Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Best of Steven Kotler, Flow Master and Peak Performance Expert | YAPSnacks

Starting point is 00:00:01 What's up young improfitors? You are listening to an episode of Yap snacks, a series of bite-sized content hosted by me, Hala Taha. If you've been listening to Yap for a while, I think you definitely know the name Stephen Kotler. Stephen is one of the world's leading experts in peak performance, flow and productivity. He's the goat of human peak performance. He's the executive director of Flow Research Collective. He's written over a dozen bestselling books that have been translated in 40 languages. Stephen has been on Yap four times, and I don't doubt that he's going to be back on again. Every conversation with him is an instant classic, and I wanted to take the time to feature some of my favorite segments of his interviews in today's Yap Snacks. It's a best-of series, so to speak.

Starting point is 00:00:56 And this episode is going to primarily focus on flow, strengthening your attention span, and maximizing your productivity. But we're also going to dive deep on topics like motivation and peak performance aging. Before we get started, I do. did want to give a quick overview of what a flow state is. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. Think about the last time we really got sucked into our project, like reading a book or playing a sport or maybe playing an instrument, to the point where the rest of the world just seemed to have melted away and has stopped.

Starting point is 00:01:29 This is a flow state. It takes 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration to enter a flow state. and it comes with some incredible benefits like high into productivity, creativity, and learning. And this concept is pretty foreign to a lot of us because if you think about the current culture surrounding work, it's not really conducive for entering a flow state. We're constantly checking our email, answering messages on Slack,

Starting point is 00:01:53 picking up phone calls, taking last minute assignments. We are rarely working on the same task for more than 20 minutes, let alone 90 minutes. Research from UC Irvine shows that it takes 23 minutes for you to regain full focus on a task after you've been interrupted. So if we're constantly being bombarded by messages and impromptu office conversations, we may never fully regain our focus on whatever we're working on. And that is detrimental to the quality of our work.

Starting point is 00:02:21 This actually reminds me of a recent interview that I had that's coming out soon. It's with Johan Hari, and he wrote the book Stolen Focus. Now, this interview was absolutely incredible. I really recommend that you guys check it out as a follow-up to this one. And we talked about how to stop bawling victim to the forces of power that are stealing away your attention. And he brought up a really good point. When your ability to focus on a task diminishes, so does your competency and your ability in general to perform at a high level. You can't accomplish your personal goals if you don't have focus. The way to really get

Starting point is 00:02:51 into a flow state for me is to batch my time and to be really, really strict about the way in which I protect my time. I turn off notifications. I make sure everybody knows. Like, for example, when I'm studying for an interview, I like to get in a flow state. I have four hours before my interview and I shut everything off and all I'm doing is concentrating on that interview. And one of my favorite things to do to study for my interview to make sure that I'm not distracted is I get my hair and makeup done now for my interviews. And I love when I'm blow drying my hair or the girl is blow drying my hair and doing my makeup

Starting point is 00:03:24 because I'm forced to do nothing but study. It really helps me get in the zone. So for two hours, I'm stuck in a chair. I've got a hairdryer blowing and making sure that there's nothing else to do. I can't take calls. I can't do anything else but steady. And I get so much work done because I'm in a forced flow state sitting in that chair getting my hair and makeup done.

Starting point is 00:03:43 And it's great. It works out amazing. And so batching your time and doing things proactively to make sure that you're not getting disrupted is a great way to get into a flow state. And I want to kick off this episode by explaining what actually happens to your brain when you enter a flow state. and why flow states are so crucial for peak performance. So let's dive into this clip.

Starting point is 00:04:03 It's from Stephen's first interview on Yap. Way back when I was a baby podcaster, episode number 32, flow into the future. Let's get right into it. So what exactly happens to our mental and physical when we enter into a flow state? Maybe let's start off at a neurobiological level. What happens?

Starting point is 00:04:20 In flow, we see really, really potent changes. We see large swatches of the prefrontal cortex, So this is where your executive function lives. A lot of your higher cognitive functions are housed there. It gets very, very, very quiet in flow. Most of it shuts off. We see brain waves move from where they are. So right now you and I were talking.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Our brains are in beta. It's a fast-moving wave. It's where we are when we're awake and alert. Below beta is a slower wave alpha. This is sort of the signature of creativity. It's daydreaming mode. It's the brain going from thought to thought without a lot of internal resistance. One level down is theta, which is a lot of.

Starting point is 00:04:57 sort of where we are not that often when we're awake though you can have waking state theta but REM sleep the hypogic state it's where you're going from idea to idea with no internal resistance right you're you're falling asleep and you're thinking about a green sweater you wore during the day and it turns into a green elephant and it turns into a green ocean and the green planet right that's theta so flow takes place on the borderline between alpha and theta so it's a lot different now your brain actually pops all over the place when you're in that state but it returns this baseline and then neurochemically, we see stress hormones get flushed out of the system when you move into flow and four or five or six of the most potent performance enhancing feel-good neurochemicals the brain can

Starting point is 00:05:39 produce, get shot into your system. There's physiological changes as well. We can now measure changes to heart rate and heart rate variability and facial expressions and facial muscles. There's a bunch of other things that we look for now when we try to figure out if people are in flow. But those are sort of the basic kind of neurobiological changes. The scientific definition of flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. The neurobiology and physiology that I've just been describing, that's what we mean, right? Like when we say flow, we're talking about very, very specific neurobiological changes,

Starting point is 00:06:14 changes in the brain and the body that are very measurable and very distinct. And there's also like a potent shift of neurochemicals that strengthen motivation, creativity, and learning. Can you walk us through what neurochemicals are exactly and why this boost in neurochemicals is so addictive? Yeah. So neurochemicals, as I said, are one of the two ways the brain communicates, right? They're signaling molecules. And typically, by the way, the brain isn't very fancy. It's kind of a binary engine. So usually what the signals are is do more of this thing or do less of this thing. That's really what neurochemicals do. But the neurochemicals you get in flow, nor epinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, possibly serotonin, possibly oxytocin.

Starting point is 00:07:00 They're all performance-enhancing chemicals, first of all. So muscle reaction times speed up. They dead in pain. Strength increases. This is all stuff they're doing. But their biggest impact, as you pointed out, are cognitive, and their cognitive performance-enhancing chemicals. So their biggest impacts are motivation, learning, and creativity.

Starting point is 00:07:20 And we'll start with motivation because you hinted at that. These chemicals, besides performance enhancement, are pleasure drugs. They're the brain's reward system, right? We are goal-directed creatures, human beings are, and underpinning all this goal-direction are rewards, and underpinning all these rewards are feel-good neurochemicals. And just to give you an idea, so romantic love, when you've fallen in love, you've fallen in love before?

Starting point is 00:07:44 Yes. It's fun, right? Really, really, really fun, right? Of course. My point is that when we're falling in love, that is predominantly norepinephrine and dopamine. And this is not my work. This is Helen Fisher's work at Rutgers on this.

Starting point is 00:07:58 But Flolving Love is most people's favorite experience, right? And that's only two of Flows five neurochemical cocktails. These are really potent, potent pleasure drugs. So potent that researchers talk about flow is the most addictive state on earth. And if you want to see the performance side of that, McKinsey did a 10-year study of top business executives. And they found that top executives are five. times more productive in flow than out of flow. That's a 500% boost in productivity and motivation. That's what addictive neurochemistry can do. So one of the great things about flow is you're

Starting point is 00:08:33 actually getting your own biology to work for you rather than against you. And this is what that means. So you can get this huge step function worth of change in motivation from flow. Similar thing happens in creativity. So creativity really gets jacked up and flow primarily because all these neurochemicals surround the creative process that surround the brain's information processing machinery. So in studies done by my organization, some done at Harvard, some done at the University of Sydney and Australia, we see that creativity spikes in about 400 to 700% in flow. And then Theresa Mabler at Harvard figured out that heightened creativity can outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes too, huge boost in creativity.

Starting point is 00:09:14 And learning, we see something very similar. Quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain. the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, better chance that experience will go from short-term holding to long-term storage. Another thing that neurochemicals do, the tag experiences is critically important to save for later. Flow, which is this huge neurochemical dump, really magnifies learning. So experiments run by the Department of Defense, we see learning will spike in flow some 230 percent. These are, again, huge, huge change, very, very useful. to maximize productivity is to enter a flow state. There's a lot of great time management practices

Starting point is 00:09:54 out there like the Pomodoro technique that encourage you to take breaks and rest your brain. But the fact is, if you're not focused on something for at least 90 minutes consecutively, you're missing out on these massive neurochemical dumps that shoot your creativity, motivation, and ability to retain information through the roof. Now that you know the benefits of flow, let's learn how to get into a flow state using flow triggers. Flow states have triggers, right? You take one of our classes, one of my trainings, that's what we're teaching you how to do. We're teaching you how to use and deploy these triggers.

Starting point is 00:10:25 If you want more flow in your life, the triggers are your toolkit. There are 22 that have been discovered. There are way, way, way, way more. This is just what we've discovered. And the easy way to think about it, and then I'll get into a little bit of the science, triggers will lower cognitive load. Coggleows all the crap you're thinking about it, anyone. point in time. And if I lower cognitive load, I liberate a bunch of energy that your brain will then

Starting point is 00:10:54 repurpose for paying attention to the present moment. So that's from a neurobiological perspective, what all the triggers are doing. And some of them are obvious. Complete concentration is a flow trigger. And that's the place you have to start when I work with companies. I always walk in and I say, look, if you cannot hang a sign in your door that says, fuck off, I'm flowing, you can't do this work. And I'm not actually joking. I'm pretty serious. But on an individual level, what it means is you want to set a sign time for flow. And how much time?

Starting point is 00:11:34 What the research shows is that you want to block off periods of time for uninterrupted concentration if you can that are 90 to 120 minutes long. is an arbitrary. Just like we have a 90 to 120 minute long REM's life cycle when we dream, we also have a waking focus cycle that's roughly the same amount. So the brain is essentially designed to focus for this period of time. In my life, it means that I like to start my day with my focus period. What the research shows is that if you really want to maximize flow, You want to start your work session, your 9 and 120 minutes in accordance with your circadian rhythms. So I'm an extreme lark.

Starting point is 00:12:17 I love getting up super early in the morning. I've been up since 3.30 this morning. That's when I got up to start working. My wife's a night up. She's going to wake up in a couple of hours and she's going to work all night. Most people are sort of best alert in the morning, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock. That's where they kind of stub into consciousness. But you can't really fight your circadian rhythms.

Starting point is 00:12:37 So if you have any control over your schedule, what you want to do is sort of block off 90, 20 minutes, kind of the period where you're going to be most alert, according to your biological clock, and practice distraction management. You can't be kind of the salience network. It's going to win. So you want to basically shut off anything that's going to distract you from what you're going to focus on. I like to start my work session, my hardest task. The hardest thing I have to do all day. And the thing that if I completed, it's the biggest victory for my day. I want to start with the biggest win, always, if I can, or the thing that's going to just take the most effort for both together.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And for me, that's usually writing my book, whatever book I'm writing at the time. So that's sort of how I start my day. And I turn off Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and my cell phone and instant messages and all my alerts and my phone ahead of time. And I also have conversations. You know, and if you need me and you work with me, you know there's certain hours that I am just not available. My wife knows these hours I'm not available. And I always tell people, have your conversations ahead of time. You're going to do this work.

Starting point is 00:13:50 Flow massively amplifies productivity. But you need focused time to get that amplification. So it's worth saying, hey, to all the people who love you or your bosses who want your attention, hey, you're going to get more of me. But to get more of me, I need to be more productive and you need to leave me alone for this period of time. That's the most common flow trigger. To put it more specifically, flow is really trainable. And the reason I know this is at the Flow Research Collective, we train about a thousand people a month.

Starting point is 00:14:18 And we train everybody from Olympic athletes and professional athletes and members of the U.S. Special Forces to see suite executives at Fortune 500 companies to large swatches of the companies themselves. And I think right now we're working with everybody from Essenture, who's a business consultancy, to Audi, the auto manufacturer. So huge swatches of corporate America. And then we train the general public. Everybody, you could possibly imagine, insurance brokers in London and coders in Delhi and soccer moms in Iowa and on and on. And so on average, because we measure flow pre and post, we see a 70% increase in flow. This stuff is incredibly, incredibly trainable. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:17:48 flow triggers like novelty, complexity, and feedback. So this is built out of the work done by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, who discovered that whenever the brain encounters novelty, complexity, and uncertainty, it produces large quantities of dopamine. And if you start getting like novelty and complexity together or novelty and unpredictability, Suppolski calls it the magic of maybe. The brain loves maybe. We love maybe. We love the thrum of possibility. It's a really, really, really addictive and you get a lot of dopamine from it. Huge, huge squirts of dopamine. So this is why, for example, you've had this experience yourself, I'm sure, where you've traveled. and it's sort of like instant flow states, right?

Starting point is 00:18:35 You find yourself, you're walking around Italy or Greece or wherever the hell you go, upstate New Jersey, and it's totally new, and you find yourself in a low-grade flow state, and it's just kind of encountering novelty and unpredictability around every corner. It's driving dopamine into your brain. Pretty soon it's going to drive you into flow. Cool, and then how about immediate feedback? This is Chicksetsemi High's work, one of those well-validated of flow triggers,

Starting point is 00:19:01 And again, flow follows focus, right? So we pay the most attention of the task at hand when we know how we're doing, right? Well, you don't have to wonder how am I doing. And so you can course correct in real time. This is why sports are so great at producing flow. Same thing with some of the arts, performing arts, and even some of the tactile arts, right? The very, very, very immediate feedback. In fact, there's direct correlations between those professions that get the most feedback and

Starting point is 00:19:31 performance and flow as well. Surgeons, high flow activities, they get a lot of feedback, right? Like your patient dies on the table, you did a bad job. That's immediate feedback. But jobs that have a lot less satisfaction like radiologists, they read radiological screens and they never even know what happens to their patient. So they can't improve. And there's not a lot of flow in their jobs because they're not getting enough feedback writing, for example, out of my own life. As publishing has shrunk over the past 20 years, editors have been able to do less and less editing. And so my editors don't really edit me anymore. If I'm writing a book, if I get an editor to look at my book two or three times along the way, that's huge. That's big. And that doesn't work

Starting point is 00:20:13 for me. I need feedback a couple times a week on my writing. In fact, I need somebody to read my writing aloud to me a couple times a week and provide feedback. So that's what I have somebody on my staff who does that because I need that kind of feedback. So I tell people, one of the best things you can do if you want to do this kind of work is find a feedback buddy at work, a friend, whatever. It's tricky to find the right criteria because everybody comes in with individual biases, right? So you have to learn how to steer and what you need to steer for and everybody's going to be different. You have to figure out what is the feedback that best drives you towards flow. I have not found a diagnostic that works for it. The only thing that I have found that works is when you find yourself in a deep flow

Starting point is 00:20:57 state, one of the things to ask yourself is, how much feedback did I receive along the way that got me here? You can only triangulate that way and what kind of feedback is most useful to you. Those are things you have to figure out for yourself, but immediate feedback is a great flow trigger. Yeah, and I think related to this, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, he institutionalized yes in order to create states of flow, where basically if somebody wanted to say no, they had to write like a two-page paper on why they said no. Yeah, so I talk about this a little bit. This is a group flow thing. So individual flow is you or me in flow,

Starting point is 00:21:33 but we can also get into a flow state together. It's a team performing at their best. It's a fourth quarter comeback in football. It's a great brainstorming session. It's a band coming together when the music just sort of blows the roof off the stadium kind of thing. Right? So the basic group flow trigger is the first rule of improv,

Starting point is 00:21:51 which is always say yes, yes and. And so in improv, they say this because if you I are doing improv and you say to me, hey Steven there's a blue elephant in the bathroom. And I say, shut the fuck up. No, there's not. Well, that's not very funny and the story doesn't go anywhere, right? Like, not funny. But if I say, oh crap, I hope he's not using up all the toilet paper, well, now we can build a scene and it goes someplace exciting, right? So conversations, idea generation needs to be additive, not argumentative. Now this doesn't mean you can't criticize. You can. In fact, in brainstorming sessions, brainstorming sessions that are all about

Starting point is 00:22:29 yes and positive feedback don't work. You need to be critical, but you have to find something to be additive to build on to. And Jeff's point was that Amazon is so freaking easy, especially for middle managers who don't want to get in trouble to say no to things. And we need group flow to succeed that he instituted an institutional yes policy. So if you're at Amazon and you want to say no, you've got to write a two-page memo and you've got to post it on the company website about why you say no so he can sort of work around this.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Flow states help you achieve peak performance both by yourself and in group settings. What are some of the other ways that you can perform at your best and maximize your potential? Stephen says the foundation of all peak performance is motivation. In this next clip, Stephen will break down the value of motivation, the different levels of motivation,

Starting point is 00:23:21 and the problem with using grit as your primary fuel source. Motivation is defined, what a scientist mean. It's defined as the energy for action, right? That's literally the definition of motivation. When psychologists use the term motivation, it's a catch-all for four different categories of skill sets. There's extrinsic motivation. This is stuff in the world we're going to work hard to get.

Starting point is 00:23:45 Money, sex, fame, right? Intrinsic motivation. This is, you know, there's tons of, different intrinsic motivators, but these are the things that drive us from the inside. Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, the desire to drive our own bus, mastery that desire to get really great at the things we do. These are all really powerful intrinsic motivators that I just named the big five that we're going to focus on. There's also goal setting. There's three tiers of goals in there. And finally, there's six levels of grit skills. There's six kinds of different

Starting point is 00:24:16 grit skills. All that gets folded under this heading motivation. If you're interested, you're interested in peak performance, if you're interested in performance, if you're interested in anything, motivation gets you into the game. There's no, you can't start without the energy to start. And what the science shows about motivation is it's actually meant to be cultivated in a specific order. Like all those component parts, they start at one place and they go to another place. This is, and it starts with extrinsic motivation, goes to intrinsic, goes to goals and goals to grit. We've talked more about that a second. The point isn't that like you can go out of order. It's just that if you go in order, this is the way the system from a biological perspective sort of evolve to evolve. And it just

Starting point is 00:25:00 makes it easier. You just get farther faster if you sort of do it in line. But it's pretty clear that you have to start if you're trying to amplify motivation. If you're interested in peak performance, motivation is where you've got to start. If you want to increase motivation, you actually have to start with expensive motivation. You have to start with stuff in the real world. The data is pretty clear. Daniel Connman did a Lenoval laureate, did a lot of this research, it's not my work. But what the studies have shown is that we have to make enough money for kind of like basic income and a little leftover for fun before we can even consider anything else. And the reason is fear can block peak performance.

Starting point is 00:25:37 It blocks flow. It blocks peak performance. And it's too big of a detriment if you have food anxiety. How am I going to feed myself? How am I going to feed my children? If you don't know where you're living. If you have rent anxiety, you can't win. You have to solve that problem first, then you go face all the other people.

Starting point is 00:25:54 You don't need a lot of money. It's just literally enough to take care of my bills and a little leftover for fun. That's all you need. But if you're not there, it's really hard to do the other stuff. There's just too much fear. It's going to get in the way of too many things. So start with the extrinsic. What the research shows is, okay, I've got extrinsic.

Starting point is 00:26:16 I want more motivation, right? And what the studies show is that you now want to reach for intrinsic motivation. If you want really big boosts and productivity, yeah, we'll still keep wanting things in the real world. It doesn't mean we stop wanting money, sax fang, right? Of course, that stuff doesn't go away. But if you're really interested in performance and amplifying productivity and motivation, intrinsic is the way to go. And as I said, there's five big ones and they designed work in an order. So it starts with curiosity. curiosity is the most basic intrinsic motivator. Curiosity is sort of designed to be built into passion, which is designed to be built into purpose. I want to talk about the question you asked, which is what is motivation good for? What do we care about it? And what does it have to do with focus and attention? And this is that answer. So curiosity, passion, purpose, Italian mastery, and master, these are all intrinsic motivators.

Starting point is 00:27:06 What's the big deal? People make a really big deal in the world about passion and purpose and things like that. And we hear a lot about them. And that may have a lot more to do with like the virtue. you're signaling than anything. Like from a peak performance perspective, this stuff is very selfish, actually. And the reason is simply this. When think about curiosity, what do we get when you're curious about something?

Starting point is 00:27:28 When you're interested in something, you pay attention to it automatically. You don't have to work hard. Curiosity, same thing with passion. You pay. Think about falling in love. That's passion. How much the attention do you pay to the other person, right? Ton of stuff.

Starting point is 00:27:41 Purpose is more of the same, et cetera, et cetera. Focus for free is a really big deal. The brain is a huge energy hog. It uses 25% of our energy at rest. So we're not even trying to do work yet, just at rest. It's like one quarter of everything you eat goes to run the tiny two-ounce thing in your head that's just, you know, a tiny little bit of your body mass. So huge energy hog and passion is more focused, purpose is more and so forth. We get other things, but at a really basic level, that's the link. And each one of these is designed and built into another. You know, think about it. curiosity builds into passion. Passion is, once we have a passion, we couple that passion to a cause greater than ourselves. That's essentially the formula for purpose. Once you have purpose, the system wants the freedom to pursue that purpose.

Starting point is 00:28:28 So autonomy becomes the next motivator that starts to matter. And finally, once you have the freedom to pursue your purpose, you want the skills to pursue it well, right? So that's where mastery comes into play. And so that's sort of the stack of intrinsic motivators. if you can get them properly stacked and all aligned and pointed in the same direction, you're bringing all your fuel sources to every problem encounter, and that's the really big deal. If you think about an athlete, you know when an athlete goes into a game, they got enough sleep the night before because rest matters. They had their proteins and their carbs and their hydration and their fats, right?

Starting point is 00:29:05 Everything was, they wanted all the possible fuel sources so they could be at their rest. But the same thing with mental fuel sources, right, with motivation. That's why you want all of your motivators pointed in the same direction because it's the same thing. So you're stacking, you know, aligning motivators. You can tap every possible fuel source. For the simple reason that peak performance going after impossible roles is hard. It's unpleasant. It's difficult.

Starting point is 00:29:34 And if you don't have all your intrinsic motivators point in the same way, the only tool you're going to ever have to reach for is grit. Oh, this sucks. I got to tough it out. And this sucks, I got to tough it out is not going to get. You're going to get burned out. You won't get, you can't. This sucks. I'm going to tough it out your way to the impossible.

Starting point is 00:29:51 It's too far. It's too hard. You have to have all these other fuel sources. I always tell people that grit, however useful it is, is the last tool that peak performers reach for, not the first tool. And I think in a lot of society, we have it backwards, especially younger generation, because they're tougher. They're resilient. You can stay up all night. Like at college teaches you to do that, being a young, right, all the stuff you sort of learn how to do says just reach for grit, reach for grit because you're tough enough. You can't handle it. What you start to figure out pretty quickly is holy crap, this allows you. Like, I can't do this. I'm going to end up burned out because there's only so much grit to go around. And even if you train up all six levels of grit and get them expert level, it's still, there's not enough of fuels. There's not enough energy there. You have to reach for all the other motivators first. And then writ is your last resort. Okay. So if I have this correct, it feels like motivation gives you this free energy source. It's like downstream. It's effortless. It kind of helps you get you going.

Starting point is 00:30:54 Like you said, it's the first step. You have to make sure that you have your extrinsic motivation satisfied first. So your basic needs, paying rent, being able to eat, getting food on the table. That needs to happen first before you can be ready to start tackling your intrinsic values. and then there's five main ones. What are the five again? Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hello, young improfitors. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute.

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Starting point is 00:34:16 slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. Motivation gives you the energy for action. So if you aren't motivated by anything or if your motivations are weak, you're not going to get very far. Remember, if you want to become a peak performer in whatever you do, you need to be motivated by several different factors. Grid alone is not enough. Moving on, we've been focused on how to maximize your potential in the here and now. Once you have that mastered, you can start practicing peak performance aging, which keeps you healthy, strong, and energetic as you enter your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Let's round out this episode by learning the core components of peak performance aging.

Starting point is 00:34:57 So if you want to rock, tee drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, you need to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that is dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now, let's unpack this big-ass sentence and what it means and why it answers your question. So challenging, social, and creative, lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons, but short version, if we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom. Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain, lots of real estate, lots of redundancy, impervious to cognitive decline. the more expertise, the more wisdom.

Starting point is 00:35:40 And this is why one of the reasons performance aging starts young. Like literally the guy who did the core research on wisdom, Elkanon Goldberg, his core advice is that more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the more we can stave off Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline. All the things that are going to happen

Starting point is 00:35:59 could happen to the brain over time. This is how we fight back. And his point was, wisdom, among the many things encapsulated in wisdom, are all like the unconscious rules that govern how does systems work, how does behavior work, all that stuff. It's onboarded slowly over time. So you want to start training these things. You want to start learning. Challenging creative and social activities, we learn a lot during. They also tend to drive us into flow. Social activities are really important as we age.

Starting point is 00:36:28 Most important thing you can do for your brain is maintain social activity because it keeps the brain in active in really important ways and really lower stress level. So a lot of stuff we're going to be talking about. There are nine known causes of aging. They're all linked to inflammation. Inflammation is linked to stress. So anything you do that fight stress, that lowers stress, that gives you more emotional control is involved in peak performance aging. So social activities, lower stress. They give us these pros social. Oh, there's people around who love me, got my back. I can be a little less stress. So there's a lot of that stuff. Dynamic. deliberate play is the next bit.

Starting point is 00:37:04 Dynamic is literally what we're talking about. It's just a fancy way of saying. It's all five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility. Deliberate play, you've heard of deliberate practice. Anders Erickson's favorite expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path for his expertise. And Anders wasn't wrong, but as he himself said, that's only true in certain, very precise disciplines and when faced with just general learning, deliberate play works better than deliberate practice.

Starting point is 00:37:34 Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation. You can do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish, a little, something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad, who cares, you're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry, more endorphins. This one really boosts the immune system, lower stress levels, but amplifies learning. So dynamic, deliberate play, is I'm using all the physical skills that decline, and I'm learning better than any other way. Novel outdoor environments, the last bit. Why do we care? And this is back. Action sports, demand dynamic, deliberate play. They take place in novel outdoor environments, and they're challenging, creative, and social.

Starting point is 00:38:16 So one stop shopping. The last bit is most important bit. One, outdoor environments in general, lower stress. We know this. This is well established. positive psychology. A 20-minute walk in the woods will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression. I can talk about why if you care, but like we know that. Good for you, lowers stress. So in itself, being in nature, is anti-inflammatory. So it's better for healthy aging. But if you want to preserve brain function, how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets. That's learning. So the adult brain, contrary to what we used to believe for a long time, it actually does continue to birth new neurons. In fact, the adult brain will birth about 700 new neurons

Starting point is 00:39:00 a day, even basically until you die. But where do those neurons show up as the key question? They show up in a part of the brain known as the hippocampus. The hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory, and it does location, place. It's packed with place cells and grid cells. Why we evolved as hunter-gatherers. When you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you've got to remember where you were when it happened, that's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger so I don't go back there? Where was that ripe fruit tree? So when it comes into season, I'm hungry, I can go there. This is survival. This is what the brain is designed to do. Peak performance and peak performance aging is always getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Our biology is designed

Starting point is 00:39:42 to remember when we have novel experiences and outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for. Action Sports gives you that. I also say in the book that if action sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this by simply hiking with a weight vest. And weight vests are really key, better than a lot of other things, because they amplify bone density. Little known fact, your bones, like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients are stored in your bones and they're released into, so everything that drives the brain, calcium, for example, which is in everything the brain does, it's stored in the bones. So as our bones become less dense over time, which happens, it impacts everything for women. Really important after menopause, where does most of your estrogen come from? Your bones.

Starting point is 00:40:31 So wildly fluctuating hormone in levels, which is a problem that most people have postmenopause, exacerbated by bone density. If you want to increase bone density, one of the best ways is hiking with a weight vest. There's lots of literature. There's lots of science on that. There's also a bunch of other benefits. but it hits all of those categories if you're not interested in action sports. That said, there's a lot to recommend in action sports.

Starting point is 00:40:55 Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career, and it starts with Shopify.

Starting point is 00:41:21 I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my mastermind subscription is also on Shopify. I built my site quickly in just a couple of days, payments for setup super easily, and none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does, because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my management.

Starting point is 00:41:46 masterclass to over $500,000 in revenue in our first year. And I'm launching some new podcast courses and can't wait to launch them on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, just like the millions of entrepreneurs that they power. You can build your dream story using hundreds of beautiful templates and set up as fast with built-in AI tools that help you write product descriptions and edit photos. Plus, marketing is built in so you can create email and social campaigns easily. And as you grow, Shopify can scale right along with your business.

Starting point is 00:42:16 In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yapfam, hear your first. This new year with Shopify by your side. And there you have it, Yap fam, some of our favorite tips from Stephen Kotler on peak performance and flow.

Starting point is 00:42:43 Stephen is an absolute genius and I can't wait to have and back on Yap again. To recap, flow states produce several neurochemical cocktails in your brain, giving you a 500% boost in productivity, a 4 to 700% boost in creativity, and a 230% boost in learning. The best way to enter a flow state is by focusing all of your attention on one task, but you can use other flow triggers to enter a flow state like novelty, complexity, and feedback. Don't try to take on a big task if you aren't motivated to do it because you will run out of energy. Before you even start, you need to have your basic needs met. Then you need to have extrinsic motivation. That's what you want to achieve in the world, as well as intrinsic motivation,

Starting point is 00:43:23 which is made up of curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And all of your extrinsic and intrinsic motivators should be pointed in the same direction. And of course, you need grit and perseverance, but those should be your emergency energy reserves and you should not be primarily fueled by grit. And finally, if you want to stay fit and energetic as you age, engage in challenging creative and social activities and dynamic, deliberate play, ideally in novel outdoor environments. So, fun fact, I used to ski all the time when I was younger, but once I hit my 30s, I felt like I was too old to ski because I thought that I had too much to lose. I was worried that my body wouldn't be able to handle it. And honestly, I've got a lot to live for

Starting point is 00:44:03 right now, and I just didn't want to get hurt. But let me tell you, after talking to Stephen, I feel like that was silly. I feel like I'm totally young enough to go back to skiing and snowboarding and the long-term benefits of action sports are just too good to miss out on. If you want to learn more about Stephen Kotler, we have his website, his socials, and his books all linked in the show notes. And if you like this, the app snack, be sure to check out all of our full interviews that's episode number 32 flown to the future, Master the Impossible, episode number 138. And we had him on pretty recently episode number 211 on peak performance aging, how to stay at the top of your game in your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. And lastly, we also had

Starting point is 00:44:40 him on Clubhouse. So if you want to scroll through the archives, you can find that one. And all the episodes are linked in the show notes for easy access. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoy this episode,

Starting point is 00:44:53 drop us a five-star review on Apple or your favorite podcast platform. And if you like this episode, make sure you share it with a friend. You guys can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn if you search for my name, Halataha.

Starting point is 00:45:05 And if you like watching your podcast in video format, check us out on YouTube. Thank you. Big thanks to my amazing Yap team. Thank you so much for all that you do. I couldn't do without you. You guys rocked. You crush this one. Appreciate all your help. This is your host, the podcast princess, Halataha, signing off.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Best of Steven Kotler, Flow Master and Peak Performance Expert | YAPSnacks

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