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Brad Stulberg Profile picture
@BStulberg
Aug 13, 2019 • 11 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
A bunch of people have asked me what essays and stories from my last few years @outsidemagazine taught me most.

I'm fortunate I get to explore so broadly. Topics include wellness, mental health, burnout, peak performance, and motivation.

Here are top 10, in no particular order.
This very personal and heartfelt essay on mental illness. Among lots of other things, I learned about vulnerability, the massive benefits⁠—and massive limits⁠—of exercise, how therapy works, and what it feels like to really suffer. outsideonline.com/2279856/anxiet…
I've learned so much from @ShalaneFlanagan over the years. This conversation explores important topics like the illusion of "balance" when you are pushing hard at something and also the vast importance of community and purpose if you want to be a champion. outsideonline.com/2281741/shalan…
Stress + Rest = Growth.

This is true for basically everyone and everything, from athletic growth to intellectual growth to emotional growth to career growth to relationship growth to even how communities grow.

Such a useful concept.

outsideonline.com/2327746/equati…
The key to being great is to stop trying so damn hard to be great and focus on being good enough over and over again. This requires some key skills that are often overlooked in today's culture:
-Acceptance
-Presence
-Vulnerability
-Community
-Patience
outsideonline.com/2348226/case-b…
The 24-hour news cycle is designed to prey on your attention, make you feel like crap, and keep you coming back for more. I had no idea the engineering behind this, or the strategies you can use to overcome it. outsideonline.com/2371546/break-…
Good vibes are contagious. In a huge way! Work with someone who is a high performer and your performance improves by up to 15%. Work with someone who is a low performer and it goes down by 30%.

The people with whom we surround ourselves shape us. outsideonline.com/2391572/send-g…
The mastery mindset: a series of practices to keep you on the path of continuous improvement and fulfillment.
-Drive from within
-Process > results
-Be the best at getting better
-Embrace acute failure for chronic gains
-Be here now
-Take a long view
outsideonline.com/2391341/passio…
In this essay on millennial burnout I learned that the problem isn't always the work itself. It’s the addiction to ego, relevance, and self-worth that gets linked to the work—and that our culture implicitly and explicitly promotes. outsideonline.com/2395138/millen…
My latest essay on the wellness industrial complex was eye opening. It taught me why pretty much everything it's selling, by design, doesn't work; and—most important—what you really need to be well.

(Hint: it's not buying any potions, lotions, or pills.) outsideonline.com/2399826/wellne…
Last but not least: I always thought that you had to be motivated and happy to get going. But it turns out the opposite is true. As @richroll first taught me, MOOD FOLLOWS ACTION.

Sometimes—often—the best thing to do is just get started. outsideonline.com/2274776/forget…

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More from @BStulberg

Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Mar 17
Anyone can be consistent for a few days. It’s harder to be consistent for years upon years, through ups, downs, everything in between.

Here are 7 ideas from Master of Change that resonate with readers most.

On what it takes to stay steady amidst challenge and grow from change:
1. View life as a continuous cycle of order, disorder, reorder.

You may crave order and stability, but that stability is a moving target—it's always somewhere new. It doesn't come from resisting change. It comes from working with it.
You are always somewhere in the cycle of order, disorder, reorder.
Read 11 tweets
Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Feb 1
The average person undergoes more than 30 significant life changes.

Marriage. Divorce. Kids. School. Graduation. Moving. Illness. Recovery. Starting jobs. Leaving jobs. Promotions. The list goes on and on.

Yet our models for change are old and outdated. Here's a better way:
Old models represent change as a cycle of order, disorder, order.

Change is something that happens to you. The goal is to get back to where you were.

But this is neither accurate nor how change, which is to say life, actually works.
Change and disorder are not the exceptions. They are the rules.

Look closely and you'll see that everything is always changing, including you.

Life is flux. The only time something is static is when it's dead.
Read 9 tweets
Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Dec 26, 2023
As we round out this year and head into the next, here are some of the most powerful ideas on performance, excellence, and mastery to keep in mind:
1. Outcomes matter, but if you are to have any meaningful longevity you’ve got to learn to enjoy the process.

2. Community is key. Nobody reaches the top alone.

3. Consistency—the dull and mundane act of showing up every day—is way more important than intensity.
4. It’s easy when everything is clicking, but how you perform on your average and bad day is probably more important.

5. Work and craft can be a big part of your identity, but when they are the whole of it you become fragile.
Read 11 tweets
Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Nov 26, 2023
I've got a new piece out today.

It confronts the self-help trap of needing to find meaning and grow from everything always.

Sometimes simply showing up and getting through is plenty. Perhaps the real growth is learning to let it be enough.

Highlights are below: Image
In 2017, I was blindsided by the sudden onset of obsessive compulsive disorder and secondary depression.

For the better of a year, my days were consumed by intrusive thoughts and feelings of angst, dread and despair.

It was a terrifying and disorienting ordeal.
Normally, I process whatever I’m going through via my work, writing — suddenly, I could hardly muster enough focus to string together a sentence.

My favorite foods tasted like cardboard. I couldn’t find peace, let alone joy, anywhere, not even in my newborn son.
Read 12 tweets
Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Oct 24, 2023
In finite games the point is to win.

In infinite games the point is to keep playing.

Life is an infinite game.

Here are 7 mindset shifts for playing well:
1. You don't think yourself into the person you want to be. You act yourself into it.

Know your core values. Know how to practice them. And do it.

When you fall off the path—which inevitably you will, because everyone does—simply get back on.

This is your life's work.
2. Nobody wakes up feeling great and ready to get after it every day.

The work is accepting your feelings and taking them along for the ride.

Motivation follows action.

Become a master of showing up.
Read 9 tweets
Brad Stulberg Profile picture
Sep 20, 2023
A psychological construct called self-complexity says that the key to a strong and enduring identity—one that is equal parts rugged and flexible, that can navigate the inevitable changes we all face—is to diversify your sense of self.

Important thread 👇👇
The more you define yourself by any one activity, the more fragile you become. If that activity doesn’t go well or something changes unexpectedly, you lose a sense of who you are.

But with self-complexity, you have develop multiple components to your identity.
We all can wear many hats. Examples include:

•Writer
•Spouse
•Artist
•Parent
•Employee
•Neighbor
•Entrepreneur
•Baker
•Creative

Take an inventory of your own identities.

Are there any upon which you are over-reliant for meaning and self-worth?
Read 15 tweets

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