On Quality

Excellence Without Burnout: Brad Stulberg on Escaping Hustle Culture

The Ready State Podcast, 22 January 2026. The book comes up at 47 min 4 sec in.

Brad Stulberg describes this posthumously published collection of Robert Persig's journal entries, in which Persig connects his concept of quality to excellence. Stulberg says he encountered it midway through writing The Way of Excellence and it confirmed that what he calls "intimacy" and Persig calls "quality" point to the same thing—that a good life is one oriented around deep connection to what one cares about.

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