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Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness

Hustle Culture Creates Burnout. Brad Stulberg on The Biology of Excellence and the Art of Becoming, Rugged Flexibility, How to Curate Your Content Better, and the Two Kinds of Burnout

Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness

Christopher Cook

Mental Health, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 528 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Excellence isn't a personality trait or a hustle tactic. It's a way of becoming. And in a culture driven by distraction, convenience, and external validation, genuine excellence is quietly eroding. What replaces it looks productive but feels hollow, leaving many people burned out, scattered, or chasing intensity instead of depth. This week on Win Today, Brad Stulberg joins me to recover a truer vision of excellence—one rooted in biology, values, focus, and formation. We explore why rugged flexibility matters more than rigid discipline, how to curate your inputs so your attention serves what matters most, and why there are actually two different kinds of burnout. This conversation reframes excellence not as achievement alone, but as a deeply human process of becoming aligned, durable, and alive. If you're tired of pseudo-excellence, dopamine-driven ambition, or burnout disguised as growth, this episode will help you reorient toward a better path—one that connects mastery with meaning and performance with purpose.

Guest Bio

Brad Stulberg is an author, coach, and researcher focused on excellence, sustainable performance, and human flourishing. He has written multiple best-selling books exploring the intersection of science, philosophy, and practice, and his work is widely recognized for helping individuals and organizations pursue growth without burnout. Brad's writing and teaching challenge hustle culture while offering a grounded, humane path toward mastery, resilience, and meaningful achievement.

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Episode Links

Transcript

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0:00.0

The Art of Leadership Network

0:03.0

This week on Win Today.

0:05.0

The things that we work on, they also work on us.

0:08.0

Our being, effects are doing, our doing effects are being.

0:11.0

Heartfelt, true excellence, not pseudo-excellance, not hustle culture greatness,

0:15.0

but the actual real thing, it encompasses all of this.

0:19.0

The primary point of any path towards excellence is, again, to become a better version of

0:24.3

yourself and to forge incredible relationships along the way.

0:28.7

Hey, you guys, welcome to the podcast.

0:30.6

I'm really thankful you've joined me today.

0:32.2

And I am so excited about this episode because today we're diving into a subject matter

0:36.2

that completely fascinates me

0:38.4

and that's excellence but i think raw potent excellence has been hijacked by noise and if i can be so

0:46.6

honest maybe even perfectionism here's what i mean what once meant slow steady devotion to a craft

0:53.8

alignment with values and the slow work

0:56.8

of becoming has been reduced to life hacks and intensity and hustle culture and performance

1:02.9

theater.

1:03.7

So today, author and adjunct professor Brad Stolberg joins me to reclaim a richer, truer

1:09.6

vision of excellence, one that's grounded in

1:12.5

biology, philosophy, and daily practice. We talk about the concept he developed called

1:17.8

rugged flexibility, the danger of curated distraction, the difference between intensity and

1:23.7

consistency, and why burnout often reveals not weakness, but misalignment with our values.

...

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