Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
One of the themes we’ve circled in the past few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called “How Metrics Make Us Miserable.” Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status: numbers. The university departments were ranked by status: more numbers. Individual researchers had their own H-scores and other public quantifications of prestige: numbers, numbers, and numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of “I want to answer the world’s deepest questions” becomes replaced by the external value of “make number go up.”
What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing our values and replacing them with something outside us—synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let’s call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life but work only on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy you’ll never see … that’s the machine. If you’re a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world but ends up just focusing on rage-bait political news because that’s what YouTube fingers are clicking on, that’s the machine.
What’s the opposite of the machine? It’s something a little different than success. It’s success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that try to crush them. Today’s guest, Brad Stulberg, calls it: excellence. Today’s podcast is about excellence.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Brad Stulberg explore the growing sense of alienation that people feel from their own lives and values.
Derek Thompson: It’s great to see you. So why don’t you tell people who do not know you who you are and what you do?
Brad Stulberg: Yeah, I’m Brad, and I wear three primary hats. The first hat that I wear is—
Thompson: Is the Detroit Tigers.
Stulberg: I guess I wear four primary hats. A Detroit Tiger fan, it’s the first hat that I wear—actually wearing the hat, started the season. The second hat I wear is as an author, a writer, where I’m really interested in exploring applied philosophy and human flourishing. I guess now I’m wearing four, because the Tigers hat. The third hat that I wear is a coach. So I work with athletes, physicians, entrepreneurs on their mental skills. And then I’m also on faculty at the University of Michigan, where I lecture in their graduate school of public health on leadership and self-coaching.
Thompson: Your new book is The Way of Excellence, and you’re arguing against two cultural forces here. One cultural force you’re arguing against is alienation, and the other is pseudo-excellence. So let’s talk about each of these enemies of your current project. What’s alienation?
Stulberg: Alienation is a sense of remove that we feel from each other and, in some instances, from ourselves, from our own lives. It is a sense of distance and separation between us and what we’re doing. And we don’t realize how alienated we’ve become in essentially all domains.
I want to tell this story that I had an experience when I was working on the book. And it was a super busy day. It was a weekend. I was shuttling my kids from sports to dance to soccer to basketball. And we finally got to the gas station, and the tank was almost on empty. And I get out of the car, and I’m so relieved—the kids are in the car—that I have two minutes to myself while I fill up at the gas station just to be with myself and to think my own thoughts. And 10 seconds into pumping the gas [in the] car, a woman interrupts me on the screen who is literally telling me everything is figure-outable. And if I just listen to these five steps, I can figure out all my life’s problems. So I can’t even pump my gas without something getting in the way of me and what I’m doing, of thinking my own thoughts and pumping the gas. And I think distraction has become really ubiquitous, and often we talk about distraction, but I think underneath distraction is the sense of alienation or a lack of intimacy in our lives.
Thompson: To a certain extent, I feel like what you’re calling alienation, I think of as the ability to maintain a connection with your inner values in a world that’s constantly trying to pull you away and replace those values with some other value system. So we had this conversation with the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen that you and I talked about that I thought was really interesting and so well-connected to this show. That was about the degree to which we come into this world with our own set of values, and constantly there are metric systems and quantification systems and external bureaucracies that are trying to replace our inner values with an external set of values. Is that close to what you are calling here alienation? The challenge of: How do I make sure that I stay in touch with my own thoughts as I make my way through life?
Stulberg: Yes. I think 100 percent there’s a separateness from your values and who you really are. And then at a more practical level, there’s also just a distance between you and whatever it is that you’re doing. And in many ways, I think the pursuit of excellence is pretty similar to intimacy because you get really close to something, you pay attention, you’re endlessly curious about it. And we often think about intimacy with another person, but you can also have intimacy with a craft. And if we are constantly being distracted or interrupted, it’s hard to find that intimacy. It’s hard to get into the slipstream or the pocket of a creative project or training for a marathon. You’ve cited this on the show: There’s data that shows that Americans are having less physical intimacy, literal intimacy, because their phones are in their bedroom. So it’s just this constant bombardment of external noise that separates us from our inner values and from the things that we pretend to care about being present for.
Thompson: Another way I think to get at this concept of alienation that I found really, really interesting from your book is there’s this idea from, I believe, the [Hungarian-American] psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and this idea is called “flow.” And it’s an experience that people have when they’re playing video games, when they’re playing sports, when they’re having a great conversation at the dinner table with friends, where past anxiety and future anxiety and reminiscence, it all melts away, and you are entirely enmeshed in the here and now. That’s what he’s calling flow, and he thinks of it as one of the higher states of being.
You referenced this idea that was co-named by, I believe, the psychologist Paul Bloom of “shitty flow,” which is the experience of, say, doomscrolling for 30 minutes or being on Netflix and looking for something to watch for 20 minutes and not actually watching anything. And it’s interesting because in shitty flow, time is also melting away. It’s just not melting away in the direction that you would want it to melt. It’s melting away from you. So maybe talk a little bit about this idea of flow versus shitty flow because I thought it was one of the more fun ideas from the book.
Stulberg: Yeah. So people often ask me: How is excellence different from flow? And it’s different in two ways. The first and the simplest way is that flow tends to be an acute state. So you’re in that zone maybe for a couple of minutes, or if you’re lucky, a couple of hours, or maybe even you get into the zone for a day. Whereas the pursuit of excellence encompasses all of the mundane, boring fundamentals that you need to nail to give yourself a chance at flow.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Brad Stulberg
Producer: Devon Baroldi