Balance is a Myth: How to Build Healthy Obsession

[MUSIC] Hey y'all, welcome back to Excellence Actually. A show about big ideas and practical tools for your own personal pursuit of excellence. I'm Brad Stahlberg, joined by my co-host Steve Magnus in Clay Skipper. Let's be honest, high performance in excellence, whether it's in sport or art or craft or medicine or leadership, requires some level of fixation in single mindedness. There is simply no way around it. The self-help industrial complex popularized the phrase "just be balanced" and a lot of people got rich off it. That's because the best way to get rich is telling people a lie they want to hear. The truth is you simply can't have it all. You can't just lean in on everything. Life is about trade-offs and especially for driven pushers who want to squeeze the most out of their years. And honestly, that's a good thing. Because when we push ourselves and go all in on worthwhile projects and pursuits that we care about, we get the best out of ourselves and we experience so much satisfaction in growth. It's a certain level of obsessiveness that makes LeBron James great. It's the same obsessiveness that makes a hit television show like the bear so exhilarating. And it lights each and every one of us up when we get really into something. We need it, we thrive on it. Obsession isn't always unhealthy. But, and this is a big one. If we aren't careful, instead of pushing us to great heights, that same fixation, that same single-mindedness, that same obsessiveness, it can push us over the edge and blow up not only our performance, but also our lives. Obsession can be the source of our rise, but it can also be a trap that leads to our fall. So this week we're going to explore obsession and fixation. How to harness the exact type of fixation that Brad was just talking about so that it can serve you and how to control it so that it does not control you. So in terms of practical tools, takeaways, what you're going to get from this, we will teach you how to build a checks and balance system so that you don't get swallowed by this type of fixation, passion. We're going to discuss the importance of building a support system around you and communicating with those people and others in your life, so that you don't go from productive, constructive, to unhealthy obsession. And we're going to talk about how to listen to your mind-body system so that you can to steal a phrase from. Brad, that I like burn bright without burning out. Brad bought up how one of the sort of bullshit cliches out there is, you know, seek to be balanced. I think another thing that's come up as people have talked more and more about the burnout epidemic is we've lost sight of how important it is to burn in your work, right? Burning is good. The problem is you just don't want to get so engulfed by it that you burn up completely. So Steve, I think you have some experience first hand with burning bright and with burning out. So why don't you give us a little bit of your own first hand experience here with running and what you learned about the difference between constructive and or healthy obsession and unhealthy fixation or obsession? I'm a pro at both. And here's the reason why is when I was in high school, if you asked anybody, how do you describe Steve? They would say, "Ub-sessed." And it was obsessed with running. I lived, I ate, I breathed the sport. I would skip classes, not to go hang out with friends, but to go put in more miles. During my senior year of high school, I went a six month period where I didn't run less than 80 miles a week once. That's what, 12 miles a day on average, something like that. I went an entire year where I only took two days off and I was forced by my coach. Obsession was my superpower. And it made me really good. My senior year of high school, I was the fastest mileer in the country. I ran a four one mile in a professional track and field meet against Olympians and medalists. And I was the sixth fastest high school mileer of all time at that point. Third fastest high schooler in the world, including all those Kenyans and Ethiopians that year. But here's the problem. I never ran a step faster. Four or one for the mile remains my PR until this day. And there is no hope of me ever breaking it unless we get some super duper shoes or some nefarious things to do at the age of 40. So it is my best time. And what I realized is although I had that obsession, there are two kinds of obsessions. Early on in high school to fuel that I had obsession, but it was fueled by joy and curiosity and exploring my limits. I looked forward to every race. I stepped into the ring, the arena and said, let's see what we can do. And the same was with practice. I didn't run every day or put in 15 miles a day during a cruise vacation during high school because I had to is because I wanted to. I enjoyed the process of it. Once I got really fast and felt the pressure and went to college and said, ah, the Olympic dreams, this is what I'm after. That obsession changed. It moved from wanting to do it to having to do it. I felt a compulsion. I felt if I didn't get this run in, I'm not going to be good enough. If I don't do these workouts, I'm never going to fulfill my potential. That obsession started to come from a place of not fun and curiosity. But fear, that fear of failure, that fear of not being good enough. And what that told me is that there is a fine line between obsession that is productive or as we'll later call it harmonious. And a obsession that is destructive that puts you in a place where you're showing up on the starting line, be that in sport or life where you are propelled by this compulsion, by this fear, by this anxiety to do the thing. And contrary to popular belief, very, very few people perform their best in that state. So we're going to talk about and give you tools on how to ride that line and how to understand when you go over it. So I think we should take a minute here to sort of zero in on obsession, fixation, what the good kind looks like. And I just want to double down something Brad said at the beginning, which is that obsession is not unhealthy. There's this writer who we all love, I believe here, George Saunders, and he has this great metaphor he uses where he says, you need to figure out how to harness your habitual tendencies and productive or constructive ways, right? He's the metaphor of our tendencies being like a rushing river. And we need to figure out the right sort of apparatus or mechanism that allows us to use the energy created by that river. So what I know for the three of us, for a lot of people, you can have obsessive tendencies. We are all pretty naturally obsessive. We want to figure out how to control that obsession, channel it in a productive, healthy way. So let's talk through some examples of high performers, elite level musicians, physicians, athletes, creatives who have figured out how to be obsessed or fixated in a healthy way. How do they do that, Brad? It's funny that you mentioned these elite performers because I'm going to start with the story of my seven and a half year old son Theo and how he's recently got into baseball, not because he's on the travel circuit and he's the best eight you play in America. Far from it, but there might be some people that are skeptical that like this healthy obsession can actually exist. But whenever we look into a child really getting into something, like we still have that hardwearing in us. Society tries to beat it out of us with all these measures and metrics, external validation, but it's still in us. So let's fast forward a year ago in my son Theo had next to no interest in baseball. The sports that he loved were basketball and football and at the time if you would have asked me would Theo have played baseball this year, I would have said no. And then Shohei O'Tani had the remarkable baseball season that he had last year. And then Theo's dad, Brad, who also wasn't following too much baseball, got a call from an editor at the New York Times and said you write about greatness. Shohei O'Tani is having one of the greatest seasons in the history of any sport. We want you to write about it. So next thing you know I'm watching highlights of Shohei O'Tani and Theo is over my shoulder. Theo is starting to ask me questions. We start talking about Shohei. We watched the end of the season when he breaks all these insane records and puts together the best single season in baseball. Now Theo wants a glove. Now he wants a bat. Now he wants to watch highlights from Shohei O'Tani's rookie season. He wants to see what Shohei O'Tani looked like when he pitched. Next thing you know, all he wants to do is play catch. He wants to play baseball. We sign up for the House League Baseball team. The Tigers, my home team, get on a roll. We start watching more baseball. And now all Theo wants to do is play and talk about baseball. He's not interested in trying to be better than other people. He doesn't even have the internet. He doesn't know what the internet is. It's not like he's looking up his ranking. Right? He's doing it truly because he loves it. Because he's learning because he's got this positive reward cycle. Where a couple months ago he couldn't even catch. Now he can catch. He couldn't hit. Now he can hit. So he's seeing that the result of his effort on a very concrete task is producing tangible effects. He's getting better. That is exhilarating. That's thrilling. And he came to it because he inspired himself by looking at one of the all time grates. What healthy obsession looks like for adults is that more of the time than not, we too are exhilarated. not by the validation that we get from doing the work, but by the challenge and the thrill of doing the work itself. And much like Theo got fixated by exposing himself to show Hayotani the way that we keep our obsession healthy, we expose ourselves to inspirational stories, to great art, to great books. Now maybe you listen to a podcast like this, you create an environment around you that fosters obsession and fixation and wanting to pursue goals and push yourself, but that fosters that based on a love and a joy, and almost like a sense of aliveness and resonance that you get from your own version of greatness, whatever that means for you. And that's exactly what the research shows, Brad. One of my favorite examples of this is comes from the psychologist Ellen Winner, who has the perfect name for this research, but she coined the phrase Rage to Master. When she was looking at prodigies and phenoms among music, chess, sports, academics, math, everything, she studied them and she found they all had this rage to master. Now notice she didn't say the rage to win. As we've talked about often on this podcast, mastery is different from winning. And especially when you're young, mastery comes from the sense of progress, the sense of connection to community, the sense of autonomy and control and that our effort matters. And when we have those things, and those things align both in ourself and the environment, we often get hooked up or get this kind of rage to master. My wife is an elementary school teacher and she can tell you all the time she has seen. Kids get obsessed with the topic. Once they're interests and they're kind of talents in that model of the future align in all the sudden, for the next month, Little Johnny is screaming that he wants to be a policeman or fireman and read about them all day, every day. As you pointed out, Brad, we still have this as adults. We just forget a little bit how to harness this. The way I like to conceptualize it and the way I did and when the inside game is that we need play or recess for adults because obsession almost especially the good time comes when you're pursuing the thing mostly for the activity itself, for that mastery, that sense of progress, that joy, that fulfillment, that maybe feeling alive when you do the thing or you are absorbed in the thing. And what research tells us is this, is that that's easier to do when we're theos age because we can't get lost as much in the comparison game. We can't get lost in looking at the internet. But as those results become more meaningful and we define ourselves by the external in all of the sudden if we get three hits or hit that run or win that baseball game, it feels like that is what matters. That pulls us out of the healthy obsession and starts putting in in our head. We need the validation from winning. We need the validation from being good at this thing. That is what matters. And as you'll hear throughout this podcast, it's this spine line. It is not either or it is not your either all good obsession or you're all bad and it will change over time as you heard from my story. I started out with believe it or not of very healthy form of the sessions. But as soon as I ran that 401 mile on national TV, on NBC and all these thoughts got in my head, it pulls you away from that. And if you aren't aware enough, if you don't have that environment, if you don't have that coach, it can pull you down that bad path and tying this back to psychologist Ellen Winner's research when it comes to prodigies and phenoms, that's exactly what she found is if they had parents who created a supportive environment, that's what they were more likely to translate that to adult success. If on the other hand, they had the controlling, the pushy parent, the private parent who made it all about them and how good their child was reflecting on them, guess what, some survived, but the likelihood decreased for translating that to adult success and it was more likely those kids who were gonna burn out. - So this isn't a parenting podcast and we're gonna link this to adults in a second here, but I wanna just make one more point because I think that when multiple researchers that have these big findings are all pointing towards the same truth, we can really pay attention. Like it gives us a strong signal. And what Steve just explained is precisely why the work of Carol Dwack and growth mindset can be summed up in one short sentence, which is praise effort not results. Because if you praise results, then essentially what you're telling a child or we're gonna get into this, what you're telling yourself as an adult is that a good job means that you won or that you got the promotion or that people are talking about you or that you're famous. That's very different than saying a good job means that you are present and focused and you gave it your all. And I think we can talk to ourselves the same way that we would talk to a child. We can take the research from Alan Winer and Carol Dwack and we can use that in our own self-talk track. And when we reflect on our own relationship with fixation, we can ask ourselves, hey, am I losing myself in the work? Am I losing myself in practicing the clarinet and training for the marathon in writing the book, in leading a team or am I losing myself in how many copies I sold? Or if I got first chair in the orchestra or if I got promoted or if all my colleagues are talking about what a fierce leader I am. And let's do so. It's never gonna be all there nothing. But to the extent that we can do our own version of focusing on effort not results in savoring the good feelings we get from effort not results, we do a better job of keeping our fixation of the harmonious variety. - I think such a good example of this is the previous guest of the show is the violinist Hillary Hahn. She started playing the violin when she was six years old. She was playing professionally by the time she's 11. At 45, she's still playing the violin. And when we spoke to her, she was labeled as a prodigy of virtuoso. And to go back to what we've been talking about, which is this sort of this idea that you want your obsession to come from internally and your own curiosity and expiration rather than be something that's rooted in external validation, she's over four decades, or about four decades into playing. And if you go on her Instagram, she does this thing a hundred days of practice where she's basically just practicing every day and doing a live video of herself doing it. And it's all about her just exploring. She talks about still trying to find her own musical intuition after four decades. And I think that's the reason why she's won three Grammys is one of the greatest violinists in the world is because even though she's been doing this for four decades, she's still in so many ways seems to be doing it from a place of curiosity and expiration. I'd like to be able to progize at six and to still be playing violin. I love level up 45 and to not have burned out. I just think it's such a good example of exactly what we're talking about. Hey everybody, we wanted to take a quick moment to tell you about our sponsor, Element, the electrolyte mix, which you know and love now comes in a 12 ounce sparkling edition. 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If you want to get your own free sample pack of elements, most popular drink mix flavors, purchase any amount of element at our specific show URL, which is drink element t.com/clay. Let's drink the letters element t.com/clay. Now back to our show. Well, this is what that often separates the best of the best. Like I know people hear this and they're like, okay, be obsessed. But can you really do that? And just like Hillary Han, the elite people, like best in the world that I've been around, have been very similar. One that comes to mind is a coach that I've mentioned many times here, mentor Tom Toles. He coach Carl Lewis through his entire career. So his highest stage. And at 90 years old, he is at the track, coaching like 10 year olds, how to long jump at 90. So think about that. It is about the craft. He's not saying, oh, I once called coach Carl Lewis, like give me the best of the best. He's like, no, I enjoy coaching the long jump. And guess what? I'm probably going to do this until I die. But this is what you see with athletes. This is why you see people like Randy Johnson or as Brad as highlighted, King Griffey, Jr. once their baseball career is over, would What do they do? They find something else to get almost kind of obsessed in. In their case, both of them photography where they're, you know, striving for mastery and a new domain because they can't really play baseball until you're 90. But you have that same ingredient. When I talk to Tom House, the legendary pitching coach who has coached people like Randy Johnson and Tom Brady and Nolan Ryan and Drew Ruiz, when I asked him what separated the best from everybody else, he said, and I quote, "They are obsessed with the process. Winning only takes them out of it for a moment." The first practical takeaway then is something that Steve and I have written about and we continue to write about because it is so important to high performance and that is what we call the 48-hour rule. And the 48-hour rule essentially says that after a big win or a hard loss, give yourself 48 hours to celebrate the victory or to grieve the defeat but then get back to doing the work itself. Because what you are doing is you are reminding your nervous system, your neurochemistry that the actual satisfaction, the actual thrill doesn't come from how great you are in the minds of other people. It comes from that mastery that self-contained drive, the fulfillment that you get of taking on a challenge and doing it. Now my wife is extremely literal. So whenever I talk about this, she's like, you're telling an Olympian if they just want a medal to only celebrate for 48 hours and I say, "No, Caitlin, you are very literal. It's not 48 hours is this magic number. It's the concept, right? You want to have some kind of constraints to really glow in a win or moap after a loss but then you want to nudge yourself back to the work." Because doing spiraling and what was me has a stickiness to it. We all know that, right? It's very common advice after a loss, like just get back on the horse. However, gloating in a win or getting that dopamine high of seeing yourself go up in the rankings and just constantly like refreshing the rankings to see how great you are and whatever it is you do or celebrating, that also has a stickiness. That can lead to addiction to that kind of praise but it can also lead to complacency. As an adult, we get so caught up in all the stuff around our craft. What we really need to do is get back to the craft. The Hillary Hans 100 days of practice. She's not doing 100 days of posting inspirational sayings about being a violinist to get followers. She's practicing. I like that. That's a great point. Two questions I think are worth fielding here and we'll take them one by one. I'm just going to raise them both here. Next is, I think we've made our case, Sean Case, in my opinion, a biased about the importance of obsession. One obvious question is if someone's listening and they think, "Well, damn, I'm not obsessed with anything. I'm not having that passion, that fire burning within." I'm going to kick over to you in a second, Steve, to field that one. The second thing I think we should also explore is, is it possible to be obsessed and also be content, right? You always going to have this drive for more. Does this ambition, like, does it sort of, the ambition that's built into obsession does it keep us from being content or satisfied? Let's start with the first one, Steve. If you're not obsessed with anything, so listen to this and I'm like, "I need to find that. I need to light a fire. How would you advise them to start doing that?" This exact question is one that my sister gave me when she was in her early 20s because we come from a particularly obsessed family. You heard my story. My brother is a well-known economist who is as equally obsessed with economics as I am in running. She turned to me and said, "What am I to do? I don't have the thing like you and your other brother Phillips." Like, "What am I to do?" And I told her. Here's what I told her. A, it's a matching problem. What I mean by that is obsession generally happens when interest, talent, progress, in, like, opportunity or modeling all along. We know this again, going back to in kindergarten, when you got obsessed over something, it was those things that all came together. So as an adult, if you haven't found that thing, what I often tell people is, "A, you need to go back into explore mode." Meaning, go broad, see, endable in interest, go deep enough in those interests to see if it kind of catches that fire and you feel like, "Okay, I've got this passion." One of the mistakes people make is they think, "Oh, I'm going to be obsessed with something is going to occur instantly." No, no, that's not how it works. Even with me, in fifth grade, I quit running, quit the track team that I was trying to break the school record in the mile with because I thought running sucked. It took me three years later until I got hooked up with running because I had some of the other things. We've written about this before and our newsletter, go check it out. So first is the matching problem. The second thing I think people often mistake is, "It doesn't have to be your main job." Too often people think, "Oh, I need to make this my job, my obsession." That's not true. We can have other interests, other hobbies that we really care about that like that fire, even if it's not our main thing that's paying the bills. And the last thing I'd say is, "Don't try and force it and don't freak out." There's good news. We talk about obsession and we talk about it in a good way that fuel things, but there's nuance here. Just as many elite performers have reached near the top of the top without being diehard obsessed, Tiger Woods LeBron James, you can still make it if you care a lot, but you're not in this borderline crazy obsessed. So don't drive yourself not thinking you have to find this scorching passion in order to be good at what you do. All right. Very well-fielded, Steve. As for the second question, I'm going to turn that over to you, Brad. What to do about the innate tension between obsession and contentment, right? How we reconcile our ambition with this fixation? Can we ever just be satisfied if we are obsessed or fixated? I think the short answer is no. And the longer answer is that humans are not wired to be content. All of our ancestors that were content got selected out of the gene pool. Because if you were an ape on the savanna and you were content and you weren't looking for a new and better climate to live in, when the heat wave rolled around, you died. If after your tribe of primates got a big kill on the hunt and you sat around and said, "We're the best hunters in the land. I'm just going to sit here and celebrate when the next famine came around," you died. So literally, your direct ancestors, they passed on their DNA so that you are here today because they were always looking over their shoulder and they were always paranoid about the next thing. They were always searching for more and better opportunities. And that is the wiring that all of us have inherited. The neurochemicals that are associated with wanting such as dopamine are significantly stronger than the neurochemicals that are associated with liking such as serotonin. So our wanting drive, our striving drive, the drive to push to not be content to innovate, is a stronger drive than our ability to just sit and be satisfied. I think this explains why in order to become content, you've got to go to a monastery for years and essentially step outside of the world and focus on your breath and maybe if you do that for a decade, you start to have some contentment. For the rest of us, no, I don't think we're wired to be content. However, I do think that we can experience a kind of deep satisfaction that is similar to contentment when we are in the process of doing something that lights us up. If you were to ask me when I'm having a great writing session, am I content? I would say yes. I'd say this is what I meant to do. I am just writing. I'm working hard. I'm straining. It's not necessarily easy. I might not even be in flow, but I feel like this is what I'm here to do. Or if I'm training and I'm having a great session at the gym, maybe it's not even a great session, but I'm with my friends. I'm not worried about how my numbers are, where my PR ranks me, if I've got the best deadlift in town or not. I'm just training. Am I content? I don't know if I'm content, but I'm satisfied. Now, if you were to ask me later that day when I'm worried that my book hasn't sold enough copies or that my deadlift isn't as much as it should be, if I'm content, I would say no, I'm not content at all. In both cases, I'm not really content, but in one I'm deeply satisfied. In the other, I feel like I'm wanting for something more. I think that the best that we can do is try to bias ourselves towards that deep satisfaction in the process of striving. I like that. I like that we're busting multiple myths in this episode, another one being like we're not wired for contentment. Don't even try. To me, we talk sometimes about the arrival fallacy, right? It's this psychological term poised by the researcher Talben Shahar. It says that we think that if we just accomplish this or we just get that, whether it's a certain income or a romantic partner or a sporting fee or a promotion, then we'll be content. It's a fallacy because we never get content. The answer in all of our opinion, I can speak for the two of you and my guess is many of our listeners, the answer isn't to necessarily try to force ourselves to be content. It's just to accept that, hey, I'm never going to be content. the best they can do. is find activities that light me up and get deeply satisfied and striving and try not to get caught up in all the external stuff around it. So let's move on now to systems we can put in place at the top of the episode we mentioned checks and balances. What should people do if they propelled their fixated and they can't stop? Let's look to some, again, to high performers as we always do, people who are excellent in their craft and their pursuits. What sort of systems do they build in to keep themselves from tipping into that unhealthy obsession? So here, what I would say is from the world of sport, I think there's some great examples. It is that you have to know that the obsession is going to push you to narrow, to only care about the thing, to do all the things that we talked about, to not have the broad perspective, and to use a quote from rugby star Johnny Wilkinson, who for those non-rubbie, official noddles is like the little loggeron James of rugby. I'm just going with what other people tell me because I really have no idea, but that's what I'm told. Star Alzheimer. He said you have to find some way to take the jersey off. And I'm going to quote him, the massive game, the 10 to 20% came from realizing that if you want to explore your true potential, start learning to take the shirt off. And what he meant by that is so often we become the jersey. We see ourselves only through this lens of the thing that we're obsessed with, and that can propel us to a high degree. But if we don't have something that reminds us that, hey, put that jersey aside. Hey, after the game is done, if you're like Patrick Mahomes, you've got to go spend some time being dad mode in dad mode just for enough time so that you have that jersey off. We know this because research backs it up. There is a research study that looked at Nobel Prize winning scientists and compared them to scientists who are wrong or to below who never reached the top of the top in their field. What they found were Nobel winners were 22 times more likely to sing, perform or act 12 times more likely to pursue some sort of creative writing. They had hobbies. Those are wrong or too below were more singularly focused on science itself. And I think for the rest of you out here, if you're the obsessed type, we're not telling you to be balanced. But what we're telling you is that you need just a little complexity, just a little bit of something else to be able to take that jersey off so that you can come back and do the thing to the level or degree of commitment that is required that makes you great. I love that, Steve. I think that it is so practical and so tried and true. I think that sometimes people hear that and they think, well, intellectually, this makes perfect sense, of course. But when I'm actually doing the thing, when I'm training for that marathon, when I am in my fellowship of surgery, I simply can't turn it off. Like, it is painful for me to turn it off. It feels like I'm going through withdrawal. What do I do in those situations? And here's where I think you actually need some fairly rigid rules. Now, if you listen to our first episode, our inaugural episode of Excellent, actually, we talked about how we often get a lot of flexibility. And sometimes in the performance space, we focus too much on like, I will do this 100% of the time and I need to optimize. I think in the case of obsession, rigid rules actually go a long way. And in particular, it's helpful to have a couple of daily non-negotiables. And maybe they're not daily, maybe they're weekly. But these are things that when you're deeply fixated on a craft, you may want to skip or not do. But if you end up skipping or not doing them, it is going to blow up on you. It's going to hurt your performance. It's going to hurt your mental health. What are some examples? One daily non-negotiable could be regardless of what's happening with my primary craft. I exercise for 30 minutes a day. Another one could be that I meditate for 10 minutes a day or at least four nights a week, I eat dinner with my family. I have a family dinner or I do everything I can to shut down by 7 p.m. so that I have a legitimate chance of getting a good eight hours of sleep. Or I go to church or synagogue or the mosque or whatever your spiritual thing is on Sunday. It doesn't have to be all these things. Oftentimes when you are really fixated on something, it's not all those things. But if you don't have any daily non-negotiables, then you kind of start to look like someone who is a drug addict, to be totally honest. You think about the kind of quintessential image of a drug addict where their whole life just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and centered around the pursuit of this high. At first, it's great. You're having a great time. That high feels good. But then you cannot step away. You can't do anything else. There is nothing else there for you. When you're pursuing this kind of obsession or this kind of fixation, if you don't have these non-negotiables, it is all too easy to kind of push yourself over the edge where all you're doing is the thing. It creeps up on you. The next thing you know, you're miserable and you're burnt out. I love what you're saying, you're right. And I like the metaphor here of thinking of it as a circuit breaker. What does a circuit breaker do? It basically shuts down a lecture current when it becomes overloaded before it explodes. And you're talking about building in systems that sort of act as a circuit breaker. And you can think of these, again, activity based sort of the non-negotiables you have to do every day. You also think about it a longer time rise. And I think taking a mandatory break every so long, that's why people take vacations. You can think of it as performance based. Once you see your metric start sliding for you've been plateaued for a period of time. If you're writing every day and you just can't get your say, it's a thousand words a day. You can't hit it or you're running and you're overtraining and you can't hit your paces. Another big one here I think is like a relationship based circuit breaker. It's like you need to have people in your lives and you need to have a support system who can tell you when you are tipping going too deep into that spiral of obsession, right? I think a big thing here that we talk about a lot is the importance of community. I think that's especially true with fixation. Like if you were fixated in isolation and you don't have anyone who can sort of say to you, you're getting out of that sort of positive reward cycle and you're going into this negative type of fixation and can pull you back. That's like that can be a really big danger. And I think of someone like O'Brien James who has talked extensively about how he wouldn't be able to do what he has done without his wife Savannah who he's been with since high school, right? He's like, if I didn't have someone in my circle who allows me to do the keep the main thing, the main thing, I wouldn't be able to achieve the things that I've achieved. I think you find that with a lot of people who obviously are exceptions, but a lot of people achieve great things. It's because they have people around them who they've communicated to, hey, I really want to go on in this and I'm going to need your support to make that happen. And no one gets their loan, right? I think that's a cliche for a reason. Yeah. To me, it speaks to the importance of a coach. That coach could be a parent, a friend, anybody. But when I look at coaching people, especially when there's this driven, obsess variety, my job is essentially to step in, give perspective and keep them from doing dumb things. And we all need that, especially if you're the obsessive variety where you see someone moving from that obsession where it's good and quality and helpful and out of joy to that obsession based on that fear of failure is the coach's job is to step in and be like, hold on, time out, the zoom way out and look at things and take a perspective. Because often when you're in the moment, you're world narrows and you can't see it. So I think a good rule of thumb is, who is your coach in your life? Who is going to call you and say, time out, we need to put our head above water and evaluate how we're doing things and why we're doing things. To start of the episode, I talked about how just be balanced is kind of a misnomer, especially for driven pushers. And when we were on our group, growth, and when we were chatting about this episode over the course of the last week, Clay, you had this beautiful metaphor of static balance versus dynamic balance and you related it to riding a bike. I think it would be really helpful for listeners if you share it. And I'm going to continue the metaphor after you share it with these two practical daily non-negotiables and then having people to help you see clearly. Yeah, first of all, I think I definitely saw somebody, but I don't remember who so I'm sorry that I can't properly attribute it. But I think, yeah, it goes back to this. Okay, let's talk about balance, right? Balance isn't realistic as Brad stayed at the top of the episode. But I think what elite performers do is they understand that they need to have dynamic balance rather than static balance. What do I mean by that? Rather than just trying to be balanced all the time, dynamic balance is more like things are constantly out of whack and imbalance for temporary periods of time and viewed over a long time horizon, everything balances out. Right? And so the bike metaphor here is if you're just sitting on a bike and you're trying to be balanced, it's probably not going to happen unless you have training bills on your, on your, on your tricycle. But if you move forward on the bike and you're pedaling, you might go a little too far left, you might go a little too far right, and you're always adjusting, right? And that's sort of the static first dynamic balance. Like, not everything's going to be balanced all the time, but you make little adjustments over long time horizons so that everything balances out and you can keep moving forward like you can on the bicycle. And to continue that metaphor as I promised, I think that having these constraints, these daily non-negotiables, these people to call you out, that's essentially learning how to ride a bike. So when you don't know how to ride a bike, you get on there and you take off and you're going to lose balance and explode, you're going to crash and burn. And that happens to so many driven people. And then you realize that actually there's a skill to riding a bike really fast and hard. And I've got to develop that skill just like there's a skill to single-mindedness and obsession and focus. And a big part of that skill is knowing when to pull back what daily non-negotiables to have, who to make sure is looking over their shoulder at you to be like, "Whoa, you're about to miss that turn and blow yourself over. Listen to me." And those are all these minor adjustments that we make to continue on our course on that bike without completely crashing at best skinning our knee. It works really injuring ourselves. Okay, on that note, before we get to a summary of the big takeaways, the practical tips you can apply in your life today, two pieces of homework for you. One, we harp on this a lot because it's really important to us. If you learned something today that you found helpful, something you enjoyed listening to, a tool, please take this episode and share it with somebody else right now. We love the word of mouth support. We think it is the best way to grow this podcast and we're asking for your help on that. That is your first piece of your first homework assignment. The second homework assignment I'm going to give you is the best homework assignment you've ever gotten. If you want to see this whole idea, tension of obsession on healthy or healthy obsession, being great, being excellence played out, and a great entertainment drama on TV. Go watch the bear. We talked about whether or not to discuss the bear today, Brad, as a good friend spared me from some spoilers because I've not quite finished season four yet. But that is just show that explores a lot of themes and ideas we talked about today in a really artistic, entertaining way. Go check that out and share the episode. Now Brad, take us home and then send it back to me because I do have a sign off for the show. I have a catchphrase. A couple main points to summarize here. The first is that balance is an illusion, especially if you're a pusher. That's not a problem because fixation and obsession, they can be great. If you think about the times when you felt most alive in your life, my guess is that you wouldn't describe them as perfect ly balanced. You're probably going all in on something that you cared about. Maybe it's falling in love, maybe it's starting a company, maybe it's doing research, maybe it's training for a sporting event. But my guess is that you are more on the scale of fixation than you were on perfect balance. Now there's a big difference between doing the thing and being obsessed with the actual activity itself versus seeking validation from the thing and being obsessed with all the validation that you get from it. And we're never going to be all in nothing, but to the extent possible, we want to keep our motivation, our intrinsic nature of the craft. Just that, we want to keep it intrinsic. One way to do this is to practice the 48-hour rule. After big wins or tough defeats, give yourself 48 hours, but then get back to the craft itself. Another way to cultivate the good kind of obsession and fixation in single-mindedness is surround yourself with inspiration. Read good books, listen to good music, see good art. The more that you can put yourself in the way of beauty and inspiration, the more your own fixation will grow in a healthy way. And finally, the metaphor that I think will stick with me and hopefully you too is once you are on that bike, you don't want to just crash in burn. You've got to learn the skills to ride a bike and being obsessed, being fixated, pursuing something trying to be excellent is like riding a bike. And something that's going to help you balance is having these daily non-negotiables that you don't give up come hell or high water, even if it is painful for you. To pull away from your craft, you pull away to do these things because it's what's going to keep your fire sustainable so you can burn long and not just out. And then also make sure that you're surrounding yourself with good people, have mentors, have coaches, if you're in a team environment, relying on your teammates to see what you don't see. Because when you are in the throes of obsession, sometimes you get this sort of tunnel vision and that tunnel vision can be your greatest gift. It can lead to groundbreaking discoveries and the best work of your life. But by definition, you can't see outside of it and sometimes you need someone to help. That is a wrap on today's episode of Excellence. Actually last week at the very end of the show, I mentioned that we needed a sign off when it was podcast was called farewell. We had a very natural sign off, which was farewell. Front of the pod, Mario Ferelli came through with a great line from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. So with that, we'll be back next week. Until then, be excellent to each other.