Two interesting stories emerged over the past few days:

First, a new AI model called Suno v6 pro was released, which had some in tech claiming that “Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over… Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.”

Second, senior executives at Anthropic have been wining and dining religious leaders and trying to convince them that AI has a soul.

Pope Leo XIV responded with the following:

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

I am neither Catholic nor particularly religious, but I could not agree more with the Pope. The pursuit of human craft, quality, and excellence has intrinsic value. It is essential to what makes life worth living. We must protect it.

A machine that scours the internet, rips off other people’s work, and then makes a statistical projection about what comes next is not an embodied being. It does not possess a nervous system that can have a felt, subjective experience any more than a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet can.

It could simply be that, as the writer Cal Newport has pointed out on multiple occasions, the leaders at Anthropic are part of a bizarre effective altruist/rationalist movement that believes they are tasked with heralding a digital godhead to either bring forth a utopia or end times.

Or perhaps Anthropic’s leaders are trying to convince you that AI has a soul to strengthen their argument that AI writing, AI art, AI music, AI sports, AI dating, AI sex, AI everything is the same as the human version. Although this worldview would help Anthropic’s bottom line, as the Pope wrote, it is also delusional.

Why Craft and Quality Matter in an Age of Slop

The whole point of music and art and sport and craft and love is that it’s filled with human heart and soul. The enter-a-prompt, press-a-button lifestyle removes texture, satisfaction, and fulfillment from life. A life of ease and immediacy is not the same as a good life.

We gain satisfaction and make meaning not from the result of our pursuits but from the process—from facing resistance, overcoming setbacks, and struggling to create something worthwhile. This shared experience is also what connects us as humans.

Music is a perfect example.

Real music is powerful because it transmits what someone else is feeling when they make it, and then you, the listener, feel something unique when you receive it. Music expands your horizons and opens your emotional aperture. This is the opposite of machine-generated “infinite personalized music.” Music, at least good music, is special because humans create it with care.

It’s the same with sports, art, relationships, or pretty much anything worthwhile in life. These pursuits take someone’s lived experience—the thoughts, feelings, highs, lows, heartbreaks—and turn it into something meaningful. To outsource this process to machines would be a tragedy. The quality of the finished product is diminished because the quality of what went into creating it is diminished.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper wrote about how the fishing community is up in arms because anglers are increasingly posting AI-generated photos of catches.

“Angling, even extreme angling, is just a hobby, but although the stakes may be low, the anger about artificial fish is real,” writes Harper. “Partly, I think this is because of the work that being even remotely good at the sport demands. Striped bass move and feed in locally specific patterns that can take months or years to crack. There is a risk of drowning, and the mounting reports of bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites in the Northeast call attention to another layer of danger: We smell like fish, swim in dark water, and look like clumsy seals in our black neoprene. Wetsuiting does not change the world, but it is an activity that is hard and honest and, in that way, human.”

When I first read Harper’s piece, I immediately thought about doping in sport. The cost of doping in sport isn’t just what dopers rob from clean athletes in prize money. It’s what dopers rob from all of us. Whenever we see an extraordinary performance, our first response isn’t to behold it in awe, but rather to question if it’s even real.

We love sports not in spite of human limits but because of human limits. Look no further for proof than the total flop of the “Enhanced Games,” the steroid Olympics that were, perhaps unsurprisingly, funded and operated by many of the same people who are the biggest techno evangelists. People don’t care about the enhanced games because they know it’s not real. AI threatens to turn everything into the enhanced games, but worse. With doping in sport, at least you still need to train. With AI, you need only to click a button.

If AI actually gets as good as some people say, then we’ll be left with the enhanced games of everything. If AI doesn’t keep improving, then we’ll be left with the slopification of everything. The reality will probably be a domain-specific mix of both. This should offer no consolation, since both options are terrible.

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Pillars of a Humanist Resistance

It’s not hard to imagine a world with much more AI and much less soul. The massive valuations of companies like Anthropic depend on us surrendering to this world. But it is not inevitable.

And so it is on us—people who care about craft, quality, and human excellence—to resist and hold the line. What this means will evolve, but here’s a starting point:

• Do not outsource to AI anything that is core to your craft.

• Do not replace meaningful struggle or meaningful effort with AI.

• Be skeptical of grand proclamations from tech overlords.

• Eschew AI-generated slop.

• Celebrate and support human work.

AI is fine as an advanced version of Google search or as a way to clean up and analyze massive data sets. But the more AI encroaches on our essential humanness—our ability to exert effort, to struggle, to create, and to connect—the flatter our experience will be.

Much of the discussion surrounding AI has focused on the dangers of machines becoming more like humans, but I think there is a greater, and certainly more immediate danger of humans becoming more like machines. We’ll feel less. We’ll strive less. We’ll understand less. We’ll care less. We’ll love less.

Millions of people will go with the flow and follow the path of least resistance. Many will even welcome AI into every corner of their lives with open arms, like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them.

Fortunately, you don’t need to do this.

You can be the counterculture.
You can be ultra-human.

For more on human excellence in an age of AI, check out The Way of Excellence. This theme is at the heart of the book.

I was talking to a friend the other day who was trying to get out of a slump. He felt emotionally flat and bored. I suggested he try something new —something he hadn’t done in a while, or maybe even something he’d never done before—a quest, so to speak.

My friend isn’t alone.

We’ve all been there before, myself included. In the modern world, we are all too prone to sleepwalking through life, perpetually going through the motions in a kind of half-dead, half-alive trance.

In trying to eliminate all friction and discomfort from our lives, we’ve made our lives boring. But this need not be the case.

Humans aren’t machines. We are meant to care. We are meant to struggle. We are meant to feel doubt and apprehension and resistance and fear—and we are meant to overcome it. All of which is to say we are meant to exert effort, and we are meant to go on quests.

Here are 33 to try in October.

These quests are simple and practical for a reason: there is a powerful inertia to action. A fundamental truth of the universe is that the little things add up, sometimes in surprisingly big ways.

1. Go on a day hike somewhere new.

2. Watch the sunrise from your porch with coffee or tea.

3. Host a dinner party.

4. Send a handwritten note to a mentor thanking them for their guidance.

5. Read an entire book—or two, or three—before the month ends.

6. Plant something in your yard: flowers, a tree, tomatoes— anything goes, so long as it’s alive.

7. Take a digital sabbath: one full day without your phone or computer.

8. Attend a live concert (it doesn’t have to be big or someone famous)

9. Have a difficult conversation you’ve been putting off.

10. Take a long walk without your phone.

11. Watch a serious documentary: my recent favorites include RAFA, Come See Me In the Good Light, and Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young.

12. Work out of a new coffee shop.

13. Cook something you never have before.

14. Sign up for a lesson or course to develop a skill.

15. Donate blood at your local Red Cross.

16. Clean out your closet: give away anything you haven’t worn in the last six months and wouldn’t think to wear in the next.

17. Do one really hard workout, where the whole point is testing yourself.

18. Listen to an album straight through with no distractions.

19. Eat at a restaurant you’ve never been; ask the waiter or waitress what to order and then order that, no questions asked.

20. Write down 3 goals for the next month, the next year, and the next decade.

21. Take an inventory of the apps on your phone that zap your energy. Delete them. Just do it.

22. Try a new morning routine for 3 consecutive days: keep it simple.

23. Watch the sunset. You may want to do it again, and again, and again.

24. Sign up to volunteer-coach or teach in your community.

25. Take one week where you don’t use any digital devices after 8 PM, including Netflix. See how you feel.

26. Learn how to deadlift.

27. Buy a small notebook, carry it around, and jot down interesting observations and thoughts.

28. Do not use AI for creative work.

29. Keep your phone out of the dining room at least three nights each week.

30. Pick an activity you do regularly and ask yourself how you could make it more fun; then do that.

31. Label the emotions you feel so you can respond to them instead of reacting.

32. Give yourself permission to care deeply and try your hardest on something where you’ve been holding back.

33. Reflect on what you found most valuable and make a plan to stick with it next month.

Choose at least three to five to try. And share with your friends!

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On Saturday, Sept 26, at 3:02 PM Eastern Standard Time, Justin Verlander completed his last start for the Detroit Tigers.

His career spanned 21 years and included 3 Cy Young Awards, 2 World Series Championships, an MVP award, a triple crown, and 10 all star games.

As a lifelong Tigers fan, I have many vivid memories of skipping college courses to watch Verlander pitch live at Comerica Park. He was spectacular. He competed with fierce intensity and deep joy. He loved the game of baseball and he loved it hard.

Normally in baseball, the team’s manager comes to the mound to take the ball from the pitcher. But in this instance, Verlander’s 7-year-old daughter, Genevieve, came out to walk him off the mound.

It doesn’t matter if you are a baseball or fan or not, if you are a person with a pulse this moment will rock you.

The entire stadium honoring the occasion. Verlander’s catcher, Dylan Dingler, there to support him the entire time in his full gear with the camera on his back—as if a catcher would want it any other way. His teammates, one by one, saying their goodbyes. And of course, young Genevieve, hanging on to her dad tight, as if to say, Now you are coming with me, Dad.

Hang this scene in the Louvre.

Verlander has been playing baseball since he was five. By any measure, he’s one of the best pitchers in the modern era of the game. He’s also a world-class person. He’s thoughtful; he’s kind; he’s been charitable to countless causes throughout this career.

“I don’t think anybody’s goal is to be mediocre. I think everybody should want to be the best,” says Verlander. “I feel like I ran my race. I gave it everything I had.”

Shortly after the game, which the Tigers won thanks to a walk-off home run (the Sports Gods were good that day), Verlander was asked about the gravity of the moment, and what he’ll tell his daughter about it when she’s older.

“You commit your life to something. I’ve been a baseball player since I was five years old. I gave everything for this. I left home and she’s in school and I wasn’t there,” he said, breaking down into tears again. “There’s just a level of commitment it takes to be great at something and I hope she understands she means the world to me. My family means the world to me. I’m just happy that… I’m happy I get the opportunity now to make up for lost time.”

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Verlander’s final start was so moving because it captured the commitment, the sacrifice, the tradeoffs, the fears, the joys, the regrets—all the complexity involved in the pursuit of greatness, in giving something your all, and in trying to do it the right way. It also captured the seasonality to life that each and every one of us must face, whether we participate in sports or not.

Shortly after the game ended, my phone was exploding with text massages from friends, colleagues, and people in sports all saying THIS…This is what you are getting at in The Way of Excellence.

They are right. So I am going to quote a bit from the book:

The things that you care about are the things that break your heart are the things that fill your life with meaning and joy.

When you hold yourself back because you fear failure or looking ‘uncool,’ you sacrifice growth and potential (and mastery and fulfillment and richness and love and all the other good stuff in life) for short-term safety and comfort.

It’s a trap. Get over it.

The best athletes care deeply.
The best artists care deeply.
The best leaders care deeply.
The best coaches care deeply.
The best teachers care deeply.
The best doctors care deeply.
The best writers care deeply.
The best scientists care deeply.
The best parents care deeply.

Caring deeply is the cost of admission to a big and textured life.

The world doesn’t need more mediocrity or going through the motions. The world needs more people putting themselves out there and giving it their all. The world needs more people who have the guts to care.

Fear and insecurity are part of human nature. You can either go through the motions and be superficially cool (but actually boring). Or you can step into the arena, lay it on the line, care deeply, make yourself vulnerable, and fully live your one and only life.

Try hard and give a damn.

The pursuit of excellence is not about hacks, secrets, or fads. It’s not about robotic optimization. It’s deeply felt. It’s about heart and soul. It’s about love.

Justin Verlander is the consummate example.

P.s., If you found this post resonant you’ll love the book.
Get The Way of Excellence here.

Show up on good days.
Show up on bad days.
Show up when you want to.
Show up when you don’t want to.
Show up when you’re hot.
Show up when you’re cold.
Show up when you’re energetic.
Show up when you’re tired.
Show up when there’s a crowd.
Show up when nobody’s watching.
Show up for others.
Show up for yourself.
Show up when it’s a struggle.
Show up when you’re having fun.
Show up when you’re confident.
Show up when you face doubts.
Show up when it’s easy.
Show up when it’s hard.

One of the most important skills for excellent performance (and honestly, for an excellent life) is showing up.

Relationships. Sports. Art. Music. Business. Creativity. Craft. Parenting. Coaching. It doesn’t matter the pursuit; you’ve got to show up.

People think intensity drives progress, but it’s much more about consistency. It’s not about hitting home runs, but stepping into the arena and putting the ball in play. It’s about being there over and over again.

There’s this myth that you need to feel good to get going, that you need to be super inspired and super motivated all the time. But more often than not, in reality, what you need is to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good.

In other words: Just. Get. Started.

At first, the gains often come quickly and linearly. You add weight to the bar each gym session. You watch your mile time go down, your distance run go up. You swiftly advance to the next level on Duolingo. You are in the honeymoon phase of a new relationship. But eventually, the rate of progress—and the novelty and stimulation and excitement that accompany it—flattens out. At this point, you need to stop relying on motivation and start relying on consistency.

Your mindset must shift from romanticism to laying bricks. The benefits are less about immediate gratification and hedonic pleasure, and more about deep satisfaction and lasting fulfillment. You need to master the art of showing up.

One of the biggest traps (if not the biggest) is carrying the wrong expectation of how long it takes and how consistent you must be to begin approaching your potential. So much of success comes down to not stopping. This doesn’t mean you never adjust. (You do.) It doesn’t mean you never take days off. (You better.) But it does mean that you have to play the long game.

It’s true for athletes, writers, doctors, teachers, coaches, and leaders. It’s true in the weight room and in the operating room and in the recording room and in the board room... in pretty much every room.

I’m fortunate to have some natural talent as a writer, and to have realized it. And yet, I got rejected by every journalism school I applied to. My first book was rejected by 25 publishers. I hit the New York Times bestseller list 20 years after my first published piece of writing and 11 years after signing my first book deal. Not because I got lucky. (Though that always plays a role.) Not because I built a large platform. (Though I did.) But because it took that long for me to write my first truly good book.

Anyways, it’s not just me, and it’s not just writing. My story is far from special. Just about every top performer I’ve spoken with has their own version of this story. There are rare exceptions, those of us so innately talented that things move faster—but if you aren’t already one of those rare exceptions, you probably aren’t going to be one.

Which is fine. It’s actually a good thing! Because it means that you can work your way to your goals. And that’s honestly the entire point. Winning and success feel great. It really does. But that feeling fades fast. What lasts is the path. The lessons you learn on it. The people you meet. The skills you build and the confidence you gain.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of elite athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs. They aren’t always motivated. They don’t always wake up ready to crush the day. What they are all great at, however, is showing up. They are all bricklayers.

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Showing up isn't something you either have or don't. It's not an inborn trait. Rather, it is a skill that you can learn. Just like any other skill, it gets better with practice.

The best (and most accurate) thing you can say to yourself is the following:

How I feel in the moment doesn’t determine how this will go. Let me show up, get started, and give myself a chance. If I still don’t have it after twenty or thirty minutes, I can always shut it down and try again tomorrow.

Everything worthwhile in life requires effort. Progress always entails at least some resistance and friction. There is no way around it. People love to talk about the peak moments, but you don’t get there without the unglamorous work that nobody sees, without the showing up day in and day out for months, years, and yes, even decades.

Are there other factors of excellence? Absolutely. But none of them matter if you aren’t consistent.

There is no substitute for showing up.

No secret. No supplement. No hack.

You just show up. It is as simple and as hard as that.

Over the past week, an international conversation has emerged about the dangers AI poses to humanity at a species level.

This is a good thing.

But it’s also important to consider perhaps the more imminent risk, which is what AI is already doing to our individual humanness. And it’s this risk I fear is being overlooked.

A new paper out of Harvard and the Santa Fe Institute likens AI to a “cognitive virus.” The researchers argue that while many people start using AI for trivial tasks, it finds a way to replicate itself in your brain. Since AI makes everything so much easier, you keep using it… until it starts using you. It gradually creeps into every corner of your life. You begin to think like it. You begin to speak like it. You begin to lose the skill of exerting effort itself.

Qualities such as struggle, resilience, effort, friction, accomplishment, satisfaction, and love are all big parts of what make life worth living. We shouldn’t give them up or outsource them to machines.

Which leads me to a recent conversation I had with Georgetown computer scientist, author extraordinaire, and one of my best friends, Cal Newport, for his podcast Deep Questions.

It turned out to be the most meaningful conversation I’ve had on what it means to pursue craft, quality, and excellence in an age of increasing automation, and how not to become a cynical Luddite, but also how to protect what makes you human.

So with Cal’s permission, I wanted to share a few highlights of the conversation with all of you, edited slightly for length and clarity.

If you want to get the entire conversation, you can watch on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

My AI Experience

Brad: So I started at this current position of minimal use, and then I had a conversation with someone whose work I respect a ton—this was about six or seven months ago–and they really encouraged me to use AI and essentially said, “Brad, I think your skepticism is starting to border on cynicism, and I think you’re missing the boat and a lot of the things...”

And at first, I tried it, and it was pretty good. I remember calling you Cal, and saying “Cal, maybe you’re being too much of a cynic here. Like, it’s giving me pretty good ideas.” And then about a month and a half in, what I realized is it gives me the same pretty good idea, over and over and over again.

I realized that it wasn’t making my work better. It wasn’t making my workflow better. So I said, “All right, I’m just going to use this as a copy editor. So, if I have a newsletter that I’m putting out or an essay that I’m working on, I’m just going to run it through the machine and tell it, “Please check for any grammatical and spelling errors.”

And it’s great. It catches all the grammatical and spelling errors. However, it just can’t resist adding in a little beat and saying, “Hey, if you want three ideas to punch it up, here’s what I’d suggest.” And the suggestions were pretty flat. And it kept recommending the same repetitive sentence structure for everything. Over time, it started to become really annoying.

Cal: Right. And you’re seeing this in the world of online content. You’re seeing quality degrading. You’re seeing the sharpness of ideas flattening. You’re seeing telltale signs of slop. I mean, every time I talk to you, you’re a little bit depressed about the state of online discourse. But for people out there who aren’t reading a lot online, what is it that you’re seeing happening around you by, you know, sort of our peer group of writers?

Brad: I’d argue it’s not serious writers but people who want to be writers without actually doing the work of writing, which are two separate things. But yeah, for them (which is tons of people on the internet, by the way) the writing is just completely homogenized and soulless.

I heard our mutual friend Derek Thompson put it this way: the AI robots feel like every sentence has to be more evocative than the last sentence. And that’s just not good writing. It’s weird synthetic writing.

So yes, I think that’s happening. And then another thing that is happening is that AI is degrading the experience of writing itself. Part of what makes for good writing is that someone struggled to produce it—because in that struggle, the best ideas come out. Clicking a button and picking and choosing what you want is not the same kind of struggle as actually writing.

The result of that is you can produce a lot more work, but the quality of the work goes down, and so too does the quality of your life, the quality of your experience with the craft.

I suspect this isn’t just for writing, but for pretty much everything you use AI with.

Three Planks of AI Use

1. Don’t let AI Degrade the Art of Exerting Effort

Cal: We were talking about this before on the phone; it really seemed like there were three major planks to your platform, and I think it’s worth looking at each of these in turn because we don’t normally hear this so systematically explored. Your first plank had to do with effort, right?

Brad: Yes. In order to find meaning in just about anything in life, whether it is a relationship, whether it is a work product, whether it is a leisure activity, you have to exert effort, and you have to struggle. Everything worthwhile in life requires effort.

By definition, the promise of AI is that it eliminates, mitigates, or shrinks effort. I call it the click-of-a-button economy. You want an essay, click a button. You want a recipe, click a button. You want a training plan, click a button. You want a script for asking someone out on a date, click a button. It eliminates the very struggle that leads to growth and feelings of satisfaction, whether you achieve or fail.

The common retort to this, which I totally sympathize with, is, “Well, if you’re just using AI for a few things, you can exert effort on other things.” And in theory, I think that’s great. But what happens is the more that you use AI, the more it’s a slippery slope. And gradually you’re like, “Oh, well, if it corrected all the grammar in my piece, maybe I’ll ask it to rewrite that paragraph that I was struggling with. And oh, if I asked it to rewrite that paragraph I was struggling with, maybe I’ll ask it for 10 different conclusions, and I’ll just choose the one I like best.”

And over time, it’s not you doing the work anymore. It’s the machine doing the work. And this isn’t some hidden secret. This is the very promise of AI.

But nobody wants their gravestone to read “He was efficient.”

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Cal: Right. Well, I mean, an aspect of what you just said there is something I hadn’t thought about until I read this study where researchers said we can think about LLM use as a “cognitive virus.” And part of that construction was that we’re underestimating the addictiveness of this type of interaction, that it gradually replicates within us.

So, just like you were saying, “I’m just using an LLM to do X” is going to turn pretty soon into I’m using it for almost everything else because there is something that is irresistible about having a linguistic conversational partner that is listening to you, that is reflecting things back, that is largely telling you like, “This is good; what you’re doing is smart; let me do that for you.”

There’s a construction that especially the GPT models have where, if you’re asking for advice about anything, it will always say, “Yeah, that’s good. I like this a lot. There’s just one thing I would change.” And kind of constructive turns out to be the ideal way to give feedback to someone because it makes you feel smart, but it’s not just fully affirming, and it gives you that excitement of, like, ‘I have an idea that I just have to tweak a little bit, and this is really good’, and it is pretty addictive. And what that paper and you are helping me realize is that if you let this in one place, it’s going to spread to other places.

I like that you’re pushing on this a little bit because I think this is countercultural for a lot of people:

You’re saying struggle’s good, quality is good. You know, for a human to have experiences that are of quality. This seems to me like one of the big points in The Way of Excellence: that the pursuit of excellence is life-affirming, right? You’re saying struggle is good; quality is good. You know, for a human to have experiences that are quality.

Why have we been trained to think struggle or friction somehow means that something bad is happening?

Brad: I think there are a couple of things worth addressing here. The first is that sometimes struggle and friction are bad, and we should work to minimize struggle and friction in those cases. I mean, I drive a car. I don’t walk everywhere. However, if I never use my body for anything, that whole muscular and cardiovascular system would atrophy.

So I protect certain parts of my life where I am very focused on exerting my body, and as a result I feel good, and I have a body that I can continue to use.

I think the same thing is true with our brains and with our social and emotional intelligence, and a lot of what AI says is, “Hey, we’ve now got a car for your brain, and we’ve got a car for your social and emotional intelligence, and we want you to drive it everywhere.”

And what I’m arguing is that, unlike a car, which you literally can’t drive up the stairs of your house, AI is a linguistic conversation partner that is in your pocket that you can take with you everywhere, up the stairs and down the stairs. So it’s like a shortcut machine that is very effective at making you average or perhaps even good for all of life. But it will never make you great. It will never make you feel.

I think an appropriate parallel is phones, which you, Cal, were at the vanguard of. We just kind of went into phones with, like, “Oh yeah, we see all the benefits of the phones, but we don’t really see the costs, or if we do, we don’t want to think about them. So, we’ll just kind of accept whatever costs and go with the flow and increasingly use our phones for everything that phones make easier. And now we know, as a result of that experiment, 10-15 years later, that it didn’t really work out so well.

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Cal: I’m with you on that. There’s this weird state that Silicon Valley is in right now. And they’ve done this before. The big AI companies, the Frontier LLM labs in particular, they’re still in this pre-IPO state where they think their goal is just to prove that their technology is impressive or powerful, right? Which is different from what a normal consumer product company would do, which is: “I’m going to convince you that my product is valuable to you.”

But they’re not out there making the case that “Here’s a tool we built that’s going to make this part of your life better, and here’s why, and here’s why we think we should use it.”

They’re out there talking about, “We’re solving math theorems, and we have swarms of AI robots; you know, they’re going to kill us all.”

Somehow, with AI, and we’ve seen this with other digital products in the last two decades, the onus is on the user. It’s like you are a loser if you don’t go out and become essentially like a tech R&D review forum and figure out how to use this tool. But there is nothing wrong with saying I’m happy to deploy a tool if and when someone convinces me that it’s going to be really valuable in my life, but my default really has to be getting on with productive struggle and producing good stuff.

2. Remember That AI Produces Average Work

Cal: So the second plank in your argument for this resistance is that the results are average. And you’ve got to be careful about using tools that draw you towards the average.

Brad: I think a part of it too is like, ask yourself what is the foremost goal at the top of your value structure. Is it just growth and output for the sake of growth and output? If so, then sure, use the machine for everything.

But I think a part of this resistance, or at least of a thoughtful use of this new tool, has got to be, “Hey, there are parts of my life and there are parts of my work and there are parts of my being where the goal isn’t just efficiency and output; the goal is excellence; the goal is craft; the goal is mastery. And for those parts of life, I’m actually not going to use the machine because the machine is an average maker.

And you so clearly see this in the outputs of the machine; it’s so easy now to identify AI writing because it’s all very homogenized and average. It’s not this. It’s that. It’s (Insert some fluffy metaphor).

And then another thing that I think is happening is that it is degrading the experience of writing itself. Like part of what makes good writing good is that the person struggled to produce it because in that struggle the best ideas come out. And the click of a button in picking and choosing what you want is not the same kind of struggle as actually writing.

And I think as a result of that, you can produce a lot more work, but the quality of the work goes down and the quality of your life, the quality of your experience with the craft goes down.

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Cal: So, I’d rather try to become a good human at whatever craft I’m doing. Because even if you fail, you’ll have lived a life where you strived for something and you weren’t just essentially an automaton putting prompts into a machine.

Brad: I think that’s right. I think the point of a good life is to care deeply and feel deeply and feel like you are contributing to causes and projects and people that matter to you. Full stop. So if artificial intelligence frees you up to spend more of your full human spirit and capacity on things that matter to you because instead of doing the complicated budgeting or whatever, you now have AI to do it for you or a spreadsheet to do it for you, that’s great.

But I think that if you allow AI to encroach on what ought to be sacred, the things in your life that do matter most to you, where you want to feel something, then I think it is absolutely getting in the way of living a good life, of being fully human. Because you think that you’re using the machine, but like a virus, the machine uses you. The more you use the machine, the more you start to resemble the machine. And I don’t think too many people would want to trade their humanity for the existence of a machine because a machine can’t care about things and a machine can’t feel.

3. Ask if AI is Making Your Life More Excellent

Cal: At the end of the day, I think the third and final prong of your argument comes down to a fundamental question about whether AI is making your life more excellent or not. Do you think this resistance movement has any chance of catching on?

Brad: I do think it does. I mean, the most highlighted line in my book, the one that everyone shares, is the following: “The reason I write is because AI can’t make me feel what it’s like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy-ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words. There are tools that can lift more weight more efficiently, more easily. But that’s not the point. The point is the experience. The point is the feeling of being alive.”

I go on to explain that when you increasingly automate this kind of experience in all corners of your life, your life becomes increasingly void of texture. It becomes shallow and empty. It’s the opposite of excellence. Find what makes you feel alive and protect it.

So if a book on excellence has eight paragraphs on AI and two of those paragraphs are what’s being shared most, it gives me hope that there are at least some people out there that get this message and that want to be part of humanism.

And humanism says that humans are special. Humans are unique. There’s something about the mind-body system and the nervous system that makes a human subjective experience incredible, and we should champion that, and we should protect it. And this isn’t about becoming cynical or old grumpy curmudgeons, but you don’t just need to always go with the flow. Because, again, no AI company has ever said that this is going to make you excellent at what you do. I’ve also yet to hear a compelling case that this technology is going to make you more human. I’ve never heard anyone say it’s going to make you more human.

And I think that I want to be more human.

Cal: I mean, I’d put it as simply as I’d rather support “Team Human” than put my effort into increasing the stock valuations of Sam Altman’s private equity holdings.

Brad: I would think of AI like ultra-processed food because it is ultra-processed information. It's ultra-processed content, ultra-processed material by definition. Much like ultra-processed food doesn't have fiber, so you digest it really fast, with AI ultra-processing, you lose context, and you lose all the hard work that went into doing it, the fiber of the argument or artwork or whatever it is you are making or consuming. I am not opposed to eating a Clif Bar or a bag of Cheetos from time to time, but if my diet centered around just eating ultra-processed foods, I'd feel like crap, and I wouldn't be healthy.

So, one rule would be: “Where am I okay eating ultra-processed food, and where do I want the real thing in my life?" This is an important question to ask yourself.

Cal: I want to end here by reading something you posted on Instagram recently, which I think is another good summary of what we just talked about. So, you wrote,

“We are at a point in history, not nearing it, but here, where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop, or if they’re going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love.”

I’m with you. I want to do that latter thing that you’re talking about, and I don’t think I need a ton of my AI in my life to do it. And if those things appeal to you, then it’s okay that you’re not right now trying to, you know, configure your private swarm of AI monsters to do whatever the hell you saw on a YouTube channel somewhere.

Brad: But never on your YouTube channel, Cal. That’s for certain.

All this talk about AI and machines and robots and yet what we really crave is the human spirit working at the height of its powers.

Two of the best tennis players in world just battled for over 4.5 hours in a thrilling match that ended at 3:34 AM.

Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz went back and fourth and back and fourth for five sets and a tiebreak.

It was utterly captivating.

Shelton and Alcaraz played an all-time match with care and guts and courage.

No AI, machine, or robot can replace what we saw on center court because no AI, machine, or robot can care deeply or feel deeply in the way that Shelton and Alcaraz did.

We are hardwired for the feeling that accompanies giving our all to something we care about it. We feel it ourselves and we feel it when we observe excellence in others.

This is what I mean when I talk about excellence.

It is an exhilarating process, the pursuit of which is available to anyone.

It is ultra-human.

You should do everything you can to cherish it and build a life around it.

You can see it on the face of Alcaraz, even after losing. He is content because he gave it his freaking all—the best feeling there is.

In other incredible quarter final match, Frances Tiafoe came back from being down two sets, three games to five, 15 points to 40 to defeat Alex Michelsen.

It was a historic comeback.

Otherworldly.

Immediately after winning the match, Tiafoe was about to launch into a celebration worthy of such a comeback.

But then he saw his opponent, Alex Michelsen, at the net.

Tiafoe ran up to the net and embraced Michelsen, who cried in his arms for a full 24 seconds. It was riveting. You felt the joy of Tiafoe and the gut-wrenching agony of Michelsen all at once.

Tiafoe was asked about the embrace; here’s what he said:

“Man I know. I’ve been there ... I know how much that hurts.”

It was pure humanity. It was awesome.

These feelings are increasingly under assault. Tech overlords are happy to try and automate every corner of our lives.

Resist.

Nobody gives a sh*t if two robots hit that tennis ball back and forth for nearly five hours.

It’s special because it’s human. Our humanness is everything.

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A recent, first-of-a-kind study out of MIT shows that an over-reliance on tools like chatGPT leads to a massive decline in cognitive function. The results are important, and carry practical implications for all of us.

For four months, researchers evaluated what happened to people who used ChatGPT to complete writing assignments for them, versus those who did not. The headline result: “LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

Over 80% of ChatGPT users couldn’t quote anything from work they’d just done. When researchers read the essays written by AI, they used the following words to describe them:

“Soulless.”

“Empty.”

“Standard and typical.”

“Lacking individuality.”

The essays written by AI were scored as flat and homogenized. The writing was punchy, but quickly became boring; all of it had the same synthetic feel. Perhaps most notably, LLM users saw a 47% reduction in brain connectivity compared to people who did not rely on ChatGPT to write for them.

These results may seem shocking, but they also make sense: if you are outsourcing your thinking to a machine, by definition, you don’t need to think, and you certainly don’t need to make creative and associative connections. A hallmark of deep thinking is that it relies on different parts of the brain working together.

When you outsource writing to AI, you negate this process. There’s an old saying in brain research: neurons that fire together wire together. The inverse is also true: the less you use it, the more you lose it.

The Case for Cognitive Fitness

As I was reading this study, I kept thinking that much like your physical health deteriorates if your diet includes too many highly processed foods, your cognitive health deteriorates if your information diet, both what you produce and consume, includes too much highly processed content.

Another useful metaphor for thinking about AI is fitness. If you outsource all your physicality to technology then your physical fitness will decline, and fast. If you outsource all your thinking to technology then your cognitive fitness will decline fast too. When researchers forced heavy ChatGPT users to write without AI, not only did they struggle, but their writing was worse than people who had never used ChatGPT.

Writing in particular provides a heavy cognitive strain. The author and computer scientist Cal Newport interviewed dozens of college students who were heavy AI users. They weren’t using the tools to plagiarize; they were using the tools to write first drafts, provide structure for their work, and help them form ideas. In other words, they were using AI to outsource the hard parts of writing, like “a brain hack used to make the act of writing feel less difficult,” explains Newport.

But a big part of the reason to write is because it is difficult. Writing well is a proxy for thinking well. Using AI to write for you is like going to the gym, but instead of lifting the weights yourself, you bring an apparatus to do the work. You may lift plenty of weight this way, but you yourself aren’t getting stronger. Over time, your muscles will atrophy. Perhaps you become great at configuring and programming the apparatus, but that is a very different skill than a squat or deadlift.

At the same time, it’s pretty great that we have forklifts for moving massive loads at warehouses. A world in which humans have to do all this work without assistance probably would not be better, and there are many ways in which it could be worse. Using AI to sequence DNA and find patterns in massive data sets could help develop therapeutics for diseases like cancer. That is a great use of a forklift; same tool, different tradeoffs. Discernment is everything. The problem is the more we outsource our thinking to these tools, the less discerning we’ll be.

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Efficiency, But At a Steep Cost

Relying on AI is efficient. The study participants who “wrote” with AI were much faster, because of course. But what they gained in efficiency they lost tenfold in quality, humanity, and long-term cognitive fitness.

The MIT researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” to explain this tradeoff: what you gain in efficiency now, you pay for later.

These findings are particularly worrisome for young people.

We know the human brain is most plastic until the age of 25. If youth become reliant on AI, they may never learn to think for themselves. Allowing AI in schools without any guardrails would be running a massive experiment on an entire generation in real-time.

Another new study out of Georgetown shows that when people use AI to write, their thinking and ideation homogenizes toward a soulless mean. The sentence structure becomes predictable, even robotic.

Occasionally I eat highly processed foods. I’m still healthy and fit, but I’d never make them the centerpiece of my diet. I still drive a car, and I am grateful for vehicular transportation. But I also make sure to get my steps in. Though I could outsource nearly all my physicality to technologies, I don’t. Because I know that whatever ease and convenience I’d feel in the short-term, I’d be trading for problems down the road. The same is true for the production and consumption of highly processed content.

Protect What Makes You Human

Just last week, a team of researchers from Harvard and the Santa Fe institute analyzed large-language models through the lens of evolutionary biology and complex systems. They published their conclusion in a paper titled: “Large Language Models as a Cognitive Virus.”

The adoption of artificial intelligence, the researchers write, functions exactly like a virus. When you are first exposed to it, you use it a little. But then, as you begin to use it for more and more tasks, it replicates and grows roots in your brain. Perhaps without even realizing it, you start to speak, write, and even think as if you were an LLM. The more you use AI, the more you write, talk, and think like AI, and the more you spread it to other humans. You think you are using the AI, but in actuality the AI is using you—it’s colonizing your being and turning you into a vector for its own proliferation.

The Harvard and Santa Fe paper may seem extreme, but underneath it lies a crucial truth: for all that we think about how to use AI, we also need to think about how to protect ourselves from AI—and not just at the existential level of humanity, but as individual humans. I think more and more people are starting to realize this. One of the most highlighted passages in my new book, the one that people are always sharing on social media, is the following:

The reason I write is because AI can’t make me feel what it’s like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy-ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words. There are tools that can lift more weight. More efficiently. More easily. But that’s not the point. The point is the experience, the feeling of being alive. When you increasingly automate this kind of experience in all corners of your life, your life becomes increasingly void of texture. It becomes shallow and empty. Find what makes you feel alive. Protect it.

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Where To Go From Here?

We’ve got to be thoughtful about how we use this technology, set constraints and rules for ourselves, and also stop mythologizing AI as an all-encompassing super-power. (It is not.)

The AI companies want you to think adoption of AI for everything is inevitable. The reason for why is simple—their business model depends on it. But I’m not ready to give up what makes me human to enrich a handful of technology billionaires. I think doing so would be a tragedy. The more people tell you that something is inevitable, the less inevitable something is, otherwise they wouldn’t need to keep saying it.

The last digital technological breakthrough was the smartphone. It’s many benefits are undeniable. But, so, too, are some of its costs: for example, those who use regularly use map apps see declines in their innate navigation ability. The rise of the phone-based childhood is strongly associated with a youth mental health crisis, and a large regret of the parents of Gen Z youth is that they gave their kids smartphones too early. (And kids themselves regret their own addictive smartphone use, too.)

The point is that we shouldn’t always just go with the flow in the face of new technologies. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves (and to our children) to identify potential harms and do what we can to reduce them. Losing the ability to navigate without a map is one thing, but losing the ability to think for ourselves is another entirely.

AI is still in its infancy. Its impact on our future—both individually and collectively—depends on our ability to use it thoughtfully. The problem is the more we use it to replace thinking, the less thoughtful we become. Your thinking will deteriorate if you rely on shortcuts. The muscles you have built will atrophy if you outsource them to servers.

None of this is meant to be alarmist. I don’t think being an anti-AI purist makes sense (for a whole bunch of reasons). But it does seem increasingly important to be deliberate and intentional about when, how, and why you use AI—and what you get in return versus what you give up.

Personally, I don’t think AI should be used to produce or consume creative work. Checking for typos and grammar, sure. But actually writing—absolutely not. And I don’t care to read anything written by AI either. Not on substack. Not in a book. Not on social media. It has no soul. It’s synthetic. It’s lame. I don’t find it interesting.

Thinking for ourselves is a central feature of our humanity. So are the feelings that inform our thinking. It’s best we don’t take either for granted.

Caring is cool. Nonchalance is a cop out. You don’t get unlimited chances. Get over your fear of failure. Pour your heart and soul into what you do. Try hard. Give a damn.

Roger Federer was just inducted into the tennis hall of fame. He embodies a central idea in The Way of Excellence: the things you care about are the things that break your heart are the things that fill your life with meaning and joy.

When you hold yourself back because you fear failure or looking ‘uncool,’ you sacrifice growth and potential (and mastery and fulfillment and richness and love and all the other good stuff in life) for short-term safety and comfort.

It’s a trap. Get over it.

“In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches... Now, I have a question for all of you... what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you,” says Federer.

He also says that effortless is a myth. “I didn’t get where I got on pure talent alone. I got there by trying to outwork my opponents. Discipline is also a talent, and so is patience.”

The world doesn’t need more mediocrity or going through the motions. The world needs more people putting themselves out there and giving it their all. The world needs more people who have the guts to care.

The best athletes care deeply.
The best artists care deeply.
The best leaders care deeply.
The best coaches care deeply.
The best teachers care deeply.
The best doctors care deeply.
The best writers care deeply.
The best scientists care deeply.
The best parents care deeply.

Caring deeply is the cost of admission to a big and textured life.

It’s easier than ever to sit on the sidelines. To think about the thing. Research the thing. Listen to podcasts about the thing. Talk about the thing. But these are all ways of protecting yourself from actually doing the thing. Only doing the thing is doing the thing.

Fear, doubt, and insecurity are all part of human nature. You can either go through the motions and be superficially cool (but actually boring). Or you can step into the arena, lay it on the line, care deeply, make yourself vulnerable, and fully live your one and only life.

Try hard and give a damn.

This post comes directly from The Way of Excellence. If you found it resonant, you'll love the book. Get it today plus a weekly program to help you apply all the mindsets, ideas, and habits.

Last weekend: New York Magazine’s cover story was all about how private equity (PE) firms are buying up youth sports leagues, raising the stakes for even the youngest kids, and pricing out, if not ruining, families. Youth sports generate up to $40B in annual revenue—nearly twice that of the NFL. Middle-class families are spending up to $25K a year per child. This is insane.

Also last weekend: my 8-year-old son played in a baseball tournament and had a wonderful experience. The time between the games was the best. He was with his friends. Playing outside. No screens. No helicopter parenting. Just kids running around.

When we got home, he asked, “Can we do another tournament next weekend?”

“I’m not sure,” I responded. “Why?”

“Because I want to do this every day,” he said.

***

Herein lies the conundrum. On the one hand, youth sports in America really are a disaster. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 70% of kids drop out by age 131. There’s crying. There’s yelling. There are thousands of dollars spent.

“Parents find themselves trapped,” writes Caitlin Moscatello. “They know the benefits of sports—better health outcomes, higher self-esteem—and want that for their children, yet giving it to them often means buying into a sports ecosystem that is inherently flawed. As the pay-to-play model increasingly takes hold, so does the idea that kids should start competing at younger and younger ages, risking their sense of self along with their shoulders and ACLs.”

On the other hand, youth sports are more important than ever. They offer a desperately needed alternative to the screen-based childhood, and they are an excellent venue for teaching kids the value of doing hard things, how to overcome failure, and how to forge relationships.

When done right, youth sports help with everything from building genuine confidence to developing a good relationship with one’s body. When done wrong, things go sideways fast.

Private equity (PE) firms buying up youth sports leagues is troubling. Their incentive isn’t to build skills; it’s not the physical or emotional health of kids, or the community. It is to make money.

Fees go up. Parents get FOMO. Many of the same families who would have been playing for $100 bucks in a community league now must pay a fortune.

I don’t mind capitalism (because all the other systems are worse). And yet, there are certain industries—health care and education, for example—where profit incentives don’t make sense for anyone other than those making the profits. Youth sports are one such industry.

But youth sports can also be excellent. The best.

You get to teach character. You get to teach winning. You get to teach losing. You get to teach effort. You get to teach teamwork. You get to face adversity. Kids learn they take on challenges, struggle, and improve. These are crucial life skills.

So much of youth sports comes down to coaching and parents.

• Are the coaches doing it for their own egos or because they love the game and they love the kids?

• Do all the parents think their kids are going to get D1 scholarships, or are they hoping their kids make friends, gain confidence, and build character?

• Are you playing in a PE-based league that has restrictions on what hotels you can stay at and whether or not you can film your kid, or are you doing it on your terms?

What’s fascinating is that the vast majority of psycho parents and psycho coaches have never played or been around sport at a high level themselves. Those who have understand that the goal of youth sports is not to win a 10-U championship. It is for kids to have fun, learn, develop growth mindsets, build friendships, and want to come back and play again next year.

Regularly check whatever you are doing against these goals.

• Make sure the kid wants to play, not you (the parent).

• If you are going to travel, set constraints.

• Do not specialize in a single sport before high school.

• Make sure the coaching is about developing not just good athletes but also good people.

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This issue has become personal for me. My latest book has taken off amongst coaches and parents at all levels. I coach three sports. My son and daughter both play.

Most of us can’t change structural forces or outbid PE firms. But we can do our best to parent and coach in the right way. And if enough parents say no to the craziness, then eventually, the craziness becomes less crazy. At the very least, you can protect your own kid and community.

If you’re worried your kid is going to fall behind, that’s a valid concern. I’ve felt it myself. However, you also need to worry about your kid burning out or tying their entire self-worth to performance in sport, and those risks are every bit, if not more, likely. And though I hate to be the bearer of bad news, when it comes to D1 scholarships, genetics and raw talent matter more than we like to admit.

My work has been profiled in The Athletic. I’ve worked with NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL teams. And yet, one of my biggest challenges is trying to get youth sports right—as a coach and as a parent. It’s not easy, at least given the system we have in America.

But we’ve got to be up for the challenge.

Making youth sports better starts and ends with adults. Set a good example. Be about a growth mindset. Be about trying hard. Be about having fun.

Dolly Parton was a generational singer and songwriter, a philanthropist, an activist, a proud Appalachian, a champion of reading and the power of literacy, fierce, and kind.

Dolly Parton was excellence.

Parton wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”—two of her biggest hits—in the same day. By the end of her life, she’d written 3,000 songs, some for her and plenty for others. There’s no doubt she could write a hit, but she also loved the work.

Parton released 49 studio albums in a career spanning nearly six decades. Her highest charting Billboard release was an album called “Rockstar.” She put it out when she was 77 years old.

At 78, she collaborated with Beyoncé on “Cowboy Carter.”

To be in the game that long, to love the game that long, is extraordinary. I think often about the idea of lineage, about the value of legacy and how to pass forward the torch instead of trying to hoard the flame for yourself. Just imagine how incredible it must have felt for Parton to have Beyoncé singing one of her songs, and to be on that track.

Dolly Parton was the consummate craftsperson: skill, rigor, vision, mastery. She was serious. She was joyful. She had it all.

She shaped her work and her work shaped her, along with an entire industry.

But her impact extended well beyond music. Parton grew up as one of twelve children in a one-room cabin with no electricity in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Parton’s father, Robert, was a tenant farmer and tobacco sharecropper. She frequently recalled that while he was one of the smartest people she knew, his inability to read prevented him from fully chasing his dreams.

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So, in 1995, at the height of her fame, Parton launched the Imagination Library. A program that mailed free books to kids. She said it was a tribute to her father and a way for her to give back to the community. All told, she gave away more than 300 million books to those who need them most.

Parton was married to her husband Carl Dean for nearly 60 years before he passed. Despite her flashy persona and public-facing career, she kept her marriage sacred and mostly out of the eye of her fans. She was an original “influencer,” but she also knew the value of privacy, and what fame untethered from reality could do to a soul.

“I fell in love with Carl Dean when I was 18 years old,” she explained. “We have spent 60 precious and meaningful years together. Like all great love stories, they never end. They live on in memory and song. He will always be the star of my life story.”

Dolly Parton was kind. She used her talents for good.

In 2020, she quietly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt, seeding early research that fed into Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine—her fund is credited in a New England Journal of Medicine paper.

Even as her star rose, she never forgot about home. Her theme park, Dollywood, became one of the largest employers in the Smokies, and the company later covered 100 percent of tuition for its roughly 11,000 workers. In 2024, after Hurricane Helene tore through East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, she and her businesses gave $2 million to relief.

From growing up without electricity to becoming a superstar who brought countless others up with her, who helped increase literacy and fund science that went on to save millions of lives, Dolly Parton was the American Dream, personified. She was what her country always said it would be, and what it can be when it tries. She was the best of us.

If excellence is a process of caring deeply, giving something your all, getting the most out of yourself, creating, and contributing, then Dolly Parton is as excellent as they come.

May her memory be an inspiration to us all.

On a recent flight from Charlotte, NC, to Traverse City, MI, I counted three people reading. I was one of the three. To be fair, a handful were watching sports and movies. But more than anything, I saw people buried in their phones.

Around the same time as my flight, an Atlantic cover story, “The Age of Reading is Over,” went viral for highlighting some terrifying trends.

51% of adults read 0 books a year. Only 16% read daily.

Reading has declined by 43% over the last 20 years. The decline cuts across age, gender, and race. 54% of adults now have literacy levels below those of a sixth grader.

You can observe the decline not just on planes and trains, but at pools and in doctors’ office waiting rooms. You used to see people reading books and magazines. Now, just about everyone is swiping down on short-form video. Here are findings from three recent studies on that medium:

1. A study from earlier this year uncovered that people who regularly watched short-form video (e.g., TikTok and Reels) underwent changes in the neural networks responsible for attention and impulse control. In particular, the braking mechanism of the brain, which would otherwise help someone decide to stop watching and put the phone away, deteriorated.

2. Another study, aptly titled “The Cognitive Costs of Brain Rot,” found that the fractured attention, cognitive overload, and mental exhaustion that are part and parcel of heavy social media use contribute to burnout, depression, and anxiety.

3. A 2025 meta-analysis—a review of 27 studies that included 98,000 people—found that consuming short-form video leads to a significant decline in cognitive function, attention, and self-control. “Repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may lead to habituation, wherein users become desensitized to slower, more cognitively demanding tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning,” conclude the authors.

The research shows what so many of us have experienced firsthand. When you get sucked into scrolling, it’s hard to stop, you feel like crap, and your ability to maintain attention and any sort of depth diminishes, if not flames out altogether. It’s bad for the individual mind, and for the collective one. No wonder it seems like all the serious people have gradually disappeared.

The synthetic slop revolution is doing to our brains what the industrial revolution did to our bodies. Consuming too many highly processed foods led to metabolic dysfunction and a diminished desire for more nutritious, whole foods that actually make you feel good. Consuming too much highly processed content is leading to neurological and emotional dysfunction and a diminished desire for deeper and more fulfilling material, such as books.

Life is too short to surrender your brain to an endless deluge of stupid, soulless, mind-numbing crap. It’s addictive in all the worst ways. We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where each and every one of us is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love.

Short-form video, and social media more broadly, are not going away. But you need to be thoughtful about how you consume it and set constraints for yourself. Occasionally, I eat highly processed foods. I’m still healthy and fit, but I’d never make highly processed foods the centerpiece of my diet. The same is true for highly processed content.

The best thing you can do to reclaim your ability to think deeply is also one of the simplest: read a book. Reading a book is like consuming healthy foods and going to the gym all at once, but for your brain.

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When you read a book, you consume unprocessed information in context. You can think of context like fiber: it slows digestion and is the first thing stripped away in highly processed short-form video crap. At the same time, you exert and strengthen focus. You may be uncomfortable at first, especially if you’re out of practice, but reading is a muscle you can rebuild. Eventually, it becomes enjoyable—you reach a point where you’d rather read a book than scroll because of how you feel after, because of how it nourishes your brain (and soul) instead of burning it out.

Reading a book asks something of you that almost nothing else in modern life does: it asks you to stay with one idea, in one place, for an extended period of time. It asks you to wrestle with complexity, pay attention to someone else’s thinking, and ultimately think for yourself. When you have a deep reading practice, you regularly get to experience the joy of losing yourself in a story and the exhilaration of making a new connection or thinking an original thought.

Though the state of reading may seem grim, there is some light in the dark.

The decline isn't evenly distributed, rather, it's a story of concentration. A YouGov survey from the end of 2025 found that 19% of Americans accounted for 82% of all books read that year, and the top 4%—those reading 50 or more books—consumed 46% of the total.

You could interpret this data in two ways: the first is that reading is becoming an elite activity for a very small subset of the population. The second is that there is a strong, passionate base of readers holding the line—and what’s needed is an indiscriminate recruiting policy to expand the number.

Book snobs may take issue, but let’s be real, at this point it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or nonfiction, a classic or a recent release. We just need to get people back to reading, period.

Start with a book you'd actually want to read. Set aside even just 20 minutes a day. Place your phone in another room. Prioritize consistency. It’s good to think of yourself as a reader, but merely holding a book as a status symbol doesn’t do any good. You actually have to read. Reading can—you could even argue reading must—be at the heart of any humanist resistance to technologically driven brain rot.

Whether you’re a voracious reader who is out of practice or someone who hasn’t read many books before, now is the time to get as serious about reading books and your cognitive health as you are about your body and your physical health.

Refuse to doomscroll. Read a book. Reject AI slop. Read a book. F*ck the machine. Read a book. Save your brain. Be the counterculture. Read a book.

One of the best parts of coaching Little League baseball is helping kids learn to strike out. Now, it’s not like I root for them to fail. But at some point, a strikeout is inevitable, even for the most skilled players on the team. Striking out is so powerful for the same reason it’s so hard: it is an utterly public failure.

Your teammates, your opponents, your parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles—they are all watching. There is no place to hide on a baseball diamond.

In my years of coaching, I’ve found the primary reason kids fear batting is not because they are worried about getting hit by a pitch, but because they are worried about striking out. My job is simple: first, normalize striking out—even the best players in the world do it, and often!—and then, help kids process and come down from the failure.

A common trajectory for most goes something like this:

• Tons of nerves before batting.

• A strikeout followed by an ocean of tears.

• Another strikeout followed by tears, but fewer.

• Rinse and repeat until striking out eventually becomes a minor frustration, no longer something to fear but merely a part of the game.

For each kid, without fail, once their fear of striking out diminishes, they have more fun, take bigger swings, and play better baseball. They are no longer tight and playing not to lose. They are free and playing to win. The same kids who were terrified just a few weeks prior begin to let go. They drop their shoulders, and their knees relax in the batter’s box. Sometimes they even lick their lips. It’s a beautiful thing.

***

Striking out is not only something that happens to kids. Adults strike out too. Your date doesn’t call back. Your team misses its target. Nobody downloads your podcast. Your book flops. You miss the lift. You run slower than you’d hoped. Your business fails. Your relationship fails.

And, just like kids—or perhaps even more—adults become so paralyzed by their fear of failure that they, too, take at-bats tentatively, if at all.

Fear of failure kills dreams. Fear of failure shrinks lives.

***

It’s never been easy to fail, but I suspect it’s harder than ever, in no small part because every time you open your computer you are subjected to a never-ending torrent of wild success. His podcast just crossed 100,000,000 downloads. Her Substack now has 20,000 subscribers. His bench press is bigger than ever. Her husband is like the Dalai Lama, only with an eight-pack. Her business crushed. He’s on the forty under forty list. And on, and on, and on. Never mind that the vast majority of success porn is fabricated and created by miserable people, but it has the opposite effect of my Little League coaching: it makes failure seem like an abnormal disease to avoid at all costs.

This is bullshit.

For my latest book, I spoke with hundreds of world-class performers: athletes, artists, chefs, entrepreneurs, musicians, writers, surgeons, coaches. Not a single one avoided failure. Not one!! What I was told again and again and again is some version of If I didn’t have the guts to fail, I would never be where I am today.

Failure is inevitable. For the nine-year-old on my baseball team. For Shohei Ohtani. For you. If you want to get the best out of yourself—if you want to have big at-bats and take big swings, in baseball and in life—you need the courage to face the possibility, in some cases, even the probability, of failure. The following steps can help.

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1. Accept the Hurt

You care. You gave your all. You failed.
Of course it’s going to hurt.

This doesn’t mean you are broken or weak. It means you are a flesh and blood human. The pain of failure is the cost of stepping into the arena and living a rich and textured life. When you sit on the sidelines or hold yourself back, you gain short-term safety and comfort, but you sacrifice a shot at your dreams. It’s a terrible trade.

Risking failure may break your heart, but it also fills your life with meaning and joy. You’ll never know what you’re capable of until you try, and if you try—and have the guts to truly test your limits—then at some point you are going to fail. This is just how it goes. It’s the math of the universe. But the math of the universe also says that at some point, you’ll probably succeed too.

I was terrified to submit my first book proposal. I feared getting rejected. I feared what it would do for my then shaky confidence as a writer. So I held onto it for months. I kept revising it. I’d change a sentence one way, then back, and then back again until I’d retraced the same circle dozens of times.

I finally got sick of this cycle and said to hell with it: what’s the worst that can happen? I quickly found out. I got rejected by 27 publishers. It sucked. It was painful. It was discouraging. But the 28th publisher, a little-known house called Rodale (which no longer exists), gave me a book deal. Five books later, and I’ve sold more than 600,000 copies, and my books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

None of this would have happened had I not accepted failure.

The moment you accept failure is the moment you stop being paralyzed by it. It’s just like the kids on my baseball team: striking out becomes not that big of a deal when you realize you aren’t going to melt or die.

2. Abide by the 48-Hour Rule

Following a failure, give yourself 48 hours to feel bad, and then get back to the work itself.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found the neural networks involved in taking on challenges and problem solving (what he called the SEEKING system) compete for resources with the neural networks involved in fear, rage, and grief (what he called the RAGE, FEAR, and GRIEF systems). In other words, it’s a zero-sum game in the brain. It’s nearly impossible to feel terrible when you’re actively working toward progress.

After something I write flops, there is no better medicine than getting started on the next piece. I loathe doing it every time—feeling sorry for myself is much easier than writing—but I must report that it works every time.

All the high-performing people I interviewed for The Way of Excellence told me the same. Following failure, you want to feel your feelings, but not let them linger. It’s back to the practice facility, back to the studio, or back to the boardroom.

You fail.
You accept it.
You process it.
You learn from it.

And then you get back to work.

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3. Build a Robust Sense of Identity

You are more than a result. You are not your failures.

The stories you tell yourself about yourself shape your outlook, attitude, and behavior. Rather than telling yourself the story If I fail, that means I am a failure…

Tell yourself…

…I am a person who has the guts to step into the arena and lay it on the line. I am someone who is amassing experience that will shape my character.

(The latter also happens to be the more accurate story.)

Stop identifying with results and start identifying with the courage to fully embrace the process of living. The biggest failure becomes not having tried at all.

4. Adopt an Infinite Game Mindset

Before his tragic death, Kobe Bryant was asked, “Do you love to win or hate to lose?”

“I’m neither,” he responded. “I play to figure things out. I play to learn something.”

When you fixate on winning, losing, or some other external outcome, it takes you out of the present moment. It makes it impossible to get into a flow state. It makes you fragile. But when you adopt a mindset of curiosity and growth, it relieves pressure and helps you stay anchored.

Kobe Bryant was known for his killer instinct (Mamba Mentality), and yet even he realized the difference between the finite game and the infinite game.

The finite game is time-bound. There are winners and losers. You succeed or fail. The infinite game knows no end. The only goal is to keep playing, learning, and growing.

Anyone who has ever attained their potential knows that you’ve got to play the infinite game. When you embrace an infinite game mindset, failure becomes less scary because it is not an ultimate end. Failure still sucks and hurts (see above), but it’s also something you can learn from as you keep playing.

Of course you want to win as many finite games as you can. But damn if it isn’t helpful to regularly zoom out and remind yourself that the most important game is the infinite one—and that by staying in the infinite game, you increase the odds that you’ll win at least a few finite ones along the way.

5. Become a Humble Badass

Showing up, putting yourself out there, and stepping into the arena is not for the faint of heart. It hardens and softens you at the same time. With each challenge you undertake, you become tougher and more confident. But you also become kinder. You gain respect and compassion for others in the arena because you know how hard making yourself vulnerable to failure can be.

***

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines. To think about the thing. Research the thing. Listen to podcasts about the thing. Talk about the thing. Dream about the thing. But these are all ways of protecting yourself from actually doing the thing.

Only doing the thing is doing the thing.

Another trap is doing the thing but not really doing the thing.

It’s the person who has the website and clothes and haircut and notebook and pen and typewriter and all the other accessories they think a writer ought to have, but what they don’t have is the guts to put themselves out there and write.

They fear failure and rejection, or that their work won’t be read widely. Spending all this time on the act of being a writer is what someone does when they are scared of being a writer.

Writing is an example I know well, but the pattern is universal. You see it in sports, cooking, music, photography, craftwork, and so on. You even see it in parenting. There is no shortage of elaborate ways to feign caring. Underneath each resides fear of failure.

And herein lies the best part about overcoming your fear of failure: you can begin doing all kinds of things in the world and maybe—hell, if you do something for long enough, even probably—succeed. So step up to the plate, drop your shoulders, and take some big swings. Everyone worth a damn strikes out. It’s how the game goes.

The “RAFA” documentary speaks to something in all of us: it’s riveting when you have the guts to step into the arena, risk failure, and give something your all, even if you know you’re going to leave it behind.

Rafael Nadal loved to win, but what he really loved was the feeling of pushing against meaningful struggle.

He loved the grind.
He loved the process.
He loved exploring his limits.

“Victory lasts only so long; it’s momentary,” says Nadal. “What has always motivated me is the desire to keep fighting, because satisfaction comes from difficulty.”

I watched the RAFA documentary with my 8-year-old son and there were so many incredible lessons not just about playing good tennis but about living a good life.

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If you find something in your life that allows you to push against and overcome difficulty, yes, it can make life harder, but it also makes life so much richer.

You have to risk something. You have to be willing to get your heart broken. You have to surround yourself with a support system.

When you pour your all into something—a sport, a craft, a relationship, a team—it becomes a part of who you are. The sadness you experience when you leave it behind is the price you pay for having the experience.

There’s an old saying: Athletes die twice—once when they die and once when they retire. But it’s not just for athletes, it’s for anyone who loves their craft. It’s for parents whose kids will eventually move out of the house. It’s for couples who likely won’t die at the exact same time.

Passion comes from the Latin root passio, which means “to suffer.”

To be passionate is to find something that brings you great joy, but also that you are willing to suffer for. The suffering isn’t so much in doing the thing (which should be fun) but in how you make yourself vulnerable.

It’s safer to stay on the sidelines.

To talk about the thing. To think about the thing. To dream about the thing.

But none of those come close to doing the thing. And it’s doing the thing that enlarges your life and fills it with meaning and texture.

Even if it’s hard.
Even if you may fail.
Even if it’s not forever.

So I created one.

If you want to take your game to the next level, whatever your game may be, this program is for you.

Purchase a copy of The Way of Excellence (hardcover or audio) and unlock instant access to A Year of Excellence 52-Week Program and the Becoming Excellent Workbook. Taken together, this program gives you everything you need, and I promise it will help. It’s a $90 value for the price of a single book!

I’m limiting it to 5000 people, and there are only 1,000 spots left, so act quickly!

Learn more and get yours today:

https://wayofexcellencebook.com/peak-performance-program/​

Who’s this for?

People who are serious about getting better and want to attain peak performance in the pursuits they care about most. If you’re exhausted and overwhelmed by fads, sick of shallow advice, and want tools that actually work, this is for you.

How’s this course different?

My goal is simple: give you the tools you need to improve your performance in an easy-to-access, succinct, evidence-based program. Each week, you’ll gain a core insight along with concrete ways to apply it in your own life. You’ll learn mindsets, habits, and practices that are crucial for success in any field. Consistency over intensity. Fundamentals over fads. Progress over perfection. Over and over again.

What’s included?

• 52 weekly independent reflections and tools, each with practical applications

• In-depth exercises for the most crucial mindsets and habits

• The definitive book on excellence—the New York Times bestseller, beloved by the world’s top athletes, musicians, doctors, creatives, entrepreneurs, coaches, and leaders.

Only 1000 spots left! Learn more and get yours today:

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Syllabus:

​Thanks so much for continuing to engage in the work. I hope you love the program.

-- Brad

One of the biggest lies of modern life is that in order to be happy you need to be “balanced.” It’s sold to us by the self-help industrial complex—whose purveyors, it’s worth noting, are never remotely balanced themselves.

Driven people should treat life in seasons instead of trying to balance everything every single day.

Living in seasons means a few years where you focus substantially on your craft. A few years where you commit to a physical challenge. A window when family takes priority by a mile. Then maybe another window where you go all-in on work again. A year or two for a big creative project. And so on.

Great outcomes in any area of life require making tradeoffs. It’s okay to deprioritize travel because of work. It’s okay to work less because of family. It’s okay not to be everything always.

Living in seasons makes life richer and more exhilarating. You get to experiment and learn and grow and know different parts of yourself.

The times in my own life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the least balanced. Falling in love. Writing a book. Trekking in the Himalayas. Training to set a personal record in the deadlift. Caring for an infant.

During these bouts of full-on living I was completely consumed by what I was doing. Trying to be balanced—devoting equal proportions of time and energy to other areas of my life—would have diluted the formative experiences. It would have made my life less complete.

Have you ever met someone who is super interesting and also perfectly balanced?

(I didn’t think so.)

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This isn’t permission to completely neglect important parts of your life. But it is permission to drop the weight of balance, to let yourself go all in on the things that matter to you in different seasons of your life.

How do you go all in without blowing up your entire life?

I like to think about having minimum effective doses for each of the important parts of my identity: family, craft, fitness, and friends. This means when I’m focused predominantly on one of those things, I still make sure to spend enough time and energy on the others so as not to leave them completely behind.

Family time goes down during a book launch, but it never goes to zero. Work suffered massively when my kids were infants, but I did enough to stay sharp. When I’m going after a fitness goal and training hard, I don’t have as much energy for anything else. This is just how it goes, and I’m okay with it. If I tried to be great at everything always, I’d be leaving so much on the table and fighting against my own nature.

In all my years researching and writing on excellence, craft, and performance, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: When you look at the highest performing and most satisfied people and zoom in on any one moment of their life, they don’t look very balanced. They are almost always going full steam on one, or maybe two, things. But when you zoom out and look across their entire life, they actually start to appear quite balanced. Their balance is sequential, not simultaneous.

The big shift is acknowledging that, actually, you can’t have it all. Part of being a mature adult is making tradeoffs.

Stop thinking about balance as optimizing sleep, family, work, fitness, friends, creativity, and so on every single day. Start thinking about balance in terms of years, or even decades. Think about having different seasons of life for giving your all to different things.

This post was excerpted from my latest book, The Way of Excellence. If you found it valuable, you’ll love the book.

The things that work, work great—until they get in the way. So much of life is not this or that but this and that. It’s called non-dual thinking. It describes when two truths can exist at once. Here are some of the most important examples.

Intensity and Joy

There’s a misconception that you need to suffer for greatness. But having fun is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. You can work hard with a smile on your face. Intensity and joy can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

Confidence and Humility

Confidence comes from giving yourself the evidence that you belong. It allows you to trust your training, own your seat, and let it rip. Confidence also leads to humility, because in the process of amassing evidence, you confront your limits over and over again. There’s always more to learn, always room to grow.

Process and Outcome

Anyone who says results don’t matter is selling you a lie. Results absolutely matter. It’s normal to want to succeed. However, it’s also true that all the internal satisfaction and fulfillment comes in the pursuit, not the attainment of a goal. The top of the mountain matters—but it’s narrow, and all the life is on the sides.

Self-Discipline and Self-Kindness

Doing hard things is hard. It takes guts to put yourself out there and step into the arena. You need discipline. You also need to be able to get back up after you fall, which is inevitable for all of us. It’s easier when you have your own back.

Hard Work and Rest

Hustle culture is shallow, gimmicky, and obsessed with performative grinding. It burns bright and then burns out. Genuine high performers work extremely hard but they also make time to rest and recover. They understand that lasting growth emerges from a cycle of stress and rest, experience and reflection.

Head and Heart

There are massive benefits to logical thinking. Feeling aren’t facts. The ability to step back, evaluate situations rationally, and respond not react are crucial skills. There are also massive benefits to developing intuition and feeling your way forward. After all, the states we long for most—flow, joy, love—are feelings. In Eastern philosophy there is a Sanskrit word citta which translates to “heart-mind,” or the unification of logic and emotion. leads to our wisest actions and our richest lives.

Consistency and Adaptability

Your ability to be relentlessly consistent over the long-haul depends upon your ability to be adaptable day-to-day. This doesn’t mean go wherever the current takes you. But it does mean that you can’t be rigid. Strength without flexibility is rigidity. Flexibility without strength is instability.

Success and Failure

Not a single person in the history of the universe who has accomplished anything great has avoided failure. Failure sucks. Failure hurts. Failure is inevitable. You don’t have to like it, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there and risk it. If you want to succeed you need the guts to fail.

Caring Deeply and Non-Attachment

A full and textured life requires caring deeply, stepping into the arena, and giving it your all. But it also requires embracing a next-play mentality. Whatever happened is in the past. Move on. Play the game in front of you. Care deeply... and be willing to let go.

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When LeBron James announced he’ll be returning to play basketball next year with the Philadelphia 76ers, he talked about love.

“I thought I was done when the season ended. I wasn't ready to announce it, and I knew I needed some time to really decide, but I was pretty sure I played my last game. I was honest at that last press conference when I said I needed to look at myself and deicide if I still love this game,” he wrote.

James said that he’s not returning for the money, as evidenced by his reduced salary. He’s also not returning for the limelight—the guy is already more famous than anyone in the world, save maybe Taylor Swift, Lionel Messi, or Cristiano Ronaldo.

“What am I really playing for at this point?” James asked rhetorically.

“I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work. I still want to grind. I still want to compete, and I still want to have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.”

He put it plainly: “I still truly love this game, and I have more to give”

Love The Process And The Process Loves You Back

Earlier this year, another larger-than-life figure in the basketball world, someone I’ve gotten to know a bit and whom I admire greatly, was also contemplating retirement. When Steve Kerr decided to return as coach of the Golden State Warriors, he did for the same reason as James. He didn’t want to give up on the feeling of pouring his all into the game and trying to win a championship.

“A great basketball team stands on a shared feeling more than strategy or scouting. The team lives as long as the feeling lives and when it's gone, not only is it impossible to recapture, it's hard to even remember,” wrote Wright Thompson in an incredible piece on Kerr’s decision for ESPN. “They weren't chasing titles, only the feeling of saddling up one last time together, wanting most of all to feel justified when the ride is done.”

In that same piece, the word love occurs twenty-five times.

But then again, what is excellence if not caring deeply and paying attention and repeated practice and overcoming failure and staying curious and steadfast dedication and feeling the highs and lows and showing up again and again—which is to say it’s a lot like love.

People usually think about intimacy as being in a relationship with another person. But you can also develop intimacy with an activity or craft. It’s a sense of familiarity, respect, and attentiveness that helps you feel connected to what you’re doing, and to yourself. It’s being in the pocket of a deadlift, song, or painting; total immersion in developing an idea or refining a skill; losing yourself in the slipstream of a team trying to win a championship.

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A Lesson for Us All

James’ returning to basketball is going to require grind and sacrifice. But that’s the point. The reason you feel love for the process is not in spite of what you put into it but because of what you put into it. It’s true in basketball and it’s true for essentially everything else in life.

It’s an important realization, especially now. People are increasingly content to outsource their work, leisure, and even romantic lives to artificial intelligence. It might make life easier, more comfortable, more convenient, and more efficient. But it doesn’t make life better. If anything, it makes life worse because it alienates you from the very feelings that you crave most, feelings like intimacy and love.

It’s not just James and Kerr. It’s all of us.

When you work hard at something, when you throw your all into a process, that process becomes an expression of your very essence. Musicians, coaches, teachers, physicians, leaders, writers, parents, and of course athletes all know this to be true.

The reason I write is because AI can’t make me feel what it’s like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy-ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words. There are tools that can lift more weight. More efficiently. More easily. But that’s not the point. The point is the experience, the feeling of being alive; the feeling intimacy and, on a good day, when the gym community is at my back, maybe even something like love.

These feelings are, at root, what make us human. They separate us from machines. Build your life around them. Protect them. Cherish them.

I distinctly remember being a kid on my dad’s 40th birthday and thinking how old that is. Well, here I am. The good news is that it doesn’t feel so old. As people say, age is just a number. (My sense is the older you get, the more you like saying that, and the truer it becomes.)

Anyways, I put together some reflections and lessons I’ve learned so far. I am going to do my best to imperfectly hold myself to these over the next decade. Hopefully you find a few valuable as well.

1. The best way to stay sane in a batshit crazy world is to find the people and activities you love and give them your all.

2. People think you need to feel good to get going, but often it’s the opposite: you need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good. This is especially important if you are in a tough season of life. Just. Get. Started. It’s how you give yourself a chance.

3. When you are facing doubt, fear, or insecurity, a good litmus test is to ask yourself: will making this decision shrink my life or enlarge it?

4. The worst way to be happy is by trying to be happy all the time. When I am deep into a book project, at week nine of a challenging twelve-week training cycle in the gym, or coaching my son’s basketball team, I wouldn’t say I am happy. Yet there are few things I’d rather be doing and few feelings I’d rather have. These pursuits give my life texture. What I am is fulfilled.

5. There are going to be periods of darkness. Nobody escapes life unscathed. Stay patient with yourself. Keep showing up. Don’t be scared to ask for help.

6. We live in a world characterized by persistent, fleeting distractions. Be sure to carve out space for things that are concrete and timeless: good books, good music, good art, good friends.

7. Doing the hard thing today usually makes tomorrow a bit easier—the workout, the difficult conversation, the outline you’ve been putting off. If you are able, just get it done. You’ll rest easier at night.

8. The person you marry is the most important decision you make. My wife is my editor, confidant, lover, parent of my children, and most importantly, my absolute best friend in the world. It doesn’t mean things are always easy, but my goodness, I can’t imagine life without her.

9. Don’t gamble away your self-worth in an existential casino—likes, shares, followers, comments; sometimes this stuff matters professionally, but it doesn’t mean shit for who you really are.

10. Life hardens and softens you at the same time. You need loads of self-discipline and loads of self-kindness. The latter makes the former sustainable.

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11. Build an identity house that has more than one room. If you live in a house that only has one room—for example: athlete, parent, writer, or physician—and that one room floods, you have to move out of the house. But if you live in a house with multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage. It’s important to have more than one room, because you never know when you’ll need to find strength and stability in the others.

12. It’s almost always better to be kind than clever.

13. You are not going to be the best anything with an attitude of nonchalance. It’s a cop-out, a way to avoid making yourself vulnerable to failure. But if you never give anything your all, then you sacrifice so much of what makes life worth living. Try hard and give a damn.

14. No feeling is final. In the moment it seems that way, but your brain plays tricks on you. Impermanence is a fact of life. Unfortunately, this is true for the good times. Fortunately, this is true for the bad times too.

15. Eat your fruits and vegetables. When you forget, simply begin again.

16. Competence is so important. It doesn’t matter what the thing is—basketball, guitar, watercolor, public speaking, writing, running—what matters is that you develop skill and strive for progress at something. Competence is good for your soul.

17. Think about jobs in terms of three factors: lifestyle, intellectual or physical stimulation, and money. Almost no job will give you all three, but a good job gives you two.

18. There is no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. We see the finished product but overlook the months, years, and at times decades of work that went into it. Don’t compare your first draft to someone else’s final draft.

19. Being a parent is the most exhausting joy that there is.

20. You cannot have it all, no matter how much you try. Anyone who tells you that you can have it all is lying. Life is about tradeoffs.

21. There is no better value than reading a good book, something that is becoming increasingly rare these days. Schedule time to read. Read on planes. Read on the beach. Read on trains. Be the counterculture.

22. Do not feel guilty about resting. If you are a driven, type-A pusher, sometimes going easy is harder than going hard. But if you never go easy, eventually you run yourself into the ground.

23. Consistency is more important than intensity. The little behaviors you do over and over compound to create something big. Be the person who shows up—at work, in community, in relationships. Become known for your consistency.

24. You are a product of your environment. So much of how you show up is contingent on what is around you. A good life requires creating micro-ecosystems that support your values amid a macro-ecosystem (junk food, junk content) that often works against them.

25. If you want to focus deeply, then you need to remove your phone. Not face down on the table. Not “silenced” in your pocket. But somewhere else altogether. During family dinners, the phone is on another floor. During blocks of writing or reading it’s in another room. This habit will do more for your quality of life than willpower ever will.

26. The things that work, work—until they get in the way. This is true for tools, trackers, and even mindsets and routines. Use it while it’s working, but don’t be scared to let go once it’s no longer serving you.

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27. That you must suffer for greatness is a dangerous lie. Having fun is the best competitive advantage there is. Joy and intensity can coexist.

28. The secret is there is no secret. If anyone tells you they’ve got the secret, that’s a good sign to run in the opposite direction.

29. It’s important to stay abreast of what is happening in the world, but when you start treating news like entertainment or an action television show, consider directing your time and energy elsewhere.

30. People don’t think about you nearly as much as you think people think about you because they are too busy worrying about what people are thinking about them.

31. Depression hates a moving target. Just because you stay busy or exercise doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t experience depression, but it’s the best prevention there is.

32. Ten of the most underrated words: I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that.

33. There is no greater illusion than thinking the achievement of some goal will change your inner life. What will change your inner life is the person you become along the way. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides.

34. All big successes require at least some good luck, which, by definition, you cannot control. But you can increase your surface area for getting lucky. You do this by working hard and staying in the game.

35. Complicated routines are overrated. It’s better to have a few things you do each day, a few things you do each week, and a few things you do each month. Avoid majoring in the minors when what you should be doing is keeping the main things the main things.

36. Sleep when you are tired.

37. You are not the stuff inside your head. You are the awareness that decides what to do with the stuff inside your head. The ability to choose which thoughts to pursue and which to leave behind is key to everything. You don’t have to believe everything you think.

38. Doing hard things that align with your values is one of the most satisfying and underrated things. You gain discipline, self-respect, and self-confidence. You gain evidence that you can navigate discomfort. It’s highly fulfilling.

39. Stop trying to be perfect. It’s such a f*cking drain. That’s not permission to drop your standards altogether. It means being realistic. It means remembering you are a human, not a robot. It means being decent, giving what you’ve got, and showing up as best you can.

40. Do good work. Love good people. Don’t be an asshole.
That about sums it up.

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When asked about his creative process, director of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan said, “I treat every film I do like the last I’ll ever make—and one day I will be right… So every time I want to put everything into the project at hand. I’m never thinking, ‘Well, I’ll save this for the next one.’ I don’t ever want to think like that. I want each movie to be everything.”

Everyone is talking about The Odyssey. I think that’s because in an era of automation, shortcuts, and slop we crave hard-won care and competence.

Nolan has achieved everything a filmmaker could dream. He won an Oscar for Best Director in 2024. His movies have grossed more than 6 billion dollars. And yet, he still returns to each project with a desire to further his craft and make something awesome. Three decades into his career, at age 55, he’s outdone even himself.

The Odyssey was shot differently than any feature film before. It’s the first movie to be filmed entirely with IMAX cameras. The cameras had to be reloaded with film every three minutes. Nolan avoided using green screens, even though it would have made filming easier. Crews faced nasty weather and rugged terrain during the 91-day shoot across Greece, Iceland, Morocco, Italy, and Scotland. All told, the movie required two million feet of footage.

When asked by Jon Stewart how he managed to finish shooting the film 9 days early, Nolan said, “By day 91 we couldn't have taken another step. So we finished (at) the right time. We were done. Everybody was done. I mean people were just exhausted.”

Nolan obsesses over quality and craft. It explains why so many are gravitating toward the film, and why it’s opening to enormous anticipation. Amid the shallows, deep effort and craftsmanship stand out. It feels this way even more than it did five years ago. People are sick of an ephemeral stream of junk content. People are sick of half-assed, highly-automated effort. People are sick of half-assed, highly-automated lives. The Odyssey flies in the face of all this.

The story itself encapsulates what the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls “The Hero’s Journey.” Someone goes out on a quest, faces trials and tribulations, and returns home a better and stronger person. I think, at root, we all crave this too.

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It’s not just that the movie he made is emblematic of the hero’s journey, but Nolan’s own career too. He’s on a quest to be the best at his craft that he can possibly be. He doesn’t let an opportunity to learn go to waste. Nolan has said that even his early corporate-video work—throwing up lights to shoot in-house interviews with executives—was teaching him his craft.

Thirty years later, no one was forcing him to do months of relentless prep for The Odyssey. No one forced him to tour remote villages or to make every effect as practical as possible. Nolan did it because he takes responsibility for his craft. He values the art. He values his audience. He values himself.

Therein lies an incredible lesson: when you give something your all you take responsibility for it. You face the very real chance of failure and accept the outcome, whatever it may be. “I can't blame the studio or anything like that—if the film doesn't work, it's my fault. If I fail, I fail on my own terms.” Nolan says of his work.

The Odyssey resonates because both the end result and the process that created it speak to something in all of us: we are starved for depth; we yearn to go on quests; we desire competence; we want to throw ourselves into big, scary, challenges that shape our character; we long to spend our finite time putting our all into things that matter.

Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly been frustrated by the moral failures and out-of-touch actions of politicians, major business executives, and other conventionally “successful” knowledge workers. Certainly not all, but many of these people have repeatedly let us down, among them: Elon Musk, Senate candidate Graham Platner, and, of course, President Donald Trump.

After one recent letdown, searching for some solace, I texted an old, wise, and longtime mentor of mine. This was the crux of that conversation:

Me: I can’t believe there are so many egotistical jerks. Why do all these people just completely lose touch? What is it about money or power or status that turns you into an asshole? Is it unavoidable?

Mike: I am getting more weight equipment.

We didn’t talk much further on the topic, because we didn’t need to. I immediately knew, and later confirmed, exactly what Mike was saying: lifting weights helps keep you from becoming an egotistical jerk. It keeps you down to earth.

Weight lifting, of course, is just one of many activities in the real world that can help keep you from losing touch with reality. Cycling, swimming, gardening, hiking, climbing, and sculpting are just a few other examples.

In researching and reporting my new book, I came across a common theme among peak performers who are also grounded: they regularly do real and difficult things, and as a result, they regularly practice humility and gain deep, lasting fulfillment.

When the barbell drops, it drops. When you want to run under three hours for the marathon but go 3:04, the result is right in your face. It is hard to get out of touch with the world—or to become full of yourself—when you are working hard on something concrete, when your successes are earned, and your failures cannot be rationalized by corporate mumbo jumbo or social media hot takes. Doing real things in the world provides gravity, both literally and figuratively.

Confidence Through Mastery

Throwing yourself into real activities not only helps keep you grounded, but it is also good for your brain, body, and spirit. Pursuing mastery, a kind of gradual progress where tangible results can be traced back to oneself, increases self-reliance and self-confidence. Decades of research on self-determination theory demonstrate that mastery is a core input to mental health, overall well-being, and life satisfaction.

Doing real things also affords you the experience of living in a smaller and simpler world, if only for a few hours. Compared to the complex, frantic, frenetic, and interconnected digital environment that occupies so much of a knowledge worker’s life these days, a squat workout, mountain-bike ride, or trail run are a lot more manageable. In these pursuits, you are the main factor that determines the outcome, and whatever obstacles you face are directly in front of you.

This is a lot closer to how our species evolved. It’s no wonder these sorts of activities, though often objectively harder than sitting at a desk, in many ways feel so much easier—and more aligned with oneself.

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Satisfaction Through Competence

In the past I’ve referenced the work of the philosopher Matthew Crawford, who writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge-economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”

Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need at least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors.

Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, or on their next deadlift, however, and the answer becomes much simpler.

“The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy,” writes Crawford, who in 2001 quit his job in academia to become a mechanic. “It seems to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He simply points: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

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Keeping Cool

One of my most humble coaching clients, Rob, is an executive at a large professional-services firm. I’ve been working with Rob for about six years now. He is supremely understated, at times to a fault. During corporate fire drills, when his colleagues are freaking out, he maintains calm and equanimity.

Rob is also a diehard woodworker.

This is not a coincidence. When you are building tables in your basement, you are going to get humbled over and over and over again. Tables either stand or they don’t. You can’t just use your power or money or relevance or fame or anger to make a shoddy table stand. Instead, you’ve got to keep your cool as you adjust the table and work toward a solution.

I’ve got clients who are ultra-runners and mountain climbers, and they are much the same.

Make no mistake, nothing I’ve written above is a cure-all. Some people do real things in the world and yet are still miserable, egotistical jerks. But it seems increasingly likely that one powerful way to stay in touch with reality, especially as you rise, is to stay in touch—quite literally—with reality.

Not by spending all day talking to a sycophantic AI bot, posting on X, attending Zoom calls, or joining fancy board meetings. Not by endlessly refreshing your bank account or stocks. But rather by doing actual, real, hard things in the world.