The One You Feed - Steven Kotler on The Art of Impossible

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. The author of 13 books, 9 of which best sellers, Steven is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications.In this episode, Eric and Steven discuss his book, The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer. They break down the idea of “impossible” into its component parts that, when cultivated, come together to propel us towards states of flow and otherwise unattainable performance in any area of life. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Steven Kotler and I discuss The Art of Impossible and…His book, The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance PrimerThe fact that you “go where you look”, i.e. where you put your attention is where you end upHis experience having Lymes Disease and his mystical experience when surfing one dayThe two types of impossibleThe neurobiology involved in the state of peak performance called “flow”How we can increase our motivation, learning, and creativityThe fact that more “meaningful” does not always mean more “pleasant”The importance of getting very good at being uncomfortable when working towards our “impossible” goalsExercises people can do to find their curiosityThat passion lies at the intersection of multiple curiositiesAn unexpected way to cultivate gritThe five steps to learn anythingLearning means being uncertainThe process of “crawl, walk, run”Steven Kotler Links:Steven’s WebsitePassion Recipe MasterclassInstagramTwitterFacebookGreen Chef: The first USDA Certified Organic Meal Kit Company that makes eating well easy and affordable. Go to www.greenchef.com/90wolf and use code 90WOLF to get $90 off including free shippingTalkspace is an online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.Literati Kids is a try-before-you-buy subscription club. Each month they deliver 5 vibrantly illustrated children’s books bringing the immersive magic of reading right to your home. You choose which ones you want to buy and then send the rest back for free. Head to www.literati.com/wolf for 25% off your first two orders.If you enjoyed this conversation with Steven Kotler on The Art of Impossible, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Transformative Mindfulness with Shauna ShapiroGreg KrechJeffrey RubinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before we get started, I wanted to give a big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Adele C, Jeremy C, Elaine C, Helen, Jane H, Ashley M, Paya P, Lian L, E. Corr, Marie D, and Jeremy H. Thanks so much to all of you, and thanks so much to all of our Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Many of you might have heard me tell this story before. Last year when I went to New Mexico to interview Father Richard Rohr, in his office there was a quote posted that struck me and has stayed with me ever since. Life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful. But the good news

is there is so much that is in our control, and some of those things are among the biggest influencers of our sense of well-being. In the One You Feed personal transformation program, I work one-on-one with people to build healthy habits and achieve their goals through applied behavior science. For example, when my client Janine started working with me, her focus was on regaining some balance in her life. Personally, I'm looking for overall balance in my life, which I have been for a really long time. If I was trying to implement a new habit or break an old habit, you just try to do too much at once. And I think taking on too much at once is difficult to make

it stick. Janine's certainly not alone. One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to change things in their lives is to try and do too much at once. There's a real formula for meaningful sustained change. And that's what I worked with Janine to implement in her life. My overall experience with Eric has been phenomenal. Eric has a way of helping a person come to their own solutions, you know, helping you dig deep. I would highly recommend Eric's program and I would highly recommend anything he comes out with in the future. If you're tired of waiting for the right circumstances to make progress towards your goals, I as a behavior coach can help you.

To book a free, no pressure, 30 minute call with me to see if the program is right for you, go to ericzimmer.coach slash application. My coaching spots fill up fast. So if you're interested, don't wait to look into the program to see if it's right for you. Go to ericzimmer.coach slash application. The internal experience of learning for everyone, everyone in the world is, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh, look, I don't suck anymore. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

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Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Eric. Your book is called The Art of Impossible, a peak performance primer. And as I was telling you before the show, I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book as any I have read. So we've got a lot of different ways we could take this conversation. But before we get into it, we'll start like we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson in life. And he says, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,

which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I don't know what it means to me in my life or my work, but I can tell you what it reminds me of, which is one of the really sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and human performance is the system, meaning our biology, is designed in a very weird way at every level to go where you look. Where you put your attention is where you

end up. And this is very, very clear in action sports where I've done a lot of research where if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything that has to take place in that tube takes place basically too fast for you to react. All you can really do is put your eyes on the end of the tube and you go there. When you want to ski a really hard straight line, you get to the point where you put your eyes on the exit and you go there. We're goal-directed machines internally. And what that essentially means is we don't live in reality. We live in a world that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals. And in a sense, on an internal level with those goals, the way consciousness and biology is designed to work, once again, you go where you look.

You go where you put your attention. So, I guess, in a sense, it depends on which one you feed is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle, which is essentially we go where we look. We go where we put our attention. So, I'm going to start us in an unusual place. It's near the end of your book. And you describe having Lyme disease, and you describe going out and starting to surf, and you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. still continued for you. And then I want to ground some of that back into what the science tells us, because you've done a great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them back to some of why we think they might be occurring. So as you pointed out, when I was about 30,

I was very sick. I got Lyme disease and I spent the better portion of three years in bed. And towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at a time that I could barely walk across a room. And I could focus and think clear-headed and pain-free and whatever, maybe 10, 20, 30 minutes a day. And everything else was just fuzzy and painful. And I was out there, maybe 30 seconds and a wave came. And I literally probably took all the energy I had left in the world and seconds and a wave came and I literally probably took all the energy I had left in the world. And I spun my board around and I popped to my feet

and I popped into a dimension of time I didn't even know existed. Time seemed to slow down. I had a slight out of body experience where I felt like I was hovering above my body and sort of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision, the most amazing part was that I was clear headed and I felt great. I mean, I hadn't felt even close vaguely normal for three years. So it was astounding. And I felt so good that day. And that experience was so wild that I ended up catching four more waves. And then when that was over, I was done and I was exhausted. And my friends took me home, put me in the bed and I didn't move again for about 14 days. The 15th day, walking in, I caught a ride with my neighbor and I went back

to the beach and I did it again. And the amazing thing is over the course of about six to eight months, I wasn't, went from about 10% functional, meaning like I was functional about 10% of the time to about 80% functional. And the only thing that I was doing different in my life was going surfing and having these quasi-mystical experiences in the waves. So I was obviously very, very curious about what the hell was going on because surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. And I'm a rational materialist. I'm a science guy. I don't have mystical experiences.

And Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I was pretty sure that even though I was feeling better, the reason I was having these quasi-mystical experiences is because the disease had gotten in my brain. And so I lit out a giant quest to figure out what the heck was going on. And I very quickly discovered that these quasi-mystical experiences have names. We call them flow states. And once you start to understand the neurobiology of flow, what's going on in the brain, a lot of these so-called mystical experiences that show up with this state are obviously very explainable via biology. But the second half of this question was, am I still having these experiences today? Am I still getting

them to flow today? Yes, I'm still getting them to flow today. And so would you have described them as mystical then because you didn't know what else to call them and you weren't as experienced with being in flow? Well, time slows down. I had an out-of-body experience. These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences, right? Time dilation. Now, what I didn't know at the time is time dilationation which is the time passing strangely speed up or it can slow down that's actually a foundational property of flow it's one of the six psychological characteristics that are used to describe the state so some form of time dilation usually time speeds up right you sit down and write a quick email you get so sucked

into what you're doing that an hour goes by you look up and you're like where did time did time go? That's what happens most of the time in flow. Occasionally though, you get that freeze frame effect that happened to me in the waves or it's familiar to anybody who's been in a car crash. So let's swing now all the way back around to kind of the beginning of the book. The book is called The Art of Impossible. And you described two levels of impossible. There's impossible as in like somebody being able to run the four minute mile, which was once thought of as impossible. So that's one type, but you describe another type of impossible that might apply to more of the people listening than trying to break a record that's never been broken as an example. Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let me explain what I mean by that.

I have spent my career studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible. I've done this in sports. I've done this in science and technology and business, culture. And that's what I call capital I impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what you just mentioned is lowercase i impossible, or small i impossible, which is essentially who I wrote the book for, right? Lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital I impossible. It's for anybody who's going after lowercase i impossible. Lowercase i impossibles, those things we think are impossible for ourselves. I'll give you a simple example from the book. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1970s. It was a blue collar steel mill town. And I wanted to be a writer. I mean, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was five or six years old. I didn't know any writers. I

know how you became a writer. There was no one around to ask. There was no internet. There were no books to read. It was a lowercase I impossible, meaning there is no clear path from where I am to where I want to get to. And statistically, not great odds of success. What are other lowercase I impossibles that we all kind of are more familiar with? Getting paid for what you love to do. Overcoming trauma. Overcoming an addiction. Becoming world class at anything you do.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist i'm missing one obvious one that that's eluding me that i like to grab for but i think it paints a good picture but i want to point out a couple of things just to frame this up so people understand something when we talk about peak human performance we're talking about nothing more or less i guess than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That's all that peak human performance is. And what this means is if your goal is capital I impossible, that which has never been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw. That's how you're going to do it. If your goal is small I impossible, well, the biology is the same. The tools are the

same. In fact, if your goal is, man, small lion, possible cattle, fuck that. I'm just trying to get through Monday, right? It doesn't matter. The biology is the same. The set of tools are the same because evolution shaped human beings. And the work that I do involves figuring out how to optimize that biology and its scales, meaning it's the same in everyone. Or at the Flow Research Collective, we train on average about a thousand people a month. And we train everybody from kind of members of the U.S. Special Forces and professional athletes and C-suite executives, CEOs of major companies, all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and insurance brokers from

Indiana and, you know, software coders from Bangalore, right? Because the work that I do is built on biology, the principles apply to everybody and anybody can use them. In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't. And so the principles that we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about, and as I mentioned from the number of notes I took, we're going to skim the very slightest surface of, but the principles that we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the level of biology, regardless of what our psychology might be. Yes. Personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not 6'10", you know, you're impossible as to be a center in the NBA and you're 4'9".

Okay. This is not what we're talking about, right? Like you need a different book. Yeah, you need a different book. I can't help you with the genetics part at all. Like that's a different thing. But barring that, yes, biology scales. My work is centered on the state of peak performance known as flow. We talked about flow as what I was experiencing out in the waves. It is, as I alluded to, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness. We feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing that everything else just disappears, right? Time dilates, as we talked about. Your sense of self disappears. Action awareness will start to merge, and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

We could talk about what through the roof actually means. Huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspective, a little bit of strength, stamina, fast switch a couple other things. We'll talk about why later. But the point I want to make is those are basically all the things you'd want to accelerate for cognitive. It's the whole suite. It's all our tools. They're all amplified in flow. And here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for flow. It's a foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being to perform at their best

in float. Flow is how we do, how we're hardwired for peak performance. There are other things going on during peak performance and other things that lead to it, but flow is at the center of it. And one of the most well-established facts in flow science is that the state is universal. It shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. So everybody watching this, listening to this, can get into flow. And you can get this same boost in performance. So for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about when you say biology scales. Excellent. And you've biology scales. Excellent.

And you've written about flow elsewhere. It's been part of your writing for a while now. And so you say that this book expands upon that, right? It certainly talks about we need flow, but we also have to train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning, and creativity. So a lot of the book is really talking about how we increase our motivation, how we increase our learning, and how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow ties together with those three things.

So as I said, peak performance is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What is that biology? What are the sets of skills being amplified? Motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance. The way to think about this is in any situation, any challenge, motivation is what gets you into the game. Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if you're going after high, hard goals that are complicated. You don't quite know how to get there. Creativity is how you steer, right? Creative problem solving is how you steer. And flow is how you sort of turbo boost all those things sort of beyond reasonable expectations. But you asked a sort of different question, which is sort of where I got

stuck thinking about like which way to frame this. How they relate is interesting. So as you pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've been training people in flow for years and years and years. I think I've probably spoken to or trained a quarter million people is the guess my staff has come up with. I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere around there, it's a lot of people. And what we've learned about flow over the past 10 to 15 years is more about the neurobiology of flow. What's going on in the brain and the body when we're in this state. And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism. So if you want to make something

reliable and repeatable, you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've gotten very good at training flow. And when I say very good, I said that at the Flow Research Collective, we train about a thousand people a month. We measure flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and post. And we see about a 70% boost in flow consistently back end of our trainings. But, but, and but, and this is how everything's related. What we used to see is you get this big burst in flow because it turns out this is easy to train. And then there'd be this spectacular return to baseline. Like they'd get a ton of flow and then it would just like,

somebody turned off the flow tap. And flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful, life-affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give people a whole lot more of that, and then you take it away or it stops showing up. You have very pissed off people. And we had very pissed off people. And so we spent a really long time trying to figure out, well, what the hell's going wrong? And what we realized is the problem wasn't flow. It was that all the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning, and creativity, if you hadn't trained those things up alongside flow, you couldn't keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided. And worse, when psychologists and researchers talk about motivation, the term is technically defined as the energy for action, but what they really mean is a whole bunch of stuff. Motivation is a catch-all

term for external motivation or extrinsic motivation. So like money, sex, fame, things in the world that we want, intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion or purpose. We're also talking about goal setting and grit. And if you haven't done really good grit work, right? Flow is this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever. And if you haven't done the good solid grit work, there are going to be days where there's no flow, right? And it's just hard work, hard slogging. And if you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills, those days are going to be very, very difficult. They get a little easier because of flow.

And we know that flow massively amplifies grit. But some people have this problem when they do this flow work where they start to feel that it's a bliss junkie problem. Flow is so addictively pleasurable, right? They're like, oh, dude, everything's got to feel this good. This is how life's supposed to feel. Well, no. No, it's not. And there's times when you can't get into flow.

And if you haven't done the really hardcore grit work, you can't sustain the flow. It's not simple, but important, I think. Yep, absolutely. That really covered it. And I think you make that point a bunch of times. And I think it's an important one that on our way to impossible, flow is an absolute booster. Necessary, but not sufficient. Yep. And that it feels really good. But along the way to impossible, there's going to be a

lot of feeling not very good also. And if all we're thinking about is, oh, well, like you said, I should be feeling flow. I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful. We won't have what it takes to keep going all the way to impossible because there are times it's not easy. The way I put it in the book, I think more meaningful does not always mean more pleasant. And that is very, very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness available on the planet. The first level is happiness. How do you feel right here, right now? There's not a whole lot you can do about that level, right?

You can make yourself, as Dan Harris said, 10% happier. Gratitude practices, mindfulness practices, regular exercise. There's stuff you can do. But because of how emotional set points work, those points are set up usually by 10, 11 years old. And this is the worst we're going to feel and this is the best we're going to feel. And our life's going to take place pretty much in the middle. And barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child on the low end, that's the low end. It doesn't move.

It's pretty set. High end can move with constant exposure to flow, but in general, it doesn't. In other words, you can get 10% happy. That's about it. And flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills to the utmost. So usually when we're doing that, we're uncomfortable. And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to be uncomfortable sort of all the time, right? Because you're always sort of trying to push on your skills and be a little better and be a little better. You get very good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, but moment to moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The next two levels of happiness available to you being the second level is a high flow lifestyle, right? It's a lifestyle in which

you get regular access to flow. This could be, it doesn't matter what you do, but maybe what you do doesn't produce a lot of flow. I live in Tahoe and all around me, there's tons of people who work whatever job they can get in the summer so they can ski all winter. That's a high flow lifestyle, right? The best we get to feel on the planet is a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is giving us the most flow is coupled to our purpose. And, you know, as a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary i'm i'm kind of uh in a very very very poor rural county for a very very long time with a lot of animal cruelty that's a very high flow lifestyle with a lot of purpose it was also pretty miserable grueling difficult work it produced a lot of flow along the way and a lot of meaning. My point is that that kind of work

produces deep meaning, deep contentment, deep purpose, deep peace even. But happiness is a thin drug, ultimately. That's, I think, what you start to discover over here. It's not that you don't want to be happy. It's that it's a thin drug and there are much better drugs out there. Right, right. And often aiming right at happiness as that being the goal is particularly counterproductive. Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah, it's a good way to miss it. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out

if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what I'm going to do from here is we're just going to skip through a few different parts of the book and hit some different things that bring together some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity. So I want to talk about motivation for a minute because you talk about there being a stack that's really important in the drive part of motivation, which we would think of

is the way most people typically think of motivation as, I feel like doing something, right? I have the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned that there are really five things that make up this drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and then autonomy and mastery. After those, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that you laid out for people to find some of their curiosity, I really loved. I really liked some of the exercises that were there. And so I was wondering if you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is. I hear this from a lot of people. I don't quite know what it is. How do you cultivate a passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity? I guess would be

the better way to say it. So as you pointed out, there are a bunch of intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you mentioned, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery, but those tend in the science to be the biggest five, right? You could list intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the biggest five. And what the research shows is that if you want more motivation in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators. You've got to start like with, you need enough money in a sense to take care of basic safety and security needs. You have to deal with safety and security first. Now it's a little bit, what the research shows is. You have to deal with safety and security first. Now, it's a little bit. What the research shows is you basically have to be able to pay all your bills and have a little

leftover for discretionary spending, a little. It's not a whole lot. Once that's in place, if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action, turns out it's not that we stop wanting things like money, sex, and fame. We still want them. But as a driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as internal motivators or intrinsic drivers. And there's five of them, as you pointed out, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. These are the big five. And what you notice among peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you like anybody, an athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning they're always going to hydrate super well. They're going to make sure they have enough protein and carbs and fats and blah, blah,

blah, right. And the right nutrition and the right supplements and the right everything. You also want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard to do anything in this world. It's hard to go after anything, high, hard goals. You need as many of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In other words, you want all your intrinsic motivators, your big five, aligned and point in the same direction. And they're actually built that way. They're built to come online in a certain order and to point us in a direction. And as you pointed out, the most foundational human motivator is curiosity. So by the way, what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators? Like, why do we even

care? Why are we having this conversation? Intrinsic motivators give us focus for free. That's the really big deal. Your brain takes about 25% of your energy at rest and it's 2% of your body weight. It's a giant energy hog, right? And focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense. You're curious about it. you're paying attention without working too hard or at all. That's great. Now, curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to be built into passion. When people say passion, what that looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities. The way to think about this is like maybe you're interested in football and you're interested in nutrition. Now, each of those on their own, they may not have enough energy, kind of be a lifelong passion, something you're going to spend

your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to all the time. But if you can figure out where three or four of your curiosities intersect and get a couple of easy wins there and get some other things going on that I talk about in the art of impossible, that's sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants to know how to do this, yes, you can read the art of impossible, but I can make it easier on you. You can go to www.thepassionrecipe.com, which is, we basically took these chapters because this was so important to so many people. We turned it into an interactive workbook. It's free. We just put it online for people, thepassionrecipe.com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn curiosity into passion

and turn passion into purpose. So if you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to start with 25 things you're interested in. And all I mean by interested is, say you had a free weekend. You would maybe want to spend it, watch it in a couple movies about the subject or reading a book or having a conversation or two with an expert, right? That's what I mean, interested. Make a list of 25 things you're interested in. The key here is try to be as specific as possible, right? Don't be interested

in football. Be interested in the pass blocking mechanics required to play left tackle as precise as you possibly can be, right? I loved your punk rock analogy you gotta you gotta give the uh if you remember oh yeah don't be interested in punk rock right don't be interested in punk rock be interested i think was the evolution of political punk from crass to rise against um and an old girlfriend who lived in the original crass commune and uh i don't know i'm just a huge rise against fan i guess but uh which is true. Do you love Against Me? I do love Against Me. They got a little more melodic.

I really like Early Against Me. And it's a little too poppy for me. Like it's not quite as punk as they were. And I like the older punk better. But I really do like Against Me a lot. They've got a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever. Miami, Baby, I'm an Anarchist. Yeah, their live record that they put out.

Oh, I love it. I don't know if you've... Yeah, I love it. It's so good. The live version of... The lyric is Condoleezza. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell, From Her Lips to God's Ears.

I think that's the name of the song, From Her Lips to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good. And Potatoes, Rice, and Beans Live is really good on that album as well. They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves now. Oh, I need to punk you something. Now you got my attention. Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it. So we're making a list of 25 things. Yeah. 25 things you're interested in. And then you just want to look for places they intersect. So, you know, I said, let's say nutrition is also on your list.

Again, too vague, right? You're interested in the past blocking mechanics to play left tackle and nutrition is too vague, but maybe you're the example I give in the book is insects as a food source, right? So where could they possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of calories to play left tackle, right? Would insects make a good football food? That's an intersection. And all I say is when you find those intersections, play there for a while.

Just play there. Go there. Hang out. Spend 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day. Do this over months and months and months. Test out those intersections. See which ones are really sticky and grabby for you, where there's a lot of energy. But if you can figure out where three or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there and learning stuff and getting some easy

wins along the way, that's how we build passion. A couple of things that are worth pointing out though, because people have this problem when they start cultivating passion is they think about passion. I say, you know, give me an example of athletic passion. You get like LeBron James coming in for the dunk, you know, with the scowl on his face and the finals, right? And yes, you are right. That is passion, but that is late-stage passion. That is not what early-stage passion looks like or feels like. Early-stage passion is just a little kid standing in a driveway trying to get a basketball to drop, and it feels like that on the inside. It feels more like curiosity and little successes than this burning, consuming thing that you think if you

expect to this like giant burning fire all at once, it's not going to be there. And the other thing is you don't want it there right away. What you want to do is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure you've got it right because you don't want to be a couple years into this is my passion to discover, oh shit, it was only a phase, right? I don't actually want to spend the next two years on an archeological dig in the deserts of Egypt because no, it turns out it was a phase, right? Like when you come to that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating. So on the front end, that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating. So on the front end, you want to go slowly here. This is not one of those things in peak performance. Everybody can do this. Everybody can align their curiosities, build them into passion, build passion and a purpose. We're

all biologically hardwired for it. We all can do it, but you want to do it slowly. And you don't want to be in a rush in this case, right? A lot of people are really impatient to be there already and get it. And here you really don't. The system, the biology is designed for this to be cultivated over time. And you don't want to make an error on this one. This is one of those places where you got to go slow to go fast. Yeah, I love you say in the book, you know, we often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed, stay obsessed.

And you say, you know, let's start with get curious, stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump right out of that section, even though we could go from there into how to turn that passion into a purpose and, you know, autonomy and mastery in that area. But I want to move into a little bit about grit. into a little bit about grit. And I want to talk about the idea of learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit. Oh, yeah, that's really key. So place to start, I guess, is that when psychologists define grit, they often define it using Angela Duckworth's definition as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love Angela's work. She's an exceptionally bright woman. She's done exceptionally great research. But when you talk to peak performers about grit, they actually say, hey, wait a minute, they train six different kinds of grit skills

and all sort of require different techniques. And in the end, they sort of all will boil down to the same thing, but you have to train them independently for a while. The first is the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right? Kick me in the teeth, punch me in the gut, doesn't matter, I'm still coming. And that's the first level of grit is often. And by the way, if you want to train that level of grit, that level of perseverance, you want to start physically. The research says even if you want to train that level of grit, that level of perseverance, you want to start physically. The research says even if you want to train it cognitively, which is this question that you asked about, and we're going to get there, the place to start is physically.

And by perseverance, if you work out, go to the gym, and you normally do three sets of 10 when you bench press, next time do two sets of 10 and one set of 11. Very, very slowly. You just want to push outside your comfort zone a little bit at a time over and over and over again. And here's the key, especially on perseverance side, because this is tricky and people miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice. put in the hard work to get grittier, you have to notice. So you have to, in other words, you've got to, yes, you've got to show up and do that X 11th rep, you know, every time you work out just for the next month. But you also got to remember at the end of the month to look back

and go, wow, the entire time, every time I had to do that 11th rep, I got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along the way, which is really important because you have to trust that grit for it to really make a difference in your life. You need to be able to know that you go into this situation and you're actually grittier, right? Like you can handle a little bit more, which is why we want to do this for a long period of time and we want to pay attention to it. Once you've sort of become a little physically grittier, the next thing to pay attention to, if you're interested in peak performance, if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is the grit to control

your thoughts, right? You got to pay attention to what's going on up here because, you know, if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot of the time, right? And so if I'm not kind of paying attention to what's going on in my head, it can often swallow me. There's a number of different ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with this particular problem. Gratitude lists or mindfulness, breath work, meditation. These are two really, really great methods. There's a lot of other stuff you can do. If you're more kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to just straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But there's a lot of different ways to get some space between thought and emotion. There's a gap between thought and emotion. What

you want to try to do is like stretch it out so that when the thought pops up, before you get super angry and totally lose your temper at your wife or spouse or husband or whomever, you have a second to get in there and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, right? Really? You sure this is the reaction you want? You bring up a couple different things here. One is this idea of using the phrase controlling our thoughts, which you then later sort of say, well, that's a little bit of a misnomer, right? Any of us who have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of launch of a thought into our brain is not really a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up. It's really what we do after that. And I love that you talk about the self-talk. You say self-talk is really important here. There's a quote in here from

Michael Gervais that I absolutely love. And listeners will have heard me talk about this a lot. And he says that there's only two kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us, or those that expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea. You know, even in when decision making, is this decision going to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to expand me or contract me that that core idea is so powerful? I think so too. Well, what I like about it is, for me, when Mike first said it to me, I thought about, well, I know what thoughts that create more space feel like internally. Right. And so that way I was like, oh, this is totally applicable because I know what this feels like. So I can steer from this right off the bat.

Mike's very, very good at that. Um, at coming up with performance tools where you're like, oh, I like, not only do I know what you mean, I know what it feels like. That's why I love it too. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you something funny about this. This is not exactly in the art of impossible. We were having this conversation on this, this phrase. So I was skiing week and a half ago, one of the biggest lines I've ever skied, uh, of my life. And, uh, there's a hundred foot straight line at the end of it, which means you don't get to turn for a hundred feet. You just like you pin between two rock walls and you just have to hold, keep it together until you get to the exit or you'll die. And it's terrifying. And I got into the straight line and my right ski hit a bunch of ice, uh, icicles actually that

were falling off the trees and into the run. And it was like, my right ski was a bunch of ice uh icicles actually that were falling off the trees and into the run and it was like my right ski was bouncing on marbles and the guy was skiing i said later it looked like i started to tip forward like i was going to somersault which would put me in the hospital easy possibly worse and my internal experience the way i described it to him at the afterwards this is like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately refer to as fuck this. I'm not dying now. Right. But I, like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like enraged. And I get what he, what he said is, is just look like I sat back up and shot out of there. And I remember nothing other than just being like, wow, this is that feeling that precedes the I'm falling now, which precedes the I'm going to the hospital now.

And I was like, I'm not like, no. And I got super angry. And what was interesting, and this is why I'm bringing this up, is we were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote, because you would not expect like anger to be a thought that creates space. But in this particular case, this particular context, it was the only tool, right? If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment, I had to fight against gravity, right? Like icicles trip me forward, which is really interesting. And we were talking about how sometimes thoughts that create space are not going to be the obvious ones. Sometimes that was what the conversation was. And I thought it was,

I thought it was an interesting, subtle point and one I hadn't thought about before. Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of our time, but let's hopscotch ahead in the book here. And I want to talk about another part that I absolutely loved, which was the five steps to learn anything. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You left out the most important part of that title. The five steps to learn anything before you have a public opinion on it. Five not so easy steps to learn anything. Yes. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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And you sort of talk about, the other part of it that I loved is you're like, before I'm going to have a public opinion about something, I'm going to have gone through those. And I remember thinking, boy, that would be refreshing for the world for more people to think, well, before I'm going to have an opinion on that, I'm going to go through these five steps. It was really practical and it really sort of dovetailed in some ways with my experience of learning things. And there were some subtleties that I had not thought of before that I think will help me in the future. So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly. There's a lot of detail in there, but here's the big idea. What's worth knowing is

learning works a certain way in the brain. We're designed to learn in a certain way. And if you can sort of do that and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster. So in the five not so easy steps, it's basically a lesson in how to read and how to learn from, this is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisition. So this is about how do you learn a subject? It's going to involve reading. And one of what I want to talk about now is what do you pay attention to while you read? Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you think it is. And it's much more interesting when you actually know how the brain is designed to work. It makes it so much easier. So the things that I talk about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're trying to learn, because it's not what

you did in high school or what you did in school, right? It's almost the exact opposite. One, Almost the exact opposite. One, your brain loves narrative. Your brain is cause and effect all the time, right? This caused this. Why? Because we want to know how to create our future, right? We want to know if this causes this, I know how to get that.

I know how to intervene. I know how it works. That's what a narrative is. That's what a story is. This happened first. This happened second. This happened third, right? So when you're reading, one of the first things we want to pay attention to a little bit is history, the history of a subject. First of all,

stop being intimidated by subjects. Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's just a voyage of discovery. Somebody had a question. They answered that question. It led to another question. Somebody had another question and they answered that one, right? That's the voyage of discovery that is any subject. And it's a narrative. And so just pay a little bit of attention to the order. The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give your brain the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts show up, ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them because your brain is going to be like, oh, this happened. I put this fact right there. It slots in. This is something your brain naturally does. So you're just taking advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The second thing you want to pay attention to is terminology, jargon. And what I mean by that is,

and I will be the first person to do it. I have a flat rule in my company and by my life. If somebody needs a lot of big words to explain it, they're probably lying. Something I learned as a journalist, right? For years and years and years, I bet the smartest people on the planet and most of them can explain their thing to you as if you were five years old. It's always the folks who don't quite know what they're talking about that make it really fancy, in my opinion. That said, jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly precise. And technical language often contains most of a subject. So when people talk about, I need to learn a new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying is you need to learn vocabulary.

So the way I do it is when I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy language showing up that I don't understand, first time I see the word, I ignore it. Second time I see the word, I ignore it. If I see a technical word that's three or four times in the book, I look it up. And then every time I see it from that point on, I just say the definition out loud, right? Instead of reading the word, I read say the definition out loud, right? Instead of reading the word, I read the definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge, massive amounts about the subject. And then you have the

overarching history. But here's the most important thing. And this is the secret to learning. When you've written a book, pay attention to what I call your emotional wows, those curiosity moments where you go, what the hell? That's so cool. And ideas start firing. The reason is this. Curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of dopamine and a little bit of norepinephrine. Those are the two neurochemicals that appear in the brain that help produce the sensation of curiosity, but they do something else. They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So write down, this is what the only thing I really take notes on when I read are my emotional wows. Oh, on page 77, here's this really cool idea about pattern

recognition and the brain. And it reminds me of blah, blah, blah. I follow my curiosity. That way I remember it. I follow my brain through a subject. As long as you follow your curiosities through a subject. Now, by the way, this is not how you master a subject to pass a test in college. This is not going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical, real-world, applicable knowledge that you can do shit with. Passing a test, you have requirements for that test. This will help, but if you're reading Ethan Frome in college and they're going to ask you, you may want to write down more than just the emotional wows. Okay, so caveat there. But this will really, really help because by following

our curiosity, we're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it. The other thing that I always point out to people, because people make this mistake, I don't know if it's that we were taught this in school or we just assume this because it seems like common sense, don't always need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertain. The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world is, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh, look, I don't suck anymore. Right? That's the experience of it.

In fact, my buddy, Andrew Uberman, who's a Stanford neuroscientist we do a lot of work with, he says, you know, he does a lot of work with the Navy SEALs. And he says, you know, one of the things that peak performers, especially spec ops guys, know that everybody else doesn't, is that peak performance, it's always crawl, walk, run. And the biggest difference between peak performers and everybody else is that peak performers know this and everybody else show up and they're like, dude, man, I don't crawl. I don't even walk. I'm going to figure out what the shortcut is. I'm going to start by a jog, right? And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what? Okay. I got to crawl. Then I'm going to walk and then maybe I'll run and it's going to suck. I suck. I suck. I suck.

I suck. And there's nothing to do but to do it. And it's funny because you see these top performers and we often think, oh my God, they're so far ahead of the rest of us. How did they get there? One of the main ways they got there is every time they're faced with a challenge, they know it's going to suck and they just don't care. They just lean right in. The rest of us, when faced with a challenge, we dither around for a while. We're eventually going to rise to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to get it done sooner or later. You've got to. But most of us are like, oh, really?

I've got to let me call my brother and tell him about all the shit I got to, you know. We do all that. But peak performers are just like, nope, crawl, walk, run. I'm just going to lean in immediately. I loved that whole section. And I think what you just said there is a great place for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really that idea of crawl, walk, run. I talk about it all the time on the show. We just talk about this idea of, you know, sometime we've got to be willing to take baby steps. We've got to start where we are and move through the progression.

I got to tell you something. I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One of the things I tell people, this isn't a hundred percent true, but as a general rule, because of emotional set points, if you've sort of survived being a teenager, you've already felt just about the worst that life can offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends. You know what I mean? But emotional set points are sort of set up by around, you know, 10 or 11 or 12 by like bad experiences, good experiences, and most of life takes place in between. And then you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you have no control

of your emotions. So honestly, again, as I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child or chronic unemployment, which can change this, as a general rule, if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst that you're going to suffer on any peak performance path taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize, but it seems to be biologically true. Awesome. Well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the book absolutely fascinating. And as I said, I took so many notes, my curiosity points of things that jumped off the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews. What excites me? There were a ton of them. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks so much for taking the time to come

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