Transcript of Why You Click With Some People & How to Pursue Anything with Excellence

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Today on Something You Should Know, How Your Cellphone Can Cause a Big Problem Just by Sitting There. Then, the science behind why you just click with some people, but not others.

There are things that can make you less likely to click. You cannot experience synchrony virtually. If you're not in another person's physical presence, you really can't experience synchrony to its fullest and richest extent.

Also, when you have extra money, what do you tend to spend it on? And what it means to pursue something with true excellence?

It means a couple of things, Mike. The first thing that it means is that you have to be okay with making yourself vulnerable in risking failure. So it's one thing to say you're going to give something your all. It's another thing to actually put yourself in the arena and make yourself vulnerable in risk failure.

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Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Caruthers. You know what I've started doing? I've started hiding my phone, and I'll tell you why. Hi, I'm Mike Caruthers. Welcome to something you should know. When I have an important conversation, like dinner out or a meeting with someone, I hide my phone, like fully gone, not face down on the table, not silenced, but gone in my pocket. Here's why. Even if you never touch your phone, just having it on the table changes how people see you. Research shows that people come across as less sincere, less engaged, and less trustworthy when a phone is visible. The weird part is nobody can really explain explain why. They just feel it. Psychologists say it's because a phone on the table sends a quiet signal that this conversation could be interrupted at any moment. Once that idea is in the room, the connection never quite gets off the ground. So if you want someone to feel like they have your full attention, whether you're trying to build trust, make a good impression, or just have a better conversation, don't just silence your phone remove it from sight.

It's a small move, but it instantly makes you seem more present, more likable, and more dialed in, which in a world where everybody is half-distracted all the time is a huge advantage to you. And that is something you should know. There is this magical moment, and I know you've experienced this probably several times, and that experience is this. You meet someone, you talk to them for a little while, and somehow you just click. Instant chemistry, like you were meant to be. Not just in romantic relationships, but in friendships or as work colleagues, too. There's just something about when the two of you are together, you're in sync. It can all be summed up with the phrase, We just clicked. But what does it mean to click? Why do we click with some people and not others? Is it just chance that two people click, or can you make it happen? What if you feel like you click with someone, but they don't feel the same? All of this and more is about to be discussed with my guest, Kate Murphy. She's a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

She's author of a book called Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Syncrony. Hey, Kay, welcome to something you should know.

Well, thank you so much. Happy to be here.

From your point of view as somebody who has studied this, what does it mean to click? What is going on?

Well, it's that feeling of resonance. It can be romantic, it can be platonic, but it's when you meet someone, and it's that instant feeling of ease and attraction, and the conversation is effortless, and you just feel connected.

But is it just a magical moment and that's the end of it? Or is there some science here that can explain why you click with this person, but maybe not that person?

Well, this is something that writers, poets, philosophers have been trying to wrap their heads around for centuries. But it's only recently that scientists have started to wonder what causes that feeling. What is it? Is it pure magic and mystery? But is there something that's identifiable as to what's happening within us when we feel that? Because it is almost physical. When you have that connection, that click, it's almost a whole body experience. And because of advances in technology, they have come to realize that not only do when we have these moments of feeling like we're clicking with someone, not only do we start to mirror one another's facial expressions, postures, and gestures, It's also uncannily we start to sync up our respiration, our heart rate, our pupil dilation, and our hormonal activity. So there's a lot. It's actually measurable. You can see that moment. And when we have these meaningful conversations and have shared experiences, there's also a related and associated sinking of neural patterns and brain waves. So you can actually see, now we can actually see that it's a whole neurophysiological phenomenon beyond just the emotional feelings that we have.

Is part of the definition of clicking that it'd be instant? You know, like click. Because I've had people in my life that I feel like I click with, but it wasn't instantaneous. It took a little time to develop. Not a long time necessarily, but it wasn't instant.

Well, that's What's the thing about clicking? What they call it, what scientists call it is interpersonal synchrony. Just to throw that term out there. Generally, we get a read on people within 30 seconds, less than 30 seconds. But we also move into and out of synchrony with people all the time. Things can change within us, within the other person, the context, just the dynamics, what happened to you right before that instance, that can make us do later click, come to lock into one another. And a lot of it can have to do with just where we are physiologically, but it also can have to do with the context and shared experiences. We all know about, well, maybe we don't all know, but a lot of us have felt the sensation when you do synchronized activities with other people, like maybe singing at church or playing a game with people, walking with one another. That's another thing that scientists have found, that not only do we sink internally, also when we externally sink with other people, like when we're dancing, marching, even finger tapping at the same time. They've shown in experiences, makes people feel a sense of affinity, rapport.

They share more personal information, and they're more likely to be kind and helpful. Even babies strapped into face-forward carriers and bounced in sync with an experimenter, They're much more likely to prefer that experimenter versus an experimenter who is not bouncing in sync with them or who's not bouncing at all. So there are all these factors that can come into whether or not you sync with someone. So like you say, maybe later, when you say maybe they grew on you, maybe you all fell into synchrony later because of your association, because of those conversations that you had that helped you have that neural alignment. But a lot of times, just in the moment, it happens very quickly when you get a read of someone. And it can also go the other way, where you have that immediate experience of like, Oh, the person is off-putting for whatever reason. It's just they're not a good fit. And again, at that moment, at that moment, could change later.

Yeah, but it seems like you could have the same experiences with one person and the same as you do with another person and click with one and not click with another. And as you said, there could be a lot of reasons for that. But when you take away those things like you're playing a game together or you're doing activities together, there still has to be something about that person that seems really hard to put your finger on that is causing you to click with that one and not that one.

Absolutely. No, that's absolutely true. And it's multimodal sinking is, because I've already talked about it's not only these physical things that we do together, it's also all these under the hood things that are happening. The respiration the heart rate, and a lot of things they can't even measure yet. But we have this instinct to sync with another person. We like to connect. That's what feels good. But there is a special alchemy. When you think about all the unlikely friendships and romantic pairings where you think, Oh, I never would have put those two together. Well, they likely wouldn't have either. There is a special alchemy between two people, between the Their bodily oscillations. We're made up of trillions of cells. The way I like to think about it is that we're all like these walking symphony orchestras, and we have all of these instruments playing at different frequencies and different amplitudes. When we meet another person, they have their whole orchestra playing as well. Other people may recognize or appreciate the tune you're playing or just a certain couple of few instruments in your orchestra, and you can sing on certain levels, but not in others.

And there's some where you can just join in in harmony altogether. So it really just depends on where you are in your life, as well as those underlying ineffable factors that causes you to be in tune, to click, to be in harmony. I love all these turns of phrase that people have been saying since well before anybody thought to measure why it was true, but things like in-stepped, in-tune, in-harmony, on the same wavelength, clicking. It's all actually true on all these subconscious and autonomic levels.

But clicking is a two-way street, right? You could be very attracted to someone who has no use for you. I mean, it's a one-way click.

I don't think there's such a thing as a one-way click. And in fact, there really isn't. You can yearn to and want to and hope for, but you haven't clicked with that person. It has to be mutual because that's the feeling that is really so rewarding and uplifting, and it really makes you feel that sense of connection.

Haven't you ever been in a relationship or in a meeting with someone who you thought, Wow, this person It was really great, but it turned out not to be reciprocal, that they didn't feel the same thing you did, and so therefore, nothing goes anywhere.

Exactly. You just didn't click.

Oh, right. So I'm in the pre-click stage when I'm doing that.

You're yearning for it. And I mean, we all want that. We all want to be liked, and we want that sense of connection. But try as you might, you can't make yourself yourself love someone, and also by the same version, you can't make yourself not love someone. So once you've reached that moment of when you have clicked with someone, you can't really undo it. And by the same token of the things that you're talking about, where you want to, you wish you would, but sometimes you're just not a good fit, and that's okay.

We're talking about those special times, those special people in life, where you just click.

And my guest is Kate Murphy, author of the book Why We Click. Of the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts.

So, Kate, knowing what you know, and now that science is looking into why people click and how they click, are there things you can do to nudge it along, or it either happens or it doesn't?

I think a lot of it, it either happens or it doesn't happen. It's that peculiar alchemy. But I will say that you can make yourself more receptive to it and make yourself more available to it happening. Like I mentioned, doing these synchronized activities. When you think back to Aristotle and the parapathetics, there was a reason why he lectured these students while walking around the grounds or why Steve Jobs always invited people he wanted to influence to walk around with him. So there is something about synchronized activities, line dancing, singing, where people just naturally... It makes them more available and makes people more likely to develop affinities for one another. It's the thought that because you are sinking on certain levels, it makes you more likely to sink on those deeper levels. So there's that. There's also being really engaged with other people, being really curious, and being open, and allowing it to happen, to give yourself over to the various signals that we can measure and also can't measure that may be coming from the other person. So it's really making yourself... Actually, just be a good listener, asking questions, and Really allowing yourself to get on the other person's wavelength.

So though at the end of the day, it's really that peculiar alchemy between you and another person, you can make yourself almost It's like, put up your antenna, make sure that you're available and that you really are paying attention to the other person and allowing them in.

Are there people... I'm really curious about this. Are there people Are there people who tend to sync up, who tend to click with a lot of other people or find themselves in positions where lots of people yearn to click with them? There's something about their charisma or their charm that makes them more clickable than others.

Yeah, charisma is the right word. And yes, there are people that just... They tend to have this magnetism, and they tend to actually be able to get people to sync to them, to get on their wavelength. They're not necessarily trying... It's not a mutuality. It's more people are joining their wavelength and clicking with them. They're able to draw people in. And there are people like that that may become politicians, they may become preachers, where They have this ability to really inspire and bring people along with the things that they're thinking. And they may be better at sinking, because I talk about that, because there's a difference between sinking reading with a crowd versus sinking with an individual, reading a room versus reading another person. And so there are different abilities in that sense of being able to Because I think most people have been walked into maybe a party or a performance where you can totally read the crowd. It's not like you're reading each individual, but you're reading the room, the energy in the room. And so some people who have that charisma are mostly better able to deal with large crowds or to do quick sample sinks with other people, but perhaps aren't able to have sustained synchronies with individuals.

You know, as we're talking, it occurred to me, as interesting as this is, on some level, I don't want to hear this. I mean, I don't want to know. I don't want to look too closely because there does seem to be some magic to clicking. Sometimes you don't want to know how the magic trick is performed. I just like the magic to be the magic.

That's one thing I love about this is that it is so peculiar to the two individuals and what they bring, whether it's their history. Because if you think about it, we embody everything that's happened to us without us knowing it. It's in every twitch and neural oscillation within us encompasses who we are. Other people somehow, someway, pick up on that and sync with us, or not. And so there is really some magic to it. Commonalities can help, but not necessarily. There's still that mystery and magic to it. The thing I love about this is that you can actually see it happening and realizing how much we are almost like tuning forks roaming the planet, looking for resonance and finding it or not with other people, and moving into it and out of it with other people. That's what essentially makes up our social lives.

Has there ever been Has a survey done? Has everybody clicked with somebody sometime, more or less? I mean, not everybody, but is it a fairly common experience or is it a fairly uncommon experience?

It's a fairly common experience for most people, but there are things that can make you less likely to click. The research clearly shows that people who have autism or ADHD, that can interfere with synchrony. It's not that you can't click with people, but it makes it a lot harder. Also, some psychological disorders like depression and anxiety and narcissism criticism, can make it more difficult to click with people. So I won't say that... I would hope most people do experience clicking. And when you aren't clicking with people, Well, that's when you have things like loneliness, and what we call this loneliness epidemic. A lot of that also has to do be because you cannot experience synchrony virtually. Because as we've discussed, it is a multimodal phenomenon. It encompasses more senses than the five we take for granted. If you're not in another person's physical presence, you really can't experience synchrony to its fullest and richest extent. And by the way, eye contact is really very important. And the research also shows that when people aren't looking at each other, whether their backs are turned to each other or they're looking at a phone, they're much less likely, and also it's pretty hard, to develop any type of synchrony.

So I think people who are just relying on virtual relationships, you can, to some degree, feel like you've experienced some degree of synchrony, but then often, as often happens in online dating, when people meet face to face, they're sorely disappointed because they're just not feeling it. It's just the click does not happen.

Well, that seems to explain so much right there that you can't click with somebody if you're not physically in the same room with them. It doesn't seem like it would even be possible. And yet people seem to be more distant from others because of phones and things that we don't connect with people. And if you don't connect, you can't sync, you can't click.

And boy, that explains- And even when you're in the same to really be present and notice it, because you have to be aware of notice to be able to have that moment of connection, of clicking with another person. And you bring up another point that when we were talking about those commonalities of experience, we have so few of those now, if you think about it. We're not going to the same movies in a movie theater, and anymore. We're not getting our news from the same sources. We're in our own little curated bubbles of what we're paying attention to. And so when we do come together, there are fewer commonalities, fewer starting points, fewer common neural patterns that we can sync up to and latch onto. And it's not to say we can't eventually, but that clicking It takes more work to get a read on the other person and to try and understand where they're coming from.

Well, as we've been talking, I've been reminiscing as well about the people in the times that I've clicked with someone. I guess partly it's because it is rare. It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens often enough that you remember how magical it is. I really enjoy hearing you explain the science behind how it happens and why it happens I've been talking with Kate Murphy. She's a journalist and author of the book Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchronic. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Kate, great. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. Have a great day.

Thank you, Mike. Same to you.

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When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Kradaraki Empire, which occupies and dominates most of the galaxy's inhabited planets. The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed, leaving countless corpses in their wake. Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways, all hoping to find some small bit of peace amidst a universe thick with violence and oppression. Four decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living. But a friend from the past won't let them move on, and neither will their bitterest enemy. The Stone Wolves is Season 11 of the Galactic Football League science fiction series by author Scott Sigler. Enjoy it as a standalone story, or listen to the entire GFL series beginning with Season 1, The Rookey. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-L-R. I-g-l-e-r, wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a word that comes up a lot when people talk about their careers and their goals in their lives, and the word is excellence.

And on the surface, well, it sounds really good. Who's against excellence? But I've started wondering if we're actually confusing ourselves with that idea. Do you really need to be excellent at everything you do? And what does excellence even mean anymore? Because these days it feels like we're all expected to crush it at work, optimize our health, be amazing partners, great parents, perfectly really balanced humans, all at the same time. If that's excellence, that's exhausting. According to my guest, a lot of what we chase in the name of excellence isn't excellence at all. It's what he calls pseudo-excellence. It looks impressive from the outside, but it doesn't actually lead to satisfaction, meaning, or sustained success. Brad Stullberg studies this for a living. He coaches people on performance, well-being, and what he calls sustainable excellence, the kind that actually holds up over time instead of burning you out. He's also the author of the book The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. Hey, Brad. Welcome.

Mike, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me.

First, help us understand what excellence is and what excellence isn't.

I think that there is a lot of confusion between what I call pseudoexcellence and actual excellence. So pseudo excellence is so much of what you see on social media, where folks think that they need to be perfect at everything. They need to wake up at 4: 00 in the morning. They need to have a 37-step routine in a super restrictive diet and take a cold plunge four times a day and on and on and on. And the question there is, what's it all for? What's the 37 step routine serving? What's the cold plunge doing? Are you just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things? That, to me, is pseudo excellence. I think genuine excellence is, again, when the mountain that you're climbing is one that you chose because it aligns with your values and it's one that you genuinely want to climb. The reason that I think that, yes, this is for everyone, it's not just for elite athletes or master chefs or Grammy-winning musicians, is because so many people that I spoke with in the reporting process said that they have a sense of longing in in their lives and a sense of going through the motions and almost numbness.

When you pursue excellence, when you are serious about an activity, when that activity becomes a craft, one of the greatest rewards that you'll ever get from it, more than any medal or any income or any promotion, is a sense of satisfaction that you've gained skill and you've gained competence.

A lot of the things, though, that people have to do, and maybe in the big picture, they have to... There are things they want to do, but the day-to-day This stuff isn't stuff I love to do. I have to pay the bills. I have to... These aren't things that seem to require excellence, or do they?

I think that the answer here is it depends. Some of us are really fortunate to have a livelihood that very much aligns with our values, where we can pursue excellence and mastery in our work. Some of us don't, and that's totally okay. I think another big misconception is that excellence is just a pursuit that is professional. If you If you don't like your job, well, then you're never going to have an opportunity to have excellence in your life. Especially in America, I think that we often ask people, What do you do? We over-identify with our work. For some people, work is just that. It's a way to pay the bills. It's a way to open yourselves up to other leisure pursuits. But that's where you get to pursue excellence. You can pursue excellence as a musician. You can do it as a baker. You can do it as an athlete. It's not a standard. It's not saying that you need to be world-class. It's the way that you approach the craft. You approach it with focus, you approach it with dedication, with commitment, with consistency, and you get better over time. I think the way that I train in the gym, for example, is very much aligned with this excellence.

Am I ever going to win an Olympic medal for power lifting? Of course not. But I take it seriously. I make progress. I give it my all. And not only am I working towards that goal of lifting more weight, but that goal of lifting more weight is also working on me. It's shaping me as a person. And And none of this is related to my day job.

So talk about doing this in a real way and maybe comparing it to somebody who doesn't do it in an excellent way. But just moment by moment, day to day, how is it different to do something with excellence versus not? It's one thing to talk about, well, you give it your all and you do the best. But what does that mean?

It means a couple of things, Mike. The first thing that it means that you have to be okay with making yourself vulnerable in risking failure. Just about everybody can remember there were kids back in high school that were too cool to try. They phoned it in in gym class, they sat in the back row, they never tried in music, and they did it because they were way too cool. But the truth is, they weren't too cool. What they were is they were insecure and they were scared to fail. Instead of giving something their all and making themselves vulnerable to failure, they just never tried. I think So many adults have yet to outgrow this tendency. It's one thing to say that you care. It's one thing to say you're going to give something your all. It's another thing to actually put yourself in the arena and make yourself vulnerable and risk failure. You don't get excellence unless you're willing to do the latter. That's the first thing. The second thing is really approaching what you do with an intentionality and a focus around it. Excellence is the opposite of going through the motions. You want to be extremely present for what you're doing.

In the modern world, that often means you have to design your environment to help you become more present. Depending on what your activity is, it might mean leaving the phone behind. It might mean trying to select certain people to do it with. It might mean having a 10-minute prep session where you get into the right head space to approach your craft. But it really demands a level of intention and focus that feels different than just the going through the motions of everyday life. Then I think the third factor that is really important is consistency. It's less about a commitment to intensity, and it's more about a commitment to consistency and to showing up again and again over time. As you do that, the relationship that you forge, not only with your activity, but also with yourself, becomes that intrinsic reward that keeps you coming back.

But don't you ever have days where you just go through the motions? I just don't have it today, and it's okay.

Oh, absolutely. To deny that is really to deny our humanity. We're not optimized robots. We're people doing the best we can in a chaotic world. I think there the practice becomes, how do you try to stop a bad day from becoming a bad week? Then when you have a bad week, how do you try to stop a bad week from becoming a bad month? There's this concept that I think is so important, and it's called Raising the floor. Oftentimes, we think about, Well, how can we make our great days better? We all index on our best days. But the truth is, we don't often control when our best days are going to happen. For all that we know about human performance, there's a lot of magic to it. But what we don't think about, nearly as much as our bad days. How can we make our bad days just a little bit better? Or as I was saying earlier, how can we ensure that one bad day doesn't ruin the rest of our week. I think that all that is part of the practice, too. Yes, it's a long-winded answer to your original question. We are absolutely going to have bad days.

Everyone does. But then the practice becomes, well, how can you get curious about why you had that bad day and how can you try to short-circuit it from ruining the rest of your week.

Help me understand how to raise that floor. How do you make a bad day not so bad?

I think it's just about being in the moment, acknowledging that, all right, it's just not there today. In the moment, what you can do is you can tell yourself, All right, I'm acknowledging that it's just not there today. I don't feel my best. What's the best I have to give today? It's quickly acknowledging what's happening, not denying it, not resisting it, not trying to power through, and then adjusting your expectations for what you have to give, giving it, and then not beating yourself up after. Because what happens when you beat yourself up is then you get into this guilt and this shame spiral, and that's when a bad day becomes a bad week. Whereas if you can just say, All right, it wasn't there today. I adjusted. I gave it my best shot. I'm going to rest. I'm going to recover. I'm going to try to get a good night's sleep, and we'll see what happens again tomorrow.

Do you have to enjoy the activity to be good at it, to be excellent at it? Because the gym is a good example because I go to the gym a lot. I don't like I like going. I like the feeling of leaving, the feeling you get after it's over. But going there, it's just become a habit that I feel worse if I don't go than if I do, so I have to go. But I don't love the experience. I do it, I keep track and all that, but you know what I mean?

Yeah. What I would say is that you're going to the gym for probably a different reason. My guess is you're going to the gym because you value your health. You probably value your cognitive health because your brain is your greatest asset and you've got a really good one on your head and inside your skull. So you're probably not pursuing excellence in the gym. I would turn that around, though, Mike, and say, what about when you podcast and when you're in the pocket of just recording a really good episode or a good string of episodes or where you feel like the last month you've just been putting out bangers? My guess is that you enjoy that a lot more. And this is the area of your life where you're excellent and where you're pursuing excellence. And that's okay. It's unrealistic to try to be excellent at everything because you're not going to be excellent at everything. But in order to really be great at something, yes, you have to enjoy it. I think this is another one of these misnoms with pseudo excellence. You have all these guys on the internet and they run around pretending to be Navy Seals talking about how great they are at suffering and how hard everything is.

Guess what? No elite athlete, no elite artist, no great writer, hates writing or doing sports or making art. They might find it really challenging. They might find it very hard. They might have bad days. But the totality of the experience, of course they like it. Because if If you don't enjoy what you do, if you don't have fun, then you're not going to last very long. There's this enormous misnomer that intensity and joy are separate in their opposites. But what I found in my reporting and my research is that actually intensity and joy can often coexist. You can bring your all and be really intense about something and have a great time doing it. When you have that combination, that's when really good things tend to happen.

Do you bring this to everything you do that you enjoy? I mean, if you're going to scramble an egg, are you this intense about it, or this is for a few select things in your life?

It's got to be for a few select things. I think that, as I was saying, if you try to bring this to everything. You're just going to burn yourself out, and you're probably not going to enjoy or be very excellent at any of the things. I think this is for one or at most, two things in your life. A lot of people have a primary craft, and then maybe there's a secondary craft. In my own life, I bring this most to writing. That's my craft. I'm very lucky. It's also my profession. Then as an athlete, I try to train with this mindset most of the time, but certainly not all the time because it's secondary. There are times when I'm in the gym and I'm checking my email in between sets because it's not my job and that's okay. If I tried to do this when I was scrambling an egg, I think I'd be miserable and burnt out all the time. Then there are things in life that we should just enjoy for their own sake. I'm not trying to be excellent at watching Netflix. Sometimes I watch Netflix just because I like it.

I am not arguing that we should be perfectionists and we should be these type A buttoned up pushers in every domain of life. What I'm arguing is that we should pick one or two activities that we do enjoy and that we want to push ourselves in, not just because we're excited about the results, but because we think that the person we're going to become along the way is aligned with our values, and we should bring this orientation to those select activities.

When you say there is a benefit to that, what does that look like? Is it a feeling? What is it?

I think that it is a connection to yourself in a feeling of deep satisfaction in fulfillment. Without getting too philosophical, I think that one of the biggest challenges or problems of modern life is alienation. Alienation is just a fancy way of saying we feel a disconnect from each other, we feel a disconnect from ourselves, ourselves, and sometimes we feel a disconnect from our own lives. We're going through the motions. We're constantly distracted. I think that when you pursue excellence, you get really close to a craft, you get intimate with it, it requires deep focus, You get competence, you get mastery. Not only do you get to learn that craft in a deep way, but you also get to learn about yourself. I think that that intrinsic reward is really the whole point of the entire endeavor.

Is this a good way to determine if you're maybe not so good at something? If you give something your all and you're not happy with the results, maybe this isn't you.

Yeah, that's right. It's totally okay to quit. There's a lot of talk about grit, and grit is really important. It's passion, it's perseverance, it's stick-to-itiveness, and you absolutely need grit. But you also need fit. Fit means that the activity that you're doing is one that you have some natural ability for, that your temperament is suited towards, and that you enjoy. If you don't have fit, then it makes no sense to lean into grit. What you need to do is quit. All these words rhyme, which is nice, but it's not just soft and fluffy. This is a real important concept. It makes sense to try a bunch of things to quit early and often until you find an activity where the fit is there, where you like it, and even when it's hard, you find satisfaction in doing the hard thing. At that point, you want to lock in and you want to have stick intuitiveness and grit and persevere. I know this in my own life. If I think back to my schooling, I was not at all gritty in math and science. I quit math and science pretty early. I was not very good at them, and I didn't like it.

I was a very gritty writer. Why? Because I had some natural talent and I was good at it. I think it's important to know ourselves to the extent we can to try to be discerning about when are we going to lean in and really buckle up and bear down versus when are we actually going to quit and try something else that we might enjoy more and we might be better at and we might learn more from.

There's a perception, I think people have, that to be excellent, you have to be really intense and give 110% all the time to be excellent at something. And it seems impossible, and I can use myself as an example. I've been doing this podcast for almost 10 years now, and I think I try to bring a lot of excellence to what I do. But it isn't like it used to be in the beginning where I was so intense because I didn't know really what I was doing and I was trying everything and being very intentional and intense about it. I'm much less intense and more relaxed now, but I still think I'm doing it as excellent a job as I can.

Intensity doesn't mean any given moment or any given day. I think it's the totality of the It's the body of work. When you zoom out and you say, Let's look at the last decade of your work, I'd say it's been a pretty intense effort. It's definitely been a consistent effort. The body of work is heroic. Are you going to feel like you're heroic today, tomorrow, the next day? No, probably not. That's actually for good reason, because if you brought that level of energy every single day, you probably wouldn't be able to stay consistent. I think that people make these two mistakes around intensity. The first is, again, the intensity and joy can't coexist, and that's just not true. The second is, I think people often overrate intensity because they see the all-nighter, or they see the person who works out till they puke, and they think like, Oh, that's awesome. That feels so good to just really give it your all. And they underrate Consistency. Consistency is the showing up day in and day out and actually showing some restraint, because if you push way too hard, then you're never going to be able to get back and do it again for a long period of time.

You say that focus is very important for excellence. You must focus. But what does that mean? What does it mean to focus?

Focus in today's world, to me, it's really actually quite simple. Simple doesn't mean easy, but it's simple. It is just removing all the attention vampires in perpetual distraction devices that we otherwise surround ourselves with. Turning off your email client, putting your phone in another room, turning off the television if it's on, really digital devices in particular, these are the attention of empires. They just suck away our attention. When we want to do meaningful, focused work, we need to remove these things. Willpower is never going to be enough. I know you've had prior guests who have pointed this out, that the way that these devices are designed, it's just way too strong and willpower is not enough. What we have to do is we have to say, All right, when I sit down to write, that's important for the next hour and a half, I want to be really focused. That means that my phone is going to be charging in the basement. It's not even going to be on the same floor as me, and I'm going to turn off my email client. I'm not going to minimize it. I see the little mail icon pop up and then have to resist checking it.

I'm actually going to hit the X and quit the program for an hour and a half. I think that we need to think about designing our environment to enable us to focus. Then focus, to me, is just the absence of distraction. Again, it's simple, but simple does not mean easy, especially in today's world.

From talking with people, what is it you think is the toughest part of this, of really grabbing something and going for it and being excellent at it?

The initial resistance it takes to get started with something, especially when you're novice and you're not too good, and facing that initial resistance and expecting that the first couple of weeks or the first month of a commitment to excellence in anything is going to feel pretty hard and challenging and at times uncomfortable. You are going to make yourself vulnerable to looking stupid or to failing. Once you get through that initial resistance, then I think that the satisfaction, which is a word I keep using because that's the big reward, the satisfaction of trying really hard, getting intimate with a craft, making progress is so great that it keeps you coming back. But it's the initial resistance. It's the, Hey, like you said, I work a job. I'm an accountant at a big firm. I don't really care about being excellent at that. I think I'm good. I'm well respected. I pay the bills, I pay rent. But man, I haven't played guitar since I was in high school, and it's going to be hard to pick it back up. I'm not going to be as good. It's all of that that we just have to get over and throw ourselves into a craft.

Otherwise, our leisure time is just going to be filled with scrolling TikTok, and that doesn't make for a very fulfilling life.

Well, ever since that book came out decades ago, In Search of Excellence, it's become such a buzzword. We've got to bring excellence to everything. I think it's important to understand what that really means and the difference between excellence and pseudo-excellence, so I appreciate your explanation. I've been talking with Brad Stullberg. The name of his book is The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes, and I appreciate you coming. Thanks, Brad.

All right. I appreciate you. Bye.

Money can buy happiness. Really depends on what you spend it on. Scientists at the University University of British Columbia, gave people some hypothetical choices like, would you rather have an expensive apartment close to work or an inexpensive apartment, but a longer commute? Would you prefer a high paying job with longer hours or a smaller paycheck, but more free time. In addition, one group of participants was given an actual real choice between $50 cash and a $120 house cleaning voucher. The people In all these cases, the people who were willing to give up the money in favor of more time, a shorter commute, fewer hours, fewer chores, they were happier, according to the researchers. Why? Because leisure time lets you do fun things. Even if you have a million dollars, what good is all that money if you have no time to enjoy it? It's painfully obvious, though, that many of us make the opposite choice, prioritizing money over time. You spend your weekends mowing the lawn and cleaning gutters rather than hiring a handyman or a landscaping service. You take the indirect flight to save $200, but at the expense of six hours of your life.

It's worth remembering what really makes you happy when you create your budget. Maybe you can spend less on material things to free up money for services that make your life easier. And that is something you should know. A rating and review would be particularly helpful. They help in a couple of ways. They let other people know what you think of this podcast, and it raises our visibility. It just helps in a lot of ways, and it only takes a moment to leave a rating and review on whatever platform you're listening on. Five-star ratings are particularly welcome. I'm Michael Brothers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Safe Space.

You mean damit is alles sicher?

Ja, genau. Wiso Steuer ist so die Steuer-App, die dich einfach versteht. Egal ob Studium, Job oder Umzug. Stimmt. Krass. Fühlt sich gar nicht wie Steuern an.

Steuern erledigt?

Safe.

Mit WISO Steuer.

If you like something you should know, you're probably a curious person who enjoys learning about the world. And if you're looking for more places to learn, you should know about a podcast from Ted called How to be a Better Human. The host, Chris Duffy, was recently a guest here talking about why he loves laughter and how you can find more of it in your everyday life. On How to be a Better Human, Chris interviews scientists, experts, and Ted speakers about fascinating practical topics from how your dog experiences the world, to how to stop doomscrolling, to how to find a deeper sense of belonging. You can find How to be a Better Human wherever you listen to podcasts.