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Six Books That Changed How We Think About Performance

excellence, actually, 25 June 2026. The book comes up at 30 min 20 sec in.

Brad Stahlberg's pick. Matthew Crawford quit a tenured academic track to become a motorcycle mechanic and wrote about how concrete, manual work benefits the mind, body, and soul. Brad reads a passage on how physical competence relieves the need for self-justification and contrasts the objective feedback of craft work with the ambiguity of white-collar work, where quality depends on factors entirely outside the worker's control. Brad urges listeners to find some domain with real, concrete, objective feedback.

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