How to Be More Grounded in a Frenetic World

15 lessons for becoming the most wholehearted version of you in 2022

Brad Stulberg
Forge
Published in
5 min readDec 9, 2021

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Photo: Stephen Zeigler/Getty Images

Over the past few months since the publication of The Practice of Groundednessa book which, in many ways, is a coda to what I’ve been writing about in this column for the last five years — I’ve had the chance to interact with all kinds of people, from elite athletes, to creatives, to traditional workplace professionals, on what it means to practice groundedness. What follows are the 15 most common lessons. Taken together, these lessons provide a recipe for attaining more inner strength and stability in a frantic and frenetic world.

1) Addiction to achievement is real.

It is easy to tell yourself a story that your work helps or inspires others, so therefore it is okay to go all-in, all the time. Eventually, this mindset ends in burnout. Just like in sport, in life too, it is important to create boundaries so that you can rest and recover from hard efforts.

2) Wherever you are, the goalpost is always 10 yards down the field.

If you believe that, “if I just do this, or just accomplish that, then I’ll arrive,” you are in for trouble. There is no arriving. The human brain didn’t evolve for…

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Brad Stulberg
Forge

Bestselling author of Master of Change and The Practice of Groundedness