Book Review(s): Peak Performance trilogy
Peak Performance, The Passion Paradox, and The Practice of Groundedness
Brad Stulberg (with co-author Steve Magness) has written three books in past few years on the subject of peak performance. They are:
Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (2017)
The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life (2019)
The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds - Not Crushes - Your Soul (2021)
You can guess from the titles what the books cover: how to succeed, maximize your potential, and do it all without toxicity and burnout. Although I had already converged on a similar philosophy before reading these books, I still found them useful for deepening that understanding and shining a light on these ideas from a slightly different angle. This review is a little longer than usual since I'm reviewing three books.
The 'why' of peak performance
It's hard to talk about why these books should matter without discussing our individual philosophy of life: what do we value, what makes us happy and fulfilled, and how do we want to live our lives? I'll try to keep it brief.
On the last page of the last book of the three (The Practice of Groundedness), Stulberg brings up Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and its society of "superficial thrills". That speaks to my own philosophy: I care about peak performance because that's what feels fulfilling to me — I wouldn't want to live a life that's just filled with "easy pleasures". If I spent my whole day relaxing, watching great TV shows, and eating delicious food in a five-star hotel room, I wouldn't actually be happy. I would feel empty. I want to help my community; I want to set challenges for myself and achieve them. This is what makes me feel most alive.
If you don't feel the same way, and you feel fulfilled living the life of luxury, I am not sure what I can say to convince you. Some people are just wired differently from each other. In fact, in his own explanation of why we should care about peak performance and passion, Stulberg discusses how our brains are wired:
Dopamine excites and arouses us, focusing our attention on whatever it is we are working toward. Under its influence, we feel revved up and alive...
Unlike other feel-good neurochemicals that are released after you’ve accomplished a goal, the far more potent dopamine is released prior, during the pursuit. This timing had an important evolutionary purpose. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could not afford to be content upon meeting their immediate nutritional demands. They needed to continue accumulating food in order to prepare for inevitable times of scarcity. As a result, our species evolved so that dopamine—the striving neurochemical—gives rise to feelings of intense desire and often overpowers other neurochemicals that make us feel content and satisfied. We don’t get hooked on the feeling associated with achievement, we get hooked on the feeling associated with the chase...We’re not wired to simply be content. We’re wired to keep pushing...
Over time, and in a process similar to other addictive substances, our brains become less sensitive to dopamine, meaning we need more of it to feel good.
And some people are genetically inclined to respond to dopamine differently:
Some studies show that up to 40 percent of our personality may be inherited...research suggests that there is a link between our inborn temperaments and our sensitivity to specific neurochemicals. In particular...“persistence”...is closely associated with an insensitivity to dopamine.
Another thing I've noticed is that I like to do hard things because hard things have lasting benefits. In general, I find that it's hard for things that happened in the (further) past to make me happy in the present or future. For example, a great TV show is entrancing while I watch it, but a month after I've finished it, all I'm really left with are a few memories of funny jokes or surprising plot twists. Those don't really have the power to make me happy in the here-and-now. If I want to be happy again, I'll have to watch another great TV show.
On the other hand, doing something like studying Chinese or practicing frisbee isn't as immediately rewarding as a great TV show is. But, a month after that study session, the language skills I've built have stayed with me — I have a lasting benefit that I can use to make connections with people, or lasting frisbee-throwing skills that I can use to have more fun playing frisbee at a higher level. (Consuming culture, e.g. TV shows, can also help us make connections with people who've shared the same cultural experience. But in my experience these connections are not as strong as the ones I'm talking about.)
There's been enough times where I looked back on my past and realized that something I spent my time on has had no lasting impact on me, and that I was much more proud of the things I did that were still effecting me now. This realization has made it easier to do the hard things now — I know how much I will appreciate it later.
Stulberg also motivates the importance of hard work and passion by highlighting flow states:
...when you are in flow—or long ago what the Buddha called Nirvana and the Taoists called the Way—time seems to evaporate altogether. This makes sense. When you are fully present you aren’t thinking back or ahead. You are not worried about falling behind or everything else that you have to do. You are simply existing in the here and now.
These experiences can be some of the most pleasant moments of our lives — you're not worried about this or that; you're not disappointed with yourself for not living up to expectations; you're not plagued with second doubts about whether this delicious meal is a bit unhealthy for you. In The Passion Paradox, he pushes back against the idea of "balance" in life—our popular culture suggests that we should live a balanced life, with a little of this and a little of that, but is that really what makes us happiest?
Nearly all the great performers whom we’ve gotten to know...can draw a direct line between being happy, fulfilled, and at their best and going all in on something...
Just think about the times you’ve felt most alive in your own life and answer the question, were you balanced?
Finally, I want to say a few words about status. I'd be remiss if I didn't. Books like The Elephant in the Brain argue two things:
People have a number of basic urges, ‘programmed’ by evolution, like the urges for reproduction and survival; we also have an urge for high social status which helps us fulfill those more basic urges
Our unconscious brains can value these things, even while our conscious brains come up with more 'noble' explanations for why we do what we do.
It's probable that some of the human desire for mastery exists because being the best at something makes us high status, and makes others look up to us. I'm not sure if Stulberg avoided bringing this up because he didn't think of it, or because it's a more base explanation of why humans value mastery, and thus doesn't fit well with the theme of the books. But two of his six principles of groundedness are Acceptance and Vulnerability...so it's best to be honest with myself that one reason I'm driven to be the best is that being high status feels nice.
I'm comfortable with this because this is just one of many reasons to improve myself. Evolution has programmed us to think dopamine feels nice. Evolution has given us empathy, so if I use the skills I build to help others, mastery can have unselfish benefits, as well. Evolution has probably not given us consciousness — and the flow states that come through mastery can help us avoid the worrying and overthinking that our modern, self-conscious brains are only too good at. And finally, evolution made us value high status. Some of these things are a little more noble; some are a little more base. But they all play into why we value mastery, and all are natural human urges.
Now let's get into the books' lessons:
Stress, rest, and patience
The most critical idea in Peak Performance is the "growth equation":
Stress + rest = growth.
To get better at anything, to grow stronger or to grow smarter, you need to stress yourself. And then you need to allow your body to recover.
To me, The stress phase is the less interesting of the terms on the left-hand-side of the growth equation. For many of us, that's the obvious part of the growth equation: work hard to get better. We're all familiar with, for example, the coach who pushes his players to exhaustion. There's no getting around it, we need to work hard if we want to get better:
In the words of the writer James Clear, “The single greatest skill in any endeavor is doing the work. Not doing the work that is easy for you. Not doing the work that makes you look good. Not doing the work when you feel inspired. Just doing the work.”
The best performers are not consistently great, but they are great at being consistent. They show up every day and they do the work. A large body of social science suggests that attitudes often follow behaviors. Great performers understand this...
More interesting to me is the focus on rest. And it's interesting to Stulberg too, as his latest book, The Practice of Groundedness, is all about building a healthy base from which to strive from. I read that book and worried that people who hadn't read his earlier books would miss the fact that there was a whole other half of the equation—the whole point of building the base of groundedness—working really freaking hard. The Practice of Groundedness is meant for CEOs and elite athletes to learn how to chill out and chase their dreams in a non-toxic way; it's not so much meant for people who already chill out too much to understand how to chill out better.
Anyways, let's talk rest. This anecdote about American runner Bernard Lagat has stuck in my mind for months:
At the end of this year, Bernard Lagat, one of the best American runners ever, will take a break. For 5 weeks, he’ll hang up his sneakers and complete little to no exercise. This isn’t something new or brought about by old age for this 43-year-old athlete. If anything, part of the reason Lagat...remains atop the international running scene is because of this break, which he’s been taking every year since 1999...
Lagat credits his annual respite with keeping him physically and psychologically healthy over the years. The extended shutdown period allows his body to recuperate from grinding 80-mile running weeks. Although Lagat’s year-end break might be the longest, nearly all his peers at the top of running take similar ones, ranging from 10 days to 5 weeks.
Similarly, one of his principles of groundedness is patience. This is slightly different from rest, but he again highlights the theme using an elite distance runner:
Shortly before setting his world record, [Eliud] Kipchoge told The New York Times that he rarely, if ever, pushes himself past 80 percent—90 percent at most—of his maximum effort during workouts. This allows him to string together weeks of consistent training.
My initial response to these stories was to brush it off. I told myself, this only works because they're freak athletes at the limits of human performance, genetically endowed with incredible cardiovascular capability. But these stories stayed in my mind over the course of a winter where I got injured a few times, and I came to look at it in a new light. I can work out hard and make progress towards my goals athletically, but too much time pushing myself inevitably leads to injury. The choice between "work out for 12 months" and "work out for 11 months, then rest a month" is a false choice. There's no way to choose "work out for 12 months". In reality, your options are "work out for 11 months, then rest a month" or "work out 11 months, then be forced to rest a month when you get injured".
Making slower gains, but taking it easy enough to avoid injury has started to seem like a better path than making quick gains which I then lose when I inevitably hurt myself. In other words, being able to consistently stress yourself depends on keeping your body healthy enough to take that stress—and staying healthy comes through rest.
In The Practice of Groundedness, the chapter I mentioned above on patience is full of examples from the world of sports. Here's another quote:
“Sudden” breakthroughs are particularly common in athletic training, in which it’s ordinary to go from running eight-minute miles for weeks and weeks and then suddenly drop down to 7:45...It takes your body time to absorb and adapt to hard training.
Or:
Stopping one rep short requires discipline. You need confidence in your process, confidence that if you stay patient, show restraint when appropriate, and take consistent small steps, you’ll end up with big gains. Research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine shows that most sports injuries happen when an athlete increases their training load too quickly.
Perhaps this is so important for athletes because of what was just mentioned above — injuries. It's easy to get hurt when overtraining. Mental pursuits seem a bit different: though I might burn out quickly, I'm not going to sustain a serious injury if I jump from studying Chinese 5 hours per week to 15 hours per week.
Another side of patience is understanding that sometimes things won't get better for a while ("running eight-minute miles for weeks"). Recently, this idea has come to be more and more important to me: accepting frustration, and then still putting in the time, anyway. There's a balance here: if you're not making progress because you're practicing the wrong way, then you don't want to just accept the frustration and continue doing the wrong thing. You need to slow down and figure out how to get on the right track; accepting frustration is exactly the wrong thing to do. But when you are on the right track, there will be frustrating days anyways. Some days you're just going to be a little worse than you usually are. I've tried to learn to accept that and patiently put the work in anyways.
For me, patience has always been the antidote to frustration, but in The Passion Paradox, he suggests it can also be an antidote to boredom:
The path of mastery is almost always very hard and requires lots of time and unyielding commitment...Any long-term progression contains inevitable periods of boredom...
I once saw an image on Reddit, a graph of how we improve over time but there are always ups and downs. The image below is not the same one I saw long ago, but it expresses the same idea. We shouldn't be surprised when we sometimes lose ground towards our goals — that's just how reality is. But when Stulberg brings up boredom, he makes a good point: there's one thing the graph is missing, and that's a few long stretches where we're not really going up or down, we're just putting in the work without making any obvious progress.
The practice and principles of groundedness
Here's how Stulberg briefly describes his six principles:
Briefly, the six principles of groundedness are as follows:
Accept Where You Are to Get You Where You Want to Go. Seeing clearly, accepting, and starting where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where other people think you should be. But where you are.
Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy. Being present, both physically and mentally, for what is in front of you. Spending more time fully in this life, not in thoughts about the past or future.
Be Patient and You’ll Get There Faster. Giving things time and space to unfold. Not trying to escape life by moving at warp speed. Not expecting instant results and then quitting when they don’t occur. Shifting from being a seeker to a practitioner. Playing the long game. Staying on the path instead of constantly veering off.
Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence. Showing up authentically. Being real with yourself and with others. Eliminating the cognitive dissonance between your workplace self, your online self, and your actual self so that you can know and trust your true self, and in turn gain the freedom and confidence to devote your energy to what matters most.
Build Deep Community. Nurturing genuine connection and belonging. Prioritizing not just productivity, but people, too. Immersing yourself in supportive spaces that will hold and bolster you through ups and downs, and that will give you the chance to do the same for others.
Move Your Body to Ground Your Mind. Regularly moving your body so that you fully inhabit it, connect it to your mind, and as a result become more firmly situated wherever you are.
A few quick comments (I've already discussed patience above):
1. Acceptance and Vulnerability:
I see a lot of commonalities between acceptance and vulnerability. They are both about seeing yourself clearly. And seeing yourself clearly is deeply connected to peak performance:
Meister Eckhart taught that where you think you are weak you are strong, and where you think you are strong you are weak.
If you think you're already good enough at something, there is no need to continue improving; but if you're able to clearly see your weak points, you can practice until those weaknesses have grown stronger. Here's another way Stulberg looks at it:
By knowing that you don’t know everything, that you don’t always have it together, you become more—not less—robust and grounded. You become stronger and more confident. Social scientists sometimes refer to this paradox as intellectual humility, which can be understood as confidence gained by owning one’s limitations and not being overly concerned with being the best or having power over others. It involves active curiosity about your blind spots and perceived weaknesses. Intellectual humility is associated with greater self-awareness, discernment, and openness to new ideas.
Vulnerability also allows us to connect with others — people naturally feel attracted to our "real" selves:
Deep down on the inside, most everyone dislikes pretending that they have everything together. No one does, and keeping up the act is exhausting. When you let your guard down and get real, others don’t view you as weak. Rather, they are relieved. They think: Finally, someone who isn’t faking it. Someone who is more like me.
Similarly, one of his components of the "mastery mindset" laid out in The Passion Paradox fits here as well:
Don’t become overly discouraged or saddened by failure...Rather, view failure productively, as something that serves as critical information, as a microscope into areas in which you can improve.
2. Community
Since I ended the last section writing about connecting with others, let's move on to community. This is an area where I could do a better job in my own life: finding ways to use my passions to connect with like-minded others, and use those connections to grow my passions further. This quote would have fit nicely in my recent review of The Upside of Stress:
In researching his groundbreaking book, Tribe, investigative reporter Sebastian Junger found that many soldiers are more satisfied at war than at home...“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it,” he writes. “What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”...
This body of work has coalesced into self-determination theory, or SDT for short. SDT demonstrates that humans thrive when three basic needs are met:
Autonomy, or the ability to have at least some control over how we spend our time and energy.
Competence, or a path toward tangible improvement in our chosen pursuits.
Relatedness, or a sense of connection and belonging.
Part of this chapter focused on the way we are influenced by the people around us, with stories like this:
When [Shalane] Flanagan decided that instead of training alone she’d start training in a group, her performance, along with that of all the other women in the group, soared. Every single one of her training partners—eleven women in total—has made it to the Olympics while training with her, an astonishing achievement.
And studies like this:
A 2017 study out of Northwestern University found that sitting within twenty-five feet of a high performer at work improved an employee’s performance by 15 percent. But sitting within twenty-five feet of a low performer hurt their performance by 30 percent. That’s an enormous impact.
Those around us can support us and inspire us. And there's potentially positive feedback at work here, too: as pointed out in The Upside of Stress, stressful challenges make us more open to connecting with others. Then those same connections inspire us to continue chasing our goals.
3. Move Your Body:
This was the least interesting principle to me, since it's the one that's already the most deeply ingrained. Stulberg makes a few points: first, that the challenges of physical training get you used to doing hard things. Second, no matter what your passion is, you'll make more progress living a healthy life. And third, that physical activity is a good change of pace that helps us relax when we need to turn our brain off for a while. Since physical activity is one of my passions, I look at this a slightly different way — having multiple passions gives you outlets of different types when you need to spend some time working on something else. For example, when I'm feeling frustrated with a lack of progress in Chinese, my mood might be buoyed by my happiness over recent advances in my frisbee ability. Or if I'm sore from a long workout session, I can still challenge my mind through writing, or through reading a book in Chinese.
In The Passion Paradox, Stulberg suggests jumping into passions incrementally:
Going all in on something makes you fragile, especially if you go all in prematurely. Pressure to perform, be it financial or psychological, often leads you away from thoughtfulness and logic and toward a more irrational style of decision-making. When you go all in, you move from a place of wanting to succeed to needing to succeed....
I literally "quit my day job" to spend some time focusing on my passions, but because I have multiple passions, I can feel psychologically stable— I'm not "needing to succeed" at any one passion because there's always others. So these two ideas are connected: "jump into your passion incrementally" and "stress your body (not just your mind)" are variants on a theme—don't put all your passion eggs in one basket. "Move your body" as a practice of groundedness doesn't work as well for people whose passion already is physical activity. So I'd rephrase his advice: Have multiple passions. At least one should be a primarily physical activity. At least one should be a primarily mental activity.
4. Be Present:
Presence was kind of the odd one out — the other practices were all about staying sane while pursuing passion: moving your body to stay healthy and clear your mind, being vulnerable to connect with friends and family, spending time with your community, etc. But presence is more like focusing deeply on your work —its more like striving than building a base of sanity to strive from.
So many paradoxes
One thing that stands out about these books is how many dichotomies and paradoxes there are in the search for meaning and greatness. Throughout the series, Stulberg says that this philosophy represents a fusion of ancient wisdom and modern research, and it's fitting that he often references Buddhism, itself a philosophy full of paradoxes. Here are some dichotomies to keep in mind as you chase your passion:
Obviously there's the titular passion paradox: toxic passion can lead us to ruin, but healthy passion can lead us to the best experiences of our life.
Caring and not caring. Stulberg quotes T.S. Eliot: “Teach us to care and not to care.” He uses the example of a woman he coached, saying:
[she] learned to let herself feel all her emotions—and then do the hard work of creating space to hold them so she wouldn’t be overtaken by them.
It's important to care enough that you put in the work to get better, but at the same time to not care so much that you can't handle the inevitable disappointment.
Succeeding by not focusing on success. Those who care about external rewards may be less likely to achieve them than people who focus on the process of success — putting in the work, rain or shine.
The great paradox, however, is that although external achievement is never a primary goal of harmonious passion, when you become completely immersed in what you’re doing for the joy of the activity itself, it is often a by-product.
Stress and Rest. As mentioned above, the central dichotomy of Peak Performance is that both stress and rest are necessary for growth. Without enough rest we'll get injured or burned out. Without enough stress we'll never grow.
Where you think you are strong, you are weak. What makes us strong is seeing our weaknesses; if we think we're already perfect we'll never put in the work that allows us to get closer to perfection. Likewise with vulnerability: when we feel like we are showing others the weakest parts of ourselves, they are likely to actually be impressed with our strength — our ability to be real and say the hard things.
A focus on self can lead to a smaller self. What could be more self-centered than saying "I'm going to be the best"? But at the same time, the flow states we achieve through mastery of our craft are some of the moments when our self it at its smallest: we are at one with our activity and the people we're doing that activity with. We're acting on instinct, fully in the present and not worried about how others view us.
Passion requires boredom: when we think passion, we think of strong emotions. But it reality passion can also mean caring about something enough to keep doing it through inevitable periods of boredom. Passion is excitement, but if we stop doing something the moment we get bored, were we ever really passionate?
Self love and self discipline. To reach our potential, we need to be honest with ourselves: I can be better. But at the same time, to chase that goal without toxicity, we need to be comfortable with accepting who we are: I am who I am in this moment, and that's OK. Personally, I like to think of it as accepting that I can't change the past, while believing that I can create the future.
Conventional wisdom on behavior change asserts that on one extreme there is taking responsibility and picking oneself up by the bootstraps, and on the other there is showing oneself boundless love and caring. While these are often pitted against each other, the truth is that they are complementary; you need both. You need to marry strong self-discipline with strong self-compassion.
May we all find our balance as we walk these paths. 😄