Ep231: How to Become Resilient In the Face of Change (and Manage an Identity Crisis) | with Brad Stulberg

Zack Arnold

I'm here today with Brad Stulberg, who is the best selling author of the book The Practice of Groundedness, as well as the co author of Peak Performance, you're also the author of the brand new book Master of Change, How to Excel When Everything is Changing, Including You. You also work as a coach with executives, entrepreneurs and athletes on both their mental skills and their well being probably no surprise to my audience, why have gravitated to you so heavily? And why aren't you here today? But here's the most important thing that must be mentioned that you might not be aware of, is that I, too am a graduate of the University of Michigan. So before we say anything else, Go Blue. Go Blue. I was so excited when I read that I'm like, Oh, my God, I have something in common with Brad, it was very, very exciting for me and in you're as a matter of fact, also on the faculty of University of Michigan.

Brad Stulberg

That's right, go blue all the way. Yeah, I was very, very excited about that. And any other big 10 School listeners we have here,

Zack Arnold

of which there now I think 27 schools in the big 10. Last time I checked, I can't keep track

Brad Stulberg

I was just gonna say they keep adding them. It's more like the big 34

Zack Arnold

Yeah, exactly. It's going to be the big 50 Before we know it and every state's just going to be in one conference. But anyway, we could talk about that for hours, we won't. So one of my my podcast dreams just to get us started as imagine the screenshot that we could take if it was you, and me. And Adam Grant and James clear. And Tim Ferriss all on one call. Just picture that for a second. How amazing would that screenshot of that Zoom call be? You know, the like the five quintuplets, right? So the reason I say that is both jesting, but also because all of the names that I mentioned have been hugely influential in my journey in the work that I'm learning about. And I believe that the work that you're doing with Adam with Tim, with James, I just I think all of you are having such a tremendous positive impact on both me and my listeners. So I just both wanted to start with a really stupid joke. But also just to say thank you, that I hold you in very high esteem with all the work that you're doing.

Brad Stulberg

Thank you, I thought you were alluding to the fact that you'd have the most hair of that crew. And I probably would, you're probably not often in that position. So

Zack Arnold

Yeah, that's that's the it's funny, because I literally thought about that right before I was getting ready for this call. I'm like, because this is long for me, I haven't cut it in a couple of weeks. I'm like, I wonder if I should actually cut this shorter because I think it'll it the screenshot will look better because you know, there'll be matching, but I just, that's the kind of crap that I think about, you know, when I'm getting ready for a podcast. But anyway, the point being, the real reason that we're here is to talk about the tremendous amount of change that I believe that we have going on in the world and politics, in technology. And in your brand new book master of change, you help us better understand those things. And we're definitely going to get there eventually. But I've got about seven hours of notes just from your previous book on the practice of groundedness. So get a couple of cups of coffee, cancel all of your plans, because I want to talk a little bit more about what it means to be grounded, because I think that's the place to start with this conversation. Whereas I know that the books not technically a sequel, but kind of reading both of them simultaneously, there's so much convergence and overlap between the concepts, that I wanted to get a basic sense of what you mean by groundedness, and the practice of it, and how that's going to apply to everything we're going to talk about in your new book.

Brad Stulberg

Love it. So the metaphor that I like to use is that of a mountain. And when most people come across a mountain, they immediately look up towards its peak. And we admire the peaks of mountains, they're beautiful, they pierce through the clouds, that's where we want to climb to. But when you think about a mountain, what actually is the most important, arguably, at least part of a mountain is its base its foundation. Because if a mountain doesn't have a really strong base, then its peak will not stand through different seasons through different weather patterns. And we're very much the same. We spend so much time focusing on our peak performance and our peak productivity. And we often forget about our foundation. And we're only as strong as that foundation. So the practice of groundedness is really a book about how do you develop that solid foundation, from which you can then strive? And how do you learn to be present in the process of striving instead of just being attached to a result. Because the climber that has more present for the journey and finds the journey more enjoyable and more fulfilling, not only has a better chance of actually getting to the top of the mountain, but they're also going to climb more mountains, their work will be more sustainable. So groundedness is the foundation I wrote this book a couple years ago on the foundation. And then in the last couple of years, as you mentioned, the pace and intensity of change has just been so immense. So to continue with the mountain the the metaphor of the mountain, this book master of change is really about like what happens when you're climbing on the side of the mountain when you're working your way up towards whatever goal you're you're going toward in the wind blows or you get back knocked off the mountain, or you are expecting it to rain and it actually snows or the opposite. You're expecting you to be cold and it's hot. And obviously, I'm not reading a book for mountain climbers, this is all metaphorical. So yeah, that's how these two books work together. One is the foundation. And then the other is how do you navigate all the changing weather patterns that are inevitable in striving for any goal or even just striving to cultivate a good fulfilling life.

Zack Arnold

And if I'm going to add one thing on top of that, I would say that given especially with the advancements of technology, and now with artificial intelligence, which is all brand new, even since you probably were, you know, the depths of writing this book, now you're climbing the mountain, and all of a sudden, the mountains gone, right? It's not it's snowy or it's cold, or it's hot, or this is harder, I'm tired. It's where the hell did the mountain go that I was climbing? Did it just disappear. And that's one of the areas that I feel my audience is so stuck in, there's so much fear right now, is artificial intelligence is nothing new. It's something that automation and robots and all these systems have slowly been replacing different areas of different industries for a long time. But now it's come for the creatives. Now, it's, you know, it's comforted the writers like at least as of recording this, the writers and the actors in Hollywood still on strike, the entire industry is completely shut down. And what I discovered this is something that I've been writing about that I think is so similar to the things that you write about when it comes to change, is that there's no question that we're in the middle of an economic crisis. But I think that much larger, what we're dealing with is an identity crisis, which is, if when I'm ready to climb the mountain, again, the mountain isn't there anymore, than Who am I like, well, what does that even me about if I am I work and I can't do my work anymore. There's so much immense change. It's not just, I can't make money right now. It's I don't even know who I am, if I can't do this thing that I've done for so long. So that's kind of the foundation of today's conversation. And I really want to help people better understand how to manage all of this. And I think that the place to start, there's so many aha moments that I had reading through your book, but the one that really clicked that was explained very, very simply, was understanding the difference between homeostasis and homeostasis. As soon as I saw that, I'm like, Aha, this makes so much sense. So break this down really, really simply for people to understand what change really is and how it works.

Brad Stulberg

All right, homeostasis is the conventional model for thinking about change. It is about 150 years old. So in the mid 1800s, physiologist named Walter Cannon, had an observation about what he thought made for a healthy living system. And he said that healthy living systems love stability. Change is inherently bad, because it causes instability, it causes chaos, it causes disorder. And whenever a change occurs, a healthy system is going to do everything it can to get back to stability as fast as possible. So homeostasis describes change is a cycle of order, or stability. And, as I mentioned, for 150 years, this has been the prevailing model of change. More recently, in the last couple of decades, the scientific establishment has stepped back and said, actually, you know, Canon, while he was a real relevant story thinker, in the mid 1800s, we've got new tools now. And we can actually investigate scientifically what makes living systems thrive. And it's similar to homeostasis, but it's different and it's different in one very important way. So Alice stasis as the EES it is true living systems of which we are one human organisms, we like stability, no doubt about it. However, following a change, we don't want to get back to stability where we were, we want to get back to stability somewhere new. So homeostasis, order, disorder order, aloe stasis, order disorder reorder. The other key difference is homeostasis, as the change is something to resist, and to try to avoid and push back against our status, it says actually, healthy systems embrace change, and adapt to it. And they participate in it. So what happens between disorder and reorder, we have some say in that we have some agency, and we have some skills that we can build to get to a favorable reorder as fast as possible. And the ultimate, most grand majestic example of this is evolution, like the whole of evolution, you think about species that are able to persist and thrive over long periods of time. And they have these two features. One are these core qualities, the hills that they're going to die on that really make them who they are. And if these things were to be released, the species would be unrecognizable. However, they are able to apply those core qualities so flexibly, over time, that when the environment around them changes, they can evolve, adapt and grow. So it's constantly it is species level, a cycle of order disorder reorder, and then of course, in our own lives, I think that we're always somewhere in this cycle. We're always in conversation with change. And I'll close this question maybe giving you more than And you asked for another way to think about the difference is homeostasis as the change is something that happens to you. And Allah stasis says that change is something that you are always in conversation with.

Zack Arnold

I know, I would also add that too. And this can be, you know, maybe a slight perspective shift. But you could say that if homeostasis is something that's happening to you, aloe stasis is something that's happening for you is you talk a lot about how that change really yields a process of growth. And that's something that you go into extensively in both of your books. And we're maybe going to get to a little bit a little bit later, this idea of, well, maybe it doesn't have to, maybe things just suck because they suck, which is probably one of my favorite chapters, because it wasn't all about how do you frame this as growth and an opportunity all which is great. But maybe things just suck, right? And I accepting that I think is a really important part of the process. And if I had one theme for how I would characterize my year, because I like to have a theme or a word or an idea that characterizes what the journey looks like, for the year. And it's ironic that it took me until the middle of the year to come up with this, and you're going to find out why in a second. But the theme was, I need to be okay with where I am. And that is a huge theme of both both the practice of groundedness and master of change. Why? Why do I struggle with this so much, Brad, I'm such a high achiever, I want to push I want to do doing is my thing being is not? Why is it so hard for me to just be where I am.

Brad Stulberg

You know, I think a lot of this is really our inheritance. There's a lot of interesting research that shows that different people have different neuro chemistry and different brains. And some people are able to find contentment much easier, they're able to work a nine to five job to completely clock out at the end of the day to truly work to live. And that's what work is it's a paycheck. And there are other people that are wired, where that becomes really hard, where work becomes a bigger source of meaning or a bigger part of their identity. And it would be almost impossible to say that I'm just going to clock out at the end of the day, I'm thinking of entrepreneurs, creatives crafts people. And I'm really careful when I talk about this, and I truly mean this I am values neutral. Like neither temperament is better or worse. They both have pros and cons. What's interesting is the person that can clock out at five and then sit on the couch and drink a beer often says I wish I was more driven. And the person that super driven says I wish I could clock out in five and have a beer. So you know, it's it's very, it's very different. But neither is better or worse. So I think another reason that perhaps you're like that is now more than ever, we are living in an age where it is so easy to engage in comparison on a global scale. So it used to be your point of reference for growth, or how you're doing or athletic performance. Or if you're an author, how many books you're selling, whatever it is, it'd be your local community, like you'd have a community newspaper, and you would compete with people in your community, you know, the best high school athlete, you just had to be better than the people within the school district. Now, the internet is basically a global social comparison machine. So you can always find not one person, not two people, but 1000s of people, often millions of people that are on a similar path than you and you perceive them to be ahead. And we're a social species. So like that sort of comparison making is very hard to overcome. It is also something that is hardwired in our DNA. What has changed dramatically, is again, it used to be that we were constrained by physicality. And then with the newspaper, we're constrained by what paper newspaper that we get, and we read. And now we have the internet. And those constraints are completely lifted. And the internet also allows people to do a whole lot of photoshopping on top of the realities. So oftentimes you're not even comparing yourself to someone else. You're comparing yourself to someone else's performative Photoshopped life.

Zack Arnold

And where it gets even scarier. And this is the doom and gloom side of artificial intelligence I'm not going into is we just thrown gasoline on that fire times a million of now, it's not even my photoshopped reality. I don't even know if it's somebody's reality at all anymore, right? So that's, that's a direction I don't want to head down. But I very much am on the same page as far as social media, and how it's really just amplified this idea that I can compare myself to anybody where Let's even say before the internet, let's say that I wanted to be an author and I want to write books, right? I can say, well, you know, I really admire Tim Ferriss, but I'm not going to be Tim Ferriss tomorrow. And I'm not going to lose sleep over the fact that I'm not a best selling author. And I don't have you know, billions of downloads on my podcast, because there are different journeys, right? But because of the internet, I can look at somebody like you, and I can think ooh, there's somebody that's doing executive coaching for years, and he's got a couple of books under his belt, and he's got so many more social media followers than me or he's, he's doing so well with these books, or he's figured this out, and all of a sudden, because it's somebody that's closer to where you are, but ahead perceivably at least Right, then it's so easy to set these unrealistic expectations about where we're supposed to be versus where we are. And an area that you have gone into extensively that I am so appreciative of is that I don't have the level of, like professional background or working in the scientific fields that you have. But I've had this hypothesis that I've been working on for years that has now been confirmed by a multitude of the world's experts. And it was that the root cause of burnout is setting and proper expectations. And I've been saying that for years blowing smoke out of my ass having no idea if I made any sense. And then one day, I had a conversation with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar. He's like, That's exactly right. The science says you're exactly right. And you talk about how happiness is essentially, where reality does not meet expectations. So I want to talk about this a little bit more, so we can start to build a vocabulary of understanding how to manage change.

Speaker 2

Yeah, ooh I love it. So Tal Ben Shahar, one of my favorite academics, he calls this the arrival fallacy as well that like, we think that if we just achieve a goal, then we'll be content. And that expectation never turns out to be true, either. So the angle that I come at this from is, like you said, there's so much great research out there over the last decade or so that shows that our happiness, and I expound even further and I'd say, our mood at any given point, in reality, excuse me, at any given point is a function of our reality minus our expectations. And part of the reason that change is so painful is another way to think about change is simply our expectations are met. So our brains, our prediction machines, the way that we make sense of the world and are able to absorb all the stimulus around us is our brains are constantly making a prediction for what's going to happen next. And when that prediction is confirmed, or at least it's close to that prediction, we feel really good. And it takes us less energy to get through the world. However, when those predictions turn out to be way off the mark, or there's a radical changes that appends the whole picture, then suddenly, our expectations are very different than our reality. And that's when we can start to suffer, we can start to feel pain, fear, overwhelm despair, you name it. And people that are able to work with change really skillfully, are very good at updating their expectations when reality changes. So out of the kind of clinical and into a very practical example of how this played out for just about everyone in the Western world. So relatively early on in the pandemic, we had an early summer, where cases in just about every geography in America and much of Europe, essentially went down to zero. It was the summer that we thought the pandemic was over, our kids could go to their friend's house and play inside, we could go to restaurants for dinner. I remember here in western North Carolina, the cases went down to like one in 100,000. So we really felt like the pandemic was pretty much over. And our new expectation was, hey, like, this sucked in for many people, it was much more than socks, people lost their lives. I mean, this was a horrific tragedy. But even for those of us that were blessed, like, like me, I didn't lose any family members, no one had any major health consequences, it still sucked, we got to the other side. And then that winter, the Delta variant came in, it was such a gut punch. So many people when the Delta variant came, felt worse and had a worse time with that than they did at the start of the pandemic. Even though objectively, we were in much better shape. We had therapeutics, we had vaccines, we knew how transmission worked, we had mitigation strategies, but people felt worse. Why? Because the expectation was, we made it through this hard thing. The expectation was, were a mile 25 marathon. And there's the finish line. And the Delta variant was essentially picking us up and putting us back at mile 13. And those who struggled the worst with this, were those who are not able to update their expectations. Those that were able to say, well, this is what's happening right now. Sucks, I wish it weren't so. But I can't like cling on to the old expectation that I had, I need to very quickly adapt to reality, then you're able to take skillful action. And until you are squarely living in your reality, not in your expectation, but in your reality, you can't really do anything productive about it.

Zack Arnold

It's funny that you say all this because again, I only dug into the books themselves relatively recently. But what I've been saying on and off for pretty much three years since COVID hit but especially since the beginning of what I call COVID 2.0, which for most of the world is irrelevant. But for the creative world between artificial intelligence and the shutdown of this industry, it feels like COVID all over again, nobody's working. Nobody has any certainty about the future. And I've been saying since the beginning of COVID 2.0. In every newsletter, there are so many things we cannot control. The best use of our energy are the things that we can control, which is a huge foundation of your work, which is also and this is something we're going to talk about more than come vergence of Buddhism, Taoism and stoicism so now let's talk a little bit more about how we parse out that which we cannot control from that which we can control and how that helps us change our expectations.

Brad Stulberg

So in the midst of change, exactly like you said, there are things that we can't control. And there are things that we can't control. Epictetus, the Stoics, call this the dichotomy of control, he's obviously said, focus on what you can. In Buddhism, we have the second arrow. So the first arrow is an event that happens to you that you can't control the second arrow is your response. And in Christianity, we have the Serenity Prayer, grant me the courage to accept that, that I can't in the, you know, faith or wisdom, whatever it is to then act on what I can. So it's this very common pattern, very common theme that the wisdom traditions recognize and have for millennia. Fast forward to more recent, and so much of modern psychological science is just exploring what wisdom traditions were grappling with which other topic I find fascinating. So now, neuroscientists have identified these various pathways in our brain. And in the midst of change, there are two pathways that compete, there are zero some pathways in our brain, if one is on the other is off. One is called the rage pathway. And the rage pathway is exactly what it sounds like. It's angry, it's despairing, it is pissed off, it is fighting it is pushing against it is resisting. The other pathway is called the seeking pathway. And the seeking pathway is curious. It's problem solving. It's making plans, it's taking action. And like I said, neuroscientists have studied an image of the brain, and it shows that these two pathways cannot be firing at the same time. And anyone that has ever gone from bitching about a problem to trying to solve a problem knows it's very hard to be angry about something while you're actively working on it. So what we do, when we focus on what we can control versus what we not, or excuse me, versus what we cannot, is we shift our entire neuro chemistry to the seeking pathway. So not only are we actually doing something productive, to hopefully make the situation better, but we also start to feel better when we take action. And then an utmost extreme case of this individuals with clinical depression. One of and it's by no means the only tool. But one of the most powerful tools in the toolkit is something that psychotherapist called behavioral activation. And it basically says, Just get going, just start doing something, just jolt your neuro chemistry out of that rage pathway and despair and despondency into action. And I want to be clear, as someone that suffered depression, don't go tell someone's depressed, like just get started, right? This has to be in a therapeutic model with other tools. But the underlying neuro chemistry is such that once you get moving, you start to feel better. So back to your initial question. Yes, I am 100%, on the same page with you that in the midst of change, we want to separate what we can control from what we can't. And we want to focus on what we can, for two reasons. Number one, actually gives us a chance to make the situation better. Number two, even if it's not making the situation better, it makes us feel better.

Zack Arnold

There are about a million and a half questions, 10 different threads that I want to pull out all this and there's two that I want to get right before I lose the train of thought one of which I'm going to put a pin in this for a second. But talking about this idea of just getting going, I want to make sure that we get sooner rather than later to this idea of the real fatigue versus the face fake fatigue, because oh my god, that chapter was the story of my life. But what I want to dig into now a little bit further is this idea of expectations versus reality. And it's COVID 2.0. And all of a sudden, you know, I've lost my entire identity. And like we've talked about in the beginning, I was climbing a mountain and now the mountain has disappeared. So from here, I just don't know what it is that I could possibly do. And I just gonna kind of sit here and I'm gonna wait. And like you said, with the homeostasis versus the aloe stasis, the simplest way that you put it, where it really clicked, was we think we're gonna go from x to y back to X. But you don't you go from x to y, y being the massive change, but then you end up at Z. Right? So what I've been saying for a long time now is that we're never going back and put artificial intelligence is not getting put back in Pandora's box. And I have so much uncertainty about where it's going next. So rather than just putting my head in the sand, what can I actually start doing that isn't so incredibly full of fear and apprehension because I just want things to go back to the way they are before. How can I actually get started? Knowing that we're going to talk in a minute about this idea of like, is this the real burnout and the real fatigue versus I'm just kind of making this up?

Brad Stulberg

Oh, yeah, these are great threads to pull on. So I'm glad that we're going to do it. The question about the mountain no longer being there in artificial intelligence and the writers strike and all that's happening. I think the first step is just right. Recognizing that many people in the creative industry are in the midst of a disorder period. So if you are feeling unstable, you are not broken, nothing is wrong with you, it's because the ground that you're standing on, or at least a big part of your life stands on is shaky, and it can feel like it's being swept out from under you. So that's the first thing is to be kind to yourself, and to realize that, of course, like it feels unstable because you're in a period of instability. Now, what to do in this period of instability, how to try to work with disorder, to influence and to get to reorder. And here, I think there are a couple of really important things. The first is to ask yourself, What are your core values? So not? What Do You Do? Not? What do you like? Not? What do you wish for? But what do you really value? Is it creativity? Is it intellect? Is it making connections? Is it family as a community? Yeah, what do you really value? And then step back and ask yourself? How can I practice those values? Regardless of what's happening around me? How can I update those values? So here's an example. I am a writer, that is my craft, that is the hat that I take the most pride in wearing. Other than my family life, it is the biggest part of my identity. I have had to work hard to define myself not as a writer, but as someone who is creative. And here's how that makes me less fragile to change. Let's say the artificial intelligence comes for all nonfiction book writing, I actually don't think this is going to happen. But I could be wrong. So let's say that it does.

Zack Arnold

I'm on the same page. I don't think so either. But continue.

Brad Stulberg

Let's say that it does. If I define myself as a creative, then it's not that despairing. I can be creative through a podcast, I can be creative through video, I can be creative, through so many different sources than just writing. Whereas if I define myself just as a writer, or a book writer, and book publishing goes away, then I'm kind of screwed. So I think it is really important to get beyond the thing that you do to what is the value underneath it? And then ask yourself, what actions can I take that are in alignment with that value. And then I also think that is worth recognizing, in the midst of any big technological change. And I write about this in the book, and I looked well over history. So we're going back 1000s of years, whenever something new comes along, there's generally a hype cycle that outweighs the gravity of the thing. Do I think that artificial intelligence is in the hype cycle? Absolutely. Do I think that artificial intelligence is going to change a lot? Also? Absolutely. Both those things can be true at once. But I think if you just pay attention to the hype cycle, it's easy to feel so overwhelmed, and fall into such despair. Whereas if you say, hey, you know, imagine life before the internet, it's hard to imagine, but the Internet didn't like just wasn't just a switch that turned on and then everyone lost their job. Right? Like we were able to adapt and be in conversation with the Internet. And I expect the same thing will likely happen with artificial intelligence into something that you said earlier that to make this about artificial intelligence, but it's not new. I mean, you know, spell check is artificial intelligence. How long has Google had that technology, where as you type something that finishes what you're typing based on pattern recognition, that's artificial intelligence. So I think it's just a step change in evolution, and then a lot of marketing behind it now. But I can't imagine that artificial intelligence is going to take over creativity, because I always think that by definition, creativity is human. So whatever artificial intelligence does, creatives can be one step ahead on the cutting edge.

Zack Arnold

This is where I know that I'm talking to the right person at exactly the right time, I'm going to presume you probably don't subscribe to my newsletter, no harm, no foul and no hard feelings. I literally just this Monday, wrote an entire loose newsletter with a picture of the Gartner hype cycle, and said, we're at the peak of the hype right now. And we just need to simmer down now. Because this is this too shall pass. And I talked about this. The same thing had happened no more than 10 years ago, where it was a huge change in the the entertainment industry, going from things being shot on film to being shot on digital. And in that transition, specific job roles are now extinct, right? There are now like, I have 35 millimeter camera operators, and they all work for Christopher Nolan, right. Other than that, everybody shoots digital, but there's 40% More camera operators than there were in 2012. But you just have to be willing to adapt your thinking and know it's not going to go from x to y to x. It goes from x to y to z. So I literally just wrote all about this.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, a lot. It's crazy. And artificial intelligence, I think will be a tool. But there's going to be so much room to use it creatively and you're already seeing this in, in in my world. So in nonfiction writing. There are and I'm going to call them rose because they tend to be like young dudes that are kind of Broly. But at first it was like new and glamorous, and they're writing using artificial intelligence. And it was interesting. And it seems pretty good and cool. But now it's become such a commodity that you can immediately recognize when someone had artificial intelligence, right, their Twitter thread or their newsletter, or whatever it might be. And it's like, oh, I'm reading the robot, unsubscribe. And I think like, that's where the human touch for creatives will always be there. So maybe artificial intelligence provides a great draft, maybe it helps with research, but it's never going to do the creative work, because by definition, creativity is at the cutting edge. And currently, by definition, artificial intelligence looks back to create pattern recognition. And these are two fundamentally different things.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up pattern recognition. Because you mentioned in your book, that's one of your core zones of genius, your ability to recognize patterns and see convergence, which is another area where I gravitated you immediately because it's exactly the way that my brain works is I see all the complex disparate ideas and information. And I can bring them down into a coherent narrative. I mean, that's what I did as an editor for 25 years. And the convergence that I'm seeing, it's one of those where you're going to buy a red Prius. And now there's, there are red presses everywhere, right? And I presume you're ready to buy a red Prius the way that I am, because I think you and I are seeing the same patterns. Is that what I'm seeing, and this is very much based on our mutual admiration of your friend, David Epstein. Because of technology, we are watching the transition from a specialized society back to a generalized society. And I think the core of surviving this and thriving it is identity. It's like you just said, if I'm only a nonfiction writer, and that's who I am as a person, and artificial intelligence replaces that, who am I, but if I'm a creative, I just find other outlets. And if I can take my one specialization, and diversify it, that to me not only gives you more security for your income, but it just makes your life more fulfilling?

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, all right, good. So two things to dive into, both from the section in the book on identity. The first is just really being explicit about defining your craft based on the values that underlie it, not the thing itself, because values are so much more robust and less fragile to change. Because generally speaking, you can take a value and apply it differently, as the environment around you changes. So again, you write books, I'm a book writer, and books go away, you're screwed. I'm a creative, there are many more ways to use that value. And really do what you can to define yourself by your values, I know it's hard. The second thing that helps identities become strong and more robust to change is to have more than one room in the house, that is your identity. So identity like a house, right? If we imagine a house with just one room, I'm a writer, I'm a podcast host, even just the one room of I'm, I'm an actor, you know, I'm a producer, well, then when things change in that one room, you don't have any other rooms to go into, it can feel really disorienting. Whereas if you have a room for being a producer, or writer, or director and an actor or an actress, whatever it is, but you also have a room for being an athlete, for being a spouse for being a community member for being a son or daughter, a parent, well, then, when shit hits the fan in one room, you can step into the other rooms, for a source of stability and a source of meaning and a source of identity. And this is not to say that you need to be completely balanced and spend equal time and each room of your house. It's simply to say that you never want to make one room, the only thing that is in your house, you always want to have some doors open so that when there's big change over here, you can seek support and stability over there. And I think that it really goes against this false, extremely false narrative. That to be great at something you have to be completely obsessed and do it at the expense of everything else. That is just not how greatness works, at least not how sustainable greatness works. Sustainable greatness is yes, you have to be pretty obsessed with something and yes, you have to care deeply and do a lot of it. But you can also benefit from having other elements of your identity. So again, I want to take this from clinical concepts to real life example during at home. The story I tell in the book is of Niels Vanderpol, set the World Championship, or excuse me set the world record and speed skating won gold medals in both the 10k and the 5k. In the 2022 Olympic Games, the best speed skater to ever skate on this planet. Fast forward seven, eight years, his performance was going to crap. He's a really reflective dude. You looked into why this might be the case. His training was great. His nutrition was great, but he couldn't lie to himself. He had immense fear before competing. And then he said Why am I getting so nervous? Why do I have so much fear? And the reason he had so much fear is because his entire Your identity was speed skating. And if he lost, there was nothing else if he got injured, nothing else, if he fell down in a race, catastrophic because his entire identity was linked to him being a speed skater. And what a wise mature 22 23 24 year old he said, This isn't working. I need to diversify my sense of self. So he started training less. He started taking two days off every week on heard of for a world class athlete to take two days off, and not just take two days off, but act like a normal person. Today. I got friends, they go out for beers, they watch movies, they go bowling, I'm gonna start going out for beers and watching movies and going bowling. What he did was diversify his sense of self, he went from having one room as a speedskater, to having multiple rooms. speedskater was still a room that he spent a lot of time and you still train 40 hours a week. But he became a friend, he became a community member, he became someone that liked reading, he became someone that enjoyed hiking, he had these other areas of his identity. And what Vanderpool says is that the fear went away, because he realized that even if you had a crappy speed skating performance, Niels Vanderpool was separate than just speed skating. And the rest is history. He shifted his identity, and he became the best speed skater to ever live. And I just think like, that is such a beautiful story. And the last thing, if I sound like a broken record, I think it's because it's important. Vanderpool wasn't quote, unquote, balanced, he still trained 40 hours a week, he went all in, he went so hard at speed skating. But he also made sure that he had other components to his identity. And that made him less fragile. So it's not to say you need to be proportionate across all these areas of your life. It is simply to say, to make sure that you're cultivating more than one element of yourself.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, this is the epicenter of the narrative that I've been sharing the I've got an upcoming workshop that I'm putting together, everything that I've been talking about, is this idea that if we're going to weather the storm, you have to diversify who you are, like you said, diversify your sense of self. I cannot even imagine if what's going on in our industry right now. It happened to me seven or eight years ago, because the only thing that I did to support my family was at a television. But it wasn't just my only source of income, it's who I was, I would wake up, I would get in the car, I would drive to the job, I would do the job for 14 hours I would get in my car, I would go home, I would do the job in my sleep, rinse lather and repeat for years. And I realized this is not who I want to be or how I want to live my life for the next 30 years. So I started to learn the value of diversity. The problem was the world keeps saying you got to pick your one specialization, you got to do this one thing and you're gonna get better at it. It starts in preschool. So what do you want to do when you grow up? Right? And this drove me absolutely crazy. And for years, I kept identifying as I'm scatterbrained, I'm unfocused, I can't get it together. And now I look back on the last 10 years, I'm like, holy crap, do I have a head start? Because I spent 10 years diversifying as a podcaster, and a writer and a coach and doing online courses and training for American Ninja Warrior and becoming fit and doing speaking. And on the surface up until about six months ago, I still had that voice of like, until you're going to pick something right, you're going to pick one lane to go down. And then I discovered Chase Jarvis, who I'm sure you're familiar familiar with. And I had him on the show talking about creative calling. And I'll link to that. And I realized I can give myself permission to be okay with being so quote unquote, scattered. But now it's gone from being my kryptonite to be my superpower. And that's why I'm so excited to have you here because you're helping bring a vocabulary to the value of this.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, diversify your sense of self. I mean, that's it. And I love that you mentioned not only professionally, but also like American Ninja Warrior and becoming fit. And that is so important psychologically, because let's say there's a world where all the professional stuff goes to crap for a period of time. Oh, it's gonna suck. And I don't want to sugarcoat it. But if you can go to the gym and have a good workout, and get one small win in an area of your life that you can control. That's really important. And that's a real important sense of stability through change. The flipside is also true. Let's say you get super hooked on training and you want to become you know, regionally competitive, which is great. And then you get injured, you tear a hamstring. And you can lean heavily on your career. And say, as much as I like that, and as hard as this is, I can still derive value from my career. And then for those of us that have partners or families, it's another big bucket. So I just think like, I cannot stress enough what you are saying is that we should expect change back to expectations, it is inevitable, it's going to come from all areas of our life. It probably won't come from all areas at the same time. The value of having these multiple rooms in our house, multiple hats we wear, whatever metaphor you want to use, is that when big change comes in one area, we can lean on the others for mental psychological fortitude and support.

Zack Arnold

Basically minus the hamstring pull you just narrated the law six months of my life, because that's exactly what happened. Where I've been in the process of training for over five years now I've gotten the call to compete on the show been on the course, sucked both times. That's a whole other conversation about identity and fears and anxiety, and you might end up being my coach. But the point is, I didn't get the call this year, but I had the opportunity to test actually go to the warehouse with the producers and get on the obstacles, first de terre attendant in my shoulder, right. And that entire part of my identity started to fall apart, and it had some serious ramifications. And I dealt with some depression, and I dealt with some burnout. And then right around the time that happened, this strikes began, and there was this idea of, well, I can't go back to my regular job. And it was still really hard, and it sucked. But I cannot imagine what would have happened to me on a mental health level, or my well being, if I didn't have like, you know, my office hours, and my students that's going great right now, or things with my kids are really great. Like, if I didn't have that sense of diversification, I would have completely fallen down the deepest, darkest hole, ask me how I know that has been there, right. And I know that that's an area where you have been as well. So I wanted to, I wanted to talk a little bit more now about your personal story. And relatively recently, what happened, because I really want to dig deeper into the value of identifying these values, you literally have an entire page of values in your appendix that I'm going to be stealing from relentlessly and all the work that I'm doing. But talk to me a little bit more about how you don't just practice this stuff, but you've lived it and you preach it from a place of empathy.

Brad Stulberg

Right, so it's alright, so let's talk about values driven action. So things are going great, it's easy to act in alignment with your values, things are going medium, it's easy to act in alignment with your values, there's a big change, and you're overwhelmed, it's still relatively easy, harder, but relatively easy to act in alignment with your values. You're in a rut, it's hard to act in alignment with your values, but you can do it, you're clinically depressed, it can feel impossible to do anything, and is someone that have been in those muddy, murky quicksand de waters, I completely get it. And part of what makes this approach that therapists called behavioral activation so powerful, is that it is a key part of therapy for helping people that are clinically depressed, it was a key part of my therapy. So behavioral activation says that you cannot control your thoughts or your feelings. Contrary to the power of positive thinking, you cannot force yourself to think positive thoughts. The worst thing to tell a depressed person is just be optimistic. Don't ever do that. You also cannot control how you feel you can't will yourself to feel better. All that you can control are your actions. And it turns out that while we think that we need to feel a certain way, or be thinking a certain way to act, the opposite is true. We act our way into how we think and feel. And this is the core of behavioral activation. It simply says that we can learn to take our feelings and our thoughts, however dark and hard. They may be along for the ride, to be kind to ourselves to not judge yourself and say I see you intrusive thoughts, I see you feelings of meaninglessness and despair. And yet, these are my values, I'm going to show up and act on them. Even if you're telling me that life is meaningless, we're all going to die anyways, all those depressive thoughts and feelings, even if they're there, you can be kind to yourself is it sucks that this is happening, it sucks that I'm having this torrent, but I can just show up and give myself a chance and start acting in alignment with my values. And then the thoughts and the feelings tend to change. And I want to be clear, it's a tool in the toolkit. For some people, it's enough in the hands of a skilled therapist. For other people. It's enough with medication, but it is a evidence based tool. And if it works at the extreme of clinical depression, then you better believe it. It works when things just aren't going our way, or when things aren't going our way. But there's a massive change. So this notion of you don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good is so important. In any evidence based clinical therapists will know about behavioral activation for depression. But all this stuff is so nuanced because again, the worst thing to say to a depressed person is Hey, I heard you know, Brandon's, that kind of podcast, just get off the couch. And why don't you just start exercising? It's like, well, if it was that easy, of course I would. And that's what makes depression so gnarly is that the depressed brain says no, I can't do that. There's no way I can get off this couch. I can't even contract a muscle to begin to get off this couch. And that's why this has to be couched in broader therapy for people experiencing depression. But for those that aren't in acute depression, it is such a powerful tool to use day to day.

Zack Arnold

So I want to dig into this with a couple of real world case studies. One of them being me, one of them being you. Okay, it's one thing to read the clinical research but all these deep, dark thoughts and fears and anxieties. It's another one to have them in your head is especially when a core part of your identity is high level executive coach. So talk to me about this duality of Oh, I understand all these things. And I know the literature says this works versus who am I, when this identity of mine as a high level executive coach complete completely goes to shit, when I can't control my own thoughts, you know, a thing or two about that.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, and all I can say, to be honest, is at that point, you just kind of have to surrender and say, it doesn't matter, I need help. And you find a good therapist and a good psychiatrist, and you get help. And you don't try to hold on to that identity, you don't try to create meaning, you don't try to tell yourself, I'm going to be grateful, and I'm gonna grow from this, you learn to be like, I can't do this, I don't know what's happening, I need to find people that can hold my hand and help me walk through this forest. And then when I get out of it, maybe I'll be able to make some sense of it. But my experience of depression and anxiety is when I'm in the thick of it, like, there's no amount of intellect or knowing that makes any sense. I think the only thing that one can do is to say like, Hey, I need help. And I think that, um, you know, before I experienced depression, I had an idea of what I thought it was. But man was I off. So this metaphor that I like to use is, you know, imagine that you see people that are in this, like kind of dark river. And you've been in rivers before and you know, you're across the bridge, and you're like, Oh, I know what it's like to be in that river. Like, it sucks to be sad, it sucks to be in that dark water, but you're still just in a river. And it's not until you've been on the other side of the river that you actually know what it feels like. Because, you know, the way that I describe depression is like, depression is to sadness is basketball is to oppress. They're just two completely different things.

Zack Arnold

That's a really interesting analogy. At first, I'm like, Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Oh, that's exactly. Right. Yeah. So then let's dig into this a little bit deeper, because I think this is really important for people to understand, I want to talk both about any anything you can suggest that if somebody doesn't have access to a therapist, or some form of help, where there are strategies that even they can use, but I want to get there in a second. Because I promised that I was going to have two different case studies, one of which being used, the other of which being me. Yes. So I want to break down in a little bit more detail what happened when I got that injury. So when I got the injury was it was this just so I think it was the end of February, certainly. So it's been Yeah, it's been give or take five or six months. And I had been pushing hard towards this goal for a little bit over five years. I'm very intense, very driven, very ambitious, very focused, all of what you can probably tell already. And I've there's a version of myself that I called ninja mode, and I was pretty much a ninja mode 24/7 for over five years, which I'm sure contributed to the injury. But the point is that as soon as it hit my body, and my brain just completely started to break down. And for a while I was experiencing very real fatigue. I had been pushing myself hard physically, mentally, I was building a business during all this, I've made a major career pivot from working primarily as a film and television editor to now doing it on the side is like my side hustle. And what I do now is what I do for a living, and all the pieces started to fall apart. And I was in this very real position of fatigue, where I just kept telling myself, it's okay, be where you are, take a rest. You don't need to be training everyday, you can sleep more, you can take naps. But then there is this threshold that you know all about, which is at some point, you got to start doing something. And I literally couldn't. I tried to intellectualize myself out, it's like, Dude, you're a coach, you know, that action leads to motivation and motor you I knew all these things. And I still couldn't do anything. So let's pretend I didn't reach out for help, which I will talk about soon. But let's pretend I'm in a place where you don't have the resources to reach out for help. And I'm sitting there on the couch for three months saying, everybody says that action leads to motivation. Just get up. What do I do? What are the little tiny things I can do to get out of that? Because even I couldn't with all the tools that I have.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, so I want to name the elephant in the room, because it's actually really important to name which is if you're sitting on that couch, and you're having thoughts of suicide. And even if you don't have access to help or you feel you don't there are multiple mental health hotlines that you can call that are staffed 24/7 that can help in that moment. And maybe we can include some of those numbers in the show notes. So it's really important to say, now, let's imagine that you're not in that deep and dark of a hole, but you're still feeling like crap feel like you don't have access to help or it's not something that you are interested in right now. separating real fatigue from fake fatigue. Now, people are gonna be like, What is he talking about? I'm going to try to explain. Real fatigue is when your mind body system needs a legitimate rest. Psychologically, physiologically, sometimes both you are tired, you're worn Burn down, you're feeling burnt out. And we know that the only thing that helps in those situations is resting like you do need to rest, you need to give your mind body a system a chance to recover. But if, after a certain number of days, or if it's a really bad case of burnout might even be months, you've really done a lot of resting in, you're still kind of feeling like I can't get off the couch. That's when in my parlance you switch from experiencing real fatigue to fake fatigue. And fake fatigue looks a lot like real fatigue. But it's your brain kind of tricking you into being tired, when what you actually need to do to snap out of it. It's just a force yourself to get going. So real fatigue is physiological, it's organic, you need to rest. Fake fatigue is much more psychological, it's more depressive. It's your mind body system saying, oh, Zack, like nah, nah, stay on the couch, you're tired, you're tired. But the best thing that you can do is force yourself to get going. And the example that brings us to life is in I think it's a really interesting one, elite athletes, perhaps you know, this from when you got really good, they tend to do what's called a taper before a big event. And a taper is when you rest. So you do all this hard training for months and months and months, in the case of an Olympian for years. And then you put your foot off the gas about a month before the event to give yourself and to give your body some time to recuperate. And what tends to happen with tapers is about two to three weeks in the athletes starts to feel really stale. So they switch from real fatigue, to fake fatigue. And the good coach knows that you want to give an athlete a couple of short intense workouts before the competition for the sole purpose of waking their body up. And I think the same thing is true in all of life. So why this is such a hard line to figure out is sometimes we actually do have real fatigue, and we do need to rest and we do you need to spend time on the couch. But at a certain point where is recovered is we're going to be and then we kind of have to do it those pro athletes do we we have to force ourselves to do a couple short, hard workouts, whatever the equivalent of that is to wake ourselves up and to get some vigor and to get some thriving back. So I always err on the side, because it's really bad to push through burnout, of like, give yourself some time to rest. But if after an appropriate time to rest, you still feel like crap. Then experiment with behavioral activation with just saying, hey, here are my values, my brains telling me that I'm tired, and I can't do any of this. I hear you brain, I'm going to be kind to your brain. But you're coming along for the ride, we are going to just try to do this and see if then I don't start to feel more energy.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I can, I can speak to all of that on a very, very visceral and personal level. So to break it down a couple of the different things that I found so interesting. When I first started all this training, this is a little over five years ago, I've been doing obstacle course racing and Spartans and whatnot for over 10 years now. And I'd gone through the p90x series, and you know, it was into like fitness and stuff. But training for an actual sport with a skill is very, very different. And I remember about six months in just all my joints, and my body started to break down and I'm no spring chicken, I'm in my 40s. So it's like, what the hell am I even doing learning all this crap when I go to these events, and people think I'm the parent, not the athlete, right? That's happened more than once. But I worked with somebody that had worked with high level athletes in college. And he said, You should probably take a rest period, I might go for how long he's like about a month, I'm like, a month, I'm not gonna rest for a month, I assumed that like a rest day or two days is like, No, I wouldn't do anything for a month except take walks and like, you're insane. Like, there's I'm not gonna, but then I did. And I went back to training after a month, I'm like, Not only have I not lost strength, I feel stronger, and I feel better. And that was a big kind of aha moment for me. And then I started working with a very high level ninja trainer a couple years later. And she taught me about this idea of tapering where she was pushing, pushing, pushing. And then about two weeks before an event, she's like, just stop doing just about anything, but really light workouts where you barely break a sweat. I'm thinking, well, aren't I gonna lose all the strength and power and all the things we've developed? She's like, just wait. And then the coolest thing was, she said about four hours before the event, I want you to do this 10 minute workout and go all out. Like, why would I exhaust myself and she's like, watch. And then I did it. She said, You're, you're basically telling your brain get ready, because in a few hours is gonna get nuts. And I learned all of these higher level strategies, which for anybody listening, they're like, who gives a crap. I'm not training for American Ninja Warrior. But all of this applies to the creative process, too.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, I knew you'd say that. And it's 100% True. So coming off of like a big creative piece of work. I just need rest, and I give myself rest. But then that rest very quickly becomes an inertia that says like, you're not ready to write, you're not ready to write, you're not ready to write. And I said, it's gonna take two weeks now it's been three weeks and now it's been one month and now it's been two months. And what I need to do is just go to the coffee store and frickin write and have a couple shitty days of writing. And then by day four, the ideas start flowing in. I didn't need more rest. What I needed to do is to do that workout 10 minutes before or to wake my brain up. And this applies to all of life. So yeah, I think that it's this like weird balance of real fatigue and fake fatigue. And knowing that what starts is real fatigue often turns into fake fatigue. And how you deal with them is very different. And the reason that this is in the book on change is because often during periods of change, like it is exhausting, and we do need rest and recovery. And it's so important to honor that without becoming a slave to that.

Zack Arnold

Which like I said, goes back to the theme of the year, which has taken me over six months to figure out is that I need to be okay with where I am. And if there's one strategy I've really been trying to learn and hone in on. And I didn't have the vocabulary until I read your book is knowing the line between I should be resting versus I should be pushing. And I had the excuse from my chiropractor who also doubles and specializes in injury rehabilitation. And when she did a full assessment, she said, don't do anything for two months. And like, two months, I'm supposed to be testing obstacles in a few weeks. She's like, Oh, no, you're done. It's like, you tore a pen, and you have two months. And then guess what, two months came, I'm still a little a little tired burden on I'm gonna wait another week, then wait another week. And all of a sudden, it's four months, I have never gone four months without intensely training or exercising in my entire adult life. And it was, I don't know if I'm quite ready. That was when that was the point in which my intuition, and it's hard to tell people that intuition is the strategy because it's hard to connect with that. But my intuition was, it's now time to reach out to somebody for help. Because you're four months into this, and you don't want to do a pull up. And you don't want to take a walk around the block. It's time to talk to people and the catalyst that changed everything that got me back to where I am now was exactly what you said, I reached out. And I told somebody, and I got help. And I'm a completely different person, because I literally got off the couch, but realized I couldn't do it alone.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah, and I think that that's the ultimate pairing right is like the, the deeper the hole, the more that you need help to implement these strategies. So these strategies are the same, like I said, you know, never just tell a depressed person, like just exercise, because they're gonna laugh at you and tell you to eff off. But if a therapist that establishes trust with you, that hears you, that teaches you self acceptance tells you to exercise in a very gentle way, you're probably going to do it and you're probably going to feel better. So the strategies are the same. But the wraparound services that we need, and the deliveries can be very different. But again, for most people that are in the throes of clinical depression, this behavioral activation, I think, is even more powerful. Because you can just tell yourself, you can recognize in yourself that I needed rest gave myself rest, and now I just have inertia in the only way to break the inertia is to do just that to break it. And I don't have to be motivated, I don't have to feel like I want to do it. I just need to force myself to do it. So let me just string together for days. And that was the first four days of writing master of change. So I had finished the practice of groundedness went through the publishing cycle, that book came out. And I was really excited about mastery of change. And I felt like I had this window because it's like pandemics happening. There's all this change. And I said I'm only going to give myself two weeks for a start this book. Then two weeks later, I'm like, I'm not ready to start writing, then it was a month and then it was two months. And I distinctly remember sharing this with a close friend and saying you just need to practice what you preach, man, I don't like what do you care of it, you don't feel like writing just go right? So I committed to one week of showing up at the coffee shop from one to 5pm in the afternoon writing block in just drinking coffee and writing and coffee helps me so I did have that as need. And I I truly By the third day, I came home and my wife's like, Wow, you're a different person, like I'm in such a great writing groove. And three days, that's what it took. But three days before that my brain was saying there's no way you're ready to start writing again.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and I think one of the important things here that could easily be an entire another 90 minute conversation is that you're okay with sucking. You're okay with being a bad writer for a few days and failing and knowing you're probably quote unquote, wasting your time and wasted words. But it was that momentum that got you out of the inertia. And what I'm seeing so much right now, in my community and in my industry is inertia at the beginning of the strike. I was telling everybody don't focus on all the chaos, focus on what you can control. Get out there. This is the best time to network to build relationships, everybody's available, all those big names A listers that you want to, you know, have coffee with or whatever, their home because nobody's working. And at first there's always this momentum. And then all of a sudden, everybody's like, Oh, I don't know, I don't really feel like it. And there's just so much fear wrapped up around like we keep talking about the mountain isn't even going to be there when I continue climbing it. Everybody has stopped doing everything. I mean, the people that are in my community, they still have that encouragement and that inertia and they're sharing their wins but even within the community. Yeah, there's just a sense of where is this over yet? Right, but it's never going to be Oh my go back to where it was.

Brad Stulberg

Yeah. And I think in addition to that, this is a great time to start diversifying your sense of self. So to start a fitness habit to learn how to garden and start gardening, to double down on your marriage, or on your role as a parent, I think like you can look at it is a real opportunity to say, hey, if I, if I truly feel like there's nothing to do in my work, and I just kind of need to wait for the dust to settle a little bit more to make a move, well then use it as an opportunity to cultivate other parts of your identity, whether it's your creative identity, or if it's just other rooms in your house completely.

Zack Arnold

Yeah no, I couldn't agree more. And it brings us back to this idea of what are the things that I value? And I just, I want to want to let everybody know that literally, by the book, go to page 203. If you're like, Oh, what are the values, there's got to be at least 70 of them here. And like I said, I will be referencing this for years and years to come. Because this is one of those key components of the all of the materials and workshops that I'm putting together to not only understand these concepts, but put them into action. So my, my students will be hearing so much more about all these values. But if we were to end with you explaining what are the key core values that I have, that are in my diversified portfolio of my life, just to give people a sense of what those three to five core things are? What are they for you?

Brad Stulberg

Hmm, this is a great question. So my core values are love in life, and really, it took a lot of time just to get down to those two, those can be pretty broad. So what's underneath those. So underneath Love is my kids, my wife and my community. What's underneath life, underneath life is doing so if love is being life is doing. So this is creativity, health and autonomy. So those are my values. How does it look like in practice, so creativity, I am a writer right now, that could change maybe one day I'll be a podcaster. Maybe one day I'll make films who knows maybe one day I'll use AI creatively, I hope not. I don't want to but I'm open to that that could happen. My health, a strength train five days a week I compete in powerlifting, completely different room in my house. Back To Love family. My role is that I pick up my kid from school most days, and I try to shut down my phone during dinner. Every Saturday, take a digital Sabbath, no phone, I'm just there for my family. Community. Once a week, I make sure that I just we live in western North Carolina, small mountain town I just sit on my porch and listen to Jason Isbell, my favorite folk singer, let people come by chat. So I have these various practices that ladder up to these core values. And what's beautiful about it is if a book flops or a piece flops or it gets rejected, I can double down on family and community and training. If training is going to shit, I can say, hey, you know, I can still accomplish things in my creative pursuits. If both training and creative pursuits are going to shoot at the same time, I can go to my wife and say, I really need you to help me because I'm feeling like crap. And she'll say go play with your kids. That'll make you feel better. And I understand not everyone's married, everyone has kids. But you know, this is just one way to shape the house. There are multiple ways. But I think the important part is that you have these various areas that you can lean into.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I couldn't have said any other better. This is exactly like I said, the core center of my narrative right now all the things that I'm writing all the things that I'm teaching, I'm only bummed because I feel like I barely started the conversation. And I want to go for at least another two to three hours. But of course, I want to be very respectful of your time. And the most important question of all, this is the shameless self promotion portion of the program. I've listened, today's conversation, I'm sold, I want to get all your books, I want to learn more about you. Where's the one best place that I can start to connect with you and consume your materials?

Brad Stulberg

I'd start with Master of Change. I think it's my best work. It's my most mature work. I'm the oldest one I wrote it. I have the most life experience. I'd start with Master of Change and then go from there.

Zack Arnold

And where can I find that? Is there like a landing page that I just go to Amazon where's the best place to support you other than getting the book?

Brad Stulberg

I appreciate that. My website is just my name, www.bradstulberg.com And I'm on Instagram or my handle is also my name @bradstulberg, I try to make it simple. And then the book is available wherever you get books and whatever format so it's available in hardback but also audible and Kindle. You can get it from Amazon Barnes and Nobles. bookshop.org. If you want to support your independent bookseller, and call them make sure they have it, get it from there. So yeah, really anywhere you get books.

Zack Arnold

I love it. And I'll just emphasize at the end what I emphasize in the beginning, I have hor and detest social media, but your social media as some of the most educational, motivational, inspirational uplifting posts that I've ever seen. And I've even reached out to you about it because I was so impressed by it. So if anybody wants to use social media for good follow this guy, trust me it will be woth it.

Brad Stulberg

Can I tell you the trick to my social media? You may not have recognized it, but I basically and this is like how I've made social media more fun for To me and more of a creative practice, is I'm gonna give away my secrets. I batch write my post. So I do take it very seriously. You know, once a week, I set aside two hours to write social media post. But in those two hours, I'm basically just flipping two random pages in my books, and saying, Alright, here's a key concept in my book. Here's how I wrote it is a nonfiction writer. What would it look like to try to adapt this message for social media? Or how can I peg this to a current event? And for me, that's been a game changer. Because if I think of social media purely as marketing, I don't want to do it, because it's just like work. If I try to post pictures of my own life, and my family and my kids, I don't like that either. That stuff's just for me, it's my own system. But how can I take the underlying core value of creativity and even craft which sounds crazy because we're talking about social media, and try to apply it to those platforms. And I still wish I didn't have to be on social media. But as a creative, I feel like I do. And it's made it a lot more tolerable. And some days I even like it,

Zack Arnold

I love it. And all I have to do is write a book so I can flip through random pages of the book, and I can post them on social media, but it's Brian, I cannot thank you enough and emphasize to everybody how great your books are, how great your social media is, have this voice in your ears have these thoughts in your head. So Brad, I cannot thank you enough for finally making this happen. Thank you.

Brad Stulberg

Thank you, Zack. I appreciate you and I really enjoyed getting the chance to have this conversation today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai