Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How To Sustain High Performance As You Age | Steven Kotler

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

This week’s conversation is with Steven Kotler, a best-selling author, journalist, and one of the world’s leading experts on flow and human performance. Steven has spent three decades teaching people how to achieve peak performance, and of late, putting his own advice into practice as documented in his newest book, Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad. In it, Steven challenges us to test our own limits as he himself sets out to become an expert skier at age 53. Using his understanding of embodied cognition and flow science, he puts theories and his own body to the test in order to challenge the perceived limitations of peak performance as we get older. He’s authored fourteen books, eleven of which are New York Times bestsellers. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice, appeared in over 100 publications, and his work is translated into over 50 languages; and yet, Steven’s appeal comes from far more than a list of very impressive accolades. While endeavoring to help others be at their best, he puts his own teaching into practice so his perspective isn’t simply scientific, it’s personal. As you’ll find out in this conversation, Steven embodies true grit and refuses to allow getting older to hold him back from achieving his highest potential. I think we can all find inspiration in these insights from a real badass who’s living life to the fullest and inviting you to do the same._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'll never run out of guitar. There's an endless amount of shit that I can keep. I don't run out of anything. I'm going to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning. I think of skiing that way or writing that way. I actually think marriage that way. Like these are the infinite games right there, but their progression is built in and

you don't win. There's just the progression. Okay. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. I trade and training a high-performance psychologist, and I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back Stephen Kotler to the pod for this week's conversation. It's safe to say that Stephen knows the power of pushing to the edge. Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Stephen is not only an 11-time

best-selling author and a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, he's the kind of person who puts his own safety at the center of his research in order to challenge the perceived limitations of performance and in a body that's not getting any younger. I think this is what they call walking the talk, or in this case, skiing. At age 53, Stephen set out to prove whether you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks. Quite literally, as he set out to become an expert park skier, meaning jumps and tricks and the potential for broken bones, it doesn't get much more punk rock than that. At the heart of this pursuit was an exploration of what he calls

peak performance aging. I can't wait for you to experience Stephen's badass approach to high performance as we dig into the importance of flow and how access to it shifts as we get older. We also explore how engaging with our own developing superpowers like wisdom and creativity and forgiveness can help us and even our teams huck ourselves successfully down mountains, literally and figuratively. His expertise isn't just scientific, it's deeply personal. And if you're enjoying this podcast and haven't already, just a quick reminder to hit the subscribe or follow button and to drop us a review wherever you're listening. It is the easiest and zero cost way to support the show. And with that, let's find out how to grow old and stay rad in this week's conversation

with my friend, Steven Collar. Steven, this is number four that you've been on this podcast and that's a record for us. So we're doing something right here where we're having a little bit too much fun or we're really like our folks want to learn from you. So it's awesome that you're here again. Thank you. We get to do it live.

I know. Is this the first one live? I think do it live i know is this the first one live i think the first i want to say the first one live also yeah yeah but i mean this is close enough for you to spit spit balls at me like you did last time you know what kind of kid you were in high school that might have been a theme for you as i was reading our country and i didn't realize yeah right it's coming up again. You can't slip stuff by psychology. It just, you know, it just kind of happens automatically. Okay. So we'll get into some of the origin story for you. But when you told me a couple of years ago, what you're sorting

out to do. And then when I read in our country, I was like, oh, he did it. He did. He did it. And when you first told me, I was like, really? Is that what you're going to do at 50? Yeah, you were part of the That's Impossible crowd. Yeah, like really? And then I was incredibly inspired by it. Like, I can't wait to see how this goes for you because it's a real thing that you're facing down. But just to be clear, let's just start with this question which is like what are you doing with your life like what what was this really about and explain the whole thing to your best ability let me just soak it in from your perspective now all my work is most of my work is in flow and uh flow has deep ties into the world of adult development has deep ties into the world of adult development, has deep ties into the world of successful aging,

peak performance aging. All of those things, Flo plays a major role in. And it's not just Chick sent me high, ended up moving in this direction, the godfather of Flo's psychology. So in following his work, I started stumbling deeper and deeper onto these things around peak performance aging.

And long story very short, you know, I grew up like most of us grew up with like the traditional theories of aging, which is what I like to call the long, slow route theory, right? It's the idea that our mental skills, our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And yet there was stuff I was following in flow science and in related fields like network neuroscience, neural dynamics, and embodied cognition, some whiz-bang stuff. All of it basically said, hey, wait a minute. Everything we've heard about performance in the second half of our lives is wrong, right?

Is wrong. For example, the long, slow route theory, all our skills decline. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. Partially true. Our skills do decline over time, but it turns out they're all use it or lose it skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you can hold on to them, even advance them far later in life than you thought possible. And that also includes flow, right? Flow is really important to successful aging, performance aging, all those terms, but our access to flow declines over time. But it's, again, trainable. That's a new idea, that your access to flow,

the ability to experience flow as an older adult declines. So the ability to experience the way you phrased it is not, that's, I don't think that shifts. Or does our flow of pronenesseness our desire for the state that in fact somebody has very last study was on flow proneness late into life that's right but um what changes is our ability to utilize some of flow's triggers and we can talk about why that happens it just shrinks a little bit because of things that can have our life that we have to train against oh that's cool which is doing things in the back country where you break your body if you make mistakes all that is besides the point

right now yeah okay anyways so i the traditional theory of aging the like the the the classics phrases you can't teach an old dog new tracks right that's and i was reading all this stuff and i was like wait a minute if this stuff is right at least in the lab old dogs should be able to learn new tracks and including really really hard tracks when did you start to identify with being an old dog i didn't uh i i never really identified with being an old dog but i would even in skiing right i would we call it getting geezered it's where somebody gets there oh i'm too old for this shit juice all over you and i would find invariably this wild mismatch i'd go skiing you know you're wearing goggles and a mat nobody can tell how old

you are and i'd be in the chairlift talking to people who were clearly like 20 years younger than me and i'd be like hey how are the moguls over there? What's this cliff like? Or you'd be trying to talk about the stuff I wanted to ski. And I would consistently be like, get like these looks like I'm to my knees, haven't done that for 10, you know, all this stuff. And I was looking at people who were consistently a lot younger than me.

And I was like, wow, they seem like they're old. I don't – like none of that makes any sense to me and I don't – that doesn't – that's not how I feel or think or anything. Though I'm now 55 years old and I don't necessarily know if that's old, but it's certainly not young, I don't think. Yeah, right. So when you – that phrase, can't teach an old dog new tricks you were not identifying no not at all not at all i was not identifying i was just all i was saying so all i knew is that what the research is starting to show is that people over 40 over 50 there are cognitive superpowers that start coming online in those decades, right? And everything I'm reading says, oh my God, you should be able to really learn

difficult skills late into life. And there was stuff, you know, the big saw was the motor learning window, which supposedly slams closed. And that's not also not true. It's that when we're kids, we predominantly learn through playing. And what changes so much in adulthood is we start learning in a radically different way. Yes, the motor learning window does thin and there are shifts, but it's actually the way we approach learning that changes the most. And so all this stuff was saying, hey, wait a minute, we should be able to do this. I wanted a way to test it. It's part A, right? And I decided to test it by teaching myself how to park ski, which if anybody's listening and doesn't know what park skiing is, it's the discipline of skiing that involves doing tricks, off jumps, on boxes, on rails, on wall rides.

It's super acrobatic, somewhat dangerous. And as you pointed out at the start of the conversation, right, if you're over 35, people say, wow, it's really difficult to learn. You shouldn't even really try. Over 45, it gets to you're, that's impossible. And over 50, you're downright crazy, right? Which is what most people really thought. You know what I mean? Like it was very clear to a lot of people that I wasn't running a science experiment. Clearly I was having some kind of midlife crisis, right? And that wasn't it at all, right? I was literally running a science experiment, but that was the only frame people had to relate to what I was doing is, oh, this must be a midlife crisis. He's not going out and buying a Ferrari. He's going to teach himself how

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That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. I've grew up skiing as well. I love it. I think that skiing is an excellent laboratory to figure out edges, not literally, you know, underneath your foot, but just the edges of what you're willing to push on. And so I've, I've loved skiing for those reasons. It, you know, it's a high speed environment. You get to choose, you can stay in the groomers or you can go explore. Depends a

little bit about your nature and the crowd that you're with. Right. a cool thing that we can talk about as well and so but getting there was a phase in my life where I was like I'm not leaving I'm not leaving the snow I don't need to leave the snow anymore to your point the old thinking you know of the young person which is like why do I need to be up in the air anymore that's for the young kids. And so I know exactly what you're describing as this phase or experience in my life where I pulled back and knowing what you were doing just last week, I spent about a handful, I've spent a good solid week on the mountain with my son. And he's like, dad, let's go in the park. Did you go? I did go. And yeah, but I'm not doing, I, you know, I mean, the most I pulled was a 540 kind of

safe grab. I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, no, no, no, no, nothing. I mean, I'm like, I am the old guy going, am I going too fast for this lip? And so, you know, like, let me just kind of tuck my knees and see if I go straight and kind of land in one piece. But so, so I do, I really appreciate that you pushed up against that constriction and you said, now I'm going to use me as a N of one experiment. So you asked for the full story, right?

And you know this. So it was good that way. way i'd like yes but i had so first of all i had unfinished business from sort of just my childhood relationship with the jocks and athletes in general then i had unfinished business in skiing because the you know i started my career as a journalist i chased professional skiers around mountains for a decade and were you like the little brother like hey i guess we'll take him on or were you like was it different than it was a little worse than like the little brother like hey i guess we'll take him on or were you like was it different than it was a little worse than being the little brother because you can ditch your little brother when your little brother is there you know covering you know

skiing for the new york times or rolling stone or you can't ditch your little brother so like so you were a reporter so you were no no I was just a reporter covering, right? And this was the beginning of the peak performance research as well from those areas. You know what this is like. I thought I was an expert skier until I got onto a mountain with actual pros. And then you see what that looks like. And you're like, I'm not even a beginner. I've got no skill.

Like yourself. It's a different world. I mean, it's a crushing blow to yourself. To me, it was. Most of us experienced that. Part in our country was, so I knew I was going to need a lot of motivation. To learn how to park ski in general, right? You're going to hit the ground so many times.

It's difficult. It's hard. It's going to hurt. I knew I needed all the possible motivation. Like, I knew I wanted to test these peak performance aging ideas. And I knew I had to pick something to test them where i was really really motivated because it was a challenge the tech experiment i was running was very challenging and it needed to be physically or emotionally physically i will tell you that i make this point at the end of the book

but the the two things that were hardest about this project, one, it was once I started having success, the addictiveness of success was like the addictiveness of progression is so delicious. And the other thing was when, and I didn't know this. I mean, I could have probably talked to anybody I knew who would have told me this, and I just didn't know. I didn't realize that when you, even if you do, go up against really like hardcore scary things over and over and over and over again, and you win at them, you're successful, which I was most of the time, you're still going to get PTSD. It's still going to affect your nervous system in that way.

So I would step up to the plate every day. What's the PTSD from? Literally from success. I, from over the course of the book, I stepped to so many hard challenges. And even though I survived them, every one of them scared me a bunch. And it wasn't any one thing, but the residual, I was scaring myself a lot for an entire for seven months in a row by the end of it um i i had serious i called laird hamilton about it he was the guy i called it i was like dude i didn't know you could get pts and he said oh yeah it happens to big wave surfers all the time yeah it's and we we more talk about adrenal fatigue right you don't use it yeah right but you're calling you're framing it as like a traumatic stress, a reoccurring traumatic stress. So the reason I was framing it as a reoccurring traumatic stress is, um, in my case, the two of the distinguishing features were my

starter response was jacked up to 11 and that's a PTSD, uh, symptom that, you know, it's too much norepinephrine in your system. And I was doing that fixating thing when you fall asleep and you replay it and jerk awake. Oh, that's interesting. So this is not adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is what we see with people that are on the frontier in the backcountry of whatever it is that they're doing, where it's a high speed, high heat, rugged, consequential environment they're operating in where speed and accuracy are required. So what ends up happening is that it's so intense that there's a fatigue system that takes over where not only do you struggle just to have the normal enjoyment from a good conversation or whatever?

But you need to go above and beyond the stimulus that you once had to feel anything that new. And so there's, you know, this, it's like chasing a bigger, bigger, bigger, and it gets exponentially more dangerous. And one foot bigger in the back country on surfing is when you're at that scale is like a big deal. Whereas one foot in small surf is not necessarily a big deal right so it's exponentially harder and more dangerous so there's an adrenal fatigue that takes place that looks very similar to people that come back

from combat and so but that you're not talking about that no i'm literally i yes that was that was the problem with the addictiveness of progress right yes is because that's part of the addictiveness of progress i was i was talking about that's part of the addictiveness of progress. I was talking about that. This was literally – I was developing literally symptoms of actual legitimate PTSD, the sorrow response, super amplified. Wow. My wife rolls over in bed and I jump kind of thing. Oh, yeah. Look at that.

You know what I mean? So that stuff was real. I didn't – so those things i didn't see coming the thing that was so unusual about this is i'm a i'm a bad athlete i've become a good athlete but it's after literally decades of work at it and what was so shocking about this in our country experiment is that the protocol we developed from all this kind of whiz-bang science that I applied to Park's game, then Ryan applied, then we applied in our study groups with others. I mean, like it worked. I mean, like when I started this all out, I figured if it takes five years, cool, it takes five years. I learned, you know,

my goals, I got reached all my goals in a single season. To go after something. It's not, there's no hacks and shortcuts. There's like, there's no real secrets, but there are fundamental commitments. And so that's me, me talking, not you talking. There are fundamental commitments that the best in the world do. And you made a final fundamental commitment. You moved to the base of a mountain. I don't know exactly where, but you went, you organized your life and lifestyle to go after this thing. Is that a fair statement to say? Yes. Yeah. So, and then, and then you had this ticking time bomb at some point, like I'm going to run out of time. Yeah. And then the pandemic hit. So what totally triggered it was I had worked nine years without a break, literally, without even a vacation.

Now, I would go skiing. I would have day trips for skiing. But, like, I didn't even go anyplace overnight. My wife and I, I think we went away for maybe two weekends in that period of time. And if you – I don't go out to dinner. I don't have a social – like, I work with you. I ski with you or I'm go out to dinner i don't have a social like i work with you i ski with you or i'm married to you or i don't know you right like and that's always been my life so when i say i work nine years without a break i work nine years without a break and i

rearranged my life moved from northern new mexico to tahoe and uh i was launching a book that winner which which book uh future faster than you think with peter and uh my plan we're going to launch the book i was going to i knew there was going to be like two months of book tour and then i was going to come back and for the first time in nine years i was going to take a three-month break and i was going to ski from like basically March through May, which you can do in Tahoe. And yes, then COVID happened. And, you know, COVID – and I – first I got COVID. I've got COVID and then COVID happened and then they shut down the ski resorts. And out of all the things going on, it was the ski resorts.

And mind you, I'm like everybody else in COVID. Like we're trying to save my company and like, you know, it's like everything else is crazy. But I'm so angry that the ski resorts are closed. Like not just a little angry, like homicidally murderous. And it's building every day. And like the whole world is suffering. Billions of people are suffering and dying. And I care that the world is suffering. Billions of people are suffering and dying. And I care that the ski resorts are closed.

And I like I couldn't stop caring. Like I was super angry. And the level of anger where like you're dangerous to your marriage, you're dangerous to you. You understand rock and roll better. You do understand rock and roll better. Slipknot. Slipknot sounds really good yeah and so what i was picking up on in your experience is that you hit the panic button like i'm gonna run out of time and i'm not gonna go after i'm not that way all those things happen

like the season went away and i was like this has been so why am i so mad that was it i was like why this anger is totally irrational so i started investigating the anger right i'm like okay why are you so mad i was like oh my god i've been totally irrational. So I started investigating the anger, right? I'm like, okay, why are you so mad? I was like, oh my God, I've been robbed of progression and I'm running out of time. So that was exactly it. Like I'd run out of time. Yeah. And so I decided then coupled with all the peak performance aging stuff, it seemed like a great way to kind of turn that into a fundamental challenge.

And then the other motivators, like the deeper motivators were, it sounds like that you struggled at some level as a kid with your relationship with sport. Oh yeah. And so you wanted, is part of this that you wanted to prove them in quotes? So no, so we started this conversation. One of the things I said at the beginning is, we enter our 40s and 50s, we get access to legitimate cognitive superpowers.

So let's go a little bit deeper into that. There are genetic changes that happen. Certain genes are activated only by experience. So it's actually epigenetics. And there are changes in how the brain processes information in our late 40s and 50s. And it's really the two sides of the brain start to work together really well like never before. And the brain starts to recruit underutilized areas and regions and build backups and redundancies and things like that. And as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom.

Hugely important traits. So one of the reasons I knew that, especially that I could learn to park ski later in life, was the heightened creativity that you actually get. And even the heightened wisdom. The heightened wisdom means like more emotional control, ways to keep myself safe that maybe I didn't have access to when I was younger. So I thought there was certain things from this pool

working to my advantage. And I want like I'm a writer. I want access to new levels of intelligence and creativity and empathy and wisdom. Like as a writer. Oh, my God. Yes. So but as you know, because you're a psychologist, these are not this is adult development. But like everything in adult development, it's not guaranteed.

There are moderators, if then conditions. And there with adult development, especially coming out of the long studies, the Harvard studies on adult development and some of those, we've learned what some of these gateways are. And there are three that take place before 50 that unlock these superpowers. By age 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world, right? It's 40, it's match fit, which is there's a tight match between my identity, who I am, and sort of what I do with all my time and my values, my strengths. Put it differently, you need to live in a way with lots of passion, lots of purpose, and lots of flow, right? And you need a tight fit between your identity

and what you do in the world to get that. So that's 40, but here's the weird one. And this is the answer to your question. By 50, it's forgiveness of self and other that matters. So you got to set down shame and self-consciousness and you got to forgive all the people who have done you wrong. And I've said this before, like I grew up in Ohio. and self-consciousness and you got to go forgive all the people who have done you wrong and you

know i've said this before like i grew up in ohio i was a punk rocker in ohio in ohio if you had a mohawk like carloads of football players would like pull over on the side of the road just so they could beat you up as a group like that was ohio so um yeah like a lot of us carry crutches. So besides everything else that went along with that, but I had unfit business with these people and they were forgiveness was this moderator. And most of the intelligence levels that come on line in our 50s, this is about multi-perspectival thinking, being able to see things from other people's perspectives. You can't forgive others. You're not going to have access to their perspectives. There's going to be no increase in empathy. No increase in wisdom is going to block the creativity.

Everything I wanted. And so part of my mission was, and the standard tool, by the way, for forgiveness and wisdom is really loving kindness meditation, compassion meditation. And I've done that on and off for years. Amazing tools. Fantastic. But it wasn't big enough and strong enough to sort of solve some of the grudges I had from back in the day. So I decided I was,

I wanted this kind of challenging athletic quest because I thought if I could go walk a mile in their shoes, like really create a quest where I would have to become a jock to succeed, there would be no, like you can't teach yourself how to park that's a massively athletic activity that requires all of like the right so i was like okay i like i know i want these superpowers and i need them to for this quest and everything else but like i i knew there were that's when i say i had unfinished business i had unfinished business and it was bigger than the best tool I had, which was loving kindness meditation. And so this is what I did. I think it was going to work. No, I thought the

whole thing was kind of ridiculous, but I had no other ideas and I knew I needed to do something. So I just ran the experiment and it turns out it did work surprisingly well. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company.

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that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. When you were running it by people, and like I think about our call when you're telling me what you're doing, did it help you or get in your way when I or others were like, really? Is that what you're going to do? Did that like sometimes that that does wonders for me. I'm really fond of spite. Small S spite is a motivator. Yeah. Right. I really am. And. I used to be. I,

big capital S spite. It feels like it was too, too hot of a fire for me. Like I couldn't manage it. It doesn't like, well, so I'm not like, I hear about like,

you know, some of the football players, even maybe they're just saying it for the microphones. No, even maybe they're just saying it for the microphones. No, no, they're not saying it for the microphones. Like that kind of like competitive. He's like, like, I'm not that way. But like, tell me I can't do something. Tell me it's impossible.

That works. That's why I'm asking. That's really motivating for me. I'm just wondering like what the insight is when you have an idea and it's relatively clear and you are pinging your community. If you already kind of know what they're going to say and you're using it in your eco chamber to be able to do something with it, or are you really hoping that they're going to see you and they're going to say, Stephen, I think you can do this. It is incredible. You know this, like you don't need many. In fact, many is possibly too much pressure because if everybody expects you to do it, well, you better not screw it up, right? But if you just have a couple of like secret allies who believe the other thing that i had going for me is that ryan who's my ski partner ryan had seen me throw so the whole thing

started before the thing is because i because the it's that weird sliding spin story that's in the in the front in the first chapter of the book the almost 360 yeah the almost 360 um i had thrown sliding spins explain what a 360 is so a sliding spin 360 which is the trick we're talking about is a trick 10 year old skiers learn how to do it's you're sliding forward on the snow and you just spin in a circle you don't leave the snow, nothing. And most skiers stop doing this trick by like age 12 because it's really not cool. Like it's super uncool. But it turns out that novel sensations are a phenomenal flow trigger and whenever we encounter g-forces or polyaxial rotation spinning around your middle those novel sensations plus some of the flow's deep embodiment triggers meaning engages multi

senses at once and that pulls our attention to the present this drives flow so at the front end of every ski day i would i would throw a handful of these sliding spins because it would dump some dopamine into the system prime the system for flow. And so it's the, and I didn't even think of it as a trick. It wasn't a trick. It was just this thing I, you know, I like to do. Nobody would ever consider it a trick, but if you tilt it and do it in a half pipe or on a rail or on a wall ride, that's a real trick. And so Ryan and I were skiing and it was like the last day before they closed the resort to COVID. And we're in the middle of a pretty serious shoot, like nowhere near Drain Park.

And I saw this snow pillow, like on top of a rock and my brain went, try sliding some 360 on it. And I got like, I did a 270. Like I'd never tried anything like that in my life. I don't know why. And, you know, Ryan saw it, cheered. And so he also like, he knew what I was building on. Like that was what I was going to, that was my, I was going to build on that foundation. Right. And so he had seen that nobody else had seen it. And he'd also seen that, you know, I threw it basically on one

of the steeper pitches of a run called oops and poops that's a heavy run so like it wasn't like i just threw it on a beginner slope it's i threw in the middle of a really heavy run with consequences everywhere i don't know why it just sort of came out of me one day but so he had seen that and he had a little bit of faith he didn't he was also very nice about it i think he had seen that and he had a little bit of faith. He didn't – he was also very nice about it. I think he had a lot less faith in the beginning that he talked about. But – no, it didn't – and my wife liked the idea, which was the other thing. Oh, she did like it. Yeah, she never pushed back against it because she saw that I was starting to have fun.

People ask me all the time, like, what do you think? If there's one thing, and there's not, right? But if there's one thing that sits as part of the high performers support mechanisms, what is the number one thing that goes with most of the high performers that you have? Support mechanism? Yeah. Like they're out there doing the thing on the frontier. Like what allows them to do that?

That's an interesting question. A part of me, like one, if without regular access to flow, you're not doing it without, but almost every one of them, they've either got a best friend or a girlfriend or a spouse or a boyfriend or, you know what I mean? There's somebody who is solving the cognitive load problem, right?

There's no way to – that's part of the hard – like when you're trying to do that at that level, you can't hold the rest of your life in your head, right? Literally, you're up against a cognitive load wall. So there's got to be somebody who's filling that gap. And there's got to be a lot of flow in a tight loop because otherwise you can't keep going. The other thing is I always think there's a little, there's always a little extra. There's always the, it's a mission.

It's not just a, there's a little bit of a there's a little yeah especially with the one with the ones who are really really good and you know and stay for a while when you say mission so i'm nodding because that's now how i'm answering the question it's like when people ask me and i'm like it's my wife you know and they ask like what is that true for other people i'm like yeah the support mechanism is really important i couldn't have done it's an intimate no i didn't well i couldn't have done our country without joy for sure yeah well you would have had to choose between let's say if she was like no bad idea like i'm not i'm not part of this i don't think this is smart and you know what you want to go move to

tahoe go ahead or nevada go. That would have been a choice between marriage. I've read. So I've written two of my books Joy didn't like and didn't like when I started writing them. Not when I was done. Didn't like didn't like the idea. And those are difficult projects. It's hard to do work on a multi-year project where your partner is not down with it. I like – I think that's one of the great things about my marriage and a strength that like my wife is willing to look at me and be like, yeah, I think the book you're writing, I think that's a bad idea.

And like I don't – I disagree with the premise. Like that's – I look at that and I'm like – So good. Right? That's a healthy marriage. That's great in a relationship. Yeah, it's so good. And it's also – it forces my books to be better.

She's constantly like, you can't sleep on anything because you're already against the idea a little bit. So it makes me better. And I don't mind any of it. But it is a harder project. It's a harder project. There's no way around that. Okay, so let's do two words. Let's do one word right now, progression. It's a word that matters to both of us, but let's just open that word up a little bit and then let's get into what

the unlocks are that you figured out for other people that want to increase or grow in a multifaceted way in their life. And they're feeling a little bit older, they're over the age of 50, and they're looking for some unlocks. So let's go progression, then the insights you learn and the unlocks that are applied for folks. So it's funny because the unlock that I'm going to come to in a moment is literally a formula for progression and lifelong learning. So if you want to stave off cognitive decline, Alzheimer's and dementia, you need expertise and wisdom, right? Those are the big, they create big networks in the prefrontal cortex. You need, oh, say, so keep working,

keep working. No, no. So when they say, hey, lifelong learning is how you preserve the brain, they're not joking expertise and wisdom which are expertise think of it as facts strategies skills wisdom emotional intelligence writ large when we suffer cognitive decline also having interventions predominantly prefrontal cortex because the prefrontal cortex is the newest structure in the brain from an evolutionary perspective, most vulnerable disruption. And when expertise and wisdom are really diffuse networks across the prefrontal cortex, and when the brain builds brain networks, as you know, it doesn't find one way to do something. It likes to find 11 different ways. Redundancy is what the brain likes when it builds networks. So the greatest defense against Alzheimer's and dementia and cognitive decline is literally expertise and wisdom.

In fact, Yakov Stern out of Columbia who did some of the early work on this, he did a really famous study where he was looking at like leisure activities that increase expertise and wisdom. So things like doing puzzles or having rich intellectual discussions with your friends or reading or those sorts of things, you get an additional 8% protection against Alzheimer's, cognitive decline and dementia for every additional sort of expertise, skills yeah leisure activity yeah really really neat finding on there so um expertise and wisdom lifelong learning progression is literally how you have to preserve brain function so the hack i'm going to give you in a moment um does all that but i want to i want to come back to progression i don't think there's a better drug in the world. I think progression is the best drug. Yeah. I wish that term wasn't political.

Is it political? Progressive. Oh, I guess that way. Okay. It's one of my favorite words, progression. It's definitely an off-axis feel to the word. You can look at it and not get the vibe that i think you and i both feel when we say the word so when i say the word my buddy uh michael warden one of my closest friends uh has been teaching himself how to play the guitar i mean for four or five years now right and he says he says you know the best thing about teaching myself how to play the guitar is i'm never going

to run out of guitar i'll never run out of. There's an endless amount of shit that I can keep. I don't run out of anything. I'm going to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning. I think of skiing that way or writing that way. I actually think marriage that way, the actual like how to be in a good relationship. Like these are the infinite games right there but their progression is built in and there's you don't win there's just the progression and the other thing that is weird also is to me there's a relationship between progression and expectation that kind of destroys more good days than anything I know, right? Which is the going into, it could be a writing activity,

going into a mountain and expecting a certain level of you're going to make this much progress today. I love this thought. How do you, how does the word standard fold into that? Expectation versus standard as a killer too. This was the, so this was why in my Naira country season, right? My goals were, if I didn't have a lot of energy, I wanted to ski 12 laps a day. If I had a lot of energy, I'd ski 16.

And if I felt really great, it was 20 or more. And my goals were never try to learn a trick or ski a big line. If I got into flow and I was performing my best, then is when I would go learn a trick or ski a big line. But that I so I tried to separate the standard. I had a standard for behavior. Right. It was unlinked to performance, unlinked to the things I couldn't control. I wanted my standards are things that I can control. That's what I can always meet.

Yeah, so standards are about process. Yeah. Not an expectation for outcome, but a standard for how the inputs feel. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to do this. Yeah. And I had to say, I totally had to separate those. And that was for motivation reasons, because nothing is more demotivating than saying i'm going to go here and do and learn this yeah and you don't um in fact i

found oddly one of the easiest get ways to not learn how to do something while skiing is to turn to my ski partner before the day begins and say you know what i'm going to definitely do today i'm going to get my switch 180s down a 10 of them, at least 20 of them today. And like the end of the day will come and I'll realize I hadn't even done one. Like it's almost a guarantee if I say it out loud, it's almost a guarantee that it can't happen. And I don't know why, what that is even about. It's a, it is such a fine line because the, the progressive progression nature, it, I have a hard time relating to people that don't love it. And like, I don't get X, I get external goals. I should say that, but I, they don't drive me. And I know that's a popular thing to say, you know, like, but the unlock is so so like it's so rich when something happens inside of me that i

go oh got it oh my wow that thing is it's like elusive and wonderful and it's big when it takes place that that that fuels me big time chick set me high talks about flow as an engine of adult development because on the other side of a flow state – because to get into this state, you have to use your skills to the utmost, right? You have to push on your skills. Right on the edge. You're right at the edge. And so on the other side of a flow state, complexity goes up. Adaptability goes up.

Mastery increases. Wisdom goes up. And that's – so Chicks Set Meyi is considered the major driver of adult development. Other people have talked about it as always as an evolutionary side of mastery. When you get into a flow state, it's a sign that you've actually mastered skills. I think it's more – it's definitely a sign of progression. That's sort of what you're that that's that's for sure and but the thing that i think is so neat about progression is this is it's so empowering right it's really a weird thing i

learned how to throw a 180 which like does that have a real world application at i mean at all like besides i'm the ski hiller and what – like – Describe the nuances of – Skiing forward, jump up into the air and land. So I'm skiing backward. I threw a 180, right? It's a 180-degree turn. But it's amazing the shift in real-world confidence and competencies and efficacy like there is something very strange about progression something that shouldn't actually matter in a real world frame and how it actually does impact the rest of your life and

that's um it's hard to explain and i love that you're talking about earning um self-efficacy meaning a sense of power that i can do some stuff. I feel powerful in myself, in the world around me. And you have to earn it. Nobody can give it to you. Same with empowerment. No one can give you like this idea that happens in business. It's like we want to get after empowerment. We want to help people to be empowered.

You can't like come off of the perch and say you are now empowered because if i'm the one giving you power then i can also take it away yeah it doesn't you have to be yeah you you have to work from the inside out yeah you have to take it yeah you have to earn it earn it right because there's so many mechanisms inside of us that are saying hey play it safe be small don't get your head lopped off like that that's a risk not worth not taking. There's so many mechanisms that are keeping us away from the edge. But when you get on the edge and you figure out how to dance a little bit on the edge, that's like, oh, I can dance on the edge and I'm okay. That sense of power is really important. No, I mean, you know, like my favorite part about all this is I can, I can now ski some really big, big lines. And it's not that I can ski them.

I mean, that's cool. But it's that on the other side of them, my pulse rate hasn't even spiked. That's where I was going. It's like, what do you now get to say to yourself that you didn't get to say to yourself in 2020? There's a million of them. What's a couple of those? Questions around skiing and bravery bravery where i used to wrestle with them because i would see what the athletes would do and i wasn't putting myself into those

situations but like my skiing ability even on the in the big mountains right has because the thing about park skiing is we were playing this game with we were lateralizing back and forth with the challenge skills balance so you'd scare yourself in the terrain park and like get to the point that you and then you just go back into the big mountains and stuff in the movie suddenly seemed a lot less scary or you know when the big mountains got scared we'd go into the terrain park and suddenly the terrain park wasn't so scary so it was this back and forth between and you were more confident in the backcountry. I was more confident in the bigger lines. So I've now managed to ski a handful of lines that I would actually consider significant. And so those issues are done.

They're off the table. My ability to learn, really to set myself up, I've never in my entire life set an athletic challenge and meeting it like i've never i was not one of those jocks i like i was a artist i was a creative that like that was not what i did um and i came you know skiing skating the things i was doing those were not sports you know, Ohio in the seventies and eighties, right? That's, they weren't, we were arrested for it. Right. We were arrested for it. Exactly. That's exactly right. They were against the law. It's crazy to see my local community now have like not one skate park, but two. And we were, we were run out of town. It's,

it's awesome. Like what, what's happened over the last 30 years. And now, one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep

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If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. Well, so this is where we're talking about self-efficacy. This is actually how self-efficacy gets paid, is that there's five mechanisms to increase self-efficacy, but it really has to push through a filter, which is something about I can do hard things. Well, I mean, to me, it's the other, I mean, some of it,

okay, I'll give you a random example. We skied a line the other day at Kirkwood called Jim's that it's not only on the edge of a cliff, it's right, like it's's if it's normally like dropping into a chute or something like that you can come in anywhere here you have to come in right off next to the cliff edge and i have vertigo and blah blah and three years ago when we started the nar country project i literally 25 feet from that edge i like i could sort of stand 25 feet away and look and sort of see the edge of gyms and the world would start to spin and i would start to shake and i

would collapse there were times i would have to crawl back like crawl just to the main run to just like get out of sight of it literally because my whole body it collapsed and we skied it the other day and afterwards i i looked around and i was like you know what's funny is i don't just think i just skied that i think that's the first time i stood on the edge of that cliff without even collapsing like which was really like so like those are it's not just a little bit of courage. You know what I mean? That's a, it's a, that's a totally different kinesthetic bodily response. That's really completely different.

Would you say that, so you're the artist focusing on doing an athletic feat or having an athletic process with clear goals. Is that similar to the athlete or the executive even? But let's do athlete trying to now really push in and write a book. Or they've always been fascinated with canvas art and they're going to go for it. Would you say that the corollary is similar or does it fall apart because it's not physical? Oh, I think it's really similar. Okay. Because, I mean, certainly, let's just talk about the business for a second. We process financial fears and money, as you know this, in the same structures that we process physical fears, right?

So there's no difference in the brain between physical pain and financial pain. And it doesn't appear there's much of a difference between physical pain, financial pain and social embarrassment, shame, all that stuff, which certainly all creatives are going to face when they when they bring their stuff into the public eye. So, no, I think. And that's what I like about it is because – and you know as well as I do, this doesn't always translate. You know – you and I both know members of the special forces or professional athletes who like try to transition to the real world and they go into a boardroom and fall apart or, right, they can't do it. But those that stick with it end up really kicking ass. And the reason is the skills are transferable. It takes a while to figure out how to transfer. Not everybody sticks around long enough to really be able to figure it out. But the skills are transferable and the patterns are the same and the learning patterns are the same.

And, you know, the order is always crawl, walk, run. It's always going to suck to be a beginner. Like it doesn't matter whether you're learning a hard physical challenge or, you know, certain challenges, skateboarding. It's so painful to learn. It's so painful. Falling has set you. What do your shins look like? I broke my back. Forget my shins. I've your shins look like? Man, I broke my back.

Forget my shins. I've got scar tissue up my back. You know, like you leave blood and skin on the asphalt. Yeah. I mean, I took all the skin off my body. I broke my arm in four places. I broke my back in two spots. Skateboarding hurts.

I understand when you said you were not an athlete. Yeah, that's the other thing. No, no, no, that's exactly right. You're totally, I tried, I did, I was devoted to all these things. You're right on the edge. No, but I'm not, like, I'm not naturally, I know what sort of naturally gifted athletes look like.

I've been around a lot of them. I'm not that, I really am not. So when you, okay, so let's get to the unlocks. And like when people read and or they're listening at this moment, what do you hope they take away? What is the process that you've clarified? Yeah, I mean, the two takeaways. I mean, like what's the, so one, you asked for the hacks. So like.

No, I did not ask for that. Not the hacks. Well, you and I know there's no such thing as a hack. There are no shortcuts, but like the formula. Okay. Peak performance aging in a single sentence, right? If you want to rock to your drop, you have to regularly engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play. And I'll define dynamic in a second.

And take place in novel outdoor environments. And let me – dynamic is – right. As you know, dynamic basically means there are five categories of functional fitness. Strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. All five need to be trained over time. All five – decline over time. All five are very trainable. So dynamic is one word for all five at once.

And bonus, when activities are dynamic, when the brain has to coordinate strength, stamina, and balance at the same time, for example, that not only does a bunch of good stuff for the body from an exercise perspective, but dynamic motion boosts the angiogenesis and neurogenesis. Two big fancy words, but angiogenesis is the birth of new blood vessels in the brain that support new neurons, and neurogenesis is new neurons, right? And if you want to fight off Alzheimer's and dementia and preserve cognitive function, you need new neurons, right? So dynamic motion is an extra, it hits all the physical categories, but it's also helps you preserve the brain. It's also one of the reasons that action sports are such great anti aging tools. They're phenomenal for it. But. That's the formula. And before we drill down into those parts, I want to say a couple of high level things.

First of all, a lot of those words are flow triggers right so a lot of this formula flow really matters for peak performance agent for a bunch of reasons we can talk about why in a second but so a lot of these things do double duty as a flow trigger a lot of them help unlock the so creativity we talked about the superpowers of aging creativity is a moderator if you want multi-perspectival thinking this boost in intelligence and creativity and what you actually creative activities in your 50s are what unlock it and totally train the brain so you have to have them challenging activities what type of creative doesn't actually matter it's literally so you got to remember creativity

could it be everything from i drove a new route to work for the very first time to I'm doing fun things with words as a writer in sentences to I'm creatively interpreting terrain features with my body in a new way as a skier or as a snowboarder or whatever. So creativity, and it's the act of connecting ideas together in novel ways that starts to unlock these really beneficial changes. So challenging social and creative activities, social, huge boost, right? If we robust social connections, people with robust social connections will live about eight years longer than other people, right? Really matters. Dynamic, I explained. Deliberate play is just the, it's sort of the inverse of deliberate practice, right? And deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement is great for learning certain kinds of skills, but as a general rule with most skills, deliberate play, repetition

without repetition, repetition with improvisation, outperforms deliberate practice for a million different reasons. If the first is that like the more neurochemicals produced during experience, the better chance we're going to remember it, right? That's what neurochemicals do. They tag experiences. When we do deliberate practice, the best we're going to get is incremental advancement, and you're going to get a little bit of dopamine from goals. With deliberate play, you're going to get that dopamine, a bigger hit of dopamine. You're also going to get endorphins, which is what underpins play. So you're getting two really potent reward chemicals instead of one, so you've got a much better chance of increasing learning.

And with deliberate play, deliberate practice, there's one right answer. I did the thing I did before and a little bit better. With deliberate play, there's only one wrong answer. I did the thing I did before. Everything else is the right answer. So there's a lot of feel-good neurochemistry and less shame and embarrassment so challenging social and creative activities right that demand dynamic deliberate play cool take place in novel outdoor environments and novelty is another flow trigger right pushes dopamine to our system drives focus into the now drives us into flow so there are nine known causes of aging what they share in common is inflammation stress inflammation So anything that fights stress

is an anti-aging technology, right? So this includes mindfulness and breath, all that stuff. But as we know, a 20-minute walk in nature outperforms most of the SSRIs on the market, pushes that much serotonin into your system, removes stress hormones.

So novel outdoor environments, you want the stress component there, the de-stressing component. But most importantly is if you want to preserve cognitive function, you want neurogenesis, right? The birth and new neurons, an active plasticity, those neurons form networks. We evolved as hunter-gatherers. The brain evolved to remember where we were when we had emotionally charged to do and birth new neurons is to have powerfully emotionally charged experiences in novel outdoor environments which is why the longest lived communities in america summit county pitkin county eagle county all in colorado this is vale beaver creek aspen copper mountain um and folks in summit county which is the longest lived

community in america they will outlive the rest of America by an average of 10 years. So you want to talk about the power of action sports and outdoor activities for longevity. Think about my formula. A lot of that is packed into outdoor sports and action sports. Summit County is your example of it working. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's a good find.

Wow. So you consider a park, a terrain park to be a novel outdoor experience? Have you been into a terrain park recently? Yeah, but they don't change. Like, so I want to just. Oh, they do change, by the way. Well, they change, let's say, every X number of days. But when you're doing 12 laps, they're the same.

The features haven't changed. Your line on it can change. The future, which is a good thing, right? Because you can get those repetitions, but every couple of weeks they do change the park. So I naturally went to surfing, which is like every wave. Every wave is different. So you're fitting that in. So is that basically any outdoor environment?

Any outdoor. So it's the emotionally charged experiences right so that's like as long as you're having emotionally charged experiences in outdoor environments the brain like you know our brain evolved to remember where was that ripe fruit tree after the long winter or where was the cave that housed the bear that tried to kill us and so we could avoid that right all that stuff yeah that's what the brain evolved to do So it doesn't really know the difference between like, I scared myself jumping off a jump and I saw a bear. It's still a bunch of norepinephrine and cortisol in the brain is treating it the same way. So you get the same kind of reaction, but you get neurogenesis,

which is what you're looking for. So that's the, like, that's really peak performance aging in a formula. Is that your term, peak performance aging in a formula um is that your term peak performance aging it so it's been i think the first adaptive aging successful age there were a bunch of those right yeah and um they were all about and they still are um they're about maintaining quality of life and sort of lifestyle interventions they weren't about peak performance keeping like performing at weren't about peak performance, keeping like performing at your best. Where peak performance started showing up, it started emerging as a term when people

started looking at the skills like VO2 maxes. I think this was one of the first times I saw it. VO2 max is one of these use it or lose it skills, right? And it used to be. We know VO2 max, which is our upper aerobic capacity, it starts declining at 25. By 50, it really starts to fall off a cliff. And in the successful aging community, in the whatever community, this is one of those things people used to sort of beat you with.

Like, you're never going to be able to do it. Because what about VO2 max? Like, we all know it falls off a cliff and what happened was there's this weird thing you might have heard about it in sort of triathlons ultra running these really difficult endurance events older athletes folks in their men and women their 70s and 80s are outperforming those in their 50s and 60s and they started wondering like how is this happening why is this going on for a while why is a question so they decided they were gonna well let's measure the vo2 max of some like octogenarian triathletes and see what we find turns out they have the health the vo2 max of like healthy 35 year olds

so that was and but they've been training it for about three decades, right? So that was some of like, that was some of these user lose it ideas, right? Yeah. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention. Now, that's why I've been loving iRestore Elite. It's a hands-free red light therapy device that helps stimulate dormant hair follicles, helps to support regrowth.

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the set I always like to point to is McKinsey. They spent 10 years trying to figure out how much more productive top executives are in flow versus out of flow. They went around the world and they asked executives, CEOs, C-suite executives, and it's self-reported. So, you know, grain of salt with the numbers, but on average, they reported being 500% more productive. That's enormous. And what's so weird about that number is it's not out of line when the Department of Defense measured how much faster soldiers learn and flow is 240 to 500 percent faster than normal. When they measured how much we boost creativity and flow at the University of Sydney, it was 600 percent. So that's sort of in line with the other things that we see in flow. But, you know, the collective now, I mean, we're training, we're working with companies and people in 130 countries, training them in flow.

And like, just, we're training Facebook, the San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, Bain Capital, Accenture, Audi. I mean, like, what I'm trying to give you is examples of companies in tech, in industry, in manufacturing. Like every industry you can imagine, peak performance. You know this because you do this – we do the same job basically. Like companies are starting to figure out that, oh my god, mental high performance is the ballgame. And if you're not training it, you're going to get your ass kicked. This is like – this is one of those advantages. I mean with flow, it's easy.

I can say, look, if the competition is going to be 1,000% more productive than you are, if they get their employees to spend two days a week in flow, like what are you doing, right? So that's A. The second one, this is the cool one, and this is the message that in our country that I think business leaders really want to listen to is we gain access to new levels of intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and empathy in our fifties. So I have trained a ton of CEOs, met a ton of CEOs, worked with a ton of CEOs, had dinners with a ton of CEOs. And often the conversation, as I'm sure this is your experience as well, is about hiring for peak performance skills or training them, right?

And whenever that conversation comes up, my first question, probably your first question as well is, well, what skills are you really interested in, right? What are you trying to get? What are you trying to do, right? And over the years, I've heard two answers. And usually they come together. But like, I want creativity and innovation because the rate of change in the world is blitzkrieg. And how do I keep pace if we can't out-innovate the competition? I hear that all the time. So I need intelligence.

I need creativity. I need intelligence. I need creativity. I need innovation. Or I hear I need empathy, wisdom, and those kind of emotional intelligence skills because I can't do my job without team performance. I can't do team performance without psychological safety and cooperation and collaboration. And or I hear the Jeff Bezos mantra of 21st century business, which is customer centric thinking. And if you don't have empathetic, wise employees, nobody can even think like your customers, like you're just screwed. So I these are the four skills that come online in adults in their 50s. Now, it's not a guarantee, right? There are moderators. We talked about it. And

there are things that you have to do post 50. You need creativity to unlock it. And then you have to constantly be training down risk aversion because that increases over time and it'll block all this stuff. And you've got to train up your physical skills because physical fragility, because I would hear this and I say, well, why aren't you hiring older? Like these are older workers. And they'd be like, well, yeah, but they get so risk adverse that they're unwilling to innovate, even though they're super creative. And I was like, okay, you know, that's a fair answer. And physical fertility, I don't want them to take sick days or time off or all that stuff. So you have to train against those things. And we can talk about that if you want. But

this is the dream workforce of the 21st century, right? Like the very people who are getting pushed out of companies right now are the very people companies should be hiring for exactly what we want to do in the 21st century. And there's these crazy biases towards younger workers, which is not – I don't – like I think the best blends – it's like the best companies are companies that figure out how to use humans and AI. I think the best companies are also going to be the companies that have older and younger workers and really blend them together and get the best out of both. But that's – I mean if I'm talking to business leaders, those are the messages. Like if you're not training flow, what the hell are you doing? Because the competition sure is. And two, if you're looking for your dream workers, it's, you know, if you can screen for adults who regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand, you know, that formula, some variety of that, that's a pretty good barometer for, oh, are they going to be successful in their 50s and 60s?

They have what we want. These are dream workers. So those are my two messages. Let me give you a couple of quick hits. It all comes down to, this is going to sound like a freaking cliche. So it all comes down to showing up. Cool choice. Like if you can't show up every day there's yeah okay so that's cool choice

but the way you said it's a little punk okay because you didn't say you know being present right you said showing up so it's a little off access there okay i am yes okay my vision is what the hell i'm giving you one word answers money is my friend my friend uh-huh who tells you no no very many feel successfully where do you want to belong that's an interesting question right i don't really want to belong most of the places that will have me. I want to belong a lot of places where they won't have me, I think. That's an interesting question. That's super interesting.

I was wondering how you're going to do that with the early childhood, like early adolescence. It just reminds me of the Woody Allen quote, which is like, I don't want to be a member of any country club that would have me as a member. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Success is? Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Successes. It's going to take some explaining, but I always think of success as having something exciting to go to next. I always think about how you define a creative to me is like the difference between, and there's lots of reasons people write books, right? And you don't have to be a creative. You can write books because you're a businessman. You have an idea that you think it'll help your career, whatever. But the mark of a true creative is they're always about what's next.

So like a book comes out, a movie comes out, art happening. They don't. Like the real creatives, I don't give a fuck what people think about that stuff. They're on to the next thing already, right? So like to me, not having that next thing, not having a success to me is being able to wake up every day and be creative for a living. That's what success is. You ready for this?

I'm going back to it. Relationships are probably the hardest thing I do with my day. Congrats on so much. Congrats on the clarity. I think back to our days over at Red Bull where the clarity that you have now. Now being the operating word you have now. Now. Now. Now being the operating word, Michael.

Nice job. And just the knowing in what you've earned over the last three years, the way you've tested yourself and put your science and your art to work and to be able to have the systems thinking mind and the artistic abilities to write, to be able to share those insights and those practices with people. Like it reads like butter. And so when I was reading, I was like, Were you laughing?

Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad. And it was like, there's ample vulnerability in there too. Like I knew, I know you now in a different way, which was really fun. Yeah, I had to, for the book to work, I had, I mean, I always said the secret to good writing is tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth this was one of those situations where and when i realized like what

i was going to have to talk about in the book for it to work i was like couldn't we have another maxim couldn't there be another right like another really every once in a while exactly yeah you did it but yeah that took um that was a little bit of a leap of faith you know what i mean like i didn't i didn't know people were gonna react poorly or well to that as well um that was a little scary yeah it's cool man yeah are you enjoying the feedback that's coming or are you not taking a look at the feedback how are you so how do you work with that once you think that's been the most fun is, yes, we built this. We turned this into a training, right?

So now we have our standard flow training, and then we have Forever Dangerous, which is the second half. And it's really focused on our ability, as I said, flow, our ability to get into flow matters over time, but it decreases. So we've got a training for it um but people in their 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s um are because it's about that we can teach you a bunch about peak performance aging but i'm also trying to create a nar style mission for people mine was learning how to park skate right but it's whatever kind of impossible challenge you can set for yourself that would essentially

explode your mindset towards what's possible in the second half of your life and some of the stuff people are doing and have done that's been really cool that's been really really really cool yeah like i'll see things on like you know the other day there was something on instagram where it was like grandpa joined the climbing gym. You know what I mean? Like, red in our country and like that kind of stuff. And I'm like, that is so, so cool. And it's not just physical.

Action sports aren't for everybody. So there's people who have done everything from like there was a woman who first solo art show, right? Because that was like her impossible bear. So there's been a whole diversity of things people have done. And it's new. It's early. So like there's more of this coming, right? That's what's up.

It's really neat. But like, you know, 70-year-old folks who are like trying to run Ironmans or learn how to kite surf. It's just cool. It's just cool. Congratulations, brother. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Thank you for coming in.

Thank you for sharing eloquently wisdoms and insights and using your body as a bit of a tool for the last three years to heighten our understanding of peak performance aging. Appreciate you. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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