The School of Greatness - 53 Becoming Superhuman: Unlocking the Science of Ultimate Human Performance with Steven Kotler

Episode Date: February 25, 2014

As an athlete, being "in the zone" is a state that I absolutely love. It's something that doesn't happen as often as I like, but when I get there, it's the best feeling on earth. I've always been passionate about getting to that place and this week on the School of Greatness I've got an amazing guest with an intimate knowledge of what it means to be "in the zone."

This is episode number 53 on the science of ultimate human performance with Steven Kotler. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, greats? Thanks so much for tuning in today to this very special episode all about flow.

And there's a great quote by Bruce Lee that explains flow when he talks about becoming like water. I said, empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Like that, you see? I see.

I get the idea. Now, being like water, to me, what it really means is to be in flow. And in this episode, it's all about achieving flow states in every aspect of your life, from business to sports, to relationships, to hobbies, and everything in between. And I'm very excited to be bringing on Steven Kotler, who is the author of The Rise of Superman, Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. And as an athlete growing up and transitioning into professional sports and now with the USA National Handball Team, I've been obsessed with this topic of trying to figure out

how to stay in flow and peak state of mind and peak body performance all the time. Every practice, every game, it's all about how to get into that flow in the zone. Some people call it, other people call it runner's high or in the pocket. You know, it's every athlete's dream is tapping into this flow state. So I'm very excited to introduce you to Steven. And what we're going to be covering is really decoding the science of ultimate human performance and strategies for getting into the zone and being in flow on a more frequent, consistent basis. We're also going to talk about kind of Stephen's story about how he got into this subject and

becoming so obsessed with learning about this in the first place and understanding the exponential growth of humor performance over the last 50 years. It's pretty staggering what humans have been able to create, especially in extreme sports. So I'm very excited about this. Make sure to get a piece of paper and a pen and take some notes on this because Steven covers a lot. We've also got all the show notes back over at lewishouse.com forward slash flow. So make sure to check that out as well. And let's go ahead and dive into the rise of Superman with Steven Kotler. Thanks again, everyone for tuning into the school of greatness. I am so excited for today's episode. I've got a new friend on.

His name is Steven Kotler. How's it going, man? Really, really good, Lewis. Great to be with you. And you wrote a book that is the book I've been waiting for my entire life. No joke. It's called The Rise of Superman, Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. And as a white kid growing up in Ohio, middle Ohio, similar to you in northern

Ohio, I always wanted to figure out what was the advantage that I could get as an athlete to raise my game to the next level and perform as a peak performer in every sport that I was doing in middle school, high school, college. And eventually the goal was to be a professional athlete. And I was looking for ways to always get in the flow state or get in the zone. And I don't know if you have a different definition for both of those or you consider them the same thing. But for me, it was always looking to how can I be in the zone and flow as often as possible. And you've written the book that basically breaks it down and talks about ultimate human

performance. And now it can be applied not just for extreme athletes but in business and life and relationships as well and i'm super pumped to go into this so thanks so much for writing it well thank you for having me let me talk about it so let's go into uh let's go into it first so people know uh what is flow let's just kind of go into that well you started off with right where we should start, which is the lingo is endless, right? In the zone, runners high. If you want to go back to the beatnik jazz musicians, they called it being in the pocket.

The most recent term that I've heard coming out of the comedy world and improv comedy, they call it the forever box. Anyways, the term that scientists prefer is flow states. And quite simply, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we perform our best and we feel our best. And I think everybody's kind of tasted this experience. In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else vanishes. Time either speeds up, so five hours will pass by like five minutes, or it slows down like that breeze ram effect in a car crash. Your sense of self, your sense of self-consciousness disappear completely, and all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's kind

of the quick shorthand definition of what we're talking about in flow. And why are you so obsessed with it? And why did you write this book about it? Well, it comes out of two different places. The origin story, my origin story with flow, when I was 30 years old, I had Lyme disease. And I was very, very sick. And for those people listening who don't know what Lyme is, it's like the worst flu you've ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia.

I lost all my functionality. I was in chronic pain. I could barely walk. My mental function was gone. My short-term memory was gone. My long-term memory was gone. I couldn't spell. I couldn't write.

I couldn't work. I was literally lucid and able to even hold a conversation for less than an hour a day. And I had been sick for a very long time. The doctors had pulled me off meds. They didn't know what else to do with me. And nobody knew if I was ever going to get any better.

And I was, I'll be honest, I was totally suicidal because I, all I was going to be from that point on was a burden to my loved ones. No, there was, there wasn't anything I could do. So I was very, very suicidal. And I, you know, it really was a question of when and no longer if. And a friend of mine showed up at my front door. I was living in L.A. She demanded that we go surfing.

And I just started laughing. I was like, I can't walk across the room. You're out of your freaking mind. We're going to go surfing. And she was a pain in my butt. I wouldn't leave, wouldn't leave, wouldn't leave. And after like a couple hours of this, I was like, you know what? What the hell?

I can always kill myself tomorrow. What's the worst that could happen? So like they literally like they walked me to the car. I had to be helped into the car. They drove me to Sunset Beach, which if you know anything about surfing in Los Angeles, it is the wimpiest beginner break in the world. And it was summer. So the waves were small.

The tide was low. There was nobody out. The waves were small the tide was low there was nobody out the waves were maybe two to three feet tall they gave me a board the size of a cadillac and they walked me out to the break literally had to walk me out to the break put me on the board a couple seconds later a wave came and i don't know what happened muscle memory took over whatever spun my board around jumped up and i jumped up into a different dimension. Suddenly, my senses were incredibly heightened, and time seemed to be slowed down. It was a quasi-mystical experience, you could say. I caught four more waves. By the way, all the pain, everything that was wrong,

my body was gone. Suddenly, I was normal again. I caught five waves that day, which is not a lot for a surfing session. And they drove me home and I was so discombobulated. I couldn't move for 14 days. On the 15th day, I felt good enough to walk again. I got in my car, went back to the ocean, and I did it again. And over the course of about six months, when the only thing I was doing differently in my life was surfing, I went from 10% functionality up to about 80% functionality. So my first question was, what the hell is going on, right? Surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, so what is this? Second of all, I've got a background as a science writer. I don't have

mystical experiences, and I kept having mystical experiences, and Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I thought it was moving into my brain. I thought that could be the only explanation, and that I was actually, even though I was feeling better moving into my brain. I thought that could be the only explanation and that I was actually, even though I was feeling better, I was pretty certain I was dying. So what started this was a giant quest to figure out what the heck was going on with me. And, you know, that quest got solved. The short version of what happened, just so your readers or your listeners understand, is one of the things with flow is there's a very complicated neurochemical reaction that produces flow. Five very potent neurochemicals are released during

the state. All of them are significant immune system boosters, which is important. More importantly, flow seems to reset the nervous system. Autoimmune conditions are basically a nervous system going crazy, right? So these continual flow states calm my nervous system way back down. That was where the health boost came from. It led into all the other stuff we're going to talk about, performance and things like that. The second thing that happened is my background is as a journalist. And I started writing in the early 90s. And back then, action sports were the new thing. And if you could ski, surf, rock, do any of those things, there was work. I was hungry, and I was young, and I wanted work.

I spent the better portion of five or six years chasing pro athletes around the world, mostly skiers around mountains. I kept seeing over and over things that shouldn't be possible, like impossible, impossible. I was a great skier when I started this. Then I saw what these guys were doing, and I wasn't even a beginner again it was like I couldn't believe what was going on and I kept thinking to myself and talking to other journalists in the field saying well this has got to end there's no possible way this progression can continue but the idea at the heart of Rise of Superman which is the book that I have coming out right that we're talking about is simply this. If you look at action and adventure sports as a data set over the past 25 years,

what you see is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. So I define ultimate human performance as performance when life or limb is on the line, and nothing like this has ever happened before. History of the world, sports performance, it's slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution. You plot it on a graph, you get a linear curve. At no point do you get athletic performance quintupling in a decade. But let's take surfing.

Here's a 1,000-year-old sport from 400 A.D. to 1996. The biggest wave anybody's ever surfed is 25 feet. And today, it's pushing over 100 feet. And that's one example. If you go back to the early 90s, snowboarding, the biggest cliff anybody had ever jumped over was the Baker Road Gap in Mount Baker. It's 40 feet end to end. I was just talking to Travis Rice a couple weeks ago, a pro snowboarder, and he told me he had just cleared something he thought was about 230 feet. So this is what we're talking about.

You're looking at literally nearly exponential, sometimes exponential growth in ultimate human performance. So the question of the heart of Rise is what the hell is going on? And the answer is, for a variety of reasons that I'm sure we're going to get to, these athletes are getting into flow more frequently than anybody else in the history of the world. So I started out with, well, let me give you a quick historical perspective. The research on flow is vast. It starts in the 1870s and goes all the way up until now. And as far back in the 1870s, we started to notice, you know,

that there was optimal states of consciousness and there were these weird altered states. By the 1970s, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came along, he not only identified seven conditions that are the way we identify flow. So if any of these seven things start showing up, you know you're in flow. So at the low end, that's intense concentration, focus on the task at hand, merger of action and awareness. At the high end, it's time dilation, the vanishing of ego and things like that.

And there's states of microflow where you only get a couple of these things and macroflow where you get the full bore experience. So one way to think of it is like any other emotion. Emotions exist on a spectrum. You can be a little bit irate or you can be homicidally pissed off. Same thing with flow, right? Csikszentmihalyi also identified three psychological triggers,

and these have been exceptionally well-validated. One of the most well-validated theories in psychology, they essentially underpin expert performance theory. That was in the 60s and 70s that he first identified those. In the 80s and the 90s, a guy named Keith Sawyer, who was at the University of Washington in St. Louis, a brilliant kind of neuropsychologist, discovered there's a group flow state, a shared flow experience when a whole bunch of people get into a flow state together, so you

play football. Anytime you see a fourth quarter comeback, right, it's everybody dropping into flow at the same time. When football looks like ballet, it's a pretty good tip that everybody's in group flow. So he discovered there are 10 social triggers that bring on group flow. The work at the Flow Genome Project, which is the research organization that I co-founded where we study flow, we've identified three environmental triggers and one creative trigger.

And the reason action adventure sport athletes get into flow so frequently, it's twofold. One is necessity is clearly the mother of invention, meaning the level of performance has gone up so much that if these athletes are not in flow when they're performing, they're going to end up in the hospital or dead. So it's become a necessity in action adventure sports. The other thing that has happened is, and this happened inadvertently,

it was not intentional, nobody set out to do this, but what they ended up doing in the past 20 years in action sports, there were a number of changes and things along those lines that I won't go into, but they basically surrounded themselves with all 15 of these flow triggers. They basically created the most high flow environment they possibly could. So everything in their lives are triggering flow. So it's a twofold. They had to do this out of necessity and possibly, I don't think it was conscious, but in an unconscious level, flow is, psychologists talk about it as a source code of intrinsic motivation, meaning like when you're in flow, another way of putting this is the five neurochemicals you get during flow

are the most addictive chemicals on earth. And the only time you ever get access to all five of them at once is in flow. You couldn't, for example, dopamine shows up in flow. Now, cocaine is widely known to be the most addictive drug on earth. All that happens when you snort cocaine is it releases dopamine into your brain and it blocks its reuptake. So flow gives you four other chemicals besides dopamine that are also just as potent and it cocktails them. If you were to try to cocktail

the street drug version of these things, you'd end up dead or in a coma. It would not work. But the brain cocktails them naturally. And the interesting thing about flow as opposed to all the other addictions is all other addictions lead backwards. But flow, because, and you can testify to this

because we were talking about it earlier, not only as your performance, does it go through the roof when you're in flow, so not only do you get turned into Superman, you usually get a vision of what your life could be like if you had more access to flow or if you were to follow this path forward. So it leads you into the future.

Flow is the only addiction I know of that drives you forward instead of backwards. So if they talk about it as a source code of intrinsic motivation, deeply, deeply, deeply motivating. And so you've got an incredibly motivating state that all these athletes are driving towards. And you see this, by the way. Look at surfers. These are people not known for being hyper-responsible in life, right? Yet if it's firing overhead tubes, they're out there at 4 o'clock in the morning for

Dawn Patrol every day, right? So we've all seen this over and over. You see it with artists who are musicians, totally, completely unreliable people in general, except when it comes time to make music. And then they're totally there and totally flying. That's true. I mean, I can attest to this.

I mean, there was one specific game. I've been in flow many times, but there was one specific game where I remember it the most in college. And I just felt invincible. I felt unstoppable. I remember the first part of the game, the first quarter,

there was one defensive back on me. I played wide receiver. And then there was two on me and then there was three on me with the safety shading over. And I just felt like the whole team was on me and it didn't matter how many people were on me, what they did,

what they tried to do. The ball was still coming my way and I caught everything. And I remember at the end of the game, feeling like I didn't catch that many balls or get that many yards. You know, it's kind of like, I had no clue what my stats were, what, what I had done. And then, and everyone was like, man, you have this unbelievable game. How many catches do you think you've gotten? I was like, I don't know, maybe like eight or 10 and which was about, you know, probably a good game for me. Like that had this unbelievable game. How many catches do you think you got? And I was like, I don't know, maybe like eight or ten, which was about probably a good game for me.

That's a good game. Yeah, it was like eight or ten. And then we actually lost the game by three points. So I was more depressed than anything because we lost. So I'm the last one to get out of the shower because I'm beating myself up, thinking, what could I have done better?

How could I have been a better teammate? And then I'm the last one to get out of the shower, just kind of wallowing in my own misery of this loss. And my coach comes up to me and says, I just want to say good game. You actually broke a world record for the most receiving yards in a single football game. And I was like, what? I was like, are you sure?

And I was like, how many? He said 418 yards. No way. And I was like, I just didn't believe it. Cause I was like, Oh my God. I was like, well, I mean, I was like, did they mess the stats up? You know, and we talked about it, you know, earlier McKinsey, right. Did a 10 year study of top executives and flow. And they found top executives and flow are five times more productive than out of flow. And that's five times, right? It's 500% more productive, right?

So what you're looking at is a perfect example of that. I mean, the general feeling, and this is not 100% true, so I don't want to steer people wrong here, but the general feeling is pretty much every world championship in gold medal has a flow state behind it. It's not mandatory. You can have peak performance without flow but it doesn't feel very good it's really really hard and it's not sustainable it doesn't feel easy and natural at all and the only way you won is because everyone else around you wasn't in flow either. Absolutely. One other thing I just want to interject,

because I didn't say it earlier, and I should. The reason we call it flow, the reason flow gets its name is when Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the chairman of the University of Chicago back in the 60s and 70s. He performed what we would now call the largest global happiness study ever. We didn't have happiness studies back then.

And he really wasn't actually even looking at happiness. He was looking at what we would now call life satisfaction or well-being. But he did a giant survey, almost 10,000 people, and he discovered a number of things. First of all, he discovered that flow is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. His survey looked at experts, right? Top dancers, top rock climbers, top neurosurgeons,

top Wall Street traders, et cetera, et cetera. But he also looked at Navajo sheep herders and Detroit assembly line workers and Japanese teenage motorcycle gang riders. And all of them said when they felt their best and they performed their best, they were in this state called flow. And it was called flow because in flow, every decision, leads seamlessly fluidly to the next so the truth of the matter is flow feels flowy and that's where the name comes from yeah it feels very very natural and in the zone I mean that's the way I use to explain it all time in the zone so it occurs it occurs everywhere is what you're just kind of talking about pretty much any type of workplace athletics you, you know, sheep herding,

you said it's all over the place all the time, right? Yeah, provided certain initial conditions are met, meaning these 15 triggers we talked about a second ago, provided, you know, those initial conditions are present, yeah, absolutely. Anybody can get into flow, all ages. And the funny thing is, by the way, most people don't even realize this,

studies of people in flow at work most people spend about five percent of their work life in flow which is you know ideally not much but interestingly by the way if you want to talk about production the mckinsey researchers who did this 10-year study on flow they calculated if you could move that five percent up to 15% to 20% of your time and flow, overall workplace productivity would double, which is, to me, kind of the most astounding thing in the world. Everywhere you look right now in business, people are talking about the culture of speed and business is moving so much faster, and how do you keep up, and how do you keep up, and how do you keep up?

Well, here's your answer. We already know. So is there such a thing as too much flow? Well, the interesting thing about flow is this, and this is something, this is the most important flow hacking tip I can give you, and it answers your question.

So the most common mistake people make about flow is they think it's a binary. You're either in the zone or you're out of the zone, right? Turns out that's not true. Flow is a four-stage cycle. And a number of the stages in flow don't feel flowy at all. So the first stage is known as struggle. It was named that by a Harvard cardiologist named Herbert Benson, who did a lot of foundational research on the neurobiology, a lot of the neurochemistry he mapped. And struggle is a loading phase.

You are overloading the brain with information. So if you are an athlete, this is skill acquisition. You are trying to learn a new route as a wide receiver. And, right, it's uncomfortable. You're awkward. It's not good. And you get frustrated, frustrated, frustrated, almost to the point of total boiling over. If I'm a writer, this is not only am I doing all my research, but I'm doing the bang my head against the wall hard work of trying to get the structure and the

first paragraph written. And if you would have talked to me yesterday, I was as far from flow as I possibly could get working on a new article. And, you know, literally, it's a major article and very important for me, and I was ready to quit. I literally, I was about to call my agent. I was like, I don't want to do this. And, you know, this morning I had a breakthrough, and there you go. But so the first stage, struggle, very unflowy. Second stage is relaxation.

You literally have to take your mind off the problem. You have to take your mind off the problem. You have to relax. And that triggers a, there's a neurobiological release that happens when that happens. But essentially during struggle, all the stress hormones rise, right? Cortisol, norepinephrine, you're very uncomfortable. When you relax, you get a global release of nitric oxide that flushes all those negative chemicals out of your system. And instead, you get dopamine and endorphins and aminamide and all the positive uplifting chemicals that come and flow. So release, struggle goes into release, gives way to flow. And then on the back end, there is a memory learning and consolidation phase.

This is also important. This is where most people screw up. They get into a flow state. They feel like Superman. They can do incredible things. And is where most people screw up. They get into a flow state. They feel like Superman, can do incredible things, and then suddenly it goes away. It goes away because the neurochemicals have a very short lifespan in your brain, right? And then the brain has to eat more nutrition. It needs to do certain things to build those back up again.

So for people who have done illicit pharmaceuticals, say ecstasy, they flush all the serotonin out of the system and they're very depressed the next day because the brain has to make it again. You can't do a lot of drugs days in a row because of this. Same thing with flow. So first I'll talk about flow hacking, then I'll answer your question.

Where people screw up very often is they get into flow, they feel like Superman, and they come out of flow into this memory learning consolidation phase where what is really going on is the brain is moving all the stuff you learned in flow into long-term storage, but you have none of these neurochemicals. So you're very, very down and you're depressed. Most people cannot relax into it and just chill out and accept the fact that, I call it the hangover rule. Most people, most adults have been hungover.

They know that you should not trust your brain when you're hungover. You're going to get all kinds of wild negative thoughts and you just got to kind of say, okay, I'll deal with this tomorrow when I feel better. I'm not going to deal with this today. This is my hangover brain talking, right? We know how to do this.

We do this kind of automatically. Same thing happens in flow. You have to kind of relax because you have to go from this like learning consolidation phase back in the struggle. Very difficult to do if you're gripped about not being in flow anymore. You could end up stuck there for a very, very long time. So to answer your question, there is no possible way to live in flow in what you call in the actual zone because you have to go through this four-stage cycle. And two of the stages feel profoundly unflowy. What was the fourth phase? Pardon me? What was the fourth phase? The fourth phase is a memory learning consolidation phase. And one thing I want to speak to that, it's not – so when we talk about how could performance possibly be five – how could you be five times more productive?

What the hell is going on? Well, one of the things that is going on is you're learning at a massively accelerated rate. So a quick shorthand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals you get during an experience, the greater chance that experience is going to move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Because flow is this giant dump of neurochemicals, all those neurochemicals really are tags for memory for the brain to go, oh, this stuff is really important. I better save it for later. So we've got studies run everywhere from brick-and-mortar schools to electronic learning environments that show learning is massively accelerated flow. To give you a number, DARPA did a study with snipers, and they induced flow artificially. I won't even go into it because we'd have to talk a lot more about the neurobiology of flow, but they induced it artificially using transcranial direct stimulation and taught snipers target acquisition skills. They learned them 230%

faster. In a separate study, non-military, also induced flow artificially, they cut the time it took to train a novice sniper up to an expert level by 50%. So massive boost in learning and memory is one of the things that drive that performance up in flow. But you need, by the way, learning is hampered by anxiety. So what happens is when people get out of flow and they get gripped because you're not Superman anymore. And it's really like without these feel good neurochemicals, it's not even like you go back to normal.

You are suboptimal. You are not feeling very happy. You're in hangover mode. And if you feel too much anxiety because of it, not only are you going to have a harder time getting back in the flow, anxiety disrupts the learning pattern. So you are hurting yourself. You're basically harming yourself, and it's going to be harder to get to that next level again when you get back in the flow. Wow. Okay.

So let's break it down for a second and let's just say you're an athlete or you've got a big game coming up or maybe you're a business professional and you've got a presentation or a speech. You've got some big thing happening, about to happen. You've done the work. You've done your practice, everything you can do, and you're about to go into the big moment, the big opportunity. What is it that someone can do to, I guess, quickly jump into flow state without overcomplicating

it too much? The bad answer for you is there's no answer there. Everybody wants the quick fix. They want the magic pill. They want all that. And I always tell people two things are very fundamentally different about flow or three things. One, it's a step function. You're not trying to be 5% better. You're five times better. It, just step function worth of difference, right? So that's different. The second thing is there is no magic pill. There is no, I mean, I can, we can, and I'm happy to do it.

We can walk through the 15 flow triggers. All you can do is live in such a way that you're kind of, your life is filled with these flow triggers. That works really, really well. It also, by the way, get plenty of sleep, be relaxed. Things like that are very, very, very critical in flow. The other thing that you need to know is this is not self-help, first of all, because there's nothing I can tell you today that you can apply tomorrow

that is going to make your life better. What I tell people is you've got to kind of throw out a lot of stuff and sort of start over and build your life around these flow triggers. The other thing you need to know, and I say this out loud and very kind of forthright about it. These are incredibly addictive, potent neurochemicals and you, the flow is dangerous. It is giving you, you see this in action adventure sport athletes. A couple of years ago, we lost one professional athlete, I think it was, every 18 days. It's insane. People chase the state at all costs.

It's very, very addictive. And if you don't know what you're doing, and if you can, for example, if you don't understand the four stages of the flow cycle, you can get gripped and you can find yourself out of flow for months at a time. And those months are miserable and depressing. It is not, you know, this can go wrong. You have to tread lightly, be very aware. It requires a lot of emotional control. This is big boy stuff.

This is not, you know, I mean, you want to know how to be Superman? We can tell you how to be Superman, but it is not easy and it is not, you know, the safest path for you. And, you know, I really try to be clear on that because maybe it's not for everybody. And that may just be the case. You have to really want to play at this level because you are definitely playing with fire. And I always say, as children, we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire. And if you can have massive acceleration and performance

like you've never believed, but it is a dangerous path and there is no quick way in. That said, let's talk about the flow trigger. So let's talk about what people can actually do to get more flow in their lives. And I'm not going to go into too much depth because they're all in rise as Superman, but let's just talk about the three environmental triggers that action and adventure sport athletes pull the most frequently. Now, other people do them otherwise, but very common in action and adventure sports.

So they are high consequence, deep embodiment, and rich environment. And let me go through them one at a time. High consequence is obvious. Flow follows focus, right? You need incredibly, incredibly tight focus. High consequence is risk. Catches your attention and it holds it, right? Now, the important thing to remember here is that it is not just physical risk.

Emotional risk, creative risk, mental risk, all these things work as well. For a shy guy, all you got to do is cross the room and talk to the pretty girl to trigger it. And by the way, let's break it down even further. The risk triggers, whenever we take a risk, mental or physical, the brain releases dopamine. It releases dopamine for a lot of reasons, but dopamine speeds up muscle reaction times. It heightens pattern recognition. It tightens

focus. It does all the things that you need to do to pay more attention when you're in a high consequence environment. That's what you're going for. You don't have to have the physical risk. The thing that helps action adventure sport athletes is they don't just take one risk. They take lots of risk right in a row. So, for example, the business environment we see the most flow in is startups, entrepreneurship. Why? Lots and lots and lots of risk. So that's the high consequence trigger let's talk

about a rich environment a rich environment means lots of novelty lots of unpredictability lots of complexity basically what you are going to do is you're putting yourself in an environment where you're overwhelming the brain and your conscious processing has to be swapped out for your subconscious processing so most people have this experience have you ever felt awe right Your conscious processing has to be swapped out for your subconscious processing. So most people have this experience. Have you ever felt awe, right, where you see a beautiful sunset and the world seems to freeze for a second? You're just kind of sucked into that sunset.

That's actually the front end of a flow state. It's a dopamine release. It's the feeling of time dilation. Time starts to slow down. But it's really the brain reacting to lots of novelty, lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability. Wide action in Metro Sports trigger flows so much. Lots of novelty, lots of unpredictability, lots of complexity in the environment. It's built in.

But you can get novelty, complexity, unpredictability in your daily life in lots of different ways, right? I mean, novelty, read a book outside your field. Read a book that you wouldn't normally read. That can be enough. Let's jump to the last one, which is deep embodiment. Deep embodiment is a really fancy way of saying all of your senses are firing all at once. So you're basically paying attention to all your sensory streams at the same time,

and not just your five senses. You're also playing. You've got vestibular awareness, which is essentially balance. You've got proprioception, which is body position in space. So all action adventure sports trigger have multiple Gs, zero Gs, and polyaxial rotation, which is rotation around one's middle. They're everywhere in those sports. These are deep embodiment triggers.

They tell your body to pay attention to lots of different information streams. Most of us, most of the time, depend on mostly our eyes and a little bit on our sense of touch and a little bit on our sense of hearing. That's most of your waking day. You're not paying attention to everything at once because you're not putting yourself into those conditions. But you can train up deep embodiment very, very, very easily. For example, and this is, so I'm,

let's be clear on what I'm talking about in this next second. I am not saying do this and you're going to get more flow. Do this and you're going to start training up deep embodiment, and that will precipitate more flow. But easy ways to train up deep embodiment, for example, Zen walking meditation or yoga. Yoga where you're paying attention to your breathing and you're in your body and you're everywhere, right?

That is a very great way to do it. There's other simple ways. Eat your dinner with your fork in a different hand than you normally do. Drive to work in a different direction. These force you to pay attention in ways that you don't normally pay attention and do that over and over. Remember, every time you're doing stuff differently, you're grooving new pathways in the brain. So the more flow you have, the more flow you have. The same thing with all these flow triggers because the more practice you put into developing them, the easier when crunch time comes, you will have getting into

flow. So to answer your question, how can you, if you've got the big presentation, you've got the whatever, how do you get into flow? I can't give you a quick fix, but what I can tell you is if you start actively building your life around these 15 flow triggers and start accessing them more often, you're going to start to groove the brain, learn the patterns your brain needs to get in the flow, and you're going to slip into flow much more easily. Yeah, and you've got all 15 are in the book. Yeah, all 15 are in the book. When people pick it up, you'll be able to get access to all that.

Absolutely. I can definitely testify to how addictive being in the flow state is just by, you know, you always want to, for me as an athlete, I always wanted to pursue the next greatest level. And when I got injured playing football, I was depressed for about a year and a half almost, sleeping on my sister's couch, recovering from a surgery. recovering from a surgery. And I just missed the feeling of what it felt like to be active and be in flow and be in a high-performance game with a crowd and with, you know, stakes on the line. And you see it. You mentioned it.

A lot of, you know, a lot of pro athletes die because of this. But also, I feel like a lot of pro athletes have a lot of problems after they retire. Afterward. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, Junior Seau is a great example. Yeah.

Who's an all-pro. Let me actually speak to that for a second. So flow has a creative trigger. It probably actually has more than one. The research is very early days on this. And when I say flow has a creative trigger, what I really mean is creativity is essentially two things. It's pattern recognition. When creativity is recombinatory. You're taking an old idea,

bumping it into a new thought or a new information and creating something totally new. So that requires pattern recognition, which actually releases dopamine and requires risk, which also releases dopamine. So creativity is a phenomenal flow trigger. You have this problem a lot. We see with a lot in action adventure sport athletes. I talk to a lot of older action adventure sport athletes about, you know, why does my life feel so unfulfilling now? How do I get more of this? The ones who are the most successful are the ones who go into creative fields afterwards or have creative hobbies, playing music, writing, making film, any of these, right? Anything where you're being creative, it's triggering a lot of flow.

So if you're coming out of that kind of career, that kind of high flow environment all the time, it is extremely helpful to start doing creative things. Really, really helpful. We'll absolutely cushion the blow and you'll start getting the same flow state experiences you got before. Right. So it's really channeling the energy that you lost from the activity into another creative activity. Into another activity that creates that high flow. Right. Exactly.

You can move into computer coding, by the way. Flow is incredibly important in computer coding, so much so that you go look at the Oracle Developer's Handbook. They have a chapter on flow. There's a PeopleSoft, which is kind of a classic in a classic kind of human capital management for software development. They, the authors of that book, have argued that they should pay people for flow time, which is the time spent in flow rather than just hours on the clock, because hours on the clock doesn't mean anything, but time in flow really counts for person.

By the way, I have no idea how you're going to do that. Yeah, how are you going to try that? It's a great idea. I love it. I'm for it. It's phenomenal, but I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do it. But I will give you another.

James Slavitt, he's a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners. He wrote an article for Forbes where he talked about because creativity is massively enhanced in flow for reasons that I can explain if you care, but he says that flow is the most

important, what he calls flow stake percentage, which is, again, the amount of time employees spend in flow is the most important management metric for building great innovation teams. So you see it a lot. You could very easily come out of your football career and become a hacker and probably be just as deeply satisfied. Sure. Yeah. Well, and you also talked about, you mentioned it earlier, kind of your story about how you got into this whole research and wanting to learn more about it. It's really a healing thing as well. It's a healing modality. Like you said, once you got up on the surfboard and you're kind of in the flow state and you were just happier, you started to recover and it was healing.

And you also mentioned something about your wife before we got into this interview about being altruistic, right? Yeah. So let me address both of those at the same time. So my wife and I run an animal sanctuary, a dog sanctuary called Rancho de Chihuahua. We deal with small dogs with very, very big problems with special needs care, hospice care for the aged. We have a healing methodology based around flow. We try to put the dogs in the flow states and it works incredibly well. And I can't like, I hate to say, I'm always nervous saying things like this out loud, but I'm just going to say it anyways. All of our dogs come to us from a vet. Most of our dogs arrive with a warning like, yeah, this guy's going to be alive for a month, maybe two months. It's just, you know, last legs,

like, yeah, this guy's going to be alive for a month, maybe two months. It's just, you know, last legs, whatever. Our dogs live forever. I'm looking at a dog right now that has four-stage cancer. When he came to us, tumors all over. You know, we got the tumors removed. He should have been dead six months ago, easily. I did five miles with him through the mountains this morning.

What? Up and down. If you get online and you search under five dog workout, the five dog workout, you'll find a Vimeo movie outside television sent a crew out here to just basically record what we do with the dogs.

You can see what it looks like. We're running up and down these cliff faces and these mountains. I try to basically use the environmental triggers. I do it both for the healing purposes and because when you have a dog sanctuary, if you can't get a dog to bond to a pack, you're screwed.

If I have a dog who comes in, we don't cage our animals and there's a lot of them. So if you've got 25 animals and one of the dogs isn't bonded to the pack, he's going to wither away and be dead very, very quickly. So one of the other things that happens to the pack, he's going to wither away and beget very, very quickly. So one of the other things that happens in flow, this is why earlier I said building great innovation teams, right? We talked about flow as per building innovation teams.

All of the neurochemicals you get in flow are incredibly potent social bonding chemicals. So norepinephrine and dopamine underpin romantic love. Endorphins and anadamine are both social bonding chemicals. So I do this with the dogs because I need to get the dog, I need all the dogs to bond together and be a very tight, cohesive pack. But to get to your second point, which is there are lots of different on-ramps in the flow, obviously. Some people get in through adrenaline sports.

Some people get in through creativity.. Some people get in through creativity. You can also get in through altruism, helping others. Alan Lukes, who founded Big Brothers Big Sisters, discovered this in the 90s, and the altruism-based flow state is known as helper's high. And it's an unusual flow state. Most flow states only last a couple of hours. Helper's high for reasons that nobody can understand yet,

but I'm dying to do the research on it, and I don't know if we'll come up with anything. But helper's high can last for days. So people can get into these low-grade flow states that last for a very long time. Interestingly, we do know in the beginning when Alan Lukes did his original research, we thought it was only kind of hands-on frontline altruism, like the stuff we're doing with our dogs or working in a soup kitchen or joining the Peace Corps. Turns out you can get low-grade flow states by doing something as simple as bidding at a charity auction online.

So I think one of the reasons, and I can't prove this to you, but if you look at micro-lending sites like Kiva, where I can lend somebody $100 and suddenly somebody can go to college in Africa, that kind of thing, that is producing low-grade flow states. Video games, by the way, also produce low-grade flow states. Mistakenly, the video game industry is very aware of this. Flow theory has become essentially the foundational metric for explaining the lure of the joystick why are video games so popular interestingly most video games are only producing low grade flow states it's mostly a dopamine loop you're getting a little bit of norepinephrine a little bit of dopamine a couple other chemicals but you're not getting the full

blown experience yet what's interesting about this and i actually just wrote an article for my fourth blog about this uh called legal heroin but we are getting better and better at this. So right now, video games are incredibly addictive, as we know, and they're only putting people in low-grade flow states. We're going to come to a point where they're driving people into full, deep flow states, and then it's going to be really addictive. It could be a bad thing, but really interesting is there are a lot of people who are building learning-based video games who are really working on this hard because we talked about the massive application

you get of learning and memory and flow. So if you can imagine a learning-based video game that puts people into deep flow, I'm not saying we're going to end up with like Matrix-style downloadable learning, but we're going to end up with like matrix style downloadable learning, but we're going to get a little closer. This is incredible stuff. I could, uh, I could talk about this forever. Um, but I want to do a couple more questions and before we wrap it up and what, um, let's talk about, I think you already, you talked about it a little bit, but I want to cover

a little bit more about the dark side of flow. What is that exactly? Well, the dark side of flow is really what we talked about. It's the fact that we don't, you have to understand that there's a four-stage cycle. You have to understand that the struggle phase on the front end, you know, sometimes you can move really quickly through it. And what I have discovered, by the way, you can't short- these four stages. There's no way you can't skip a stage, but I have discovered that you can shorten the time you spend in each phase. So more by what I have discovered, and this is tangential, but everything I do in my life essentially creates

flow. I only really do three things. I write, it creates flow. I hurl the meat carcass down mountains, whether on skis or a mountain bike, right? It creates flow. And I work with the animals. It creates flow. When I go skiing on Monday,

my chances of getting into flow on Tuesday while writing go up significantly. So one of the things, what happens with people in the dark side of flow is they have one pursuit. I am a football player. I am a rock climber. And they double down and double down and double down

and keep working and keep working and keep working. And the struggle phase can drag on forever when what they really need to do is lateralize and go into something tangentially related that can kick them into a flow easier, and then they can come back to football or whatever it is that you're trying to learn, right? That's really important. There are a lot of ways to avoid the dark side of flow. The other problem is what we call bliss junkies.

Bliss junkies are people who get into flow and they go, oh, my God, life is supposed to be like this. I should be in a flow state all the time. So I'm not going to do anything until I get back into this state. And so you end up with like people chasing the high. Flow isn't about chasing the high. It's about understanding the whole cycle and that it's about chasing the best possible version of yourself, right? You have to kind of put yourself into the struggle. And you have to also,

so we talked earlier about psychological triggers. One of them is very famous from expert performance theory. It's called the challenge skills balance. And balance is actually, it's a misnomer. What you really need to trigger flow psychologically, one of the things is you need the challenge to be slightly harder than the skills you bring to bear to it. So what does that actually mean?

From an emotional point, it means that flow exists in what they call the flow channel, which is on the midpoint between boredom, there's not enough stimulation so I'm not paying attention, and fight or flight, anxiety. So between boredom and anxiety. And it's right at that midline. And this has not been extremely well validated. A chick sent me high and a Google mathematician did a back of the envelope calculation,

and they figured that as a general rule, there needs to be a 4% difference between challenge and skill. So the challenge needs to be 4% greater than skills you bring to bear on that. and skills. So the challenge needs to be 4% greater than skills you bring to bear on that. We have done some loose but long studies on this number at the Flow Genome Project, nothing that we want to publish yet, but we have found that pretty much works, though there seems to be some variation here. But one of the problems with 4% is 4% is the point at which you get a little uncomfortable, basically. So the problem with that is for guys like you who are super high performers, you're going to zip past 4% without even noticing.

You're going to try to go to 10% better, 20% better. By the way, I did this for years with various things and couldn't get better and couldn't get better and couldn't get better. I tried to become a better skier by chasing pro athletes around mountains. And the gap was too big. I was pushing myself way out of the sweet spot so I could not get into flow and I couldn't accelerate the way I wanted to. On the other side of this, for people who are not as driven, they have problems because 4% is roughly, you're uncomfortable at 4%.

You're not cozy. This is not familiar territory. You've pushed past that. And most people who are kind of less driven, they get to that point and they go, oh, this is too hard. I don't want to do it. It feels too scary. But high performers zip right by it.

So you have to know that there's a sweet spot. So the dark side of flow is really mitigatable by knowledge. It's not, you know, it's not a death sentence, not any of those things. You just need to know what you're doing with this stuff. You can't, you just can't get in and, you know, you can't take it lightly. This is not like smoking pot for the first time. It's much more like playing with crack. Again, I bet it. Yeah, that is a quote I'm going to regret. I love it. Again, I could talk about this stuff forever and go into many examples,

but in your book, The Rise of Superman, Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, Stephen's got so many great examples. All the different research and science that you need to know is in this book. So I highly recommend checking this out. Oh, Louis, one thing let me mention, by the way, starting, we're going to do, as you do these days, a giant pre-sale campaign with lots of rewards. Starting the 15th of this month, so I'm not exactly certain when you're running this, but after the 15th of this month, giant pre-sale campaign. Go to risesuperman.com and you'll see it.

The reason I'm mentioning this, we've got lots of cool gifts, including just buying one copy. We're giving you access to some of the videos we've been making with top athletes about ultimate performance and flow. We're also giving people access to the flow diagnostic that we've developed at the Flow Genome Project, which is my research organization. This is, it's a loop. We have much more rigorous ones, but it's basically different people getting to flow

different ways. So this is a look at, you know, you can take the diagnostic and figure out what are the easiest pathways for you to get into flow. So anyway, then it goes on and on and on from there. But I wanted to let people know that this is going on. And there's, you know, if you want more flow in your life, you know, the book will help. But we're giving away some cool, cool, cool rewards along the way that will also help a lot.

That's awesome. So it's riseofsuperman.com and then also your site, stephencottler.com. And we'll have links all up on the show notes for everyone over at School of Greatness and lewishouse.com. So make sure to pick up a book by, I say by 10 and give some to your friends because this is really what it's all about.

It's about getting in a flow state that makes us the most fulfilled, the happiest, you know, performs the best. And that's what it's all about. It's performing at our best every single day, every single moment that we possibly can. So make sure to check this out. I'm going to finish with the final question,

which I asked all my guests and interested to hear what you have to say about this. So what is your definition of greatness? Wow. Take something easy. Why don't you got to prep? What is my definition of greatness? Honestly, I think my definition of greatness is, yeah.

Okay, all right. Honestly, to me, I mean, at a certain level, you just ran through it. To me, greatness is you wake up every day and you say, okay, today I'm going to move mountains. And you just, you know, I saw many of us when I was a kid, here's my quick answer. When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, massively arrogant, totally crazy. But I figured the only impact I was worth having on the world, if I wasn't going to be Mahatma Gautami, Martin Luther King, or Jesus Christ, I wasn't interested. And for a long time, that got beaten out of me.

I think it gets beaten out of every one of us. And it's sort of come back to me. I think so many people want to compete against their neighbors, their peers. I want to compete against the people who would be very, very, very best in the world at this. And that's what I'm striving for. And as long as you're striving for greatness, that to me is actually the definition. Greatness, I don't know what that is, but I do know it's about how you choose to live your day on a day-to-day basis.

It's how you approach everything. I love it. Does that work at all? That's perfect. I love it. Thanks again so much for coming on again. This is some interesting stuff and I hope to be able to have more conversations with you in the future and check out the project and be involved in any

way possible. I love what you're doing. I appreciate it. I think it's amazing for everyone to check out. So everyone again, check out Rise of Superman and pick up a copy or two. And thanks again so much, Steve, for coming on. This was great, great fun do this interview for hours and just listen to Steven and go into examples about flow nonstop. I love this topic. And it's basically one of the reasons I started the School of Greatness podcast was to really dive into this type of information about peak performance, about flow, about getting in the zone, and how to tap into your own greatness. So if you guys enjoyed this, please share it over on Twitter and Facebook. Again,

you can go over to the show notes at lewishouse.com forward slash flow to check this out. And there's some great quotes over there and awesome video as well. And some other cool images that you'll see over on the show notes at lewishouse.com forward slash flow. And in the meantime, guys, thanks so much for tuning in, for listening, for, for giving me a little bit of your time once a week to these interviews that I bring on and to the guests that I bring on here. It means a ton to me. If you enjoyed it, again, please share it over on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, everywhere on social media.

And keep sending pictures where you're listening to the show over on Instagram. You can tag me at Lewis Howes or tag the hashtag School of Greatness. I love getting images from people all over the world and see where you guys are listening to this show. Thanks so much again, guys, and make sure to go out there and do something great. Outro Music