The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World
What's it about?
The Way of Excellence (2026) explores what it takes to achieve greatness and satisfaction in today’s world. It lays out the foundations, mindsets, habits, and practices that enable peak performers to pursue excellence sustainably, without compromising their well-being or ambition.
For all the hacks, highlight reels, and self-help manuals, we’ve lost an understanding of what excellence actually asks of us, and what it bestows in return. Excellence has become synonymous with the finish line, with the mountaintop, with the dramatic display of intensity that burns brightly before it burns itself out. But excellence is, in fact, our birthright. We’re predisposed to turn toward excellence just as a sunflower is predisposed to turn toward the sun.
It’s a deeply human desire, and one that’s surprisingly accessible when stripped of the myths we’ve come to accept as truth. For most of us, the real challenge isn’t knowing what we want to be good at – it’s figuring out how to pursue it without losing ourselves in the process. How do you stay focused in a distracted world? How do you build momentum without grinding yourself down? How do you balance ambition with community, rest, and joy? Answering these questions is critical, whether you’re striving for greatness in your professional career, creative endeavors, personal relationships, or holistic development.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how excellence is grounded in human biology and psychology, which mindsets foster sustained success, which habits turn intention into improvement, and which practices make excellence endure across decades, not just days. By engaging with your life in this way, you can ensure you’re proud of the person you become along the journey, not just the person you are at the destination. Keen to get going?
Well, let’s get started! Let’s start with this: Excellence isn’t some rare trait reserved for elite performers or child prodigies. It’s an intimately human impulse – a natural pull toward engaging fully in something worthwhile, in a way that reflects both who we are and what we value. Put simply, true excellence is the intersection of mastery and mattering.
Biologically, humans are wired to seek out this sweet spot. From the earliest forms of life, there has been an innate drive to grow. Scientists describe this as homeostatic upregulation – the tendency to not just survive, but to flourish. In modern life, that same force shows up as the desire to learn something new, improve an existing skill, and contribute our gifts where we can. Modern science has also mapped a path to this progress and the way stations along the route. We begin the journey at unconscious incompetence – not knowing what we don’t know.
With time and repetition, we arrive at conscious incompetence, where we become painfully aware of our shortcomings. With more time and repetition, we arrive at conscious competence, where we engage in deliberate practice. Finally, we reach unconscious competence – the stage of the journey where competency becomes second nature. You’ve already walked this path countless times – literally, in the case of first learning to walk – so you know firsthand how frustrating and how fulfilling it can be. Nevertheless, the fact that you have charted this course so many times is a testament to how ingrained it is within our species. Psychologically, the way of excellence offers an antidote to many of the ailments of modern life.
Emptiness, burnout, and alienation often stem from spending time and energy on misaligned or misguided endeavors. The most common way this shows up is when we let a short-term thought or feeling take us away from a long-term goal or value. When we turn to substances, even though we consider health a priority. When we spend our evenings online, despite believing family is number one. When we take a shortcut at work, even while wanting to be a person of integrity. Philosophically, the idea of excellence as central to a good life shows up again and again across cultures and eras.
Engaging deeply with that which matters to us fosters a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness – three key ingredients to a life that is both great and satisfying. And, of particular relevance and value in the 21st century: working on tangible, meaningful tasks – whether raising a child, polishing a manuscript, or tending a garden – is profoundly grounding. An expression of true excellence tethers us to who we are and where we belong in the universe, almost instantly silencing the din of the chaotic world around us.
With a foundational understanding in place, we can see that excellence is less about rare raw potential and more about how we show up for our lives day after day. The art of showing up starts in the mind. The inner stance we take toward our endeavor determines whether we grow toward greatness or whether we shrink toward smallness. These mindsets don’t arrive fully formed, however, which means each and every one of us can cultivate them in time.
The first core mindset is care. We simply can’t pursue excellence without genuinely caring about what we’re doing. But caring carries risk, which makes choosing to care a tremendous act of courage. Just think about a person or pet you care deeply for – there’s a vulnerability there, isn’t there? We know that caring now comes with potential grieving later. And yet, those investments are some of the most meaningful we will ever make.
This truth holds across the way of excellence. Focus is the second essential mindset, and it’s becoming increasingly rare. The modern attention economy is literally incentivized to fragment our focus, making sustained concentration feel uncomfortable at best, and impossible at worst. But focus is a muscle – we can train and strengthen it. This is unlikely to happen by default in today’s world, so we’re wise to schedule it, protect it, and commit to it. Blocks of 50 minutes to two hours tend to work best for most people.
The next mission-critical mindset is discipline, which bridges the gap between intention and action. Waiting to feel motivated is a losing strategy. Action is often what precipitates inspiration, not the other way around. The peak performers we all admire aren’t magical fountains of motivation; they’re real-life masters of showing up and getting started, even – and especially – on days they don’t “feel” like it. Confidence is a mindset you may have expected to see appear here, and indeed it does. However, you may not have expected it to be framed in this specific way: confidence as reflecting evidence, not arrogance.
Genuine confidence is quiet, humble, and coexists with doubt, rather than replacing it. Confidence is the natural by-product of doing the work, facing the obstacles and setbacks, and accumulating the proof that you can handle whatever comes your way. Finally, there’s gumption – the mindset of enthusiasm and initiative. The way of excellence traverses challenging terrain.
We aren’t going to feel passionate and proactive every minute of the journey. Those with the gumption mentality will allow themselves to momentarily step off the path when necessary – for example, to sulk for 24 hours after a big pitch at work doesn’t land, or to celebrate for a weekend when it does – before getting back on track, refreshed and revitalized. With the inner states of care, focus, discipline, confidence, and gumption working in concert, we set ourselves up to put excellence in action, which is what we’ll turn our attention to now.
Building on the theoretical foundations and mindsets we’ve just explored, we can now make excellence something we repeatedly do. Habits turn our best intentions into our regular behavior. They provide a rhythm that can carry us forward on days when everything else seems to be conspiring to hold us back. Over time, our habits shape not just our outcomes, but who we become in the process.
The first habit to lock in is goal setting. However, we want to approach goal setting wisely: goals are means, not ends. Goals should give us direction and energy. They should orient our efforts while keeping us aligned with our values. We are led astray the moment we start believing that greatness and satisfaction arise only after we win – especially if we start compromising our efforts and values to secure the W. If we aren’t bettering ourselves on the way, we won’t be better when we “arrive.
” Routines are the next habit to put in place, as they directly support the goals we set. Worth noting: there’s no such thing as a universally perfect routine, despite the latest Instagram influencer suggesting otherwise. What works will depend entirely on the architecture of our lives, our energy patterns, and our chosen pursuits. By all means, we can take inspiration from the influencers, but we should then experiment, iterate, and make our routines our own. Following hot on the heels of goals and routines is consistency. Consistency is arguably less sexy than its close cousin, intensity, but consistency delivers the true gains.
Instead of obsessing over raising our maximum possible output, we should obsess over raising our average minimum output. We should look to prioritize “raising the floor” rather than raising the ceiling. Excellence is a long game. What we do and who we are on our worst days matters more than what we do and who we are on our best days. The fourth habit, renewal, enables us to keep both our ambition and our well-being intact as we journey toward greatness. Rest isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s an absolute must-have.
In fact, the more stress – positive or negative – we have, the more rest and renewal we need. Some of the most research-backed options are also some of the most humble in appearance: walking and swimming, spending time in nature and with friends, deep sleep and light naps. While the latest technologies may look awfully compelling, there’s a reason our species has been engaging in these simple activities for millennia. Last but not least: curiosity.
We might not commonly think of curiosity as a habit, but there’s no denying its efficacy when it becomes one. As mentioned earlier, excellence is a long game, and curiosity is key to us in the game. Curiosity can help us see nerves as excitement, setbacks as data, and challenges as opportunities. Sustained success requires sustained effort, and goals, routines, consistency, rest, and curiosity make this kind of longevity possible – which is what we’ll unpack in greater detail now.
At this stage, we’re equipped with the theory that underpins excellence, the mindsets that enable it, and the habits that support it. All that remains are the practices of excellence – those macro movements that sustain the long-term commitment. Let’s start with the reality of trade-offs. Balance is largely an illusion, especially on the path of excellence.
We simply can’t do it all, all the time, and we’ll find ourselves quickly overwhelmed, frustrated, and burned out if we delude ourselves into thinking we can. Instead, we’re wise to approach our lives in seasons. Maybe we double down on our career in our 20s, then triple down on our family in our 30s. Or maybe we over-index on travel in our 20s, then lean hard into community in our 30s. There’s no objective right or wrong, but we will want to be intentional. On community, it’s worth calling out the profound impact those we surround ourselves with have on us.
Even if our “community” is small at this particular stage of life, we are wise to consider it a priority across our lives. Much of modern self-improvement foregrounds just that: the self. But love and connection are some of the most meaningful experiences of human existence. Few of us would want to get to the end of our lives having accomplished it all but sacrificed everyone we care about in the process. Two other companions on this long path are failure and patience. There’s no question that failing sucks, but there’s also no question that we’ll encounter failure at least on occasion.
This is another case for having and nurturing a community. Sometimes, our family, friends, peers, and mentors are the only things keeping us going. Equally sucky is needing to muster patience. Frequently. However, nothing and no one became excellent overnight. Time and repetitions are, unfortunately, prerequisites.
On the flip side, for all the talk of discipline, routines, and trade-offs, we don’t want to lose sight of joy. Anything but frivolous or trivial, joy is the fuel of endurance. And, as we’ve mentioned several times now, excellence is a long game. Those who engineer ways to keep playing will reap the greatest rewards. Joy can be our closest ally in this endeavor, ensuring we enjoy the journey rather than deny ourselves any sense of satisfaction until we reach the destination. Finally, and relatedly, is the practice of marking our progress with rituals of completion.
It’s all too easy to race from one milestone to the next, without carving out a little time and space to digest each of these phases. As tempting as zooming through may be, it robs us of the chance to fully process and integrate our experiences, and what are our lives if not a string of experiences? It would be a shame to be on our deathbed feeling life had passed us by. To return to where we started, excellence is an innately human yearning, more accurately viewed as a way of engaging with our lives than a title reserved for a rare few. You’re now armed with everything you need to unlock the greatness and satisfaction that is your birthright.
See you on the path. In this lesson to The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg, you’ve learned that excellence is not a finish line you reach – it’s a way of engaging with your life. Who you become along the journey matters just as much as who you are when you “arrive. ” Indeed, sustained success looks a lot less like one-off heroic displays of intensity and more like humble, value-aligned actions done daily.
It requires routine and rest; focus and community; discipline and joy. When you prioritize progress rather than obsess over outcomes, growth naturally arises as a by-product – and will save you from burning out in the process. Most importantly, the way of excellence is open to all. You don’t need to already be a Hall of Famer in your given endeavor. You need only clarity about what matters, the courage to continue to care, and the willingness to keep showing up. When excellence is treated as a practice rather than a prize, it becomes the path to true greatness and deep satisfaction – even in the chaos of the world around us today.
The Way of Excellence (2026) explores what it takes to achieve greatness and satisfaction in today’s world. It lays out the foundations, mindsets, habits, and practices that enable peak performers to pursue excellence sustainably, without compromising their well-being or ambition.
For all the hacks, highlight reels, and self-help manuals, we’ve lost an understanding of what excellence actually asks of us, and what it bestows in return. Excellence has become synonymous with the finish line, with the mountaintop, with the dramatic display of intensity that burns brightly before it burns itself out. But excellence is, in fact, our birthright. We’re predisposed to turn toward excellence just as a sunflower is predisposed to turn toward the sun.
It’s a deeply human desire, and one that’s surprisingly accessible when stripped of the myths we’ve come to accept as truth. For most of us, the real challenge isn’t knowing what we want to be good at – it’s figuring out how to pursue it without losing ourselves in the process. How do you stay focused in a distracted world? How do you build momentum without grinding yourself down? How do you balance ambition with community, rest, and joy? Answering these questions is critical, whether you’re striving for greatness in your professional career, creative endeavors, personal relationships, or holistic development.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how excellence is grounded in human biology and psychology, which mindsets foster sustained success, which habits turn intention into improvement, and which practices make excellence endure across decades, not just days. By engaging with your life in this way, you can ensure you’re proud of the person you become along the journey, not just the person you are at the destination. Keen to get going?
Well, let’s get started! Let’s start with this: Excellence isn’t some rare trait reserved for elite performers or child prodigies. It’s an intimately human impulse – a natural pull toward engaging fully in something worthwhile, in a way that reflects both who we are and what we value. Put simply, true excellence is the intersection of mastery and mattering.
Biologically, humans are wired to seek out this sweet spot. From the earliest forms of life, there has been an innate drive to grow. Scientists describe this as homeostatic upregulation – the tendency to not just survive, but to flourish. In modern life, that same force shows up as the desire to learn something new, improve an existing skill, and contribute our gifts where we can. Modern science has also mapped a path to this progress and the way stations along the route. We begin the journey at unconscious incompetence – not knowing what we don’t know.
With time and repetition, we arrive at conscious incompetence, where we become painfully aware of our shortcomings. With more time and repetition, we arrive at conscious competence, where we engage in deliberate practice. Finally, we reach unconscious competence – the stage of the journey where competency becomes second nature. You’ve already walked this path countless times – literally, in the case of first learning to walk – so you know firsthand how frustrating and how fulfilling it can be. Nevertheless, the fact that you have charted this course so many times is a testament to how ingrained it is within our species. Psychologically, the way of excellence offers an antidote to many of the ailments of modern life.
Emptiness, burnout, and alienation often stem from spending time and energy on misaligned or misguided endeavors. The most common way this shows up is when we let a short-term thought or feeling take us away from a long-term goal or value. When we turn to substances, even though we consider health a priority. When we spend our evenings online, despite believing family is number one. When we take a shortcut at work, even while wanting to be a person of integrity. Philosophically, the idea of excellence as central to a good life shows up again and again across cultures and eras.
Engaging deeply with that which matters to us fosters a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness – three key ingredients to a life that is both great and satisfying. And, of particular relevance and value in the 21st century: working on tangible, meaningful tasks – whether raising a child, polishing a manuscript, or tending a garden – is profoundly grounding. An expression of true excellence tethers us to who we are and where we belong in the universe, almost instantly silencing the din of the chaotic world around us.
With a foundational understanding in place, we can see that excellence is less about rare raw potential and more about how we show up for our lives day after day. The art of showing up starts in the mind. The inner stance we take toward our endeavor determines whether we grow toward greatness or whether we shrink toward smallness. These mindsets don’t arrive fully formed, however, which means each and every one of us can cultivate them in time.
The first core mindset is care. We simply can’t pursue excellence without genuinely caring about what we’re doing. But caring carries risk, which makes choosing to care a tremendous act of courage. Just think about a person or pet you care deeply for – there’s a vulnerability there, isn’t there? We know that caring now comes with potential grieving later. And yet, those investments are some of the most meaningful we will ever make.
This truth holds across the way of excellence. Focus is the second essential mindset, and it’s becoming increasingly rare. The modern attention economy is literally incentivized to fragment our focus, making sustained concentration feel uncomfortable at best, and impossible at worst. But focus is a muscle – we can train and strengthen it. This is unlikely to happen by default in today’s world, so we’re wise to schedule it, protect it, and commit to it. Blocks of 50 minutes to two hours tend to work best for most people.
The next mission-critical mindset is discipline, which bridges the gap between intention and action. Waiting to feel motivated is a losing strategy. Action is often what precipitates inspiration, not the other way around. The peak performers we all admire aren’t magical fountains of motivation; they’re real-life masters of showing up and getting started, even – and especially – on days they don’t “feel” like it. Confidence is a mindset you may have expected to see appear here, and indeed it does. However, you may not have expected it to be framed in this specific way: confidence as reflecting evidence, not arrogance.
Genuine confidence is quiet, humble, and coexists with doubt, rather than replacing it. Confidence is the natural by-product of doing the work, facing the obstacles and setbacks, and accumulating the proof that you can handle whatever comes your way. Finally, there’s gumption – the mindset of enthusiasm and initiative. The way of excellence traverses challenging terrain.
We aren’t going to feel passionate and proactive every minute of the journey. Those with the gumption mentality will allow themselves to momentarily step off the path when necessary – for example, to sulk for 24 hours after a big pitch at work doesn’t land, or to celebrate for a weekend when it does – before getting back on track, refreshed and revitalized. With the inner states of care, focus, discipline, confidence, and gumption working in concert, we set ourselves up to put excellence in action, which is what we’ll turn our attention to now.
Building on the theoretical foundations and mindsets we’ve just explored, we can now make excellence something we repeatedly do. Habits turn our best intentions into our regular behavior. They provide a rhythm that can carry us forward on days when everything else seems to be conspiring to hold us back. Over time, our habits shape not just our outcomes, but who we become in the process.
The first habit to lock in is goal setting. However, we want to approach goal setting wisely: goals are means, not ends. Goals should give us direction and energy. They should orient our efforts while keeping us aligned with our values. We are led astray the moment we start believing that greatness and satisfaction arise only after we win – especially if we start compromising our efforts and values to secure the W. If we aren’t bettering ourselves on the way, we won’t be better when we “arrive.
” Routines are the next habit to put in place, as they directly support the goals we set. Worth noting: there’s no such thing as a universally perfect routine, despite the latest Instagram influencer suggesting otherwise. What works will depend entirely on the architecture of our lives, our energy patterns, and our chosen pursuits. By all means, we can take inspiration from the influencers, but we should then experiment, iterate, and make our routines our own. Following hot on the heels of goals and routines is consistency. Consistency is arguably less sexy than its close cousin, intensity, but consistency delivers the true gains.
Instead of obsessing over raising our maximum possible output, we should obsess over raising our average minimum output. We should look to prioritize “raising the floor” rather than raising the ceiling. Excellence is a long game. What we do and who we are on our worst days matters more than what we do and who we are on our best days. The fourth habit, renewal, enables us to keep both our ambition and our well-being intact as we journey toward greatness. Rest isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s an absolute must-have.
In fact, the more stress – positive or negative – we have, the more rest and renewal we need. Some of the most research-backed options are also some of the most humble in appearance: walking and swimming, spending time in nature and with friends, deep sleep and light naps. While the latest technologies may look awfully compelling, there’s a reason our species has been engaging in these simple activities for millennia. Last but not least: curiosity.
We might not commonly think of curiosity as a habit, but there’s no denying its efficacy when it becomes one. As mentioned earlier, excellence is a long game, and curiosity is key to us in the game. Curiosity can help us see nerves as excitement, setbacks as data, and challenges as opportunities. Sustained success requires sustained effort, and goals, routines, consistency, rest, and curiosity make this kind of longevity possible – which is what we’ll unpack in greater detail now.
At this stage, we’re equipped with the theory that underpins excellence, the mindsets that enable it, and the habits that support it. All that remains are the practices of excellence – those macro movements that sustain the long-term commitment. Let’s start with the reality of trade-offs. Balance is largely an illusion, especially on the path of excellence.
We simply can’t do it all, all the time, and we’ll find ourselves quickly overwhelmed, frustrated, and burned out if we delude ourselves into thinking we can. Instead, we’re wise to approach our lives in seasons. Maybe we double down on our career in our 20s, then triple down on our family in our 30s. Or maybe we over-index on travel in our 20s, then lean hard into community in our 30s. There’s no objective right or wrong, but we will want to be intentional. On community, it’s worth calling out the profound impact those we surround ourselves with have on us.
Even if our “community” is small at this particular stage of life, we are wise to consider it a priority across our lives. Much of modern self-improvement foregrounds just that: the self. But love and connection are some of the most meaningful experiences of human existence. Few of us would want to get to the end of our lives having accomplished it all but sacrificed everyone we care about in the process. Two other companions on this long path are failure and patience. There’s no question that failing sucks, but there’s also no question that we’ll encounter failure at least on occasion.
This is another case for having and nurturing a community. Sometimes, our family, friends, peers, and mentors are the only things keeping us going. Equally sucky is needing to muster patience. Frequently. However, nothing and no one became excellent overnight. Time and repetitions are, unfortunately, prerequisites.
On the flip side, for all the talk of discipline, routines, and trade-offs, we don’t want to lose sight of joy. Anything but frivolous or trivial, joy is the fuel of endurance. And, as we’ve mentioned several times now, excellence is a long game. Those who engineer ways to keep playing will reap the greatest rewards. Joy can be our closest ally in this endeavor, ensuring we enjoy the journey rather than deny ourselves any sense of satisfaction until we reach the destination. Finally, and relatedly, is the practice of marking our progress with rituals of completion.
It’s all too easy to race from one milestone to the next, without carving out a little time and space to digest each of these phases. As tempting as zooming through may be, it robs us of the chance to fully process and integrate our experiences, and what are our lives if not a string of experiences? It would be a shame to be on our deathbed feeling life had passed us by. To return to where we started, excellence is an innately human yearning, more accurately viewed as a way of engaging with our lives than a title reserved for a rare few. You’re now armed with everything you need to unlock the greatness and satisfaction that is your birthright.
See you on the path. In this lesson to The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg, you’ve learned that excellence is not a finish line you reach – it’s a way of engaging with your life. Who you become along the journey matters just as much as who you are when you “arrive. ” Indeed, sustained success looks a lot less like one-off heroic displays of intensity and more like humble, value-aligned actions done daily.
It requires routine and rest; focus and community; discipline and joy. When you prioritize progress rather than obsess over outcomes, growth naturally arises as a by-product – and will save you from burning out in the process. Most importantly, the way of excellence is open to all. You don’t need to already be a Hall of Famer in your given endeavor. You need only clarity about what matters, the courage to continue to care, and the willingness to keep showing up. When excellence is treated as a practice rather than a prize, it becomes the path to true greatness and deep satisfaction – even in the chaos of the world around us today.
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