, as we wrap this, talking to the yogi of action or doing here, you know, so much of this conversation was around the science, was around the information. So many in our audience are consuming, watching videos, reading books. They love just gaining knowledge. But as you just said, that knowledge very rarely turns into action doing in the real world. There is actually a good feeling that we get from just collecting knowledge, right? It's like, I know what that weed is. I know what that weed is. I know what that weed is. Well, the garden's still overgrowing with weeds. It's great that you can classify all of them, but they have to be picked. So I thought you were talking about a different kind of weed, but I'm with you. What are your thoughts? And maybe there's been a mentor who really helped you cross from that knowledge to action barrier that so many in our audience are feeling right now. What can you give them as words of advice to put this into action, to get all these great feelings that go along with being grounded? So first off, I empathize. This is my third book, and it's the first one where every single chapter I split into two parts. The first part is knowing and the second part is doing. And it's for this very precise reason, like there is a knowing, doing gap. And it's so easy to read a book, like you said, and feel great. I mean, I know Zen Buddhist masters who haven't spent a day meditating, but they've read every single Zen Buddhist book. And reading about meditation is not the same thing as meditating. I'm very aware of that trap and I tried to write the book to address that trap. And if you read the book, what you'll find is that the knowing sections are super cerebral. It's stuff that you're going to talk about at cocktail parties and intellectually stimulate you and tell your colleagues and your family about whatever. But then the doing part, it's actually really simple. And that's on purpose because simple doesn't mean easy. And we spend so much time as you said, making things really complex is a way to procrastinate doing them. So if I know every weed in the garden and I can educate you on the origin of that weed in the garden, those are all just excuses to not show up and pull the freaking weeds. So I think that the key to knowing is to get really complex and to understand science and history and wisdom and mechanisms. And then the key to doing is to make things so freaking simple. So you want to be more present. Doesn't necessarily mean you need to go on a two-week silent retreat. How about we start with defining a two-hour period of your day where you're not going to have your phone with you. And if you're such an addict that you can't do it, how about you tell your roommate or your significant other to hide that phone and under no circumstance tell you where it is. Do that for one month, two hours a day, one month. That is the kind of simplicity that elicits doing. And then the other thing that's so important is this notion of behavioral activation. In the book, I talk about how you don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good. Doing is always hard at first, especially habit change. If you want to wait to be inspired or motivated, you will not get very far. You have to have faith that even if you're not motivated, just do the thing and the motivation will follow. And just knowing that, for every book that you write about being super motivated and driven and thinking positive, I got news for you. If you're feeling great, ride those waves. But if you're not, trying to will yourself to motivation or optimism is not going to work. You have to act yourself to it. And simply knowing that allows you to take this weight off your back of needing to feel a certain way to get started. So start really simple. Start really small. And understand that if you don't feel like doing it, that's all the more reason to do it. I love that. Well, we love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Brad? Oh, man, unique. I don't know if I'm either of those two things. But I think that I'm super. I don't know. Some ways it's a gift. Some ways it's a curse. But my brain is very associative. So I'm constantly making connections. So all my work is based on a mix of cutting edge, modern science, but also age old wisdom traditions, not just anyone, but multiple history, biography of great performers, interview, research. So I guess unsilowed or cross domain thinking. And I just enjoy it. I'm curious about it. And hopefully it helps me get closer to truth with the capital T on the topics that I write about. And then deadlifting. I'm not even very good at it. But it feels great. And because I'm not very good at it, it keeps me very humble. Yeah, the bar doesn't lie. Well, thank you for joining us. Where can our audience find out more about this book and all the work that you do? So the book is available wherever you get books. Amazon, Audible, your independent bookstore, Libro, you name it, read, listen, doesn't matter to me. And then I am on Twitter at be Stahlberg. I'm on Instagram at Brad Stahlberg. And my website is just my name. www.BradStahlberg.com. We talked a lot about social media. I do try to engage with folks that engage in good faith. I try to set aside 20 minutes to a half an hour a day to do that. So if you engage in good faith, I will be there. I just might not be there 24-7. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, John. So I really enjoyed being here.