26 Lessons on Excellence to Jump Start 2026

Hello and welcome back to Excellence Actually. I'm one of your hosts, Clay Skipper, joined by Brad Stahlberg. We are without Steve Magnus today. Happy holidays and as our gift to you and because we're rounding the corner into 2026. Today, we are going to look back on the past year and give you 26 of our favorite, most practical, most actionable habits, mindsets, and practices for excellence that you can take into the new year. We've got a few to get through, so let's get right into it.

We're going to start with our definition of excellence, which is something that Brad came up with for our new show when we relaunched the summer as Excellence Actually. And I think it's good to just set the table stakes by what we mean when we talk about. What is excellence actually? Excellence is not waking up at four in the morning to cold plunge and flex your abs as hard as possible for an Instagram reel. It's not a 46-step routine.

It's not optimizing every last crevice of your life. It's not some crazy diet. It's not perfectionism. It's not winning at all costs. These are all pseudo excellence. The real thing. What is excellence? Excellence is involved engagement and worthwhile pursuits that align with your values and goals. This definition has two integral parts. The first is involved engagement. You've got to care deeply. You've got to have focus, intimacy, intention toward what you are doing.

The second part, worthwhile pursuits that align with your values and goals. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. It is so important to pick the right mountains to climb because something that will come up again and again in today's episode is that when you work on a big goal,

when you attempt to be excellence, when you aspire toward great peaks, those big goals, the peaks that you're aspiring toward, they also work on you. So that's excellence. That is it in a nutshell. It is caring deeply, involved engagement, deep focus. pointed toward a worthwhile pursuit that aligns with your values and goals. This definition is for everybody and excellence is for all of us. Well said. And what's cool about the definition is it gives us something to work.

off of that's succinct but everything we talk about today can ladder up to that or come back to that so let's get into how to become excellent on the first episode in addition to defining excellence we talked about some of the core pillars that help create the conditions for excellence in yourself and any craft or pursuit. One of those was anti-fragility over control. So it's more important to be flexible.

than to try to hyper control the world around you. A good example of this is routines, right? If you have to have your exact six step routine and exactly the doses you want to have it. And something comes up during the day, you get sick, your kid gets sick, there's some interruption, and all of a sudden your whole day is thrown into a spiral.

it's not bad but you'd rather be someone who can handle that and so that's why we say like instead of hyper controlling try to build systems that are anti-fragile and can be adaptable to a lot of circumstances two we talk about the importance of psychological flexibility over happiness so instead of always worrying about feeling good get better at managing and being able to work with however you're feeling

because it's more important to be able to get some work in and something done even if you're not feeling great than it is to just try to have great days all the time because like the weather you You're going to have sunny days and you're going to have rainy days and it's important to know how to manage the weather on days when it's not 70 and sunny.

Lastly, we talked about consistency over intensity. It's more important that you stack good days over and over and over and over and over again than just have a sprinkle of a great day now and then. It's more important that you show up to the gym and do 10 minutes of work.

for four days rather than showing up and doing a heroic effort, you know, once every eight days. So again, consistency over intensity. That is number two on our list. As I write in the way of excellence, and I'm going to read right out of the book. Performance greatness is obsessed with heroic days. Actual greatness concerns itself with heroic decades. The goal is not for any single outing to be extreme but for the totality of effort over years to be extreme. Excellence comes from consistency.

Become known for showing up. If I had one, I'd sound it here, but instead I'll just do my impression of a... reggaeton plug horn go buy brad's new way of excellence book right now it comes out at the end of january it makes a great gift and a great way to kick start your new Our third core lesson is that discipline is a skill. You're not born disciplined or undisciplined. It's a muscle that you build over time.

You can think of it like training any technique. If you're quote unquote bad in an element of your golf game, you'd go to work on it. You wouldn't just say I'm bad at putting. No, you'd show up to the putting green and you would put many balls and you would improve.

The same thing is true with discipline. It is not a character flaw. If you are lacking discipline in certain areas of your life, it's often a skills gap. So how do you build the skill of discipline? It's one of those things that's simple but not easy.

You show up and you do what you said you're going to do, even and perhaps especially when you're not feeling super motivated to do it. The last thing I'll say is that there are two kinds of freedom. There are negative freedoms and positive freedoms.

Negative freedom, that's freedom from constraints. That's freedom from needing to eat fruits and vegetables or from needing to go to bed at a certain time or from using a brick or having a digital Sabbath, right? There's also positive freedom. Positive freedom. is freedom to become the best version of yourself, to have your best performances, to strive for your potential, to strive for excellence. A big part of discipline is sacrificing some negative freedoms.

in order to have the positive freedom of becoming your best. It's just a fancy way of saying that we need constraints. And so often discipline is not just exerted in the moment, it's exerted upstream.

of when you're going to have to make a hard decision by the constraints and by the rules that you put on yourself. Now, to be clear, this doesn't mean that life should be rigid. We just talked about how important flexibility is. But it does mean that in today's world, whether it's all the ultra-processed food or all the ultra-processed content or all the ultra-processed people, if you just merely exist, you're likely gonna struggle.

So you need some kind of systems. You need some kind of constraints. You need to relinquish some of those negative freedoms to do whatever you want, whenever you want, in order to have the positive freedom of becoming your best. Number four, if you are having trouble with being consistent,

to go back to that idea of consistency over intensity, or you're just focusing too much on outcomes, try to treat the work as the win. What do we mean by that? Take writing, for example. Instead of being like, did I write the greatest 1,000 words I've ever written today? Did I just show up for my 80-minute writing block or my 100-minute writing block?

Did I show up and do the 500 words, even if they feel really bad? This obviously we're talking about writing. You can apply it to anything else, right? Did I not? Did I have the best workout of all time? But did I get to the gym and get in some time?

And again, if your day got crunched, maybe getting some time in was just 10 minutes and maybe it wasn't the best you ever felt, but you did something. And so just having that metric be did I show up versus how did I do can be very powerful as a way to. build some consistency if you're struggling with that. Obviously, this has limits and caveats. I'm a New York Jets fan. They're pretty good about showing up every week. They're not so good about getting results.

You know, that's not the goal in football. You want to win. You want to make the playoffs. You want to compete for championships. So there are obviously, again, limits to this. We're not saying outcomes don't matter.

But I think you can also take the case that like, if you look at someone like the Broncos, who are the best teams in football right now, they're probably not focused on the outcomes as much as on the process, right? They're just like, how do we show up? How do we be the best version of ourselves today? How do we execute the game plan? How do we execute practice?

And so it's really just focusing on being in the showing up business rather than in the results business. And that case will get you to some consistency. And oftentimes the results will take care of themselves. This brings to mind for me the myth of Sisyphus. For those that don't know, the Greek gods condemn Sisyphus, who is the protagonist, to a life of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have the boulder roll right back down into restart again and again and again.

for all of eternity. And this is often seen as a punishment, right? You wouldn't want to be Sisyphus. Yet the philosopher Camus comes along and says, actually, we're all Sisyphus. All of us, our entire lives, are just taking on big projects and either succeeding or failing. But either way, the boulder's back at the beginning of the hill and we've got to push it up again. And you can view that as this terrible, punished, all of life is suffering, or...

What Camus said is that you can learn to push the boulder up a hill with a smile on your face. And if I might add, if you can push the boulder up the hill with good people, and if you're choosing meaningful mountains, meaningful hills, and you enjoy the view from the side. Then the fact that the boulder rolls back down and you have to start again, it's actually not a curse. It's a blessing.

So the goal of a good life is to push that boulder up the hill with a smile on your face. That is treating the work as the win. And again, if you can do it with good people and if you can ensure you're climbing the right mountains to begin with, that becomes a lot easier.

That gets us perfectly into number five, which is distinguish happiness from satisfaction. We have a lot of focus in our society and our culture on happiness. And happiness matters, obviously, but we think of it as in the moment pleasure.

Versus satisfaction, which is more deep fulfillment from meaningful work that is aligned with your values. Do you hear us going back to the excellence definition again and again? But I say it relates to Sisyphus because happiness is getting the boulders to the top of the hill. It's winning the race. It's writing the book.

running the marathon. And the satisfaction though has to come from when you go back down to the bottom of the mountain and you push it back up again. And so we all want happiness, but you can't, you can't stay there. And most of your life, if you're lucky.

and goes well is going to be spent more with satisfaction in the process than with happiness in the outcome. I think too often as well, we mistake happiness as the goal when the goal that... 99% of us actually have is lasting satisfaction or fulfillment or some version of nourishment. And to bring this into stark relief, I want to call up a thought experiment used by philosophers from undergraduate philosophy courses across the world. And it's the tube experiment. And it goes like this.

If someone came to you, Clay, and said that you, for the rest of your life, would have to go into a tube, and you can never leave the tube, but while you're in the tube, I would give you these drugs. that do two things. Number one, they make you feel absolutely euphoric, the happiest you've ever been. And number two, they make you forget that you're in a tube. So you won't know that you're in a tube. You'll just be blissed out, feeling happy, and then you'll die.

You could go in the tube or you could elect not to go in the tube and to live your life as you are with all of its messiness and unpredictability and chaos and strife and struggle. What would you choose? In the vast, vast, vast majority of people, they don't choose the tube. Now, what's terrifying, and we're not going to go too deep down this rabbit hole, is that with artificial intelligence and the overlords of our attention economy and all this shallow clickbait bullshit, it's...

a little bit like this thought experiment is becoming reality. Increasingly, we can choose the tube. And I think it behooves all of us to be aware of this and to make sure that we don't choose the tube and not to chase ephemeral happiness when in fact... Very few of us would actually want that over a life of satisfaction. There's a somewhat related short story, although it's more about our reliance on technological development, but it's called The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.

really good short story if people are listening to this and want something to a little something a little dystopic for the holidays maybe but if you're looking for a good read the machine stops it's all about

what happens when we overaly on technology to supply our needs. And when you do that, you might get happiness through a tube, but you wouldn't be getting satisfaction. Number six, curiosity is a powerful antidote to fear. The affective neuroscientist Jat Ponskip did this groundbreaking work where he found that we have these distinct neural networks in our brain that cannot be activated at the same time. So it is a zero-sum game.

Two of those predominant neural networks are what he called the rage or the fear pathway. So we are very angry or we are very scared or often both at the same time. And what he called the seeking, the play, the curiosity pathway. And this is when we are curious. Now, what does this mean for you and me? What does this mean for excellence for performance? It's the following. When you are taking on a big new challenge and you are feeling some fear.

If you can shift from a mindset of, oh no, what's this going to feel like? Or, oh my gosh, what if I fail? Or I don't think I can do this. Two, I don't know if I can do this, but it's sure going to be fascinating to find out. That completely changes your entire mindset and your physiology. You have a hormonal change, right? You have less cortisol. You have less stress response. Same challenge, just a different mindset.

Now, some people might be listening and saying, all right, Brad, it's clearly not going to work. Y'all are against hacks if I just suddenly say, I'm not scared. I'm curious, even if I'm actually scared shitless. This is a practice. The more you approach life with a mindset of curiosity, the easier it becomes to take that same mindset to big challenges where in the past you might be paralyzed by fear and it allows you to move forward.

and to see what you're capable of. And sometimes you might fail, sometimes you might succeed, but it puts you in a position where at least you have a chance. This also relates to something Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, guest of the show we had on recently said, where he was like,

He gets a ton done, and I was sort of like, what can we learn from you about getting stuff done because you're so productive? And he said the time spent fretting about a task is almost always better spent doing the task. And I think of that fretting of a task.

And like holding it over your head, having understood us being scared to do it. That's like the fear. And then doing the task is the actual getting curious about it because you have to actually start experimenting with how would I solve this problem. And to your point about being a practice, I just think the more I've done that. the more I've experienced this curiosity as an antidote to fear because...

I will have something on my to-do list that I'm putting off and putting off and thinking about it and making it this huge deal in my head. It's that Seneca quote of things are worse in your imagination than in reality. And then I sit down to do it and it's like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. And like figuring out the problem is exciting and you forget about the anxiety about it because you're too busy doing the thing. All right. Number.

Seven, we mentioned it early in the context of discipline, but it deserves its own bullet. Don't confuse positive and negative freedom. Again, negative freedom is freedom from limits. It says, what am I free from? Now, this might sound desirable, and it is to an extent. However, if you live completely without limits, just doing whatever you want whenever you feel like it, you're unlikely to make progress towards anything meaningful.

The other kind of freedom, positive freedom, is the freedom to pursue goals to become your best self. It asks, what am I free to do? How do I want to get there? What am I willing to commit to? It's about setting goals and then exercising, practicing, developing the discipline to work towards them. Positive freedom and negative freedom are often at odds. We often have to sacrifice a life without limit, full choice on everything.

in order to give ourselves some constraints that affords us that positive freedom to pursue our goals. Number eight, two words that are often vilified in our culture, and I guess we might be guilty of perpetuating some of that because we are named excellence actually. but are lazy and mediocre. And number eight is actually about being strategically lazy and strategically mediocre. What do we mean by that? To be excellent at something, you're going to have to ruthlessly prioritize.

And that means figuring out where the most important activities and practices are. It's what we mean when we say keep the main thing the main thing, right? And on those things, you've got to be excellent. But it also means that there's going to be other things you need to do that you might need to give 80% effort rather than 100%.

Or you might need to be, and I'm using this liberally, mediocre rather than great, right? And so this is the person who has minimum effective dosages for social life or physical exercise when they're in a really intense period of... work and they can't get to those other things. It's not about being, quote unquote, just lazy. It's about being selectively mediocre in low impact areas so you can apply the most energy.

and most fuel to the areas that will actually make you exceptional. This is the problem with the very pithy saying, how you do anything is how you do everything. Because if you try to do anything... to an excellent degree, then you're just going to end up mediocre at everything because there's only so many hours in the day. There's only so much energy that an individual has. So this is true in craft and it's true in life.

Identify the main things, the things that are the most important to execute on as well as you can and execute on those things as well as you can. And then be okay with letting other things fall through the cracks. Number nine.

relentlessly prepare so you can let it rip when it's time to perform i love this one this gets to what researchers call the four levels of competence and it essentially says that At just about anything, you progress through these phases. You start with unconscious incompetence. So you don't know that you don't know what you're doing. And at this phase, what you need is coaching. You need to read a book. You need mentorship. Then you move to conscious incompetence.

which is when you know that you don't know what you're doing. In here, you want to wear the Garmin, the Oura Ring, the Whoop. You want to track everything because you need accountability and you need to be able to self-correct. Then you move to conscious competence.

So this is where you are effortfully trying, you are paying attention, you are measuring, you are tracking, you are thinking as you try to perform, you know that you know that you're doing it right. However, the final phase of competence, what all the masters of craft do. and it often takes anywhere from years to decades to get there, is to be unconsciously competent, to be able to perform at your best without even effortly trying. How do you get there? You relentlessly prepare.

You are meticulous. You are rigorous in your practice and your preparation so that when the gun goes off, when the bell rings, when you take the stage, you can let all of that go. You can step into the moment and you can let it rip and have your best performance. If you want to hear how that actually works from someone who has spent decades and become unbelievably practiced at it and polished at it, we had an interview with Hilary Hahn.

world-class Grammy-winning violinists a while back, and she talks a fair amount about this, about how she relentlessly prepares. But then when she goes on stage to perform a piece of music, it's all about... letting it rip and i think it's really interesting to hear a musician talk about it because you're playing musical notes so it is sort of like there it's almost like acting where there's like very there are lines and there's a way

a way it's supposed to be using air quotes performed, but then there's actually the playful doing of it. And so it was really interesting to hear her mentality and mindset of how she approaches that. Number 10, talking about discomfort.

and difficulty we had an entire episode about it. But the general gist of that episode was that you can think of discomfort or difficulty, whether it's mental or physical, as being like an alarm that goes off in your head, in your body. There's basically a three-step decision tree to decide what to do. One, you got to figure out is it a real or a false alarm. Sometimes, say you're coming back to physical training after a long period off, your body might tell you, oh my God, this is...

Five alarm fire, five alarm fire, but it might just be you getting used to physical fitness again. Now, if you're coming back from an injury, it could be a five alarm fire. You need to figure out what's real and what's false when that comes to experience. Two, if it is a real alarm.

You need to ask, do I need to turn it down so that I can continue on with what I'm doing, in which case you want to use a toolbox of problem solving techniques. Again, we go into a lot of these in the episode, but some of those are learning to zoom in using associative focus.

versus zooming out, disassociated focus, chunking it. So like, can I just get to the next, if I'm running a mile, just get to the next lap. If I'm having a tough work day, can I just get to the next hour? Self and temporal distancing is talking to yourself like a friend might.

talking to yourself in the third person or imagining what you're going to feel like in an hour or a day or a week from now if you're just too zoomed in and too close to what's happening so that's two if you need to turn the difficulty or the discomfort down and then three

An option is, if I don't need to turn it down, can I just continue with it blaring in the background? And that's where you use acceptance strategies. Brad brought up one just a few minutes ago that I love, that I learned from him, which is the soft fuck it.

which is basically like, I know things aren't going great right now. I got a lot happening in my head or my body. And I think in the episode, Brad prepared having a screaming toddler in the back of the car. Sometimes you try to get them to stop screaming. Other times you say.

We're just taking you along for the ride today. We just have to accept that this is how it feels and we got to do our work anyway. Another one here I like is no feeling is final. You might feel terrible right now. Give yourself a chance for that feeling to transform by accepting it. And again, taking it along for the ride. To be clear, I don't condone you saying soft fuck it, even if it's really soft to your toddler. Those are adult words.

I want to elaborate on the soft effort. So quick heads up, if you do have a toddler in the car with you, whether he or she is screaming or not, you may want to turn down the volume for the next 90 seconds and come back to this segment. We wouldn't want to be cussing in front of your kids.

Wouldn't want to cost you money. My son gets a dollar for every cuss word that I say, and he is halfway to paying his tuition at Clay's alma mater, Vanderbilt. However, the soft part is really important. And this came up in a conversation I was having with a longtime coaching client who is...

wonderful orthopedic surgeon and who's also very hard on himself. And we talked a lot about just like accepting intrusive thoughts and accepting bad days and accepting cases that feel a lot harder than he wishes they would in his perfectionist mind.

We said, sometimes you gotta say, fuck it. And like, I can do it. And what would happen though, is he'd be like, fuck it. And it would be like a really like loud, grumpy, angry, fuck it. And it would be a very judgmental, fuck it. And I realized that. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not the kind of fuck it I mean.

He's like, what kind of fuck it do you mean? I'm like, it's a softer fuck it. It's just like, fuck it. This is what's happening. Let me show up and give it my best shot. It made a huge difference, truly, in his surgical practice. He has now shared it with all his partners. I believe there's an entire surgical group that has the soft fuck it in their toolkit. So that is what I mean by the soft fuck it versus a loud fuck it and not for any toddler, soft or loud.

Number 11 on our list is embrace your hunger. And what we mean by this is not actually, although you should definitely eat when you're hungry. We mean this metaphorically. No achievement is going to satisfy you for very long. It's the arrival fallacy. It's something that we talk about all the time. There's always another meal. There's always another race to run, a medal to earn, a book to publish, a record to produce, a promotion to...

try to get. However, you can still be really driven to achieve. There's nothing wrong with wanting to achieve. That is our human wiring. Any great that isn't full of shit is going to tell you that they care deeply.

They want to win the medal. They want to get on the bestseller list. They want to make it to the C-suite. They want their work to be published. You should want that. That is caring deeply. However, what you will learn, and often the hard way, by having that success and still feeling empty...

is that the achievement is not where the satisfaction and fulfillment lives. It lives in the process. So it's not process over outcomes. It's not let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya and be content together. It is let's strive hard. Let's try to win while accepting. The win isn't going to fulfill us. We've got to find that along the way. Glad you brought up process versus outcomes. We've talked about that a little bit already today, but it also ties directly into number 12.

which is build success from the inside out versus the outside in. Another way to think of this is making your success substantive and real rather than performative. So let's explain what that means. We live in a world where we valorize success And so much of success is broadcast or displayed. And so we can see the symbols of that success, whether that's money, that's fame, that status.

And I think often we try to chase those things because we think that's what success is, right? We chase money, we chase fame, we chase attention, we chase validation, we chase status. But those are all like the adornments or the outside symbols of success. actually makes you feel successful and provides a lasting foundation on which you can have a career of success and excellence is that process.

It's the practices that you find intrinsic motivation in that you really want to do, that you are curious about and find some joy and play in doing. And if you focus on those practices and that process, then you create a foundation from which you can build success. And then you might get the other external symbols, right? Again, you might get.

attention. You might get validation. If you're writing, you might get on the bestseller list. You might get more offers to write. You might end up winning NBA championships if you're a basketball player. But to try to chase those things from the beginning, those sort of outside markers of success. rather than doing the work of building success from the inside it's just not really doable and if you do get it it's probably not going to be sustainable and it might even feel hollow and empty

to you. So that's building success from the inside out rather than the outside in. Number 13, take your work seriously, but yourself not so much. This one's really quick. The best performers. They are extremely focused and driven and serious about their work, but they have a keen ability to laugh at themselves, to make fun of themselves, to not take themselves too seriously. What happens when you take yourself too seriously is you get ego bloat.

And it's not long before you think that everyone who challenges you has something out to get you. You become paranoid. It is a tale as old as time. It can actually turn your brain to sawdust. So yes, take the work seriously. but be able to laugh at yourself. Life is short. You've got to have fun. You're not perfect. No one is. 14, via Steve Magnus, via his athlete, Brian Barraza, I believe, is Raise Your Floor.

So going back to consistency over intensity, how good can you be on your worst days if you can raise that floor over time rather than focusing on how great can my ceiling be? It's going to up your average over the long haul, which inevitably will get you closer and closer to that good and great level on a regular basis. So focus on raising your floor rather than just trying to see how high can I make my ceiling.

Something else on this, Clay, that I think is nuanced but really important is you often don't have control over raising your ceiling. Very rarely can people replicate what led to an incredible day. The magic just happens.

However, your bad days, you almost always have some control of making them a little bit better. And it starts with nipping in the bud the rumination and the catastrophizing spiral that, oh, it's not there. My whole training is going to go to crap or today is going to be terrible. I'm going to feel terrible.

If you can just nip that in the bud and say, you know what? It's not there. Today's probably not going to be a great day. But what would it look like to adjust my expectations and to stay with it and just to get a little bit more out of myself than I would if I just completely threw in the towel?

And that you have incredible control over. So this is really important, right? Everyone wants to raise their ceiling, but that happens magically. But raising the floor, that's something that happens with intention and with agency and with will. speaking from my own experience it just gives me a really nice metric because these days when i do have a day where i'm like oh wow i'm not gonna do even

you know, 25% of what I was hoping to get done. I can just be like, okay, but can I make this bad day better than it would have been a month ago? And if I can have that framing in my head and I noticed that I can. That's like allows me to get a small win on what otherwise would have been in the past, a small L, right? And so by transforming that into a win, it helps you just like get a little bit more consistency and good feeling and motivation for the next day.

Love it. All right. Number 15, instead of focusing on a heroic individual achievement, think about building a body of work over your career. This allows for some slack in the system. It allows for the inevitable failure along the way. And it ensures that you're not tying your entire journey, your entire path, your entire self-worth to one specific outcome. So if you zoom out a little bit.

And you don't say, I need to be MVP of every season, or I need to win every championship, or I need to hit the bestseller list every time, or every day at work needs to be perfect, or I can never have a bad surgical outcome, or on and on and on. Instead, you say,

I want to be known as a phenomenal surgeon. I want to be known as a great coach. I want to be known as a great teacher. When people look back over my 40-year career, I want the body of work to stand out. And that takes the pressure off of needing every single piece of work to stand out. Number 16 is that every pursuit in craft has an algorithm. And what I mean by that is every system incentivizes and rewards specific things.

And you should find out what that is and understand how much you need to engage with it. And then don't let it overtake your own values or your why for doing the work. So you have to maintain awareness for the algorithm of whatever your thing is. You have to play the game a little bit often, but what you don't want to do is just surrender all agency and then get on an algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere. So very much related to the algorithm is you got to know what game you're playing.

And what algorithms are in your game? And then how can you use the algorithm without the algorithm using you? To take this out of social media and try to explain how this algorithmic thinking applies, I'll use the example of running.

When I got into marathons, I did it because I liked the act of running and the way it made me feel and the skills and habits and mind states that helped me cultivate. As I got into marathon training, it has its own algorithm that sort of makes you obsessed with... the the value that gets measured which is miles per week right so i found myself getting like caught in that algorithm and becoming obsessed with like am i doing enough miles per week and that does matter for your marathon plan

But at some point, I became way more worried about did I hit the miles than how was running make me feel, right? And that was kind of my... version of getting captured by an algorithm in the same way that like social media algorithm can capture you and i had to i had to i'm still having to reconnect with what do i actually like about running and can i stick with that rather than just becoming obsessed about

Did I hit this arbitrary number of miles, which my body doesn't even know what miles are. So it really only matters what I'm feeling versus versus that. But I think that's how I think about how you can get trapped in this algorithm.

Love it. I think that's a great concrete example. And like we were saying, everything has an algorithm. So you have to know it, be aware of it and ask how much of yourself do you want to give to it? And how are you going to make sure that it doesn't take more of that? Number 17.

Two important rules for grooving back into work after a big break. That can be physical work. That can be intellectual work. The first is don't chase the ghost of past performance. What this means is that after a break, you're probably not going to be...

as fresh. You're not going to be as good as you were when you left off. Oftentimes, you got to take a step back while you recover, while you adapt, while you grow before you then take two steps forward. So don't pick things up and try to nail your PR. Whatever that may be, your first day back, your first week back, probably not even your first month back. Be patient with yourself. Play the long game. The second rule is expect it to feel crappy off the bat.

Give yourself a week or two or three or maybe even a month to groove back in. This is especially true with physical pursuits where you take an elongated break, you allow your body to shut down, to adapt, to truly recover. It takes the nervous system. some time to build back up and to hit the flow again. So don't chase the ghost of past performance and be patient. And that was for grooving back into training or work you've done before, but 18, if you're starting something new.

beware what is called the moat of low status. That is a phrase I took from Kate Hall, who writes a sub stack called useful fictions. Great sub stack, by the way. Really good. If you listen to this, you got a good sub stack. Yeah, it's really good. But the idea is when you're starting something new, the learning is going to be difficult at first, right? This is the moat of low status. You're not going to be very good. And a lot of people give up.

before they get across the moat because they don't like that feeling of being bad. And what you have to do is you have to learn to love the moat of low status. You have to embrace being bad at something as a necessary step on the path to being. good at it. So this is about embracing the discomfort of being a beginner and accepting that the bridge over this moat

is going to be paid with disappointment and difficult feeling. That's not a bug, it's a feature. So if you're trying something and you're like, man, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. Well, it's supposed to suck a little bit until you start getting on that hockey curve growth that can follow when you start something new.

Number 19, stress is mediated by meaning. Hans Selye, who is often credited with being the pioneer of the modern stress response, stress plus rest equals growth, in his later work, what he found is that Stress that you perceive as meaningful elicits a very different stress response than stress that you perceive as meaningless. The meaningless variety leads to breakdown. The meaningful variety leads to growth.

So a good question to ask yourself is, are you suffering for suffering's sake or are you doing it because it aligns with something that you care about? It aligns with your values and your goals. Let's take our favorite example, the cold plunge. Two people can hop into a cold plunge.

One person does it because they're mimicking a bunch of clowns on the internet. It's going to be a very bad stress response. They're not going to get anything out of it. Another person does it because they feel like they struggle to sit with discomfort. And they feel like enduring 30, 60 seconds of freezing cold water is going to have spillover effects into other areas of their life. That person is going to have a very positive stress response to the cold plunge.

Same temperature, same duration, different response. What's the difference? It is the meaning associated with it. 20, routines. For routines, you want to think of being a... chef rather than a cook what is that distinction well a cook is someone who has to follow a very specific recipe a chef is someone who can flow and adapt and be an artist with ingredients and can dance with

uncertainty and chaos in the kitchen right so if you have a six-step routine as we said earlier that's great i mean it's great to sort of mitigate the chaos in a day we're not against routines at all but if you have multiple ways different ingredients that you can practice that routine rather than having to have it be super rigid or inflexible that's going to give you a better chance of adapting to how the day

actually unfolds rather than this idealized perfect day that you have in your head. It doesn't allow for any slack if you're just too rigid about it. Number 21, very much related to routines, is to figure out your minimum effective dose and maximum effective dose for the activities you do regularly in your life. What do we mean by this?

A minimum effective dose says, what is the bare minimum of an activity, of a ritual, of a habit that I need to do to feel good enough and to stay consistent so that I don't burn out? What is the smallest amount to still benefit? This is When Life Gets Crazy, taking your workout from 60 minutes down to 20 minutes.

This is going from six family dinners a week to four family dinners a week. If you are a professional athlete and you're traveling, maybe that's even two family dinners a week, but it is identifying a minimum effective dose to never leave important things in your life completely behind. It's also helpful to identify the maximum effective dose for things. And this is the upper limit of what you can do without burning out. Maybe you need at least an hour of deep focus work a day to feel good.

That's your minimum effective dose. But maybe if you try to do more than four hours of deep focus work in a day, you're going to totally burn out. That is your maximum effective dose. Every single activity can have a minimum and a maximum. We're not recommending that you go through your entire life and create this for all your activities. However, if there are times when you've left something behind and you've regretted it, that is a good place to start defining a minimum effective dose.

And if you have a tendency to overshoot the target on other areas of your pursuits in your life, those would be the areas in pursuits where it might be worthwhile to define a maximum effective dose. Number 22, RPE. This stands for rate of perceived exertion. It is often used in physical fitness. So instead of saying, go run at this pace.

or do this many reps, it's, this should be a rate of perceived exertion, seven out of 10 or an eight out of 10 or a nine out of 10. 22 is all about taking that RP outside of just workouts and using it in other. aspects of your life. Not everything can be a 10 out of 10 effort or you're going to blow up, you're going to burn out, you're going to get exhausted. So it's useful going into different parts of your day to say, what should this feel like?

an RPE? Should this feel like a four out of 10? Should this be an eight out of 10 and making sure that over the course of a day over the course of week, you're not having too many 10 out of 10s in the same way that in a physical fitness routine, you wouldn't want to have too many days of 10 out of 10s or You're going to blow a gasket, throw out your back, tear a hamstring. So RPE, use it outside of workouts and in your everyday life.

Number 23 comes from Clay's experience riding a bike and trying to juggle all the different responsibilities he has in his life. Clay, why don't you tell us about the difference between dynamic balance and static balance? I think we often have this idea that we need to have everything in exact, the scales be weighed in terms of...

I'm doing everything I want to do in my emotional life and my physical life and my spiritual life and my work life and my family life. And this idea that they should all be equal, but really balance is more about figuring out. how to have some burners, to use a metaphor of the stove, on high and some on low. And so you're constantly adjusting all the time. And it's like riding a bike, right? If you try to stay balanced on a bike.

Without moving, you just tip over the side. And so what you're actually doing on a bike is you're moving forward and you're constantly rebalancing and you're judging where do I need a little bit more and where do I need a little bit less? And so it's this dynamic balance that moves you forward.

rather than trying for this unrealistic static balance that will just ultimately make you fall over the side. Number 24, we've got a couple of quick hitters to take you home. Be wary of the comparison trap. Instead of comparing yourself to people that you don't know, compare yourself to people that you do know and who you admire and use them as a model.

You don't want to say, why is this person doing so much better than me? But instead, what can I learn and apply from what this person is doing so well? So two parts. Select the people that you want to compare yourself to wisely. Make sure that you're not comparing yourself to an airbrush fiction. And number two, when you do select those comparison points, try not to judge yourself and instead use them as inspiration and aspiration.

Number 25, instead of getting caught in is this good, is this bad type of shaming around your behaviors, you can start to ask yourself, is this skillful or is this unskillful? Is this getting me where I want to go? This allows for so much nuance in context. We talked a little bit about psychological flexibility at the beginning of the episode. So many thoughts, mindsets, habits, practices, behaviors.

They work in certain circumstances and not in others. They work at certain parts of our lives and not at others, so on and so forth. So instead of saying, is this good or is this bad? We can say, is this useful right now? And am I going about this in a skillful or unskillful way? And to take us home with number 26, I'm going to turn it back over to the one and only Clay Skipper, who really makes this podcast what it is.

The number one comment that we have gotten since we rebranded as Excellence Actually is not, I love the name of the show, but I love the new show and I love the fact that you guys now have Clay. So thank you, Clay. Why don't you take us across the finish line? Thank you for that, Brad. That's very kind, but it's appropriate that this last one is basically pulling a quote from something you said on a podcast once. It goes back to the idea of the arrival fallacy.

which is if you are miserable chasing a goal, you're going to be miserable. Once you achieve it, it sounds like a negative way to frame it, but I think it's a helpful reminder for... the new year, make sure to go back to what we said at the very beginning, whatever you are chasing after is going to make you into the type of person you want to become, is going to help you practice the values you want in the process of chasing it, not just when you achieve it.

right? If you aren't happy and fulfilled and satisfied, it doesn't mean you feel good all the time. But if you aren't finding some satisfaction in the chasing of that goal, then you likely won't find any satisfaction when you do or do not. achieve that goal. So be wary of that heading into the new year. Focus on something that will make you into the type of person you want to become in the process of chasing it. That is a wrap.

26 key lessons, habits, mindsets, and practices. If you are still with us today, if you're still with us this year, thank you so much for being a loyal listener of the podcast. We are going to ask you to do two

very quick things that can really help us and help the show and help spread this message. If you do enjoy the show, please take just 30 seconds to leave a review on whatever app you are listening, whether that's Spotify, whether that's Apple, you use something else that's great on YouTube. Those reviews really help. They help the show in the algorithm. And as we said, there are certain algorithms that we have to take part in. This is one. So please leave a rating, leave a review. And number two.

Share the podcast with a couple people in your life that you think would also find it resonant, that you think would also find it valuable. Perhaps they're a bro that is in need of rehabilitating their view of excellence. Perhaps they're someone that is so excellent.

It feels like they are alone on an island in a dark abyss and sea of grifters and bro science and influencers. And you want to say, these guys will show you the light. We'll show them the light, share the podcast. The more people that listen. means the more people having these conversations, not just with us, but with their communities. And that is how we can reclaim excellence actually. The best gift you can give us for the holidays.

is a review is sharing it if you can just take 30 seconds and do that right now it helps a ton, a ton, a ton. And if you want some homework heading to the new year, just pick a few of these things that you heard today, one or two that most resonate with you that you feel like you're not practicing or you want to practice in a perhaps more excellent way and just work on that. Start small.

As always, don't start the new year trying to do too much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of our community. Thanks, Brad, for joining here today. We'll be back in the new year with more great episodes. Until then, take care of yourselves. And as always, Be excellent to one another.