"Master of Change"

Keeping your head, even when it's rightfully spinning

“Condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. 

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace…” 

John F. Kennedy said that during a speech at Rice University in 1962 in which he outlined America’s goals for space exploration. I first read it while minoring in astronomy in college. The most famous line is: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” But Kennedy’s analogy about the pace of the change is the part I find most interesting. 

It came to mind recently while I was reading a sort of economic history of humanity. In it, the economist-author Oded Galor notes that, for most of the 300,000 years since Homo sapiens emerged as a distinct species, the life of a human was pretty similar to that of a squirrel foraging for food. Even not that long ago, at the dawn of the Common Era, change was gradual. Residents of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, if conveyed via time machine to Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem of 1800, would marvel at the new city wall and increased population, but they could adjust. 

Take those time travelers forward just another 200 years, though, and the life around them would be completely unrecognizable, not to mention twice as long. After a protracted period of little or gradual change, humanity hit the gas.¹ Whether it’s AI, additive manufacturing (a.k.a. 3D printing), augmented reality, or autonomous vehicles, the pace of change is head-spinning. And that’s just the ‘A’s’. 

Whether change is ultimately to your benefit or detriment (Kennedy noted that the “breathtaking pace…cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old”), it can be disorienting. That feeling, and psychologically healthy ways to deal with it, are at the heart of a brand new book: Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You, by my friend Brad Stulberg. 

I’ve read a lot of Brad’s work, and he always marshals a mix of philosophy, science, and personal stories while managing to write about health and human performance topics in a conscientious way. That is: without using the common health-and-wellness sales tactic of making outlandish, silver-bullet promises that vastly outstrip the available evidence. He does an excellent job of providing useful frames for critical conversations. 

Below is a Q&A with Brad about a few points from Master of Change.

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David Epstein: I like that you come up with new phrases to represent your core ideas. That might seem trite, but I think giving readers a useful lexicon is helpful for discussing an idea, and for making it memorable. In this book, the phrase is “rugged flexibility.” Why did you choose that? 

Brad Stulberg: To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances and conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking. Put them together and you get a gritty endurance, an anti-fragility that not only withstands change but thrives in its midst.

In my research and reporting on change and uncertainty, I constantly found a pattern: skillfully navigating change – be it at the level of an individual, organization, community, or even an entire species – demands not ruggedness or flexibility, but ruggedness and flexibility. It’s an example of when non-dual thinking, or holding two competing ideas at the same time, is essential to understanding the world.

As for how I coined the term, it actually goes back to a conversation I had with you! I was in the very beginning stages of working on the idea for this book, and I was describing the non-duality of navigating change and uncertainty and asked for your help coming up with some language for it. You suggested I call it “the supple moose.” I truly have no idea how that suggestion led to “rugged flexibility,” but a few days later, I had the term. No shade, by the way: the supple moose is outstanding. Someone should use that for something.

DE: I was trying to remember the odd suggestion I made, and “the pliable crocodile” was all I could come up with today, so thanks for reminding me it was supple moose. I know, so surprising that nobody has hired me to be a marketing director. Not to get away from that important stuff, but: early in the book, you feature a dramatic story of a mountaineer who is taken hostage; in order to escape he pushes his captor off the mountain. The experience of having killed someone — circumstances notwithstanding — does not fit into his sense of identity. Can you discuss why you used this story? 

BS: I used this story to tee up one of the central questions the book asks: What does it mean to have a strong and enduring sense of self when everything is always changing, including you? I am fascinated by this paradox. We all want to be solid and stable, and yet we are also constantly undergoing these shifts to our sense of self. I wanted to start with a rather extreme story to help the reader see what I was getting at. I think there is value in extremes for making an idea, or a conundrum clear.

So I used the story of this young climbing prodigy who was all happy-go-lucky and innocent and then boom, suddenly he almost lost his life and had killed another human. How on earth is someone supposed to reconcile those two things? And yet, in many ways, we are all constantly trying to create an identity that is always being pushed and pulled by our life experience.

DE: Regarding constant change, the major frame of the book is the idea of “homeostasis” versus “allostasis.” Can you give a quick definition of those, and explain why they’re important concepts when thinking about change? 

BS: Homeostasis states that following a disorder event, healthy systems return to stability where they started: X to Y to X, order, disorder, order.

Allostasis states that following a disorder event, healthy systems return to stability somewhere new: X to Y to Z, order, disorder, reorder. 

Homeostasis was the predominant way of considering change in the context of human health and flourishing for the last 170 years. Allostasis, however, is more recent and comes from the work of two scientists, Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer, who coined the term after observing that long-term stability comes as a result of changing, at least to some extent.

Allostasis is also more accurate because the truth is you almost never get back to where you were — and when you try you often end up suffering. And while allostasis is becoming the predominant model for thinking about change in the research community, it hasn’t really been applied to laypeople with our everyday concerns. I think it should be, because it’s so helpful to think about stability not as something that is static but as a process. You'll almost always feel and fare better this way.

Some people, like neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, refer to “allostasis” as “homeostatic upregulation,” but they essentially mean the same thing.

DE: You describe several common ways in which people respond to change, like avoidance and resistance. But the one I found most interesting was “try to get back to where we were.” It made me think of the so-called “end of history illusion,” the finding in psychology research that, at every stage of life, people underestimate how much they’ll change in the future — everything from their fashion taste to their values. As I wrote in Range, we’re works in progress constantly claiming to be finished. Regarding that resistance to change you describe, what are some of the ways that manifests, and is there anything to be done about it?

BS: It manifests in so many ways. Moving and comparing your new geography to your old and expecting it’ll immediately feel like home, instead of realizing that home is something to develop. Aging and yet comparing yourself to your younger self. Experiencing an illness or injury but refusing to accept it and trying to push through, to get back to how you were before. Having a child but trying to sleep and exercise and socialize like you did before. Becoming an empty nester and expecting your home to feel the same as it did when your kids were still there. Getting a promotion but expecting things to feel like they did prior to the change. Retirement. Divorce. Marriage. I mean the list goes on and on and on.

I think the innate resistance, the trying to get back to where you were, is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness because for 170 years homeostasis was the guiding principle for human health and flourishing. Order, disorder, back to order.

One small part of what I am trying to do with this book is update that expectancy, to help readers see how and why change is not something to be resisted but rather something to dance with, to participate in. To see that yes, stability is generally good, but that stability is almost always somewhere new – not back to order, but reorder.

DE: Ah, you just mentioned something I want to home in on: expectancy. I’ve been interested in research on expectations for a while, and would like to write about it (by which time you’ll have written three more books). As you write in the book, psychologists have repeatedly found that “our happiness in any given moment is a function of our reality minus our expectations. When reality matches or exceeds expectations, we feel good. When reality falls short of expectations, we feel bad.” And countries in which people tend to have modest expectations also tend to have happier people. So, I have a two-part question here. First, how should we use this information and also, like — I’m not sure how to put this — still have high expectations?? Ok, answer that first and then I’ll do the second part. 

BS: Yes, happiness, or — more generally, mood — is in large part a function of your reality minus your expectations. This doesn’t mean setting low expectations. It means setting accurate expectations and updating them to match reality. It’s another example of non-dual thinking. Yes, strive for excellence and set realistic expectations! 

Updating expectations is especially important during periods of unforeseen change, which, by definition, means things aren’t going as you thought they would. The more you hold onto old expectations (also called “magical thinking”) instead of updating them to match reality, the worse off you’ll be in the long-run.

DE: Ok, second: I’ve found both fascinating and horrifying research on changing “locus of control.” Basically, for decades, there has been an increase in the importance that young people place on “extrinsic goals,” like money, status, and being attractive. At the same time, there has been a decrease in emphasis on “intrinsic goals,” like developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Not to denigrate any of those specific desires, but the shift means that people increasingly prioritize things over which they have less control. To use the research terms, we have moved away from an “internal locus of control” and toward an “external locus of control.” I feel like that impossible mix of increasing desire for extrinsic goals but still striving for agency manifests in some really palpable ways, like people posting filtered photos on Instagram with captions insisting that it doesn’t matter how anyone else sees you. There’s a lot of implicit sadness on there.

Unsurprisingly, the shift has coincided with increasing anxiety and depression. Also unsurprisingly, people with a more internal locus of control suffered less mental distress during the pandemic. Do you think this jibes with the expectations research? 

BS: I actually think this has more to do with a different topic in the book: “having versus being.” An external locus of control is akin to a “having” orientation. It makes you fragile. An internal locus of control is akin to a “being” orientation. 

A “having” orientation is one in which you define yourself by what you have: a certain job, income, house, car, skill, and so on. A “being” orientation is one in which you define yourself by your essential values: creativity, intellect, wisdom, kindness, authenticity, and so on. A “having” orientation is fragile to change because everything you have eventually shifts and can be taken away. A “being” orientation is much more rugged and flexible because those core attributes are portable, durable, and open to being applied flexibly during change. The idea of “having” vs. “being” originated in the 1970’s thanks to the work of the late Erich Fromm, one of my intellectual heroes.

Either way, the upshot of the expectations research, for me, anyway, is during a period of change, be it big or small, I need to constantly be asking myself if I’ve updated my expectations to match reality, or if I am clinging to old expectations. 

I also think there is some wisdom to value the notion of striving for excellence in your work (internal locus of control) but having low expectations for the results of it (external locus of control). There is a reason that “focusing on the process not outcomes” has become a cliche in sport. It’s a good mindset and view.

DE: This is a total aside, but since I know you’re very publicly critical of a lot of health and wellness fads, what fad is currently annoying you the most, and on a scale from 1 to Amar’e Stoudemire bathing in red wine, how much is it annoying you?

BS: It’s worse than a single fad. It’s an entire approach: start with something that has a kernel of truth and sounds all “sciency” and then expand on it as if it were super important and the answer to everything. This is done for everything from cold plunges, to certain kinds of breathing, to recovery devices and trackers, to ionizing water, to studies on supplements, and on and on and on. Many of the most popular health and science podcasts do this. It is frustrating, and in some ways I think even more insidious than bathing in red wine, since the red-wine baths are more outwardly absurd.

Listen, tools are tools and if it’s working for you by all means go for it. But I think a lot more harm is done than people realize by promising these quick fixes and reductionist solutions to complex and thorny problems. Like I said of expectations – if you expect a breathing hack will cure clinical anxiety or a cold-plunge will treat depression, you may find yourself in an even deeper hole if these tools don’t work.

DE: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know anything about wine but even I know that bathing in white wine is way more cost-effective. …Finally, how much can you deadlift these days? I have high expectations here, so don’t disappoint me.

BS: I pulled 500 pounds about three months before my book launch. It was hard. I do love training though.

DE: I lied, one more question. Two people mentioned Master of Change in the comments on my last post. And reader Matt Golt left a question for you. He’s read a few of your books, including Peak Performance, and he wants to know what symmetry, if any, you see across your various books. 

BS: Great question, Matt! I think this book and The Practice of Groundedness are super complementary. Groundedness is all about stability. And I love that book. Everything in there is highly defensible. I recommend it often and I learned so much reading and writing it. But in this book I’m a bit older (and perhaps wiser, though who knows) and I realized that stability is nice, but most of the time, you’ve got to find stability through change, not apart from it. And that’s what this book is all about. But every reader is going to have a different experience with the books, so ultimately that’s for y’all to decide! 

Thank you for reading. If you’re interested in more, check out Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You.

Total aside: I recently started using Substack Notes for sharing links and post excerpts. So far, it seems like a place where people share quotes and posts rather than, ya know, trying to enrage one another. To join me there, head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app.

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Until next time…

David

1. Economist Robert Gordon has made an interesting and provocative argument that the most rapid time of widespread change is now behind us.