Brad Stulberg - Just Manageable Challenges

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:46)
This week's conversation is about performance. More specifically, it is about the ins and outs of steady progress and growth. My guest is Brad Stulberg, who co-authored the book Peak Performance, which combines research from many fields into a description of how athletes, creatives and others continue to push boundaries in their respective crafts.
As someone who is intermittently lazy, the growth equation framework that Brad and I explore has impacted me often since I first read the book several months ago. I hope you enjoy this conversation, which isn't about investing, but which is at its heart still about the power of compounding. I'm on vacation with my son, and he demanded that he close this one out.

**Brad Stulberg** (1:32)
Vick Stretcher, he's a professor affiliated with the University of Michigan, and when I was studying public health there in graduate school, pretty much everyone I came across told me that I should enroll in Vick's class. I think he was teaching a class on health communication and behavior change.
And I went to enroll in the class, and I saw that Vick was no longer teaching that class. And I went to my advisor, and I said, I want to take this class, Vick's not teaching it.
And it turned out that Vick wasn't teaching that class because his daughter, who was in nursing school, so a young woman, I think she's either 19 or 20, had passed away. And his daughter, her name was Julia, and she was born with congenital heart issues, and actually ended up requiring a heart transplant at age nine. It was the youngest heart transplant ever.
And at that point, Vick thought that he was going to lose his daughter, and she made a miraculous recovery. And as far as they knew, she was in good health, and then she suddenly passed away at age 19 This put Vick in a completely dark hole. He told me that he just retreated into himself and really wanted nothing to do with the world. So that's why he wasn't teaching that semester. He went to a lake house in northern Michigan alone and just tried to cope and manage and deal with his grief.
And he had this revelation one morning out as the sun was coming up. He was out on either a canoe or a kayak on the water. And he claims that it was as if his daughter Julia was talking to him and saying like, Dad, like you've totally lost your way. You've got to find a why. And for the longest time, Vick's why had been his daughter, his girl. And he says it was if she was telling him that this can't be your why anymore because I'm not here and you need to find your why. You can't just live your life like this. So Vick is one of the smartest people I know. He's so wise. He's a public health professor, but the man could teach philosophy. He'd spent years in India before. He'd studied Zen. He says that this revelation kind of triggered thinking in him, which was to explore, start exploring the power of why and the power of purpose. And what he found is that when individuals lose their purpose and they lose their why and whatever it is they're doing, they tend to flounder.
And it made him realize that this voice inside his head that he accredits to his daughter that was telling him, you've got to find your why, was actually pretty correct, and there's a ton of science behind it. So Vick totally shifts his career, shifts his research priorities from health behavior and communication to understanding the power of purpose, and starts to find all this research that was validating what he was experiencing, which is if you can come back to and find your why, you can overcome the deepest depths of darkness. So in a nutshell, that's Vick's story. How this fits into our book is, Vick is an extreme example of the why, but if you have a why, it can help you and help you get through all kinds of uncomfortable times.