Love is An Ongoing Practice

It’s cultivated through care and attention

Brad Stulberg
Personal Growth
Published in
4 min readSep 4, 2018

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I make a living coaching and writing on passion and peak performance. I know that medals won, deals closed, and promotions earned all feel nice. But I’m increasingly coming to think that if your primary goal is a long, happy, and healthy life, you’d be far better off focusing on love. This is an age-old theme across spiritual traditions. It’s also becoming a truth of modern science.

For the past 75 years, The Study of Adult Development, run out of Harvard, has been tracking the physical and emotional well-being of over 700 men who grew up in Boston in the 1930's and 1940's. It is one of the longest and most comprehensive longitudinal studies of its kind, closely following subjects from their late teens and early twenties all the way into their eighties and nineties.

Many of the findings are what you’d expect: don’t drink too much; don’t smoke; exercise often; eat a nutritious diet; maintain a healthy body weight; keep on learning. But according to George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and clinical therapist who directed the study for over three decades, the most important component to a long, happy, and healthy life is love.

Love isn’t easy. It needs to be cultivated. It is an ongoing practice.

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Brad Stulberg
Personal Growth

Bestselling author of Master of Change and The Practice of Groundedness