Modern Wisdom - #305 - Steven Kotler - A Complete Recipe For Peak Performance

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Steven Kotler is a peak performance expert, entrepreneur and an author. The mystery of achieving peak performance is what many people are striving toward in life. Steven is a world expert in Flow and through years of cutting edge research, has finally created the recipe. Expect to learn how to break & build your motivation, the best way to hack your creativity, why Salvador Dali literally WAS drugs, the universal triggers you can use to drop yourself into flow, how to integrate peak performance protocols into your routine and much more...  Sponsors: Book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at https://www.activelifeprofessional.com/modernwisdom  Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out the Flow Research Collective - https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/ Check out Steven's website - https://www.stevenkotler.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello you beautiful, beautiful people. Welcome back. My guest today is Stephen Kotler, he's a peak performance expert, an entrepreneur and an author. The mystery of achieving peak performance is what many people are striving toward in life. Stephen is a world expert in flow and through years of cutting edge research has finally created the recipe. Expect to learn how to build and break your motivation,

the best way to hack your creativity, why Salvador Dali literally was drugs? The universal triggers you can use to drop yourself into flow, how to integrate peak performance protocols into your routine, and much more. Stephen is an absolute force of nature. Like this guy, I can't believe, I can't believe that there are people who are so well-rounded and understand so much around the biology of

performance as him. It feels, it genuinely feels like Stephen's been alive, like 250 years or something. You're going to adore this episode. There's so much to take away from it. I can't wait. I'm already thinking about ways that I can get Stephen back on at the show. He's an outstanding human and so many benefits can come from taking heed of all the bits of advice and wisdom that he gives us today. But now it's time learn about the recipe for peak performance with Stephen Kotler. Stephen Kotler, welcome to the show. Thanks Chris, could be with you. Do you think that many of the things that we do and enjoy in life are just subtle delivery

mechanisms for flow? Yes, and I'm not the only one. So can I define flow for your listeners first before we do this? Cool. Flow is obviously the heart of the work I do, and it's what predominantly we studied the flow research collective, or at the neurobiology of flow. So where does the state come from in our brain? Flow is technically defined, though this is in a very useful definition, as an optimal state of consciousness, where we feel our best and we perform our best. It is more specifically, any of those moments of raft attention and total absorption gets so focused on the task and so focused on what you're doing, everything else just seems

to disappear. Action awareness is going to start to merge when that happens since itself. So, consciousness is going to get quiet, it's going to diminish. Time is going to pass strange, so it'll slow down, you're going to freeze for a moment of that, occasionally, more frequently speeds up five hours go by and like five minutes. They're out all aspects of performance, mental and physical go through the roof. Now, Flow has a bunch of core psychological characteristics, from psychologist measure to state, they say, hey, it's got these six core characteristics,

I named a bunch of them, but the one you're asking about is the last one, which is the state is auto-tellic, which is a fancy Greek work that means in End in itself. And what this means is, well, Neurobiologically and really planning, Lich flow is the best we get to feel in the blood It's the most addictive state on earth and we will go extorting there far out of our way to get more of it and Mehy ticks at mehy Abraham Maslow William James myself a lot of people have made the argument that,

hey, pretty much everything we call meaning and purpose and happiness and joy that we're talking about flow. Chick-Sent me a hi as argued that almost everything we think of as art is a flow delivery mechanism for the user. Selene Ismail, a former head of president of Singularity University where they studied exponential technology and these applications to kind of global challenges and old friend of mine, an innovation expert used to be

the head of innovation at Yahoo. He once pointed out and I wrote about this in the Resistment or Stealing Fire. He said, you know, when you think about it, when you pay money, go to a sporting event, you're actually paying money to see people in flow. In fact, if you go to the movies, you're watching actors in flow, poetry reading, it's poets in flow. You go to a restaurant, you want the chef in flow, you want the waiter in flow.

If you quantify it, I bet it's the largest portion of the GDP. And then we quantified it in stealing fire and we quantified what we called the altered state of modified it in stealing fire and we've identified what we call the altered state of cacana may how much money do people actually spend all through their consciousness into these positive field goods dates flow among others. And it turns out to like we spend one sixteenth of the global economy chasing altered states of consciousness. So yes, not only like do I think it's real a lot of smart people have thought it's real and if you're simply going by economic numbers and by the way we may you can look at the footnotes stealing fire

There's like a five-page footnote on how we did the calculation. It was the most Concert and we're probably wrong by a factor of 10 because we were so conservative. I'll give you an example You can make the argument that anytime you go to see live music You're going to have a flow experience. I want to communicate to us. I want to merge with the band and be one with the audience. But okay, we said, so people, maybe they go to rock concerts or other concerts for all these other reasons, but EDM, there's no lyrics.

You're not going for the lyrics. The clubs are disgusting most of the time. You're not going for the clubs. You're just going to dance and the clubs, you're just going to dance and the music, like that's it. So we took EDM instead of the holding the concert and through, we just took EDM and we're still like one-sixteenth of the global economy. So you know, I'm super conservative and probably wrong. So yes, it's the ask you your question, resounding, like. I love it. You won't know, but I run club nights. So for the last 15 years, I've run some

of the UK's biggest club nights. I've watched this collective effervescence unfold in front of me, right? I've seen the dance moves completely done in coordination with people that aren't even in your group without having spoken to them. All that sort of stuff completely lost in the moment. So yeah, I, am, I totally see that. Why does flow exist in the repertoire of human states? Like, why is it adaptive? So it's a great question. There's a bunch of different answers. I'll give you three, and I'll try to be quick. Answer one, runner's high is a version of flow, right? And in runners high, you get, uh, kind of spaced out while running and you get a lot of pain relief, anand a mind and, uh, dorphins both show up the

powerful pain killers. So here's the idea. We're the only species that evolved to run down our prey. We can outrun, distance-wise, any species on earth. So any human, baby back when, who had a little bit of pain relief while running down their prey, it's going to get more prey, have more meat, healthier kids, that's an evolutionary driver over time that goes forward. So that's theory one. A lot of people pretty much think that's where it came from in the first place, where it's problematic.

As flow shows up in all mammals, it's not just humans. It's common fun can be found in most mammals. Dogs can get into flow, horse skin to flow, this horse rider flow when you have riders and jockeys and dog trainer flow and like all that stuff happens too. In fact, my first conversation with me, hi chick sent me hi, the Godfather Flow Psychology was, my wife and I run an animal sanctuary.

I was like email them. I was like, look, I think I'm getting into flow of my dogs, is that shit even possible? Right, like that was my first like email them. I was like, look, I think I'm getting into flow of my dogs. Is that shit even possible? That was my first conversation with them years and years ago. Because I was like, this is crazy. This possibly be really like, no, no, check this out. So the work I did that I wrote about it a small furry prayer, could sort of put forth a different idea that a bunch of us sort of think might be true. So humans and dogs co-volved about 40,000 years ago we teamed up with wolves.

And this was tremendous from an evolutionary perspective. Wolves, first of all, they ate our leftovers. So our camps were clean. And they were garbage dispossils. They barked danger. They were our security alarms. They babysetter kids. We'd go off hunting. And the wolves would be right on it. They were, where's. They babysetter kids. We go off hunting and the wolves would

be right on it. They were, where's the term three dog night come from? It's a night. So, damn cold, you need three dogs or wolves in the bed with you to stay, right? So, we cohabitated with wolves. We hunted with wolves. We had to big prey back in the air. Or if you got a scratch, you could lose your arm and die, right? Like, you can't screw up when you're hunting buffalo, and there's no hospital or medicine or antibiotics or anything like that. So I don't know if you've ever run with a large packet dogs. I do that because it's part of the work I do with the animals. If you Google Stephen Kotler, the five dog workout, you can see what the work we do with dogs

on and how it involves a lot of running with a packet dogs outside television center crew to my house years ago to document it. It's funny. You'll laugh it. It's about how do you generate flow in animals? Because flow boosts the immune system and we do hospice care and special needs care. So you can boost the immune system into a bunch of good stuff in animals. But again, I'm into flow.

It's not hard. Dogs are hard, wired, port. Anyways, but if you go out running with dogs, you fricking trip all over each other. I mean, there's spaszing like it's dangerous and if you were running down prey and you had other dudes running with you and they had spears, it'd be a frickin' mess. But inflow one of the things that happens is massively high in pattern recognition, right? And so when we'd crypt dynamics, team-port to what you were talking about, the clubs were everybody's dancing the same moves.

How does that happen? It happens because in flow, all the brands' information processing systems are jacked up. More information per second, we fast process it faster, find faster connections between incoming information and older ideas. Then we act on it faster and fast switch muscle response gets amplified, so literally we act on it faster. All that stuff gets waged jacked up And when dogs and humans snap into flow together, some of the average information, right?

That's why we do a lot of flow work with the US Special Forces, the Navy, SEALs, even like the National Guard and whatever. They all want the teams in flow because everybody has to in a non-seals. They move non-hierarchally. They're gonna storm a building and get back a kidnap victim. The guy who knows what to do next gets to be the leader.

That's how they do it. And there's no time to talk or it's all nonverbal coordination, all through high-end pattern recognition, all done through flow. So that seems like it got into the lineage through painkiller, but because part of it is you get dopamine and flow in this amplify as pattern recognition, it seems like when we teamed up with wolves, it was better cooperation, interest species cooperation and cross species flow. And this is a huge driver. So the same thing, little more prey

when you were getting into flow and getting painkiller, but if you're suddenly getting performance enhance and chemicals and team dynamics and everything else, way more prey, much safer. And so that's the next thing. And there's a current theory, and again, these are not mutually exclusive. This is a theory that I just read, and I think it's frickin' brilliant. So to get into flow, what you have to do is, flow is what happens when you learn a bunch

of different individual skills and they come together. So you're trying to like swing a baseball bat or a cricket bat, right? In the beginning, it's like, keep your eye on the ball and swing with your arms straight and step into the, and it's like 17 different moves. And then boom, it comes together. And then boom comes together and it slows down. And suddenly you can twist your wrist a little and put spin on the ball, descend into right field, or left field, or blah, blah, blah. I'm giving you baseball analogies, which is probably useless and bread, but whatever, you get my point and I talk really fast, so I apologize. But that, when we automatize a series of movements and we can now do them as one unique movement

without conscious intervention, without the new theory as, hey, if that happened, it'd be really good from a brain perspective. We had a signal, if the body gave us a signal that, hey, this thing you've been trying to learn, you've got it unlocked, you can now do it no matter what,

and flow is your signal. So these are not mutually exclusive things, and one may have led to the other and led to the other. So it's hard to tell. That's the current thinking. And let's say that there's a fourth one, which is, maybe I don't know, what the fuck I'm talking about, all this could be wrong in two weeks from now, somebody will figure it out, right?

So there's, I sound very air-headed, but they're caveat. This is evolution, they're theory, and nobody, the science, can only take us so far. What I think is so interesting there is the inter-species stuff, the fact that you can get yourself into a mode that allows everything, not just everybody, but everything, including the creatures that you're with to continue to go. And it's cool to think that the sensation of flow is almost like a mastery alert, like a little mastery indicator. Right. That's exactly that's all that's up. Stealing that, that's perfect. That's sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I think that argument is made actually in this book, effortless attention, which is a book on, one of the textbooks on flow actually. What's the difference? That's the seventh or eighth textbook. I bet you do. What's the difference between peak performance and flow? Is it the same thing?

Yeah, so this is an interesting, first of all, it depends who you ask. Right, it really depends who you ask. I tend to think of peak performance as nothing more or less than well first of all, peak performance is just performing at your best in whatever situation you're interested in but it is, I define peak performance is getting you biology to work for you rather than against you, right? And that biology is a limited set of skills. There are a bunch of motivational

skills, then there are a bunch of learning skills, there are a bunch of creativity skills, and there are a bunch of flow skills, right? And those are catch all terms. When psychologists say motivation, they don't just mean energy for action. They mean extrinsic motivation. The stuff in the world will work hard to get money, sex, fame, intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy. They mean goals and grit. So these are catch all terms. The way to think about that sweet, that's sort of, it's almost a mnemonic in my mind,

but in any situation, motivation gets you into the game. Learning allows you to continue to play. Creativity is how you steer, right? Creative problem solving, creative decision, is how you steer. And then flow is how you steer, create a problem solving, create a decision, it's how you steer. And then flow is how, because it's not more form, how you amplify the results of those efforts, usually beyond all reusable expectation, because that's just what flow does. Right, if you look at the skills that flow amplifies,

now it's motivation, grit, productivity, learning, creativity, cooperation, collaboration, right? So, empathy and environmental awareness. And you've got to ask yourself, here's the other final answer to your question, why all these skills? Why would one state of consciousness optimize environmental awareness? You're really to see and perceive the natural world, empathy, learning rates, and grit.

I mean, like, what do you, and an infest switch muscle response, right? And increase strength 15 percent. Like, what are you talking about? Why? And the answer is really simply, we gave, we talked about a bunch of evolutionary stuff, but here's the high level of you. Evolution, drug or biology, scarcity drives evolution. Scarsity resources is the biggest driver of evolution.

There's only two responses to scarcity. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can get creative, get cooperative, get innovative, and make new resources. So why does flow optimize all this crap? Because these are the two that it's optimized as everything you need either fight flea or get it innovative, get creative, get cooperative and make new resources. So where it came from there, why did it stick around big picture? Before we start to talk about the components of peak performance, is there anything that people need to understand first? Is that like a primer for the primer?

I don't, there really isn't the only, there really isn't. The one thing that I want to say here, and I don't know if this is true across the board, is more research needs to be done, but we have found that if you're interested, I mean there are some basics and some stuff that like, you know, but all that's covered in our impossible. And this is talked about a little bit of our impossible. But so there's something a little bit of a low case of control. You have an internal low case of control, which means I feel like I am in charge of my

life. I can control my destiny. I can control my life. I can control what happens to me. Or you have an external low case of control. I'm a victim. Life happens to me. I've got no control here.

And sometimes this gets talked about as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. They're roughly the same terms, but neurobiologically, there's a little difference. Either way, if you don't have an internal locust control, if you think life happens to you, if you're a victim, if you feel like you're a victim, it basically shuts off the brain's ability to participate in the world. Basically it says the brain is as a high energy organism that always wants to conserve energy. 25% of your energy is being used by the brain at rest, it's 2% of your body mass. First order of business for the brain is always conserve energy, conserve energy. So if you think life happens to you

and you've got no control in a given situation when a problem arises or things like that, your brain sometimes won't even exert the energy to try. Because why bother if you have no control here and are gonna lose anyways, right? We'll save the energy to deal with the fall out later. So how deep this goes, how much it paralyzes any pursuit performance from mains and open question, but that's the only thing I can think of that, right? That's the one where I think, we don't have a good answer here. It's like, but considering,

especially in America today, because in, there's such a huge social justice movement, thank God, phenomenal, but it produces a lot of victim mindset, right? There's a lot of that. And I'm not saying that the social justice causes aren't righteous and true in the art, like everything every thing you're saying is right, but from a peak performance standpoint, from performance standpoint, if you, you're a victim, you think life happens to you, you're kind of screwed. And so that's it.

That's, you know what I mean? That's just the biology. And which is funny, because it's the biology that's sort of like led some of the social justice argument, right? Some of the argument going on is being biologically led, but the argument itself is causing more problems. It's interesting. I don't know what the solution is. That is so, so. Yeah, that's so circular.

What you've just gone through there, I think, is what being introduced to your work has been so interesting for me personally, because what you do, your understanding of applied neuroscience and the biology, but also the psychology and the phenomenal logical experience of what's going on. It's not just about victim mentality is a word that everybody's heard before, but how does that manifest? Like, what does it mean? And the places that you've gone with your research and why I find it more compelling, so much more compelling than most of the stuff that I've read with regards to peak performance, is that it's a lot more

tacit and explicit and it feels like there's substance behind it because there's a lot of even in psychology. Oh, there's just nonteds. nonsense. It's like armchair philosophising, right? About here's the thing, everybody understands their own experience of when they feel good and when they feel bad. And they could say, well, do you know what it is? Before I give a talk, I always go for a walk and I do that. But you actually understand the stuff that you've done and the work that you've done breaks that down

and looks at, okay, so what's happening when you walk? What's happening when your eyes are exposed to light and when you're moving and you're going through locomotion while thinking and all this sort of stuff. So yeah that breakdown there that you've just said I think really perfectly identifies why this is so important and different as well. So at the flow research collective right the organization when we study the neurobiology of people performance. We have a hardcore philosophy that we sort of live by which is personality doesn't scale biology scales.

And because what you see is in coaching is exactly what you just said in self-help and coaching. You see people who figure out what works for them and then they teach to other people. And usually it fails sometimes it's a total disaster. And the reason is really simple. Personality, what works for you, what works for me, my personality was created by my genetics and my early childhood experience. And really foundational stuff that really matters how you're going to approach people's performance. Like where are you on the introversion, extraversion scale? And what are your risk tolerances? These are mostly genetically coded or locked into place by early childhood

experience. You can change some of them, but it's often very slowly over long periods of time. If you go one level down to the neurobiological mechanism that we all share, well, that scales. The problem with psychology has been as useful as it is, it's metaphor. Psychology's metaphor. And, neurobiology is mechanism. You want it reliable and repeatable. You want neurobiology.

You have to close the perfect example. If you go back in the 90s and you can read this, go read like me, I'd check something, yeah, I'd ensue them, Jackson, Godfather, Flow Psychology, and the first woman to really try to apply it to sport. They wrote a book together called Flow and Sport and they tried to cheat, lead to athletes using the psychology, how to use flow. And it's not very successful. Their hit rate is pretty lousy, right?

And these were literally the two of the brightest people in the entire world and it's not their fault. It's this psychology is squishy. Like, it does, like what, when you sit, my partner who I write books with sometimes Peter D. Amanda's when he says mindset, he means attitude towards life. When Carol Dweck, it's Stanford's mindset,

she means attitude towards learning, and what she actually means is, no, no, if you have the right attitude towards learning, this part of your brain that allows you to learn turns the fuck on. And this part turns up that to let, why do you, what's the language, who cares what the language? What you want is this part of your brain on and this part of your brain off and that's what matters.

So let's start there and work, you know, work our way up rather than the other way around because it's the other way around. It's just too squishy and it's too subjective ands, two subjective and you can make a mess of things, especially if your risk tolerance is, my risk tolerance is off the chart. My retirees are ridiculous. I run around professional action sport athletes and that's who I research and hang out with them. That's what I do in my free time. I've got insane burst tolerances and broken 82

bones so do you want me to you want to you want to know what works for me you know how I get into flow I go ski in the trees at 40 miles an hour often alone listen to the Wu Tang clan at full volume that's what I do I mean like seriously like what we're gonna train other people oh yeah. I mean, like seriously, like we're going to train other people. Oh, yeah, we train 1,000 people about the flow research collective, right? We're the C-Squeed of a censure right now is being trained by us. How many of them do you think are going to want to ski through the trees at 40 miles an hour listening to the Wootag lab?

That would be the best. You get my point. That would be the best induction. You know the first, the first, this, the flow, the flow collective weekend away. Right, come on guys, we're going to jump on the skis. It's just going to get you into this right state and then, yeah, dirty pair of pants and a couple of broken bones later. So going into the components, you break peak performance down.

You said it before, motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. And so did Nietzsche, apparently, why those sections and how do they fit together in that order? Everybody, everybody, the point is this. Peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us, right? I think that's this, as I said. It's a limited set of biology. If you're, so if you're a peak performer, I'd say this all the time,

if you read the art of impossible and you're, let's say you're top 30% of whatever it is you're doing, that could be stab collective, right? I don't care. You chunks of the book, 60%, I would say, are going to be familiar. There could be stuff you're probably doing. You may not know what order you're doing at Inter.

You may go, well, I'm doing this. I didn't know I should be doing this. This is part of it, but oh, cool. I get that. Oh, I should do this too. Oh, I'm doing this. I'm doing this. I'm doing this.

I didn't know about this. That's everybody's experience, right? Who's good at their job and is reading this book. Oh, I'm doing some of this. I didn't know it was a system. I didn't know it was designed to work in order. It's because it's a limited, it's just the biology, right? We're all going the same direction.

We've been doing this really cool project. I'm trying to open sources so we can get used, but there's been this huge outpouring of peak performance experts who now all have podcasts, including it turns out me. And you can, we want to do an open source project where we have listeners listen to podcasts and say, okay, this is the podcast. They talked about grit and this was the advice and this was the advice and make a giant

matrix about it. So we can get all, right, like there's brilliant minds. We're talking about this stuff all the time and lots of people are interested in, so like this kind of crowds towards project to figure out where there's overlap and where's the crazy or where there's a possible new idea that nobody's seen before that is worth examining. This would be really useful, but we started doing that at a lower level at the flow research collective of bunch of years ago and I started doing it on my own just every time I listened

to a podcast, I would just like fill out a little grid thing. And it didn't take like we're all it's the same stuff. The only advantage I had in this particular universe, some of a lot of these experts like there are great books on focus or mindfulness or gratitude or you know written by amazing experts and you know I'm lucky enough the Floresist collected that a lot of these people who have written the books and are the experts they work with me at the collective so like you know that's we're a collective of we you know we try to be the best in the world in this stuff so that's that's that was the goal when I started and we're we aim for that maybe we failed but as we're trying for so but there's lots of experts and lots of these subjects. I, because flow is the big picture. And if you're going to be an expert on flow, well, you better know, I mean, if flow

optimizes empathy and environmental awareness and motivation, and like, I better know what they have. I'm talking about on all those subjects. And when I started research, and because of a neural guy, when I started reading about the neuro, how do all these things work? What's going on in the brain? What parts of the brain are getting at? You start seeing, wait a minute, this is all one thing, this is all one system. And other people had started putting this together. D.C. and Ryan are the two big brains in motivation.

It kind of did some of the early work on intrinsic motivation. Ryan went on to write a lot of really cool stuff on intrinsic motivation, the neurobiology. He went from psychology into neurobiology. He wrote a bunch of papers where you can start to see the kernels of the bigger pictures, starting to emerge a little bit. But I don't think he was looking at creativity, but because I was, you know, I run a course called flow for writers where I, you know, it's all this stuff applied to creativity and art and whatever. I was really happy for a long time looking at creativity. How does this stuff apply to creativity?

And that was to totally different field. It's totally different world. It gave me, you know, and then learning stuff matters because we train 1,000 people a month and you can't, like, you can't train that many people and be bad at it right like they don't let you they get mad have discovered Yeah, I bet that they do it's um I Think I know that you're a fan of David Epstein as well. He's yeah Pascast on the show and learning about the advantage that a generalist has, especially coming out of the Henry Ford era, the scientific management, the specialized, the workforce, think about

what the subtext was that we're being told culturally there. Narrow and deep, narrow and deep. It's interesting. Yeah, David's work on range in where he talks about ranges, Borelian, and it's not just an argument for generalism, it's an argument for generalism as a path towards what economists talk about as match fit, which is a perfect match. I think Adam Grant actually coined the term or he's the one where David got it. That's where I think it came from. But match fit is a match between your strengths, your values, and the work you do in the world.

And if you can get match fit, things hyper accelerate, right? But basically, in the beginning of our composites, why talk about how do you line up all your intrinsic motivators? How do you get curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, the big five intrinsic motivators, all pointing in the same direction? By the end of the stack, you also have to start adding in your strengths and your values, but if you get all that stuff pointing in the same direction, it's rocket fuel. It's just everything goes so much faster. And I think match fit is the like

quiet economic term for the same thing. But that's the point he's making is generalism in search of match fit gives you the best long term results of your interest in walking about the mastery. I will also say I'm Gen X. And I don't know if this is very true for my generation. I don't know if it was true for the generations that came before me. And I'm not quite sure still for today, but we really wanted to be Renaissance men and women. Like I grew up not just wanting to go deep. I was like, you had to be great, you had to be good athlete, you'd be great like, you had to be great. You had to be good athlete. You'd be great athlete.

You had to be a great artist. You had to be a great intellectual. You wanted to succeed in the business. Like you wanted to kill it everywhere. And that was like, how do you do that? How do you do it, I mean, it wasn't like, generalism was really weird. And I was an old-school punk rocker.

And you know, it's a DIY movement. So we were like renaissance men and women who were gonna do it ourselves. We were like, okay, we're gonna figure all of it. Like neuroscience, schools, where do I start reading? You know what I mean? Tennis school, give me a racket, let's go. What do you think most people have wrong about motivation?

motivation. I think there's two answers here. The first is that, and I think they're related. The first is that people really mystify, especially in today's culture, we mystify passion purpose. Oh, it's purpose is very altruistic. And let me lead with my purpose. Hi, I'm Wendy and I'd like to save the trees in Nepal. Right, I mean like Wendy, honestly, if you were saving the trees in Nepal, you wouldn't have to talk to me about it. I would already know and that's why I'd be talking to you in the first place. You have to tell me you're disqualified yourself.

The sub-news actually save you the trees in Nepal. So you're telling me you're taking up space and like, what? But all that aside, I just say that out loud. Okay, anyways, that's it happens. So passion and purpose matter on a really simple level because focus is the most expensive thing we spend our energy on. Period. It's the most, and if you look at any situation, any performance situation, I don't care what it is you're doing. You want to be a little bit better at work. Next Monday or you want to go right after world records, first of all, the biology is the same.

And you don't have a lot of levers. What do you, in any situation, bowling, you've got your focus that you're gonna bring to the bowling and you've got that bowling skills. Now, you can get more bowling skills that's called practice. It takes a very long time and it goes slowly and it goes slowly for all of us and the rules are the same.

Crawl walk rum, right? You're gonna suck until you don't suck in. It's slow. So focus is the big lever. As I said earlier, brain 25% of your energy at rest, forget it. You're not even paying attention at rest, daydreaming mode, and about 2% of your mass. So big energy hog always looking for ways to conserve or even better ways to get something for free. When we are curious about something, when we are passionate about something, when we are purposeful about something, we get focused for free.

That's the huge deal. We don't have to work so damn hard to pay attention to something and we're not burning all that energy focused for free. That's why passion matters. That's why purpose matters, purpose matters more than passion because passion that for free, comes in the form of norapidapherent. And dopamine, these are feel-good reward chemicals that do double duty, is focus in chemicals also, right? What happens when you go from passion to purpose? Meaning, I take my passion, the thing that I'm most passionate about, and I couple it to a cause greater than myself. So my passion is flow science and research, but now I'm gonna do flow of science and research

and make the world a better place with my flow of science and research. The reason I wanna do that, it may be that I wanna help the world in Kumbaya, but from people's performance perspective, I want endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin, which are pro-social, social feel-good reward chemicals,

and they're super motivators. So there, like we may, the first thing people get wrong is we may, we've mystified passion and purpose to think it's all these things. It's not, it's a focusing, it's about focus and reward neurochemistry that drives performance. That's what we're talking about. So I think it's helpful to just like bring it back down to the ground. Like this is the other thing that people really get wrong. And I think this is the big one is just because you have passion and purpose. It's not going to feel good. Like it's a like it doesn't mean it's easy and it doesn't mean it feels good. In fact, one of the hardest things, most peak performers discover,

is that it comes upon everybody's life where the thing you're most passionate about becomes your prison. Right, like that writers can get trapped. I've written a couple of books that were really tough. And it's like a two year hell that you're living inside of. You know what I mean? So it doesn't mean that I wasn't passionate about the book. It just meant that it was damn hard. And, you know, I had to, I had to

bang my head into walls a lot. How did you drag yourself out of that? How do people get out of the drugs? I just, for me, I just do the work and finish the project. I mean, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't, all my, like, I don't mind if it's hard. I like, you know what I mean? I ask this question to people all the time, which is, tell me the things in your life that you're proudest of, and that made the biggest difference and led to the biggest change and like, improve in a performance afterwards. So nobody tells me at the time they got lucky.

They tell me, oh, I worked for five years, seven jobs, just to get through college. But I finally got this degree. And like, that's what you hear about. Stuart Brand once said, and I think he's not wrong that the only sustainable happiness is the satisfaction of a job well done. And he's not actually wrong when it comes to happiness. There are three levels of

sort of happiness and well-being that are available to humans. The first level is moment by moment in happiness. How do you feel right here at Outward, which is what Stewart was talking about? And he's probably right that the next level is up enjoyment and then meaning and purpose all about flow. So enjoyment is a high flow lifestyle. And meaning and enjoyment is a high flow lifestyle, and meaning and purpose is a high flow lifestyle, where the thing generally flow is attached, just something meaningful in the world.

And that's the best we get to feel, like if you want to find people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction, well, being the people with the most flow in their lives, and usually their flow is coming from something that's tied to something greater than themselves. The interesting thing from that is being selfless is oddly the most selfish thing that you can do by serving other people. You serve yourself.

So here's the funny thing and there's an inversion of that which is also true which is equally weird. So flow in a bunch of other alternate states experiences and gluing psychedelic experiences. The ego, the self disappears. But on the back end of these experiences, right, the ego comes like roaring back. Have you ever met more blowhards than are like existing in the psychedelic community right now? How many- How many good points- Throw bra morons with a philosophy about, you know,

take mushrooms, find God, beat drums, have lots of sex. Like, really? Okay, cool. I was in high school, too. I didn't know that was a philosophy. I'm poor, let's go. Yeah, so being selfless is one of the most selfish things you can do, but also destroys the self

and then can cause it to come back greater than it ever was before. Yeah, which, you know, we have a T-shirt, we don't have a sweatswag at the Flores which collected, we have a T-shirt that says, never trust the dopamine because the big ego high comes with the dopamine and you want the dopamine for focus, for energy, for drive. But if you start actually believing what it's telling you, the message it's telling you, oh my god, you'll make all kinds of disastrous decisions. I'll give you a, we tell people also like, slow, fast-food hadn't had a recognition. We talked about that. So like, common sense,

don't go shopping in a flow state. You will buy everything. You'll be like, you'll have a great idea to single-handedly reinvent 70s polyester disco fashion. Ah, staying alive. I mean, you're going to come up and you're going to be like, I bought what? I'm not what? I'm going to be disgusted with you, Sam. Funny, funny.

I backed out the visa. You'll never believe why. Right. Oh my God. Yeah, that's so interesting. I've never thought that flow actually could be a being in a flow state could be misappropriated into an imperfect environment and put you on the back foot. We write about it as being fire, but like, so a couple things about flow.

A lot of stuff is amplified, but you just watch the prefrontal cortex front of the brain are shut down. Prefrontal cortex handles logical, complex decision-making, long-term planning, does some risk assessment. So I tell people that if anybody, there's a cult leader who's put people in the flow. If somebody puts drops, helps you get into flow, and then tries to make meaning for you, run the other way.

You're in a cult. Like, that's like, you got it. This is a powerful technology. There's a whole bunch of people in the self-help world who put people into flow using various techniques, you know, and then upsell them. Hey, you feel how good that is? Check out my new Platinum Level Superstar

Turbo program, right? Risk assessment is off. Long-term planning is shut down. That, like, there's an argument that that should be illegal, right? Like, there is an argument for that. But my point is, like, flows at tool. It's ethically neutral. Be used for good. It can be used for ill. In fact, you go back to the 1950s, and you can take your pick on it. This is good or ill, but the 50s flow literature is all about

combat flow. It's about soldiers in World War II and group flow situations. And things like that. So, you know, I always say that a cat birdler, when they're stealing your jewels, they're definitely inflow. That's a good point. You start the creativity section off with a quote from Salvador Dali that says, I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

What does that mean to you? I love that quote. I've thought a I love that quote. I love that quote. I've thought a lot about that quote. I think what Dolly was getting at was that he was trying to describe reality from a phenomenological perspective, reality as we actually experience it, right? He was talking about elongated time,

so his clocks were stretched, time elongates and flow. So like a lot of this stuff that he was trying to get at the phenomenology, I think is in and around altered state, subconsciousness, I think what Dolly Met is that experiencing his art was transformative in that way. And there's something interesting about that because, you know, the empathy is the study of empathy as a psychological, as a scientific topic is this question where the origins of empathy science was art. How is it that you look at a painting? And suddenly you feel the thing the artist was feeling when they painted the painting. How the hell does that work? Right? It's an emotion transported through an object into another person. Okay. Yeah, and how does that work? Exactly. Like, what are we talking about here? That was

where early research and empathy came from. They were trying to figure out how does that possibly work? And Dolly, that was work that was really getting a lot of attention in the late 1870s, 80s and 90s. So I'm guessing Dolly at least encountered it. I don't know his exact dates, but I'm guessing he bumped up against it. I mean, 1920s, he was painting heavily, maybe to hands, I'm guessing like he's in art school in the 1890s or early, you know, and they're talking about this stuff.

I'm guessing, I could, you know what I mean, I could be wrong, that's what I, that's my semi-area guess, or I'm possibly even talking out of his butthole. Perhaps, yeah. I did so much research for a recent talk I gave and I used Dali as one of the examples. So I did a full deep dive on the guy. I cannot believe how eccentric he was. I absolutely cannot believe the depths of his eccentricity. I hear him at Bunwell that whole

group of you. It's interesting to me. First of all, I always point out that like Europeans are very quiet and stayed and generally uptight until they decide not to be. And then get the hell out of the way. Just get out of the way. Yeah, everything's up for sale, isn't it? Everything's fair game, everything. Like you take really repressed cultures with long cultural histories that are really like set in stone and then you know we we have I think of it so in science there's this really weird things that happens where if you have a scientist who happens a lot you see physics more than anything else they suddenly they discover they start to get interested in something that science has said is not possible and they start poking at

in it suddenly possible. And this can be flow science or things like that, but suddenly it opens to, like once they believe in one thing that might be a little bit controversial, something that everything's fair game and the entire, like all the critical thinking that they brought to every step of their career seems to go out the window at that minute. Like 10 minutes ago, you were really smart, smart biologists. It's only we're talking about the formal. Exactly. What the hell happened? And can I smoke some too? That's what we need. Yeah, it's, um, did you know that I'm going to guess that you will have done? Did you know that Dali was named Salvador because his younger brother died nine months before he

was born and his parents believed that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother? So that's not too much weight to bear. I mean, you know, that's not unfair expectations for a child. Do you know what he did with it? Hey, Sal! Sal! Let me tell you about your brother, your dad brother. The one that you are. The one that you are, yeah, exactly.

What you are, by the way, this is, so you got Dolly in the Dolly Lama. I got it. If you're named Dolly, you're the real creation of the Dolly Lama. I got it. If you're named Dolly, you're the real creation of Dolly Lama. There you go. That's it. The other one, the best thing that I heard. So he married, he left his first marriage for another one that he was having in a fair, this lady was having an affair with, and he referred to her as his muse. He said that this is the woman who is supplying me with all of my artistic inspiration. And upon getting married, he bought her a castle, He said that this is the woman who is supplying me with all of my artistic inspiration.

And upon getting married, he bought her a castle, immediately started treating her like monarchy. Like immediately did. And then, didn't move into the castle he'd purchased her. He sent her formal requests by letter to be able to see her in the castle that he'd bought her, and she had to respond. So he was treating her like some sort of sacred royal, this heritage, this completely like unprofane area. And yeah, he literally treated her like a goddess in Carnot.

What a guy. I know. It's your drop in man. I don't know what to do with that. That's amazing. Wow. Um, so maybe you've got something different by I am drugs than like maybe he was going much farther than. Yeah, you think that you know, Dali, Dali's's dali's beyond our mere mortal comprehension I think I'm four researchers need it precisely

exactly right we've now got the dali research collective which is it gonna be a sub a sub discipline so going back going back to creativity going back to the dali thing how can people hack their creativity so what's interesting um again this is one of these cool things where, you know, back in the 20th century, we were trying to use the psychology creativity to train creativity. And we were great at it. The hit record in the 20th century was really up and down. Sometimes we were good, sometimes we were really bad.

And we couldn't figure out why. And now we're starting to understand, first of all, creativity is less so much, it's a skill, it's also a state of consciousness. Right, there's state changes in the brain when we're creative. And we're now starting to understand the neurobiology so like simple things make a really big difference.

I'll give you one kind of like bit of neurobiological information that is often fogging with creativity, which is anxiety. So the more anxious you become, the more logical your brain gets. The more fear there is in the situation, the more your brain wants, give me something safe, something tried, something true, something that works every time or level on repeatal. Extreme example, if I'm acute anxiety, you get the fight or flight response. Forget about options. The buffet is closed. You can fight, you can flee, or you can freeze.

I'm giving you three choices, right? That's an extreme situation, but the same thing happens with any level, level, level, zone anxiety. A little bit is good. A little bit of focus attention. It'll get curious. It'll move of focus attention, it'll get curious, it'll move you along, but too much, and you have all kinds of problems.

The issue, if we're going to be a little more formal, is the dorsal anterior singulate cortex, which is a part of your brain, does a bunch of really interesting things. One of the things it does is it finds remote associations between ideas. So when your brain creativity is always for confidence or your brain takes a novel information and it finds an older link to that new information, right? And uses the new thing that comes out of the two things we blended together to create something Starling that's essentially

creativity at a really basic level. But when you're scared, the dorsal anterior is going to go, goes, well, dude, I don't want to associate this thing with, I do, you know, this bit of novelty in the environment with like what your grandmother said to you back in sixth grade, because no, this thing could be dangerous and you're already stressed out because of this thing at work, and you're tired. You don't have a lot of energy. So no, no, no, no, happens across the board. So being in a good mood really matters because when you're in a good mood, the ACC is calmer and it can find farther flung connections between ideas.

This is why if you're interested in more creativity, if you want to train your nervous system, the best tools to reach for are either a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness focus meditation practice, or 20 to 40 minutes of daily exercise. Those are the three best ways to flush stress hormones out of your system. So when we train people, like, you have to have some level of calmness to do any peak performance, we say pick one to a five minute gratitude practice or a 11 minutes of focused meditation, focused breath work or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise. If there's crisis stuff going on in the world

or COVID and people are stressed out, do two of these things a day. It'll keep your nervous system in check enough, it flows a high energy state. We all wanna get into flow, that's gonna be the secret to unlocking everything, but the calmer, it's not the calmer you are, but the calmer you're sort of starting from

as you're entering, the better. And one of the big reasons for flow, also for creativity. There's a bunch of other things like that, but that's just a simple example. That's sort of what the new science of creativity is about. How close is that window from doing the action, the daily habits? Is it best for you to do the meditation or the exercise and then within six hours sit down to do

your work? Oh, I don't. That's an interesting question. I think it depends on where you are at the time. For example, when I wake up and I'm stressed out, sometimes I'll like, you know, I like to write first thing in the morning. That's when I work fast and focus best. But if I've come to work stressed out, I will do a gratitude practice. All right, I'll write down 10 things I'm grateful for and really try to feel each one of them. If I'm not stressed out when I come to work and I don't get a chance to exercise during the day, I'll end my day with a gratitude practice just so I can make sure I've sort of

reset my emotions before I go like deal with my wife and talk to my wife and like, you know, I don't wanna like spill my bad day all over her that, you know, so I'll tune up my nervous system that way, that kind of thing. So I think it depends on sort of where you are, how you are, and what the situation is. For most people, some of the things that you've talked about would probably be part of a morning routine.

Most people also... I think that's true. I like to... I literally, like, listen, seven minutes from the time I like roll a lot of the bed to the time I'm like... Is that right? What do you do? I always wonder. Do you have a little tune-up sequence before? Let's say it's normal day. Stephen wakes up, gets out of bed and he's feeling just good out of 10, normal out of 10. I've been quite a bit out of the bathroom, make my bed, walk from my house to my office, bring my dogs along the way, put a coffee on, usually do my gratitude practice while the coffee is

brewing, and then I write, then I start writing, and I'm usually writing within five minutes. than I write, then I start writing. And I'm usually writing within five minutes. I find that interesting that you're... Well, the reason is this, flow, among other, flow is great for creativity, it's great for writing us. My goal when I'm writing, flow takes place on the border line from a brainwave perspective between alpha and theta. So normal waking consciousness is big.

It's a fast-moving brainwave. Alpha is daydream in its mode. It's a slower brainwave. It's more associated with high creativity. Then theta is REM sleep, right? It's right there. Flow is the borderline between alpha and theta. It's a very, it's actually a calm from

brainwave perspective, a very calm state. This is the decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex that we were talking about. That's how it registers. You wake up in alpha. in a very calm state. This is this decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex that we were talking about. That's how it registers. You wake up in alpha. You don't wake up, you jump, your brain will jump up to beta once it starts racing, but you wake up mostly in alpha.

And unless you're having a bad dream or there's a lot of other things like that, but in general, you're waking up at Alpha. It's easier to stay there and drop down to the Theta border line with flow than it is to get kicked into high beta. And so that's why I try to do it. I think that's really interesting.

It's cool to use something that you're going to do every day as a your pre-workout before work is your sleep. I think that's a good way, a good way to put it together. What are the things that most common ways that you see people knocking themselves out of flow? What are the antitheses that people get into a daily basis? Let me solve that for you a slightly different way. If you go to www.flowblocker.com, we built the diagnostic. There are six major ways. Most people get knocked out of flow. And distraction, for example, is a big one.

There's a bunch of others. Anyways, we built the diagnostic. It's free for anybody and it will tell you, this is the thing that's standing between you and the most flow and give you a bunch of actionable steps to solve that problem in your life. So that work, we've done that work for people. That's free.

We can jump to the next one. I love that. That's awesome. So let's talk about some flow triggers then. So flow triggers that these proximal causes of flow itself and they split up into internal and external. What are some of your favorites? What do you think people need to learn about if they're new to this topic? Yeah, so flow states, as you pointed out, they've got triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 22 known flow triggers, probably way more, but that's what we know about.

There are 12 that fall into the individual category. What'll drive me into flow, or you into flow, and then there's 10 group flow triggers, right? What mean you together, a flow state interpersonal flow or a brains dormant session, group flow, or you know, community toss flow at scale, that's a rock concert, that kind of thing. But so there are tenders for group flow. They all work the same way. Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, to right now. So that's what the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present

moment. They do it a bunch of different ways. They can either drive dopamine or norap an effort and endure. Assistant, we talked about those earlier. They're focusing chemicals, the performance of the animals, chemicals. Sometimes the triggers will drive both into your system. Sometimes it's just one or the triggers will lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about

any one times while a lower cognitive load eliminates extra energy. And you can repurpose that for attention. So that's how the triggers work. Though the most important one and the one I love the most, I think, because it's often called the golden rule of flows, what's known as the challenge skills balance. This is the idea that this is by the way, the exact is a great follow up to what we're talking about, because this is another reason why anxiety blocks flow.

So the challenge skills balance is called the golden rule of flow, meaning flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. You want to stretch, but not snap. Now, stretch means you're outside your comfort zone. So if you have like shy, weak, timid people, this is a little difficult for the,

because you have to stretch beyond your comfort zone. So for flow hacking, you got to sort of get comfortable with being uncomfortable for like Uber top performers, right, when I'm dealing with like C-suite executives or go Wall Street type A types, the problem is that they blow by this skill set because they're used to taking on giant challenges and they, it's not that you shouldn't take on the giant challenge is that you should chunk it down so that part you're dealing with, it's right in front of you, that's right here right now that you're focused on, sits and that that suites above.

So by were to say this emotionally, I'd say, hey, that suites, so by where to say this emotionally I'd say hey that's really suites but it's not on but it's pretty close to near the midpoint between anxiety to much stimulation whoa turn it off and boredom not enough stimulation I can't pay any attention in between as a suites but what is psychologically referred to as the flow channel or physiologically, the orb stops in curve. Either way, too much anxiety in your system, right? For any other reason, and it's too much norapinephrine, and it turns up the challenge skill, sweet spots, so it makes it harder to, because you're already pushing your skills to the utmost. And if you're super anxious, as you know, it's really hard to push your skills to the

utmost. I was skiing yesterday and I was thinking about this very thing because it's been a lot of time skiing and a lot of time trying to progress my skiing. And we were in the terrain park yesterday working pretty hard, but we had skiing really hard man guy ski with a lot the day before and made a lot of progress. And yesterday we were exhausted, I was exhausted, and he was exhausted, and everything looked terrifying to me. Because I was tired, and I couldn't, my legs weren't popping.

I couldn't do the things I was doing, and stuff that I've been doing the day before, I was like, oh my God, this is so scary, I don't want to do this. And I literally had been doing it the day before, like without even thinking about it, not even like worried. And yesterday was had been doing it the day before, like without even thinking about it, not even worried. And yes, it was terrific. I was laughing at myself. I was like, this is amazing, that like perception can radically shift from day to day,

but that's the challenge skills sweet spot. It's a movable, you know, it's a movable feast. So that's my favorite figure. How concerned are you that a lot of knowledge workers and people that are contributing at the moment and want to be in flow are in an environment with always on communication and open plan work spaces or slack messaging channels and stuff like that, which is directly in the mind. is directly... I'm certain that there's that we've created a world that is significantly like anti-flow. Well you've said the precursor to flow is focus and focus is incredibly scarce.

Open office plans are very problematic and less communication can be very problematic. People always say what's the one flow trigger? I could, like, what should I start with? And I always say the best thing, what I research has shown is start your day with 90 minutes of on a neuro-epic concentration to vote it to your hardest task, or start your work session.

You should start your work session in accordance with your circadian rhythms. I'm an extreme luck, 4 a.m. My wife said, night out, 4 p.m. is when she starts to wake up. And she's not really luck. 4 a.m. My wife said night out. 4 p.m. is when she starts to wake up and she's not really awake till 9 p.m. right. So work if you can work in conjunction with your basic bio rhythms. Really great. Fantastic. And try to block 90 minutes of on our up to concentration at the front end of that period. Now 90 minutes is very particular. The human brain evolved to

focus in 90 minutes cycles. And the same way, we've got like a 90 minute rem cycle that you've probably heard about. We've got a 90 minute wake in cycle, we'll awake and we're focused and we're alert. Monasory education is very high flow education when the goad will kind of measure flow in educational environments,

monastery education and walled up schools go off the charts. Why is that? Well, one of the main reasons is they've divide the workday into 90-minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration, self-directed learning for 90-minute blocks, and they get tremendous results. Because the human brain is biologically hard-bired for 90 minutes. We're good at it, so it doesn't take a sh- ton of training to learn how to focus for that period of time, once you turn everything out of soft. And after, you know, as I said, we train about 1,000 people a month. I've probably, my staff figured out I have no idea.

This is right, but let's just even say it's in the ballpark of right, between the people I've spoken to and trained, I've trained up our quarter million people. It's a lot of people. So it's a big data set. And the thing that matters seems to make the biggest difference for most people is 90 minute block of honor of administration.

And we talked about the challenge skills balance. How do you approach the task that you're going to do in that 90 minute block? You push that task to the edge of your abilities. So when I'm writing in the morning, I'll give you a really simple example. So this is an atmospheric. I've got 90 minutes. When I start writing a book, I try to write 500 words a day. Why 500?

Because 350 I can do easily. That's not a problem. But 500 words means I've got one idea. And now I've got to connect it to the next. And I got to write a transition. And transitions, as anybody who's ever written a book will tell you, are the bitch, right? They're hard and so

500 words it's I'm stretching myself. I'm not snapping when it's the middle of a book and I sort of know a little bit more of what I'm doing and where I'm going It's 750 words at the end of a book. It's a thousand and twelve hundred so it moves every day But I've got my 90 minute block and I know what I'm gonna do with it because it's based on the challenge skills I'm going to do it with it because it's based on the challenge skills balance. You can apply that to anything in your life. Those are like, people are always like, where do I start, where do I start, where do I start, that's where you start, I think. If your nervous system is running hot, add in daily mindfulness gratitude and inspiration. Let me say the final thing that I have to say now,

which is the caveat, which is like, I get that everything I'm talking about is very simple and very straightforward. I like to point out that I like, I don't like whiz-bang technologies and I don't like substances primarily because I want to do that works every time in every situation.

There are a lot of crisis situations, people-formance situations where there's no time to reach for a substance or a, you know, or a technology or whatever. But that said, that's the good news. The bad news is nothing I talk about if you talk about it in a bar on Friday night, it's going to get you laid. Like it won't get you, it's not sexy. It's not sexy.

Dude, I am. I got a nine-minute block of block of under a concentration and I'm pushing down the challenge skills balance. You want to come on with me? Have you considered doing like the flow dating collective? I do, right? No, but the best part is this is even funnier. So Art of Impossible comes out, right? The new book comes out. I think I'm on a podcast very early on very early like before the book's even out and I say and I don't even know how to cast them on I must be on a dating podcast that I don't even know how I got on but I say look I think the first

impossible that most people sort of go after in their life is remembering like 11 12 13 years old and like wanting your first kiss or your first girlfriend or boyfriend or relationship. And it was a total impossible. Like you have no, I 12 years old I would have given you my arm or at least a finger, right? For that information. It was such an impossible. I was like, this is I think the first, like people hear about the art of possible and

they're like, no way, man, I'm not injured. I don't, well, you do it all the time, right? And here's the first example in your life. And I gave that example. So why this is funny and why I'm telling you is that the first time art and buzz will hit a bunch of like top Amazon bestseller lists early on. The first one it hit was mating. And I like how it's like, how the hell did my book become number one? Yes, early on, the first one it hit was mating.

And I was like, how the hell did my book become number one? I was number one, it made it. I was like, well, what the hell is mating? Like, what does that even mean? I was relationships with a different category, mate seeking, that was it, it was mate seeking. I was like, relationships is on category. What could pop, what is mate seeking? And who it Amazon was smoking what when they, what is mate seeking? And who it Amazon was smoking what when

they come up with mate seeking? Like, I don't like, is it, were the anthropologist getting stoned? Like, what happened there? I'm not, I don't get it. So funny, man. Yeah, it's so bizarre when you see where you, where your work ends up. One thing that I've heard you talk about before, which I'm going to be remiss if I don't bring it up, is about the importance of keeping our words to ourselves. Thank you for bringing that up. I think it's such a simple concept. All right, so let's back up one step. I realize that we're going to have. Artroom possible is not, people performance primal.

There's a bunch of onboarding stuff that you have to do, but by all of a sudden done at the end of the book, if you're really interested in peak performance, and level up for your game, there's about six things you want to do every day, and about seven things to do every week. And the six things we've been talking about, some of them, mindfulness gratitude or exercise, 90-minute block-front or environment. These are things that anybody

can do. The point is that it's about doing them today, doing them tomorrow, doing them reliable, repeatable. That's what really matters because peak performance really does its best work, like compound interest, right? That's where you really get the big benefits. Put simply people performances at checklist. And what I always tell people is, when I put something on a checklist, like when I, at the end of every day, I make up a checklist for what I'm doing the next day. When I put it on a checklist, I'm making a promise

to myself that I'm doing this tomorrow. You can, we think a lot, we talk a lot about transparency, not lying, honesty, keeping our word to other people, and I'm not saying that's unimportant, but I'm saying that it's far less important in keeping your word to yourself. The most important thing is if you say it out loud, if you say you're good at doing it, it's a promise. You've said it to the world, you put it into the world. Now you do it, if it goes on the list, now you do it,

it's not debatable. And if it stops being debatable, so much, it just gets so much easier. I like to tell my friend, I was just funny, I was talking to my editor, I'm lucky enough that my editor is my best friend and we've worked together for 25 years and we work together all the time and he we were talking the other day and he said you said something to me once about this very topic, he said that really stuck with me. Okay, what did I say? Oops, he said, he said, it's funny, he said when you write the list, you're one person and when you're acting out the checklist, you're somebody else and you sit to me like,

I just work for the boss. The boss is the guy who wrote the list. You know, I'm just showing up today and I'm working for the boss. The boss is this is the list. That's the list. That's the boss. I'm work because you don't want to work for present tense self. Present tense self is like, fuck it man. Where's the bourbon? Right? Like, hookers and cocaine, man. You know, past tense self is like, no man, if you really want to get the most out of tomorrow, you're going to go to the gym in the morning, you're going to start your day with nine, right?

Like, you don't want to work for present tense self unless you have some kind of like, amazing level of like willpower kung fu. You think about it, like you work for Past himself, the person who made the Jack Lest, and you keep your word to yourself. And it is, it's a muscle. But if you get good at it, it's amazing. I'll tell you, I will say, here's the difficulty with it. And it's not a personal difficulty. It's up. I say this to everybody

I work with and every comes into my company, every day I work with it. I said, look, I am not Normal in one particular way, which is everything I say. If I say it out loud, I'm gonna do it It's a promise and I mean it, but if you say it out loud to me I think it's a promise and you're gonna to do it no matter what. So if you work with me, you have to understand that if you say it out loud and you don't do it, we're not going to work together anymore. Like that to me is you just broke a promise and I can't trust you and we're done unless, you know, we talk about it along the way and you tell me why you're breaking this promise. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. And I find it can be, it's so it's a difficult,

it's funny, it's the best peak performance muscle I can think of and it's great to develop. But if you do develop it, the real world sometimes gets pretty weird because most people don't play that way. Dude, I absolutely love, I'm just working for the boss. That is fantastic. Right, because what the other thing about it that's really good about it is you're taking yourself I'm just working for the boss. That is fantastic. Right.

Because the other thing about it, that's really good about it is, you're taking yourself and putting yourself in the third. It gives you a little bit of emotional remove, and there's space there, right? You can work with it a little bit, and it's, yeah, so that's, he's got me, I'm gonna now be talking about it.

I'm just working for the boss, because he liked it, you liked it. So, it's really tricky, I'm going to now be talking about it. I'm just working for the boss because he liked it. You liked it. So I love it when I love it when so many things come together like that. You're totally correct. You've got the the third party perspective in there, which is actually distancing you from stuff. What you've done is you've separated out the planning and the execution self, which is

allowing you to go from system two, a system one to system two, thinking in Daniel Kahneman's speak. And you've got, oh, I've got my more abstract goals. I can actually make my planning. And then when you get into it, it allows you to get into flow. I imagine long term planning in flow probably sucks quite a bit. So it's interesting. So it's interesting.

It's not true, but it's really complicated. Why? Long term, so a couple of things, one, why does time pass so strangely and flow that start there because this is going to make sense? Time is a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. Parts of it start to shut down for these efficiency exchanges. The brain needs more energy.

It says, okay, we're going to shut down non-critical structures, liberate some energy. That's why the prefrontal cortex turns off time, it's a network effect. Like any network, the nodes go down, brain can't separate paths from present from future. So we're crushed into this thing called the deep now. So what is probably in flow,

couple things are really amazing. So first of all, long term planning is great because you can see farther into the future. Normally, human time horizons are about six months. Literally, we evolved in an hour. We're like, when is coming, oh shit, I got to find a cave. That got to follow the harvest, that sort of stuff. There was work by Jane with Donnagle.

They said that most people have a 10-year time horizon and that's the hard and fast block. And in fact, when we, one of my organizations planned at home, we help big companies basically become very, very environmentally friendly at a really deep level, and we do it by retrocrastic. We say, okay, what is the world you wanna live in in 2035? And if that's the case, what has to happen in 20, 33, 31, right? And because

you, because of those time horizons. So in flow, we don't have those time horizons. You can see much farther in the future. In fact, then there's a bunch of other reasons. So that's really up. Here's the problem. In flow, you can, like a compositor will have a sip of the, you'll pop into his head, you'll see it and flow and it'll think, Oh, dude, it's going to take me like two weeks. I'll just get back. I'll write it. You know what I mean?

It's all fine or I'll have a book idea and I'll be like, oh, I'll write this thing in two months. I got this. And then you drop out of flow when time is no longer good, pressed. And you're like, holy crap, there's a 15 year project. Right? Like, what am I talking about? And that's really demotivating for a lot of people.

Like, it's funny, but it's really demotivating. So long-term planning in terms of you want to be cautious about like risk assessments and things like that. So like people go to a burning man, they get into flow, they decide, oh, the now is so much more more than than then, I'm going to cheat on my wife because I'm having this sacred experience. That's the kind of stuff where long term plan and goes away, right? Like those kinds of situations, yeah. But there's a certain kind of like entrepreneurial

or artistic long term planning where like every one of my books have appeared to me in one person or another in flow, and then I've steered towards that. It takes a very long time, right? So the flow is sort of, it's great for the intuition, the inspiration, but I always tell people, I'm like, you have to understand there's an order to the process. Inspiration, research, publication, communication, meaning have your inspiration, do your research, publish it in some way, meaning take it public and let other people, smart people, hang on your idea and tell you if you're right or you're wrong, and then stand up on a stage, you write a book and say start talking about it. You know what I mean? I'm like, you just came back from a flow experience

and you're now gonna tell me about God, the universe, and I mean, like what? Like, get the little library. Then we can have a- That's so funny. It's so funny that flow is kind of like a mental disorder within particular domains. It's almost like a misappropriation

of your mental faculties. It's fantastic for a lot of stuff, but there's places where it gets a little wonky. And it just doesn't go a little bit wonky. Of course, it's optimal performance. So you just expect when optimal performance goes wonky. It's going to go fast and hard. It's gonna go fast and harder and it's true. I mean, it's funny because in stealing fire,

we write about Jerusalem syndrome. So Jerusalem syndrome is what happens when people go to Jerusalem and they're so complexity, which is overwhelming when the brain encounters information, there's too much information to process by the conscious mind has to sort of kick it over, you have an awe experience. So that's often geological time, right? You stand in the Grand Canyon, you think you're looking, or look at the night sky and you're looking back in time, those experiences, well, people go to Jerusalem and they have historically

based awe experiences. And they often come down with Messiah complexes. They think they're Jesus or Moses or Abraham. It's called Jerusalem syndrome and it's a flow. It's a flow triggered altered state mental illness. Time is compressed. Ego is huge, right? All this history. It's literally like we write about it to know it's like a known psychological disorder, really routine. People show up at the hospitals in Jerusalem all the time. By the way, it's not just Jerusalem. So the grateful dead used to have a guy on staff who looked like Jerry, and he would walk around all the people who would go to dead

concerts and take acid and decide that they were Jerry or decide they had to talk to Jerry and Jerry only Jerry could understand them. So they got a guy who looked like Jerry would go around rock mad where they took all the people having bad trips and say, I'm Jerry, what do you, what do you do? I was in that damn camp one day. I never went to see the dead, but somebody, so I went to a concert, Dylan, and a bunch of people were playing, one of the guys I was with,

it didn't even know him, overdose, unassured, tried to take his clothes off, and he's running around the Oakland Coliseum, we're chasing him, the cops are chasing us. Rock bet is chasing the cops, right? All to get the naked guy who thinks he's Jerry. And so like, I'm not even on drugs, right? I'm just like, I don't who is this guy? What's wrong with it? I get taken to the tent in the basement. And I'm just sitting down there like, can I please go upstairs and watch

the damn show? I don't even like the dead that much. But like, I want to see Dylan. And this guy looks like Jerry comes up to me and puts his hand on me. It's like are you okay? I'm Jerry is there something you need to tell me I was like you're not fucking Jerry. Go away. Sorry get D very sorry get Jerry Solar Jerry. I was like where's my goddamn concert get me out of acid lockup. This is no good That's so funny, man. Yeah, the um, the Grateful Dead I watched, I listened to a podcast series, there's an awesome podcast series about the Grateful Dead and about all of the history and the different stuff

that they got themselves into who's so good. As a final thing, I was, go ahead. Please. I'll go ahead. Yours. As a final suggestion,

let's say that there's somebody who's listening who doesn't necessarily have that hobby or that passion that allows them to stretch their skills and do this. Is there an easy to complete drop-in-to-flow practice that people can do tomorrow? Well, everybody has a primary flow activity. This, whatever that's, that's whatever you did from the time you were like a little kid to now that is deeply absorbed. Some people it's reading or walking in nature or dancing. They have opera dancing salsa or skiing or, you know, for me it's skiing.

Everybody's got their own thing. And what's interesting is, as we become adults, these are the very things we stopped doing, right? Like, put away childish things. We're responsible now. I'm not going to surf anymore. I'm not going to skate anymore. I'm not going to play my guitar.

And from a performance perspective, that's a disaster. And there's three reasons why. One, blow is essentially a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. If I go skiing on Monday and drop into flow and then I go to work Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, you'll get more flow because you're training the brain out of focus. Two, as we move into flow, all the stress hormones get pushed out of our system. There's a global release of nitro

toxitis. It gets the stigma molecules everywhere in the body. It pushes stress hormones out of our system. There's a global release of nitro toxitis. It gets the stigma molecules everywhere in the body. It pushes stress hormones out of our system, resetting the nerve system toward zero. So we talked about all the problems with anxiety for performance. Flow automatically flushes that stuff out of your system. Also, massive heightening of creativity and productivity and flow, and there's research that shows, definitely on the creativity,

productivity is a maybe, but the creativity, I didn't create to be without last a flow state by a day, maybe two, and the same thing may be true for productivity. The creativity research was done by to resell model at Harvard, and productivity we'd been working on at the flow research collective. So, you get productivity and creativity that's going to last outlast your flow state.

You've got your resetting, your nervous system and your training in the brain in the flow. So we teach people to sort of try to double down. If you can four hours a week devoted to your primary flow activity, spread out sort of however you want seems, three to four hours seems to sort of be enough to start moving the needle. And the interesting thing is anything that moves the needle a little bit that starts to be really absorbed it, once you know what flows triggers are, you just start layering those triggers in and you can deepen and lengthen the flow state. So, our impossible breaks down the flow triggers are, you know, stevencottler.com or flowresearchcollective.com. There's a whole bunch of free stuff, you know,

they don't even have to buy the book. There's a bunch of free stuff that will kind of break those things down for you and how to use them. And primary flow activity and then start practicing sort of with the flow triggers inside of the thing that is already, and then start transferring it to other parts of your life. That's where I start. And if you don't have four hours a week for primary flow activity, you're 90 minutes a day

for uninterrupted concentration, start by starting 10 minutes and five minutes, right? Like, it doesn't, it is not, just because you don't have that amount of time now, the goodness about flow, massive heightened or productivity, you get way more done. So you're going to end up getting time back, right? We always say in peak performance, there are places,

in peak performance, you have to go slow to go fast. This is one of those places. Dude, awesome. Today's been so, so good. The art of impossible, a peak performance primer will be linked in the showroom to below on Amazon, along with everything that you've gone through today and whatever else I can find.

If people want, is it the passion recipe? I think that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's where that, yeah, by the way, if you are interested in more passion, go to the passionrecipe.com. It's a curiosity, it's designed, we built into passion, passion, design, we built into purpose. None of them are supposed to be super mystical. It's actually a fairly easy thing to do.

So if you don't know what your passionate about, you do know what you might be curious about. I'm curious. I mean, you'd like to go read a book or two and attend a lecture or watch a movie or a documentary. I mean, I don't mean you're burning curiosity. I mean, you're just like, I'd like to learn about this thing. If you can find a single thing that is at the intersection of three or four or five year curiosities and you start to work there and learn there. That's the seed kernel of passion. And if you want to learn how to do this more formally, passionrecipe.com, like flowblocker.com. That's, we built, that was another one

where like I just got sick of talking about it. So I was like, oh, let's just build it. So I can send people there because I'm sick of talking about it. I love it. Stephen, dude, thank you so much for today. Chris, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.